"Reader beware: Science covered in the news is pretty likely to be overturned"

"Their analysis of media coverage indicates that studies written about in newspapers are highly likely to be later overturned.

“This is partly due to the fact that newspapers preferentially cover ‘positive’ initial studies rather than subsequent observations, in particular those reporting null findings,” the researchers note in their study, which appears in the journal PLOS ONE...

Also unsurprising (but by no means encouraging), news outlets were far more likely to report on initial studies than follow-up research, covering roughly 13 percent of the former but only 2 percent of the latter.

And who says readers love bad news? Not in science, apparently: All 53 initial studies that generated news coverage reported positive findings. As for the 174 studies with null, or negative, results, the number of resulting stories was zero. Journalists did a slightly better job covering negative findings in follow-up studies, but only slightly."

https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/02/science-media-news/