Last week the UK Home Office published the findings of its investigations into allegations of animal suffering, made after undercover infiltrations at two animal research facilities.

You will not find coverage of any of the conclusions in the national news media. Instead any search for media coverage will unearth the original infiltration stories under headlines such as: “Horrific video shows distress of puppies and kittens waiting to be dissected at animal testing lab”; “Graphic content: horrifying video shows puppies and kittens tested at UK laboratory”; and “Rats beheaded with scissors and kept in ‘pitiful state’.”

These “shocking exposés”, brought to the newspapers by the animal rights group BUAV, include distressing images, links to videos that are difficult to watch, and quote allegedly secretly recorded researchers saying terrible things about the animals in their care.

The newspapers seem in no doubt that the allegations they are carrying add up to “appalling suffering on a very large scale”, and appear to be proud of their role in bringing the abuses to light: “The Sunday Express today publishes details of an undercover investigation … that shines a light on the secret world of vivisection laboratories.”

You may well see these articles as reassuring evidence that we still have public interest journalism in the UK. These animal rights supporters have done exactly what investigative journalists used to do in a time when newspapers had enough money to shine a light on the darker corners of our institutions and uncover hidden abuses. And you would be right, but for one thing: we now know that the stories were largely untrue.

Since you will not find this information in the mainstream print media let me tell you what the Home Office found.

The infiltrations investigated by the Home Office took place at Imperial College London and the pharmaceutical company Merke, Sharpe and Dohme. Out of 180 allegations made by BUAV about Imperial, the Home office upheld just five and declared the other 175 “unsubstantiated”.

The five ‘non-compliance’ issues it found were classed as “minor” – one in category A and four in category B (with category D being at the most severe end of the suffering scale). Category B means that while there may have been “some animal welfare implications“, it “[did] not involve significant, avoidable or unnecessary pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm”, and there was “no evidence of intent to subvert the controls of ASPA [the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986]”.

While the Home Office repeated points it had made previously, which had been conceded by Imperial, about the poor culture of care and failings in management, the report concluded that “overall the … allegations of cruelty at the establishment have not been substantiated.” It was a far cry from the “abuse” reported by the Sunday Times, and as one commentator said, the BUAV allegations carried by the media “were 97% wrong and 3% right”.

In the case of Merke, Sharpe and Dohme, the Home Office upheld none of the BUAV claims. None. “Our findings confirm that the site is well managed with staff at all levels committed to the provision of appropriate standards of welfare and care, within the constraints of the scientific requirements of the research.” Again a very long way from the media headlines of “horrific distress” and animals that “can be heard screaming in terror as they are restrained by researchers”.

Let me emphasise here that there is no excuse for any lapses in animal welfare and that I fully support the right of activists and the media to uncover and expose abuses of animals in research facilities. However, the huge discrepancy between the allegations reported prominently in national newspapers and the truth should worry anyone who cares about the accurate reporting of science in the media, and should raise questions about the way these undercover exposés are covered.

For the uninitiated, let me just tell you how these stories typically come about. A person sympathetic to animal rights groups whose aim is to abolish all animal research secures a job in an animal research facility, usually as a junior animal technician, and stays there undercover for around 6-8 months. Despite the fact that universities and companies have robust mechanisms in place for whistleblowing, none of the infiltrators have reported the animal cruelty they claim to have witnessed to staff or the Home Office, preferring instead to secretly film the alleged suffering for months before bringing it directly to their Sunday newspaper of choice.

For the infiltrated institution this is how it goes. They know nothing about the infiltration until the Thursday night or Friday morning before publication when a journalist calls to tell them that extremely serious allegations will be made about them on Sunday. They are given just a few hours to look at the allegations and respond. In some cases they are not even shown the full dossier of claims made against them. Requests to the newspaper for more time are generally turned down and because the institution is unable to mount any kind of proper investigation in the short timeframe, the allegations appear almost completely unchallenged.

This kind of one-sided reporting may have been more understandable when scientists stayed quiet on the issue, but this is no longer the case. Earlier this year, 81 organisations signed a Concordat on Openness in Animal Research, committing them to embrace media and public interest in their use of animals in research, and open up their facilities to more journalists. So when animal rights activists in Leicester recently told local newspapers that a new facility in the university would be used to inflict suffering on monkeys and dogs, the university threw its doors open to journalists who after unfettered access reported that this particular facility housed only rodents.

The media should continue to shine a light on this aspect of science and should avail itself of the new climate of openness to go into animal research facilities and report all they see.

Why does any of this matter? Because animal research is a vital and necessary part of medical science. While scientists are making great strides towards replacing, refining and reducing the use of animals, many key questions in medical science can still only be addressed by studies on animals – studies that offer hope to millions who suffer from serious conditions such as cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, spinal cord damage and so on. The new treatments for Ebola that we have all seen in the news require studies in monkeys before they are used in humans.

All but one winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine over the past 40 years has used animals in their research, including yesterday’s UK-based winner Professor John O’Keefe.

The British public have every right to know the truth about animal research and should know about the failings as well as the benefits. Robust and open debate in the media about the ethics and practice of animal experiments is crucial. But if the public reject the use of animals in research after reading inaccurate, sensational and misleading reports, the press is failing its readers badly.

Every media studies student will know that “Man bites dog” is a better story than “Man doesn’t bite dog”. But editors should be very concerned if the “Man bites dog” story they splashed on their front pages turns out not to be true. Last week’s reports may not have made for a sexy headline but they should cause editors to pause for thought the next time BUAV comes knocking with its cleverly edited video footage. This subject is too important for poor journalism.