I don't know if you imagine me to be partisan here. I was arguing simply that headlines are hard to balance, and that people can interpret articles with a slant

I don't know if you imagine me to be partisan here. I was arguing simply that headlines are hard to balance, and that people can interpret articles with a slant. I wasn't saying that one bad study means the overall trial was bad. The issue is that SOME people might think that. (Also others might think that if it's ONE study that's bad, the overall trial WAS fine, when that's not clear either). The risk is whether real people take away a too-strong message and run with it. In other words, journalists have SOME responsibility to not mislead people even when the main way people get off-track is their own erroneous jumping-to-conclusions as readers. We KNOW that readers do such things, so we have to be careful to minimize it.