Science, Journalism and the Public were the topics of conversation at Jesus College, Cambridge on the 11th May. The conference for ‘The Next Generation of Science Media’ was all about bringing professional writers, academics and amateur bloggers together and working out just who, what and how we were going to tackle the tricky task of science communication in the 21st century.
Other pens have dwelt on exactly what went in to each of the five discussion areas of ‘Opportunities and Challenges’, ‘the Next Big Stories’, ‘Impact of Science Journalism on Culture and Society’, ‘Ethics and Science Media’ and ‘Prospects for Science Books’ (see link below) so I am going to leave these specific areas well behind and instead dig about to try and convey some of the more surprising conclusions I drew from the meeting.
Firstly there is a huge difference between being a scientist who writes articles for the public and a journalist who happens to cover some science stories. You would be forgiven for thinking that both are science journalists, but you would still be wrong — as David Adam, former environment correspondent for The Guardian put it ‘being a journalist is about causing mischief’.
It would seem that the endless hours we spend discussing how to make academic scientists into effective communicators of their science is not necessarily going to change the way in which science is reported. Journalists need a headline and they need a story. The tentative results of a ten yearlong study, which probably requires a further ten years to confirm the initial findings, is not going to grab anybody’s interest. On the other hand, controversy sells papers; after all there is nothing like a good spat. As Adam says ‘most of the time we are trying to goad them [the scientists] in to saying something stupid.’
It seems to me there is a vicious cycle going on here. Journalists need a story so they extrapolate a scientific finding to make it more relevant to the-man-on-the-street. Scientists feel that their words have been twisted and that they appear to be making wild claims which their peers will sneer at so scientists stop communicating with the press. The press feel that scientists are trying to operate outside the public domain and need to be taken down a peg or two, so mild disputes and controversies win most of the column inches. All in all this is bad for science and bad for journalism and, I think most importantly, we should question whether this is really in the public interest.
What is necessary here is the acknowledgement that both parties have an agenda. Journalists want to sell papers. Scientists want funding (which means sounding like you are solving all the world’s problems with one experiment). Difficult though it is for many to accept, perhaps page three of The Times isn’t the best place to discuss the latest nuances of genome sequencing — save that for a nice feature article in somewhere like Eureka. Maybe column inches do go on the human conflict area of science, but then perhaps that is because the-man-on-the-street can relate to a tiff between two opinionated professionals more than the complexities of the Higgs Boson. In fact, Ben Goldacre’s view that science isn’t news and cannot be treated as sensationalistic headline material may not be so extreme as all that. The science that makes the headlines often isn’t science at all, but more the political, financial and downright personal investments that cause dispute.
One area which came up during the Cambridge meeting was that of libel law. Simon Singh’s libel case has received a huge amount of press attention so I am not going to go into it here, but rather take a quick peek at some slightly less well known views which surround it.
Firstly, journalists feel that science shouldn’t be exempt from the hardline investigative journalism which is seen in almost every other field. Why should scientists not have to account for their claims and the money we spend on them? Libel laws scare journalists away from exposing flawed science and so the public don’t get answers to questions about issues which may affect how they live.
In one way, I support this view — it sometimes takes an outsider to say ‘hang on, yes this research looks interesting, but it is ethical/worth the money/even conclusive?!’. Why should scandals not be reported just because it is about science?
On the other hand, perhaps scientists do require a little more protection. Scientists can spend decades gathering data and creating delicate collaborations to produce a health or environmental report which may shape everything from the foods we eat to how much energy we consume. A slur against such reports can cause a political knee-jerk reaction (think MMR) and public trust in science is eroded. What’s more, the doubt and damage to the reputation of the scientist and even the University can be irrevocable (echos of climategate reverberate here). Do the Universities have the right to sue the journalist under new libel laws? Possibly not if the University counts as a large company (over 20 employees). For a discipline in which we put so much faith, is it in the public interest to make people feel uneasy about science? Surely it would be better to be honest and say ‘yes, scientific opinions do change, and science can never answer all the questions’ rather than portraying controversy as a sign that there is something inherently wrong with the science.
What’s more, scientists get quite peeved when a journalists tell the public they have a right to decide where science funding goes. As far as an academic goes, these are matters for funding bodies which have experts in the field on the panel, not for your next door neighbour who doesn’t understand the great scientific method. Why should scientists have to justify their research to the public when it means explaining the science in such a handwavy fashion that it barely resembles the actual experiments?
This is of course, no defence for fraudulant researchers who peddle made-up data and bogus claims in order to secure the next grant or make a splash in the papers. Libel laws shoudn’t gag journalists who are onto a hot story, but they should certainly make them think twice about making senstationalistic allegations.
Science and journalism may be uneasy bedfellows, but so it would appear, are science and media. The internet, once hailed by academics as a super way to get peer reviewed journals from the comfort of your own armchair, has become an uncontrollable beast; for both scientists and journalists the web is an anarchic source of chaotic information and opinions. Of course not everyone shares this view, but certainly there are hurdles to overcome and, as always with the media, a hefty deadline attached — the media has to find a way to make itself financially and socially viable in this new era and quickly. Gone are the days when the morning paper and the BBC’s News at Ten were your sources for all matters in life. Twitter, Facebook, blogs and Wikipedia allow anyone and everyone to read, interpret, comment and share ideas about all sorts of things, including science.
There is a strong tendency for folks to say ‘see, see — you’ve just said that scientists don’t want people to know about what they are up to’ but honestly I don’t think this is true. The trouble with the internet from a scientist’s point of view is that has sped everything up and given a huge arena of publicity to people to express ideas about science with no backing whatsoever. The former of these points is probably the most inherently worrying. Science is not quick, that’s why Goldacre is right in saying that it isn’t a source for news per se, but now we are trained to expect updates, every half hour at least about what is happening and why. As any DPhil student knows, most research doesn’t work and it isn’t because of any wildly interesting reason; science often just throws up a lot of questions we can’t answer. Yet. The idea of producing exciting interesting stories every week, even by a large body of scientists, is totally alien to the academic community for whom a year isn’t really a very long time to try something out. All in all, the new trend in media often means that science becomes befuddled while journalists are frustrated that it cannot keep up with enough stories. Of course, there are ways around this— depositories can be used along with peer reviewed journals to get data into the public domain as soon as possible, but this information has not been verified and as such scientists may well be wary about revealing preliminary data which could fuel a whole new month of tabloid headlines only to be disproved a little later.
Of course this does sound like a very negative take on modern technology and for that I apologise. Making information accessible is a wonderful thing and giving everyone, including scientists, the chance to share information with each other is fantastic. Often scientists that would never consider public engagement now tweet and blog about their work and their views, offering new resources to those who want to clarify concepts they have read in the paper, or like me, have picked up from procrastinating on the BBC news website. What’s more, they can do this anytime, anyplace for free.
Right now it seems that everyone — scientists, journalists and the man-on-the-street — are a bit at sea with just how to make the most of the new wave of media. But, with a bit of trial and error, it is likely that the new generation of science journalism will be able to broker a more satisfactory deal between science and journalism than we have now. I’ll let the public decide.
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