Roy Greenslade on The Sun's Martian scoop

Roy Greenslade, grand old person of media commentators, has his take on the recent embargo brouhaha in The Guardian, How The Sun got its 'Life on Mars' world exclusive.

Greenslade adds little that we don't know, and doesn't even seem to have a view on the saga. He just wraps up with a parting observation that "His scoop has certainly stimulated controversy among the community of science journalists, in the States and in Britain. Some of them are clearly upset about Sutherland acting like a reporter while others are wondering whether he has a point about the passivity of a news-managed journalism."

Strangely for The Guardian, which usually gets swamped with readers' observations, the piece has attracted very few comments. One is certainly in line with the 'papers readership: "While Mr Sutherland deserves some credit for sleuthing around the embargo, Mr Greenslade misses the bigger issue: the sensationalistic, misleading way the results were published by The Sun."