Of course they should! Pull the p*ss out of the news media until it hurts. Recent times are littered with clever hoaxes that are published under Shock! Horror! Outrage! headlines as truth by news outlets that have lost the concept of the public good.

In the rush to sell advertising space tabloid horse poo is dished up as our staple news.

Let em wallow in it and keep dishing up stuff that makes them look foolish. You can bet no reputable journalist would have touched the Santa story without either checking or at least running a story that was openly skeptical.

" ... journalists should not be expected to research the material presented in peer-reviewed journals. Journalists ought to trust the journals - doing otherwise is, in general, to overstep their role. The information presented in peer-reviewed journals makes up the body of scientific knowledge and journalists are within their rights to assume that those journals are a trustworthy (but fallible) source of information."

Well, it will all seem funnier by April 1, when Santa is back somewhere near the North Pole.

Not so with the casualty figures for Iraq. I refer you to www.iraqmortality.org, a site that notes the 2006 controversy about the impact of the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq. BMJ, as it happens, kept an arms-length from that dialogue. see:
http://tinyurl.com/bmj-report-of-Lancet-article

for a link to BMJ 2006;333:821 (21 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.333.7573.821-a

That 2006 article, by Owen Dyer of London, states

"More than half a million Iraqi people, about one in 40 of the country's population, have died from violent causes since the March 2003 invasion, a study in the Lancet says."

GWB made a characteristic pronunciamento shortly after the Lancet article's publication and mainstream press coverage.

The ensuing debate grew increasingly acrimonious, tortuous and politicised.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties
for more than you will ever need to know about scientific nit-picking (at times with a blunt ax).

At least a lot of children in Iraq have been spared the antics of that drunken old slob, chasing midnight around the globe, barnstorming whimsically from one rooftop to the next like Mr Toad on steroids, gutzing himself on over 650,000 plates of cookies and glasses of cows milk, then heading off to Dubai to outrage the Imams by putting Christmas presents under every Christmas tree in the glitzy district of that affluent middle-east haven.

Thank heaven Santa is not political!

Journalists are supposed to *always* check on stories, rather than just cut and paste press releases. The extent to which they do not is shameful. The open season this represents is irresistable for political and commercial interests, yet it only gets criticised when someone with nothing to gain just takes the piss.

Notice that the much-maligned ABC's "media Watch" is about the only show to routinely question journalism by press-release, as exemplified in the "unbiased" commercial media.

Rusty.

Hi agree with the other posters, it is the journalists responsibility to check their sources. If references were given, then they could easily be checked within 5 minutes. I think this may qualify as a study showing the low quality of many journalists. Perhaps we should redefine what a 'journalist' actually is, somebody who actually contributes to the information available, leaving the other recyclers of the news with a less respected (and paid) position of 'news communicator' or something similar.

I think the BMJ has stepped over the mark on this one. As you say, there is a level of assumed trust in 'reputable' journals like the BMJ. It's one thing to do the odd silly season story at Christmas, but to quote fictional studies, even in jest, is not a good thing for a journal that is supposedly committed to scientific rigour and opposed to dodgy research. This sort of thing might seem like a joke, but it undermines the credibility of journals when they want to make a serious point. It is bad in two ways because it makes the BMJ look like it is supporting the "political correctness gone too far" trend, and then admits it made it all up.
It's time the medical journals scaled back these silly Christmas/New Year stories.

I absolutely agree with the above comments: journalists should check their facts and rewriting press releases is bad. In fact, I spend a lot of my time pointing out how bad journalism can be when journalists do so in my blog and in various publications.

But it is not (in most cases) the role of journalists to question information presented in peer reviewed journals. There is an expectation that that information has gone through the appropriate process and is thus trustworthy, even if fallible.

Admittedly, any journalist with the slightest sense of humour that read the actual article would have realised it was a joke, but there is no guarantee that they would have. And it is going beyond their station to question the information by checking the references etc.

To make the point, imagine journalists your average reporter questioning the methods of studies published in Nature or Science. While that might be within the skill set of some journalists, it is not their job and should not be expected of them. By expecting journalists to check the references of research reported in BMJ, you are expecting them to overstep the role and their abilities.

Sight unseen, the BMJ will have clues in both the editorial and the teaser pages pointing up the article. If the journalists involved did not even pick up the actual journal, where does that leave them? I rather hope they realised, and published anyway, in order that others may enjoy the leg pull.

Real scientists have senses of humour too.

Rusty.

"While that might be within the skill set of some journalists, it is not their job and should not be expected of them."

Is further research into a story part of a journalists job? I think it should be, and from a good journalist, I do expect this.

Looking at at just the titles of a few of the references it is obvious that something silly was going on. Was this published anywhere other than ABC and Herald?

Two clicks = 'research'? Oh, come now! Journalists who are paid for their work have a responsibility to do it properly. Their failure to do it properly is partially responsible for killing off the press. If I want fiction, hearsay and second-hand rumours I can get them for nothing from the blogosphere.

