Over the last week, a miniature storm has been brewing on the intertubes, and it concerns a subject which everyone is sick of talking about, but which everyone feels compelled to talk about anyway: no, not house prices, but the state of science journalism.

Specifically this is a response to Jeremy Laurance, a man who does not like criticism, and so will probably not like this post, should he ever develop enough of an understanding of the internet to find it and read it.

First, some background. The whole kerfuffle came about when the curly-haired nemesis of bad science reporting, Ben Goldacre, had a gentle dig at one of our Guardian/Observer colleagues, Denis Campbell, over an article he wrote about fish oil.

The article is no longer online but was fairly poor. It ran under the headline, "Fish Oil Helps Schoolchildren to Concentrate," based on new research that was claimed to show that boys fed fish oil "showed big improvements in their performance during tasks involving attention."

The problem, as Ben pointed out last Saturday, is that the actual paper said no such thing. It didn't even study fish oil, or indeed the performance of children, of whom only 33 were included in what was more of a hypothesis-generating exploration than a clinical trial (see Ben's post for more details).

On Tuesday, Jeremy Laurance at the Independent filed a blistering 500-word response to Ben's piece, somewhat creepily entitled: "Dr Goldacre Doesn't Make Everything Better". And on Friday, Fiona Fox, Director of the Science Media Centre, waded in to the debate.

The first thing to note is that Jeremy agrees that Ben is actually correct, and acknowledges that Denis didn't help him locate the original paper, which is a bit poor. At which point his grounds for writing the piece seem to be pretty fucking tenuous.

Ben's piece looks to me fairly calm and measured, though you can judge for yourself. Jeremy though talks about Ben "swinging his fists at the media", "going nuclear", and bizarrely "pistol-whipping" and "knee-capping" his colleague. He then goes on to say that:

"One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at The Guardian's eagerness to wash its dirty linen in public. It is undeniably magnificent, but – in my view – no way to run a newspaper. I wonder at the psychiatrist's bills."

It all adds up to quite a weird subtext that I find difficult to get my head around. Criticism that Jeremy admits is fair is deliberately portrayed as the raving of an angry loon. Bizarrely it's suggested that a responsible newspaper shouldn't allow journalists to debate and criticize each other. And it's implied, albeit in a jokey way, that robust debate will lead to mental health issues.

Yes, it's rhetoric, but at the risk of indulging in some pop psychology, it's rhetoric that in my opinion reveals a hell of a lot about Jeremy Laurance's unhealthy attitude to the concept of a debate. Are journalists really this spectacularly thin-skinned? Is there a fundamental cultural difference between writers who have a science background and are therefore used to robust criticism, and those who haven't?

That aside, Jeremy goes on to make several substantive points, a few of which are mirrored by Fiona Fox:

"First, most disinterested observers think standards are pretty high (a report by the Department of Business last January said it was in "rude health")."

Even if this were true (and it's a massive assertion based on the flimsiest of evidence), it's frankly irrelevent to this particular episode. Any journalism - particularly on public health issues - should be as accurate as it can possibly be, and criticism should always be welcome to try and make it better.

Robust criticism is a vital part of science, and it should be a vital part of journalism.

"Second, reporters are messengers – their job is to tell, as accurately as they can, what has been said, with the benefit of such insight as their experience allows them to bring, not to second guess whether what is said is right."

This is a staggeringly moronic remark to make, and it's depressing to see this sort of nonsense coming out of the mouth of a senior health journalist. I can't describe it any better than Ed Yong does: "It's like a manifesto for failure."

If a journalist isn't willing or capable of doing even the most basic fact-checking of a press release, then they are basically redundant, and we might as well all just subscribe to the original fucking press release service. You are actually trying to make your job irrelevent. And you wonder why your newspaper is haemhorraging readers. It's like watching Douglas Adams' self-serving cow.

"But third, reporters are also under pressure. Newspaper sales are declining, staff have been cut, demands are increasing."

This is a theme that Fiona Fox picks up:

"The sense of a yawning gap between the brutal realities for jobbing journalists filing ever more stories to ever tighter deadlines and the luxury of a columnist like Ben who gets to lay bare the flaws in those stories once a week is now shared by almost every science reporter I know."

And Jeremy himself goes further still:

...while raging rightly at the scientific illiteracy of the media, he might reflect when naming young, eager reporters starting out on their careers that most don't enjoy, as he does, the luxury of time, bloggers willing and able to do his spadework for him (one pointed out the flaws in Campbell's report on The Guardian website five days before Goldacre's column appeared) and membership of a profession (medicine) with guaranteed job security, a comfortable salary and gold-plated pension."

