Most Americans learn about modern science from press reports, while such articles have a bad reputation among scientists. We have performed a study of 148 news articles on gamma-ray astronomy to quantitatively answer the questions “How accurate are press reports of gamma-ray astronomy?” and “What fraction of the basic claims in the press are correct?” We have taken all articles on the topic from five news sources (UPI, New York Times, Sky & Telescope, Science News, and five middle-sized city newspapers) for one decade (1987–1996) We found an average rate of roughly one trivial error every two articles, while none of our 148 articles significantly mislead the reader or misrepresented the science. This quantitative result is in stark contrast to the nearly universal opinion among scientists that the press frequently butchers science stories. So a major result from our study is that reporters should be rehabilitated into the good graces of astrophysicists, since they actually are doing a good job. For our second question, we rated each story with the probability that its basic new science claim is correct. We found that the average probability over all stories is 70&percent;. Since the reporters and the scientists are both doing good jobs, then why is 30&percent; of the science you read in the press wrong? The reason is that the nature of news reporting is to present front-line science and the nature of front-line science is that reliable conclusions have not yet been reached. The combination of these two natures forces fast breaking science news to have frequent incorrect ideas that are subsequently identified and corrected. So a second major result from our study is to make the distinction between textbook science (with reliabilities near 100&percent;) and front-line science which you read about in the press (with reliabilities near 70&percent;). ©2000 American Institute of Physics.