Nature is arguably the most prestigious science journal. Articles published in Nature are widely perceived to be correct, unbiased, and factual. This perception is certainly true of articles that appear in the News section of the journal since these article are presumably written by expert science writers who have evaluated the new study and decided that it's worth reporting.
Sandwalk readers know that this perception is false (fake news). It turns out that science writers who publish in Nature are not very much better than science writers in general and that's not good.I recently published a post about an extraordinary claim concerning the number of human genes [Disappearing genes: a paper is refuted before it is even published ]. It concerns a paper posted on an archive site claiming to have found 4,998 new genes of which 1,178 are new protein-coding genes (Pertea et. al., 2018). About five weeks later another paper was posted that effectively refuted the claim of new protein-coding genes (Jungreis et al., 2018). In between publication of those two papers, a freelance science writer, Cassandra Willyard, wrote an article for Nature News that covered the original claim of 4,998 new genes [New human gene tally reignites debate].
Let's see how she handled the controversy.