Entering the Conversation Blog Post

While reading the blog post of the University Pennsylvania professor Mark Liberman, I was shocked at just how open and honest he was but I suppose that is the point of a blog to begin with. Many things can be taken and learned from Liberman's article. I learned that many people who are writing about science for the popular audience are often very bad at what they do. It seems to me that the writers are manipulating material so they can tell the audience in mind what they think they want to hear. But when the writers do this, they are giving the popular audience false information and just plain bad writing and not helping the audience at all. To support the argument that the writers are just plain bad and need serious improvement Liberman gave an example of an article called "Fish oil helps school children to concentrate: US academics discover high doses of omega-3 fish oil combat hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder". In this article the writer, Denis Campbell, is a professional science writer for a leading newspaper. What Campbell wrote was that children will concentrate better in school if they take omega-3 fish oil. What the actual scientific study said was that there were no significant group differences for percentage correct, commission errors, discriminability or reaction time when taking the omega-3 fish oil. They also said that taking the omega-3 fish oil had no effect on any measure of performance. How could a professional science writer for a stand up newspaper give such careless and just wrong information? The evidence is very effective and very helpful. Before reading this I had no idea that things like this were actually taking place and I wonder how anyone who writes like that could even be employed by a newspaper? I think that this is a huge problem and that there should be no way that any false or manipulative information should ever be released to a public and popular audience. My solution for this problem is very different from Liberman's solution but I believe it would be very effective. My solution for this problem would be to hire someone for each department to proof read and make sure material is actually correct before letting it go to be released to the public. Each writer would be required to submit their work or article to this proof reader before it could be released and if that article used information from anywhere else (which most do) then a copy of the source from which you got the information must also be submitted with your article. Each department would have their own person for this so that they are specialized in that department. Their job would be to entirely proof read the article. They would check for spelling and grammar, make sure all the facts are correct and are correctly cited and approve the overall article. If the work is not up to par, the proof reader would return it to the writer and require the writer to fix it and be reprimanded in some small way so that the error does not happen again.  I believe this would work and prevent people like us from having to read phony information.