Mouthwash secrets: the embargo problem

On Tuesday, the Herald and some other media outlets, and the occasional journalist’s Twitter account published a story about mouthwash being able to prevent gonorrhea from spreading. Or, in some versions, cure it.  The research paper behind the story wasn’t linked and hadn’t been published. This time it seems to have been the newspapers’ fault: the stories appeared before the end of the news embargo.  The Herald story was pulled, then reappeared midday Wednesday with a link (yay)

Embargoes are an increasingly controversial topic in science journalism. The idea is that journalists get advance copies of a research paper and the press release, so they have time to look things up and ask for expert help or comment. There are organisations such as the NZ Science Media Centre to help with finding experts, or there’s your friendly neighbourhood university.

Sometimes, this works. Stories become more interesting and less slanted, or the journalist just decides the breakthrough wasn’t all that and the story is killed.  Without embargoes, allegedly, no-one would take the time to get it right. In medicine, too, there was the idea that doctors should be able to get the research paper by the time their patients saw the headlines.

On the other hand, embargoes feed into the idea that science stories are Breaking News that must be posted Right Now — that all published science is true (or important) for fifteen minutes. Ivan Oransky (who runs the Embargo Watch blog) argued recently at Vox that embargoes are no longer worthwhile; there’s also a rebuttal posted at Embargo Watch.

The Listerine/gonorrhea story, though, wasn’t new. Major outlets such as Teen Vogue and the BBC covered it in August(probably from a conference presentation). There are no details in the new Herald story that weren’t in the August stories.  It’s hard to see how anyone gains from the embargo here — except perhaps as a way of synchronising a wave of publicity.