I've been enjoying the back and forth on the BEST thread about the way the publicity for the team's papers was handled, with some people concerned about the team going to the press before peer review had taken place.
Circulating drafts of a paper seems unobjectionable to me - this is surely an everyday occurrence in the academy. Going to the press before those drafts have been examined seems somewhat more questionable. That said, given my own views on peer review - namely that it's not worth a whole lot - then some interesting questions are raised.
If we have a world in which peer review is required, then is one of the roles of the process to tell the press that it's OK to talk about a paper? I would say that it is, in which case I think there is a problem with the publicity drive.
But how would things work in a world without peer review? - an open-source world in which papers might simply appear on scholars' websites for anyone interested to review and comment on? How do the press know that it is OK to discuss the paper, bearing in mind that what they write about the paper is likely to be taken as gospel by policymakers?
I imagine one possible measure might be the number of citations - the press would have to adopt a self-denying ordinance that would prevent them from discussing papers with fewer than five or ten citations. Then again, would it actually matter if they discussed papers that were shown to be nonsense days later? This happens, even with peer review in place. Would the press have to become more cautious about "extraordinary claims"? In my view that would not be a bad thing at all.