How lazy journalism helps bring junk science into the mainstream

The Hill

07-04-2025

In 2020, researchers at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences announced a shocking discovery: Black babies are three times more likely to die when cared for by a white doctor than by a black one.
It's terrible. It's a scandal.
It's also nonsense.
The study was junk science — data manipulated to produce a divisive and partisan narrative. Yet you'd think otherwise, given how the press has covered the report in the years since its publication.
And this isn't just one dishonest study. The widespread dissemination of intentional falsehoods through the media is more common than you'd think. It's enough to raise all the obvious questions about how much faith we should put in 'settled science.'
'A September 2024 replication effort concluded that the original study authors did not statistically control for very low birth weight newborns at the highest risk of dying,' reported the Daily Caller's Emily Kopp. 'Applying that control zeroed out any statistically significant effect of racial concordance on infant mortality. Now, evidence has emerged that the paper's lead author buried information in order to tell a tidier story than the one his methods and data originally illustrated.'
In other words, the reduplication effort revealed that the study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences had failed to control for very low birth weight, a critical predictor of infant mortality. Since white doctors are significantly more likely to care for low birth-weight infants — those at greatest risk of death — they were thus carelessly associated with the mortality rates. This is why the replication, when very low birth weight was accounted for, found no significant racial divergence in the data.
Thus, a false narrative of racist white doctors causing infant deaths had been allowed to spread widely.
'Black newborn babies in the US are more likely to survive childbirth if they are cared for by black doctors, but three times more likely to die when looked after by white doctors, a study finds,' CNN reported in 2020.
Declared National Public Radio, 'A key to black infant survival? Black doctors.'
'Black babies are more likely to survive when cared for by Black doctors, study finds,' reported USA Today.
And so on.
It gets worse, because the records also suggest the researchers also intentionally concealed data that might have distracted from the preferred narrative. Kopp, citing documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, noted an initial version of the study had included this line: 'White newborns experience 80 deaths per 100,000 births more with a Black physician than a white physician, implying a 22 percent fatality reduction from racial concordance.' Lead author Brad Greenwood, displeased with this finding, noted in the draft's margin: 'I'd rather not focus on this. If we're telling the story from the perspective of saving black infants, this undermines the narrative.'
Even more distressing than this study's journey from junk to accepted narrative is that this incident is not isolated. This type of thing is so common, and it's so easy for bogus 'science' to find a foothold in our newsrooms that a journalist once tricked editors worldwide with a fake study just to make a point.
'Dr. Johannes Bohannon,' whose real first name is John, published a deliberately made-up study in 2015 that claimed chocolate was the secret to speedy weight loss. As intended, the press ate it up.
'Pass the Easter Egg! New study reveals that eating chocolate doesn't affect your Body Mass Index … and can even help you LOSE weight!' reported the Daily Mail.
Modern Healthcare published a headline that stated, 'Dieting? Don't forget the chocolate.'
Europe's highest-circulation newspaper, Bild, simply asserted: 'Slim by Chocolate!'
But the study was a hoax. It was deliberately falsified as a test to see whether journalists, their editors, and members of the scientific community were paying attention. The results were not flattering.
'Our point was not that journalists could be tricked by fakers, but rather that scientists themselves in this field and other fields are making the kinds of mistakes that we made on purpose,' Bohannon told me in 2015. 'This whole area of science has become kind of corrupted by really poor standards between scientists and journalists.'
The fabricated study was personal, he added: His mother had suffered kidney damage after falling victim to a dubious fad diet.
'There are smart people out there who are getting fooled by this stuff because they think scientists know what they're doing,' Bohannon said.
He told me that no one had bothered to double-check his research, seek comments from independent experts, or ask him about possible inaccuracies in his work.
'I was kind of shocked at how bad the reporting is,' he said. 'I didn't realize how bad people who call themselves proper journalists are at covering this beat.'
The problem extended well beyond the usual clickbait websites. Even reputable publications that employ fact-checkers skimmed the details of his research, Bohannon recalled.
'Right now, there's absolutely no accountability,' he said. 'The bulls— is just flooding. And it's flooding out of these media venues, and no one gets any pushback.'
This raises the obvious question related to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect — that is, our tendency to trust sources despite knowing them to be poorly informed on specific topics.
If we know the news media is susceptible to junk science, and researchers are not above intentionally manipulating data, then what are we to believe about our journalism and scientific institutions?
We are told to trust the science. We are told to trust the experts. But how can we know we're not being misled — either by accident or by design?