Is there a crisis brewing in the reporting of science in the media?

The Guardian: The UK's Daily Telegraph's science correspondent, Nic Fleming, is believed to be in negotations over plans to make his role redundant and, should he go, there do not seem to be plans to replace him.

The situation has reinforced the view that the media fail to recognise science's popularity with, or relevance to, the public. Reporting is either dumbed down, sensationalised, or spiked by executives with humanities degrees and an inability to distinguish one end of a hybrid embryo from another.

While science journalists proudly trace their origins back to the 1920s, doomsayers fear their field is being slowly invaded by technology correspondents (who first appeared in 1985), encroached on by health correspondents and made to seem marginal by the more recent obsession with the environment.

"Science in the daily media is too often reported in the same deferential way as political journalists used to report politics in the 1950s," says Jonathan Leake, science and environment editor at the Sunday Times. "Many of the tensions, rows and skulduggery in the science community get far less attention than they would in business or politics."

The main criticism is that respected journals such as Science and Nature - along with active news agencies such as AlphaGalileo, EurekAlert! and a plethora of less rigorous journals - control much of the science correspondents' output. An onslaught of embargoed, mid-week press releases leaves the Sundays with no choice but to pursue factually thin sensationalism.

"The science correspondents are individually very good but everyone publishes the same stories at the same time and that can make it dull," says Leake. "Although it would be a serious mistake to do away with expert science writers, any daily editor facing the pinch might wonder if they could get the same stories from the wires."

This relentless PR churn has another danger, according to Lawrence McGinty, ITV's health and science editor. "There's little time to pursue your own ideas when everyone is under pressure from news desks not to miss a story," he says.