The current study examines the influence of press releases about scientific studies in terms of their impact on news coverage. Using an innovative approach that allowed for analysis of a large corpus of text and calculation of similarity scores, we were able to trace the uptake of press release materials into news media articles. In some cases, up to 65% of sentences in science news articles reflected high similarity to press release material—a potent indication of how powerful information subsidies can be. While our results contain some good news for public relations practitioners, they also carry a warning for consumers of journalism and for the public science agenda, which may be left vulnerable to bad actors undermining the trust that the public, and journalists, have in science. News organizations that had a history of producing award-winning science journalism were much less likely to draw on press release materials, indicating the importance of topic area expertise in producing independent science journalism.

目前的研究根据对新闻报道的影响来检验有关科学研究的新闻稿的影响。使用一种允许分析大量文本并计算相似性分数的创新方法，我们能够追踪新闻发布材料在新闻媒体文章中的使用情况。在某些情况下，科学新闻文章中高达 65% 的句子反映了与新闻稿材料的高度相似性——这有力地表明了信息补贴的强大程度。虽然我们的结果为公共关系从业者带来了一些好消息，但它们也对新闻消费者和公共科学议程提出了警告，这些议程可能容易受到破坏公众和记者对科学信任的不良行为者的影响。