W. Wayt Gibbs, a former reporter with Scientific American, just finished talking to an audience at the AAAS annual meeting about how journalists turn scientists into authorities and experts. It turns out, he said, that it's difficult to knock them off their thrones once they've been established.
Case in point: Gibbs' 2005 coverage of the obesity epidemic in which he debunked commonly quoted statistics about the killing power of fatness. The response from readers who wrote in? Essentially it was along the lines of, how dare you?
He heard from "hundreds of correspondents saying, I can't believe you were quoting people who didn’t have Ph.Ds in obesity research or that you were actually doing analyses on your own, putting two and two together and not just accepting what the received wisdom is."