This isn't just bullshit, it's actually quite offensive bullshit.

Leaving aside the fact that Denis, the young, eager reporter starting out his career, has been working for The Guardian since 1999, the main substantive point seems to be that it's unfair to attack journalists who may not have the time to do adequate checking.

It's absolutely true that journalists have a tough job, and in the pressure-cooker environment of a modern newsroom mistakes will be made. But in the case of Denis Campbell's article, all he needed to do was check the abstract of the paper in question, or fire off an e-mail to the author, to see that the piece he filed was seriously in error.

That would have taken approximately five-to-ten minutes of his valuable time. Of course journalists are under pressure, but are Jeremy and Fiona really trying to claim that journalists don't have time to skim the actual paper they're writing about?

And it doesn't excuse the subsequent behaviour when Ben attempted to find out more information about the paper from Campbell.

"I asked the writer Campbell which academic paper he was referring to, but he declined to answer, and passed me on the Stephen Pritchard, the readers' editor for the Observer, who answered a couple of days later to say he did not understand why he was being involved."

The offensive part is the ad hom attack that the two make on Ben, and by extension on other bloggers and columnists like, for example, myself. Apparently, we live in a position of luxury, with an army of bloggers doing our work for us. Good grief.

Firstly Ben, like myself, has a full time job, gives talks, writes books, argues with Barclays, and generally has an extremely high premium on his time. The idea that bloggers and columnists don't have the same time constraints as journalists is daft. The difference is that we do it in our spare time, after we get home from working all day. If our columns are more in-depth than your articles it might not be because we had more time to do them, it might just mean that we're better at writing them than you are.

As for the idea of Ben having an army of bloggers doing his dirty work, this has shades of Jan Moir ranting about the internet 'conspiracy' to attack her on Twitter. It shows a fundamental failure to understand the internet, or even the concept of collaboration.

Ben has no army of helpers. What he has, is a good relationship with a lot of other science writers, and the willingness and ability to engage with his readers. This, unsurprisingly, gives him invaluable help with his journalism.

And it's what all modern journalists should be doing. I've built a following of ~2000 people on Twitter who I regularly put questions to and get interesting ideas from. It's not very time-consuming, but the boost it gives to my writing is enormous. Increasingly there are two sorts of journalist; those who don't get Twitter, and good ones.

As with the sensitivity to criticism, I wonder if this is another symptom of a cultural divide between scientists and journalists. In science, everything we do is standing on the shoulders of giants. Every scientific paper cites dozens of other papers, and I suspect it's no coincidence that science bloggers link to many other science bloggers in their work. When I write a column about a subject I see it as an opportunity to highlight a range of work by other people on that topic, and in that sense I see almost everything I write as part of a wider, collaborative effort. I find it odd that more journalists don't seem to share the same attitude, but I digress.

This is all basic stuff. You check your primary sources. You skim a research paper to see if it says what the press release says. You use social networking to engage with other people. Why the fuck does this even need pointing out?!

In fact, one of the things that staggers me about this whole debate is how ludicrous it would look if applied to, say, sports coverage.

Imagine, for example, hearing a sports journalist explain that they didn't have time to watch England's opening World Cup match against the USA, so instead they were just going to write something based on rehashing the Football Association press release issued after the match.

Or imagine the same journalist explaining that understanding the offside rule required specialist in-depth knowledge which they didn't have the training or time to gain, and which readers wouldn't be interested in anyway.

We don't accept that sort of laziness - and it is laziness - in sports journalism, and we shouldn't accept it in science journalism either. Journalists are spectacularly privileged people. They have a special position in society that enables them to reach hundreds of thousands of people with their message. It's a job which hundreds of other good writers would quite happily do for free - and all across the blogosphere they do.

So my message to Jeremy Laurance and his colleagues is this. If journalists aren't willing or able to do the basics of their job properly, then there are about a thousand people who would be more than happy to take it off their hands. Think about that the next time you're deciding whether you can be bothered to check the original paper.

ETA: Ed Yong has just posted his own response here.
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A brief apology - due to work commitments I've been a bit of an absent father to this site lately, but rest assured I'm back in the game again, and I've even cleared all the spam. Incidentally, if you're a spammer, please die. Thank you.