This is a blog post about a news website article which makes a good point

FleetStreetBlues has always been a little bit suspicious of science reporters, with their chemistry degrees and journals and high falutin' statistical know-how. The 'evidence' may say that they do a half-decent job, but to our decidedly untrained eye it all looks a little bit the same. How can tomatoes give you cancer on a Monday and cure it on a Wednesday? They even claim to understand maths.

So we particularly enjoyed this piece on the Guardian's The Lay Scientist blog, which takes pretty much every health or science story ever written and thoroughly deconstructs it in what we imagine might be an existential fashion.

This is a news website article about a scientific paper

In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?

In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of "scare quotes" to ensure that it's clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.

In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research "challenges".

If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.

This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like "the scientists say" to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist.

In this paragraph I will state in which journal the research will be published. I won't provide a link because either a) the concept of adding links to web pages is alien to the editors, b) I can't be bothered, or c) the journal inexplicably set the embargo on the press release to expire before the paper was actually published.

"Basically, this is a brief soundbite," the scientist will say, from a department and university that I will give brief credit to. "The existing science is a bit dodgy, whereas my conclusion seems bang on," she or he will continue.

Read the full article here. The comments are genius too...