Really? I used to take the sting out of those long, long walks to class during Chicago winters by imagining I was a space explorer, crash-landed in the wilderness of some frozen planet (I was reading a lot of Calvin & Hobbes back then).

I guess my view falls perhaps somewhere between your views. I agree that the job of the media is not education, but it seems that, especially for a science article, it doesn’t provide any useful information unless it gives at least a proper context for the research that laypersons can understand. This would be a bit of education, I guess.

I should mention that all of my personal experiences with science reporters has been positive: they’ve either asked enough questions to understand the research themselves or, failing that, have run statements past me again to make sure they’re accurate.

The recent cloaking reports in the media have not only been somewhat inaccurate, but genuinely misleading. This is not only bad on an ‘educational’ level, but potentially leads to the public mistrusting both the media and the scientists, when they fail to deliver on their ‘promise’.

But I do want to correct Stuwat on his view of the media: it’s not their job to “educate the public on an important scientific development.” They report the news, sometimes well, sometimes not so well. Education is not the objective; that’s the purview of science educators and communicators and — yes — science bloggers.

Did the MSM shamelessly overhype the cloaking research? Yes, they did. But look at all the nifty blog posts that were written because of it.