The Dark Matter Matter

Let me be frank at the commencement:  I am a complete amateur.  An interested layman.  Basically, I really don't know very much about any of this.  All my "knowledge" comes from documentaries on TV, articles in the mainstream media, and books aimed at amateurs like myself.  Thing is, it's a great time to be one.  TV is terrified of making anyone have to think for too long whilst scientists have spotted the lucrative market for giving us all the interesting stuff with the hard stuff taken out.  Accessibility is the watch-word and life is good.  It's sort of like how PC's these days shove all that nasty technical code and whatnot into the background and give us a nice, friendly, clicky interface.  I can learn about the cutting edge of theoretical physics without having to know what 2+2 equals.

Actually, that might turn out to be a good thing because there's an obvious danger to having all this accessible knowledge floating around.  Here follows a cautionary tale (for perhaps some physicists have been adding 2 and 2 and getting an imaginary number...):

The bulk of my science diet comes from TV, mainly the BBC.  For many a year now, and without knowing how the BBC operates on these matters I'd have to guess it's some sort of editorial guideline, any documentary on any subject that has - directly or indirectly - invoked dark matter, has done so in such a way as to imply that the theories of dark matter and dark energy are pretty much fact.  Unproven but not disputed.  Just a matter of time until proven, right?   However, I recently started reading a book called  "13 Things That Don't Make Sense" - one of those accessible science books - by Michael Brooks.  It is, by the way excellent.  A very good example of how to do it without dumbing down or over-simplifying, mixing well-chosen metaphors and interesting asides with small doses of hard science (my head started hurting at one point, when he was explaining the maths behind alpha, but it was a brief moment).  Anyway, whilst taking us through the mystery of where or what 96% of the Universe is, a personal bomb-shell is dropped:  MOND / MOG.  That's right:  WORLDCAT.  Worldcat ate it.  The furball will destroy us all.  And you thought lolcats were the nadir of humanity......

Seriously though, Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or Modified Gravity.  Is it just that gravity works differently over large distances?  In hindsight, the notion that perhaps science that is hundreds of years old might need tweaking, what with all we've learnt in the meantime, doesn't seem that shocking. And it seems to me to be a. eminently sensible and b. just plain good science to first of all systematically check your assumptions before going off and inventing theoretical exotic particles or forms of mass/ energy to fill in the gaps. But the main thing is that there are alternative theories.  Only you'd have no idea, as I had no idea, if you were relying on mainstream TV for your fix.

This is not an attack on the BBC science output.  I understand these documentaries generally have an hour-long slot in which to do their things and the necessary pedantry would kill them.  However,  they're presenting - intentionally or otherwise - one unproven theory as universally accepted principle.   I'm to blame for relying on a narrow selection of sources, of course.  Though Brooks acknowledges that fashion and publicity can be just as powerful in science as in showbiz.  Is there a danger that if one idea becomes the "fashionable" one in the eyes of the wider public, that can create a feedback that would influence scientists' perceptions and presumptions, and affect how research and funding for research are targeted?