The Cardiff researchers found that if the press release exaggerated the claim first, similar exaggeration in the media was 6.5 times more likely for advice claims, 20 times more likely for causal claims, and a whopping 56 times more likely for translational claims. (When the press release was more circumspect, journalists only exaggerated a small amount.) And although this itself was merely a correlational study, the Cardiff team followed up in 2019 with an impressive randomised trial.26 They worked with university press offices to modify randomly selected press releases by adding unwarranted
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