Media coverage of scientific retractions risks feeding a narrative that academic science is broken - a narrative which plays into the hands of those who want to cut science funding and ignore scientific advice.
So say Joseph Hilgard and Kathleen Hall Jamieson in a book chapter called Science as “Broken” Versus Science as “Self-Correcting”: How Retractions and Peer-Review Problems Are Exploited to Attack Science Hilgard and Jamieson discuss two retraction scandals that readers of this blog will be familiar with: the 2014 STAP retractions from Nature and the 2015 Michael LaCour paper in Science. Both of these incidents involved high-profile work that was retracted when it became clear that misconduct - data fabrication or manipulation - had occured. However, while both cases involved misconduct by a single "rogue" scientist, media coverage of the two cases was rather different. In the STAP cells case, the responsibility for the case was generally ...
