...are now required to offer more titillating stories, traditional journalism seems to offer little to science in the way of helping it get the word out. Journalism is stuck with its judgmental stance toward all news, making it a poor relater of straight news. This is simply good PR, which is why public relations has come to play a significant role in bringing science news into the mass media.
When Robert Macfarlane wrote about the Human Genome Project, he chose not to write an informative piece that would provide the public with information on which to base its own decisions, but to focus on the battle between the British and American labs duking it out for funding in the fight to discover the genome sequence...