BOB GARFIELD: The coverage of science often is subject to manipulation, and certainly not just by corporations. Vincent Kiernan, a science writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, has found that science journals themselves pose a program when they embargo stories they release to the press. An embargo is an arrangement between journalists and their sources that enables reporters to receive information in advance as long as they promise to hold it until an agreed-upon date. The reason is that science stories are complicated, and reporters may need to contact labs and researchers and generally study up before they report the results. Embargos cost reporters scoops, Kiernan says, but they also prevent everybody from being scooped.

VINCENT KIERNAN: So that way that journalists all know that they won't have the story first but they also won't have the story last. The theory is that science and medical journalists need some extra time to research and understand a story, to check it out, to speak to a variety of experts around the world who may or may not be easy to reach.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay. That makes perfect sense. But your book goes to some lengths to point out that there are holes in the theory. Tell me basically what's wrong with embargoed science.

VINCENT KIERNAN: There are lots of problems with embargoed science, but the biggest issue is that it misdirects journalists. It sets up a system by which journalists are given powerful incentives to cover a certain kind of story about science – the latest "eureka moment," and those eureka moments come several times each week. And so the journalists are directed toward those stories and away from critical, skeptical coverage of science as an enterprise, with all its fraud, with all its successes, with all the ethical issues. The journalists are directed away from those stories, stories that many in the scientific establishment are perfectly happy to have them not do.

BOB GARFIELD: And, as your book points out, not only do reporters tend to pay attention to the elite journals, they pay most attention to the articles in those journals that have been preselected by the journal publishers themselves as the most significant, and which come with the company press releases and other information, which you call information subsidy.

VINCENT KIERNAN: An information subsidy is not my term. It's a term that has existed in the communication literature for a while. But basically what it refers to is when a source makes it easier for a journalist to cover a story by providing prepackaged information to the journalist. So, for example, when your senator puts out a press release in hopes of luring reporters into writing about whatever the senator is saying, that's an information subsidy. It skews the process of news selection because journalists are not necessarily picking stories based on their inherent importance and newsworthiness. It skews the process by steering journalists toward covering stories that are easier to cover or that are easier to recognize as stories. Lots of very, very good science gets published in many, many journals. There are literally thousands of journals, and journalists monitor 30, 40, if they're lucky – the ones with embargos. The ones that are not embargoed, that also publish very, very good science, like a bunch of geophysical journals, they are largely ignored by journalists.

BOB GARFIELD: Let me ask you what would happen if we were in more of a free market of science coverage. Where would reporters go to find stories, and, you know, how would they avoid going down so many blind alleys to report on science that may ultimately turn out to be not very good science at all?

VINCENT KIERNAN: Well, of course, sometimes they report even now on science that may not turn out to be good science at all. The journals are not perfect by any means. Some scientists worry that in an embargo-less world, journalism about science would turn into pack journalism, that scientists would be waylaid at the door of their homes by journalists begging for the latest studies. I think that's entirely overstated. I think a likely consequence is that media outlets would do fewer stories about journal articles. As far as I'm concerned, I think that's an excellent idea. We do far too much news coverage about breaking scientific studies which may or may not hold up in the long run.

BOB GARFIELD: And if I'm the science writer for news organization X, and it's Wednesday, and while I'm digging around, my editor walks up to me and throws a copy of today's Washington Post on my desk and says, "'Autism linked to age of the father,' why didn't we have this," what am I supposed to say?

VINCENT KIERNAN: I would say that study might be important. It might not. Science is made up of many, many dots of findings that together make a pointillist picture. You're upset that we're missing this one dot. I'm working on a story about the picture.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, Vincent. Thank you very much.

VINCENT KIERNAN: My pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD: Vincent Kiernan is a journalism instructor at Clarion University of Pennsylvania and the author of the new book, Embargoed Science. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, how the bloom came off Tokyo Rose, and a Vietnam soldier deejay dusts off his mike and heads to Iraq.

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media from NPR