CNN has the "news": It reports that estrogen influences who women are likely to vote for. "When levels of the hormone estrogen are high, single women appeared more likely to vote for Obama and committed women appeared more likely to vote for Romney," CNN reports.
Or, that's what it did report. It has now posted an editor's note retracting it.
Adam Marcus at Retraction Watch explores this goodie in a post this morning.
Interestingly, the CNN reporter, Elizabeth Landau, must have known something was fishy. High in her story, she wrote that "several political scientists who read the study have expressed skepticism about its conclusions." But she went on to write 1,000 words about it anyway.
It's a bedrock principle of science reporting to ask for comment from other experts, which Landau did. What she failed to do was something that shouldn't need pointing out: Listen to what those experts say. If they say it's junk, dump it.
Follow the Retraction Watch link for more on this; it's instructive.
-Paul Raeburn
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