When crayfish make news, headlines are correct but still misleading

Abstract

Crayfish are well known to many but not often newsworthy, so cases where crayfish are covered in international news provide an example of how science journalism covers a news story about basic research. Headlines have a disproportionately large influence on people's factual knowledge and perceptions of stories covered in media. I tracked online media coverage of one scientific paper involving marbled crayfish and analyzed the headlines used by the articles. Articles were framed as "news," but almost no headlines contained "new" facts that first appeared in the target scientific paper. The fact that appeared in the most headlines (that marbled crayfish reproduce by cloning) was over a decade old. Headlines misled readers into thinking a "breakthrough" was made by one team, rather than showing incremental advances by many teams of researchers over years.