As a scientist one thing I recognize that promoting ones science is an important part of a research career. Research visibility provides opportunity to make connections, further your research, obtain funding and keep your job at the University.
When publishing your research in an academic journal peer review ensures your data is valid and conclusions are justified. Most research doesn't make waves, but you hope it gains traction and forms part of the ongoing discussion in the literature through other researcher reading your and citing your work.
However academia and research has somewhat moved past the publish or perish mindset, though publications are still important. Universities now track altmetrics, which is a measure of public engagement with the research. Universities want to conduct research that has this impact, research thats groundbreaking, that produces a technology to market. This drives a push towards creating a splash and the media becomes a means of promoting discovery.
This is where self promotion creeps in as its removed from the bounds of peer review and whats publishable. When talking about your work to the press its all about telling them why they should care, how this will fundamentally change our understanding or a tech application that will revolutionize a process. At this point its where researchers often go beyond the data to potentially exaggerating the implication. In the media a relatively humble data can become an earth shattering discovery if its the right subject matter at the right time.
This is quite common in social sciences whereby not particularly rigid datasets are portrayed in the media as demonstrating clear links or causation between factors, when there are many potentially confounding variables.
A fascinating example comes from a few years ago, with the so called discovery of a microbe that incorporated arsenic in place of phosphorus. Even NASA got in on the promotion, despite most in the biochemistry field being highly skeptical. The paper was published in Science, but the data itself did not clearly demonstrate arsenic was incorporated into the DNA. When the paper appeared in print it was eventually accompanied by 8 technical notes pointing out the issues with the study and the authors conclusions.
The study received a lot of attention in the media and the head researcher did not hold back in proclaiming the implications of the study that would fundamentally alter our understanding of life , or that there could be whole shadow biosphere of microbes utilising arsenic.
The problem was biochemist knew this was impossible due to the fact that arsenic esters are too unstable and hydrolise readily compared to phosphate diesters which don't readily hydrolise. Of course the media not being biochemists did not pick up on this.
Later studies on the bacteria strain failed to detect arsenic in DNA and noted the bacteria likely utilised trace phosphate that contaminated the growth medium and arsentate utilised.
You can read more about it on wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1
