Life of a Lab Rat

Georg kindly sent me a link this morning, and although it is interesting, I've been wondering ever since about how to frame it.

I remember quite clearly the first time I realized that what you read in the newspapers (and by extension, what you see on news bulletins) is not necessarily what actually is. I had recently completed my thesis defence, and one Sunday morning my ex-supervisor rang me up to tell me that a member of my old lab had been murdered; shot at through his kitchen window. Come Monday, and the news had made the national dailies (and continued to do so).

And it wasn't that the incident itself had been misreported; it was the background, the little bitty details that made the victim a real person that were wrong.

That was just the start, of course. Soon I began to see details that were wrong all over the place. And yes, sometimes the stories were wrong too, or even non-existent (HT).

So when Georg says, hey, look at this:

Journalists and scientists at Monday's Scientific American sponsored panel discussion, "Does Science Get a Fair Shake in the Media?," hosted at USC Annenberg, unanimously agreed that while the public is consuming more science reporting now than ever before, mainstream journalism is doing a lousier job of covering the field

my inner cynic asks "Isn't all reporting like that? What's so special about Science journalism?"

I don't want to attack good journalism, or journalists. But there is a failure to realize, on the part of people like you and me, just how difficult it is to report factually, accurately and relevantly. I'm a hobbyist; it takes me as long as I want to write this, and I might still think 'to hell with it' and hit delete. But your professional journalist is trying to create a story, not write a scientific article, so that means she has to put in some 'human interest', to create a controversy or mystery if possible because within the looming deadline (that's redundant. All deadlines loom. It is in their very nature to loom. 'Loom': It rhymes with 'doom') she also has to get it past the editor who doesn't care about telling the truth but who does care about increasing circulation, or advertising revenue at least.

To approach science reporting with a traditional journalistic judgment of newsworthiness and objectivity is fundamentally incompatible with how science works

Our struggling journalist will, because she's good at her job, interview the locals, who range from the uselessly intellectual telling her that a modification in changing the dementia praecox concept to the more inclusive one of schizophrenia does nothing to weaken the fundamental dichotomy to the self-important constable who was proceeding to the Town Hall when the alleged miscreant did allegedly accost the alleged victim with what appeared to be a blunt instrument, allegedly, and finally sees the chance to get his name in the Scunthorpe Courier.

Which all means that it's a damned sight easier just to unthinkingly regurgitate the press release — which itself is expertly spun by someone with far more time to spare, if not just plain wrong.

Enough ranting. Even with good journalists and sympathetic editors, I think that science probably is worse off than, say, cricket coverage, because it is harder, LBW decisions and Duckworth-Lewis notwithstanding.

The media isn't doing its job to educate the public – most journalists have little to no background in science and statistics [...] Furthermore, due to traditional media's budget considerations, a science reporter is often responsible for several scientific disciplines, and that inevitably leads to a lack of intelligent, dependable coverage, or worse, over-coverage of wacky, pseudoscientific studies such as Jessica Alba's score in an index of female desirability.

Scientists must take some of the blame, too. When was the last time you read a scientific article that your mother, or even your sister, could understand?

On the other hand, many scientists cannot talk in layman's terms about what they do. Neither are they trained to do so. "No effort has been made to help us reach out or learn to talk to the media and to the public," Quick said

Which is one way of saying that you shouldn't be surprised when you discover that most science weblogs are about politics or badly written, or both. It's all a little bit pants, really.

The question remains,
"Can science blogs save science journalism?"
and I very much suspect that the answer is "No. But spending more on public education, especially in science, might".

There. Politics. Hope you're happy now.