This is an article from the 2026 Civitas Examiner (Volume 3, No. 2) and was written by one of our students, Benjamin. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue. To read more Civitas Examiner stories or to submit your own, click here.
Need more clicks? Write an article about a new drug that causes cancer! While it’s not entirely moral to do this just to increase views, it is a good strategy for surviving in the fast-paced world of internet-based news. Create an existential crisis for your readers and your article will immediately be read and shared. At the time of this writing, five different articles on the main page of CNN refer to medical topics. And yes, it’s a good thing: if new breakthroughs could alter the care that people are receiving, they need to be informed about it without being burdened by reading a lengthy study. Life has been sped up and what we all need is short, snappy bites of information.
However, these reporters may not always be doing their job. Doctors and scientists bemoan the fact that their findings are constantly misreported by mainstream media. Think about how often you see a clickbait article announcing that someone has found a cure for cancer. When the original study is consulted, you invariably find that it only shows that a certain substance has been found to kill cancer cells in a petri dish. And this problem is not only present in tabloids and clickbait articles: PBS, a highly respected news source, once published an article stating that coffee is no longer shown to cause cancer. In reality, both studies–the one linking coffee to cancer and the one unlinking it–were both tentative studies that established a correlation (not causation) between the two. This nuance was not mentioned in the article, meaning that readers could easily believe that coffee was at one point a known carcinogen and now suddenly was not. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/coffee-consumption-no-longer-linked-to-cancer/
It would be easy to conclude that this is all an unfortunate error in communication. If a reporter is not knowledgeable in the complexities of study design and statistics, it would be easy for them to report inaccurately on what a study is actually showing. It is easier still to forget to provide important context–for example, an increase of 200% is alarming, but not so much if it is only an increase from 10 to 20 cases. But I believe that there is something else going on, something that is not intentional or malicious, but rather an unfortunate result of today’s click-based media economy. Too often, the blame for this misrepresentation is pinned solely on reporters for sensationalizing their stories and blowing legitimate findings far out of proportion. But I believe that the problem is two-fold, that reporters and scientists are equally culpable, and that both are incentivized to dramatize the stories they choose to tell the world.
Imagine that you are a scientist. You are running an experiment, knowing that if your hypothesis proves true, it would revolutionize your field, not to mention the fame you would attain. But unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Your hypothesis fails. Your miracle cure turns out to be worthless black gunk. So you do what anyone would do–you run the experiment again, you tinker with the design, growing more and more obsessed. Eventually, gloriously, it does work–and you rush off to report your findings. But what would have happened if your hypothesis had proven true from the beginning? You would have reported your findings all the same, without any of the necessary improvements to the experiment.
The infamous cold fusion experiments exemplify this phenomenon, which is known as “pathological science”. In 1989, Dr. Stanley Pons and Dr. Martin Fleischmann reported that their deuterium-containing lab equipment was mysteriously heating up. They ran a few tests and discovered that there was no possible explanation for the heat except a nuclear reaction. What they found fascinating was that this reaction had occurred at room temperature, and therefore was the long-awaited cold fusion–a potentially limitless source of clean nuclear energy. And so Pons and Fleischmann excitedly published their work. Equally excited, other scientists caught on and attempted to replicate the experiment. The results–no cold fusion was detected. Instead of deciding that they had simply gotten a false positive, or acknowledging that the experiment had several design flaws (which it did), they hunkered down and obsessively tried and retried their experiment, eventually becoming disgraced and mostly forgotten. Cold fusion, or at least this method of achieving it, is impossible. Yet somehow, it refused to die. A 1991 report found 600 scientists still working on it. https://undsci.berkeley.edu/lessons/pdfs/cold_fusion.pdf
This means that scientists are directly incentivized for publishing sensationalized studies, and that they are perfectly willing to hold on to disproven theories, even if only for more publicity. Also, many studies are paid for by the pharmaceutical companies making the drugs being tested. The more dramatic the story, the more it will benefit the corporation they are working for. This, again, perpetuates the cycle. As I said at the beginning, journalists will publish drastically overblown stories to get those all-valuable clicks. And now we can see that some scientists, incorruptible as they might seem, are still willing to publish overdramatic stories that pander to corporations.
Journalists and scientists will even play off of each other to push a story into big headlines. Let’s not forget the infamous 1998 Lancet study that fraudulently linked the MMR vaccine to autism, which ended up being repeated and overblown far beyond the original claims by major news sources. The paper was eventually retracted due to ethical concerns, overreliance on anecdotal evidence, and small sample size, but that has hardly lessened its influence. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2831678/ People still won’t let go of it, including, famously, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This incident also shows how harmful clickbait science can be–some parents will refuse to vaccinate their children out of fear of autism, which has led to measles outbreaks across the country and the first U.S. deaths related to measles since 2015. 90% of the people affected by measles were not vaccinated.