Stezza, I can only guess at the answer to your question, but for me, the bottom line rests in the concluding paragraphs of the article, pasted below (which line? The literal-minded may go get their Sherlock caps and magnifiers).

I am guessing the article was originally presented to workshops in Victoria, as part of a health education program.

Good on the BMJ for publishing it. They appear to have engaged more than one journalist in a learning opportunity.

The BMJ comments are also worth reading:

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/339/dec16_1/b5261
Rapid Responses to:

ANALYSIS:
Nathan J Grills and Brendan Halyday
Santa Claus: a public health pariah?

Tha article is at
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/dec16_1/b5261

"Santa Claus is a well known and loved character, but Nathan Grills and Brendan Halyday question whether he is a healthy role model

[article]

"This work was completed during NJG’s participation in Victoria’s public health training scheme, funded by the State of Victoria through the Department of Human Services/Department of Health. The views are those of the authors and not necessarily those of these departments.

"Contributors and sources:
The article was developed after discussions with senior public health professors on role models and norms in tackling obesity and inactivity. NJG is an associate of the Nossal Institute for Global Health, and registrar of the Australian Faculty of Public Health Medicine. He completed an MSc and DPhil in public health under a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University and will complete his public health physicians training in January, after which he is considering a job as a public healthy Santa. BH provided advice on the visual impact of different representations of Santa and helped develop a Santa caricature that might better reflect a public healthy Santa.

"Competing interests: None declared.

"Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Just a few responses:

Stezza writes: "Is further research into a story part of a journalists job? I think it should be, and from a good journalist, I do expect this.

Yes, research is part of a journalist's job. But *scientific* or *academic* research is not. Checking the references of peer-reviewed articles falls into the category of scientific research and should not be expected of journalists. If we expect our journalists to do that, they'll produce a lot of bad research because they are not trained to do it.

Rusty writes: "Sight unseen, the BMJ will have clues in both the editorial and the teaser pages pointing up the article. If the journalists involved did not even pick up the actual journal, where does that leave them"

There were some clues in the journal but you wouldn't have to be stupid to miss them. (You might need to be a bit lacking in a sense of humour though.) Moreover, most researchers, let alone journalists, do not pick up the actual journal. They will download the relevant article and read that which, in almost every case, is completely adequate.

Stezza asks: "Was this published anywhere other than ABC and Herald?"
Yeah, it was published in about a hundred places. One of the wire services picked it up as a serious story and then when they were caught out, became very defensive, labelling the author a "grinch". (I should note that the ABC did write the piece up as a joke.)

Mutikonka writes: "It's one thing to do the odd silly season story at Christmas, but to quote fictional studies, even in jest, is not a good thing for a journal that is supposedly committed to scientific rigour and opposed to dodgy research."

I agree. Perhaps it would have been ok if the journal had made an obvious attempt to show lay readers that it was a joke. At the very least, the press release could have been labelled "satire" or something. (Some people have suggested that the press officer didn't realise it was a joke when she wrote the press release.)

Mutikonka and Michael Slezak, why don't you check the studies cited in the article and identify which ones are fictional?

At face value, both the article and its press release are about a public health education exercise. My only beef with the article is that neither the author nor the BMJ editor took issue with the following sentence:

"By the mid-1950s Santa had become the leading sales consultant for numerous other companies and products."
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/dec16_1/b5261

I wouldn't call Santa a consultant. To me, he's more of an icon.

What journalists and philosophers may choose to infer is up to them. What the atmospherics develop from the mainstream press coverage, say a butterfly wing's vortex into a tropical storm, or a dry statistic seeding a political cloudburst, I cannot predict, as I am no meteorologist, literally or figuratively.

Journalists could have taken the matter up with the author, whose email address and associations are given in the original article. It never hurts to have a primary source quoted.

I still wonder (as is implied by my first post, above) about the civilian casualty statistics in Iraq; and Afghanistan and Pakistan, for that matter. These are also matters of public health and public health policy, for it seems that there are only so many slices in the pie, and both public health and education have been sacrificed for "defense". I say this as a taxpayer, paying for our troops, and the hardware and infrastructure, both offensive and defensive.

What is our Australian policy regarding the state-sponsored and other violence which so outrages some of its witnesses in places like the middle-east, along with those of us who view from more remote and secure places? My most recent searches offer this echo: the US government's declassified document, NSC-68, from 1950.

I don't see much evidence of analytic progress in 59 years: just substitute Al Qaeda for USSR and decide for yourself how it reads, and whether its assumptions (such as you may identify) deserve wider examination. I'm hoping Australia's classified documents read closer to ground truth.

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm

I am sure that many journalists realised that this was a joke, but chose to report it 'straight'. Journalists - and their employers - love controversy.
Yes, journalists should check their sources, but let's save the outrage when they don't for issues that really matter. Every day in the media we get uncritical reporting, often near-verbatim, of government propaganda and press releases from politically affiliated think tanks and drug companies and other commercial enterprises. That's what we should be objecting to, not traditional Xmas spoofs.