Colleagues over at Science Blogs are probing a topic near and dear, the state of science journalism. This profession strikes rather close to home, since I recently left my post as a science correspondent to write a book about the state of science, thereby participating in the decline I am chronicling. For starters, I'd agree with Chad at Uncertain Principles when he writes:

It's definitely hard to present science in a way that is comprehensible to the general public without being misleading. Scientists could do a much better job of feeding information to journalists, and putting it in a form that is better adapted to the constraints of modern mass media.

I might strike the word "misleading" and replace it with "creative": It's definitely hard to present science in a way that is comprehensible to the general public without being creative. It's very difficult--I haven't pulled it off--but I believe it's possible and necessary. For inspiration, Richard Feynmann proved that it's possible to tell the truth, but not the whole truth, in QED. And any of the long line of best-selling science books will prove it--take Carl Zimmer's Evolution: Triumph of an Idea, the current example on my nightstand. In a marvelous passage (p 131), he talks about the limitations of random genetic recombination by comparing heredity to a roulette ball. "When a roulette ball lands on its wheel, its fate is not absolutely random," he writes. "It does not bounce off the wheel and stick to the ceiling. It does not end up perched on the border between two numbers." Analogies and orders-of-magnitude calculations are enough to pump up some readers' curiosity.

A semantic quibble, with scientists doing a better job of feeding information to journalists. Point taken, but by definition anything that is fed to journalists is not journalism. The phrase "constraints of modern mass media," is a fantasically important point, however it is a complicated one, which I can not address here due to constraints of modern mass media.