Attack your local journalist

And the media tends to do this too. You can publish a 20 page release using “plain language” and avoiding technical terms or concepts- you can use graphics and hind their hand through the entire thing. But they’ll skip to the last few paragraphs of the synopsis and just take whatever is there that sounds most compelling and that’s the story. Finding out that a single subspecies of sea crab has DNA that looks similar to DNA of a human ancestor billions of years ago- will become “humans and crabs are relatives. Are you eating your cousin?”

Of course the not so funny part is that because the media (and sadly many scientists starved for funding or recognition) tend to do this- people lose faith in science. The well worn out joke about scientists or doctors telling people one week coffee is good for them and the next that it isn’t. People get confused and many just say that science doesn’t know what it is doing because it keeps “changing its story.” We’ve seen this with Corona virus as new developments have been made. It isn’t (largely) sciences fault though. It’s the media and politicians who are the mouth pieces and who are desperate to serve you a cake before the chef thinks it’s done cooking; the mouthpieces who say they’ll bring you a cake but don’t understand when the chef says “I’m making rice cakes” that rice cake isn’t the same as sponge cake- so you get a rice cake for desert and wonder what the hell the chef as thinking.