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Can Science Journalism Be Entertaining and Responsible?
GRW writes "This past week, I attended a panel discussion sponsored by the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, entitled "Can science journalism be entertaining and responsible?". This was a discussion regarding the role the media could and should play in the dissemination of scientific issues to the general public. Panelists included newspaper, TV and radio journalists. I thought that this might be a good subject for a Slashdot discussion. What do you think about science journalism? How can it better communicate to the general public about science and the scientific method? Can science journalism do a better job of helping people distinguish science from pseudoscience?"
Entertainment these days consists of either:
A) Making fun of another person, ethnic group, or sexual group, or
B) Humiliating one's self thru reality television shows
The music industry is slowly dying, so I suspect we'll only have TV and movies 5 yrs from now. Radio/records will be long gone.
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
For my part, i enjoy fairly technial reading, but most people do not, and they are the ones who have so very much to benefit from making science reporting interesting. some of the most approachable science and environmental reporting i've found yet is from The Worldwatch Institute.
if it sold papers.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
Sorry. Hope this helps.
Um
The world really needs a few more Carl Sagans. Ever since his passing, there's really no one willing to responsibly "popularize" science.
Of course it will always be nearly impossible to find a balanced and unbiased news source, but when it comes to science and tecnology it seems like the major news outlets only like to report on the latest gadgets and anything that will "make life easier". I tent to surf the internet to find my latest science news and reports. I find it easier to visit the sites of those actually doing the scietific studies/experiments. It is easier to get the full story that way.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
NOSTRADAEMON PREDICTS THE END OF ARPANET ON 1/1/83!!!!
I don't expect any geek tabloids to get into my supermarket within the next two decades.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
CBC does entertaining science programing every weekend and week. The Nature of Things is a very good program hosted by David Suzuki who is always provocative. Bob McDonald of Quirks and Quarks on the radio give up-to-the-week science news that is very informative and interesting.
It just takes the right person, and the right subject. Not all science is for everyone. Space people might not care for the science of bugs for instance.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Aren't there already magazines and programs on TV discussing nothing but science, including scientific methods?
Can science journalism do a better job of helping people distinguish science from pseudoscience?
Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic Magazine do a good job.
Unfortunately there are magazines based on pseudoscience that make it to the bookshelves; not only the crystal-waving, aura-reading kind, but even a few that seem on the surface to be legitimate scientific publications, until you see the bizarre anti-environmentalism or cold fusion stuff.
The temptation has been to rush to publish weak (fake science). Let us not forget the myth of cold fusion.
'ta
'dumbing down' explanations of Science subjects tend to lose their lustre when the terms are replaced with common usage words.
Any one else like the dire impact of pure scince placed in to science's words. It hurts my head to read it, but I must be learning some thing right?
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
Besides, it's a great magazine to have lying up on your desk, half read ;-)
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
what entertainment means to one person, may not be entertainment to another person. e.g. i think watching powerpuff girls is entertainment, however there are many people who think it is a waste of time.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Frankly, I don't trust most of the standard news stations or papers. Most have alterior motives, if they're not just plain ignorant. btw.. I also have a theory that the entire country is controlled by 2 companies that battle for the top position. See below...
AOL Time Warner vs. Microsoft
News:
AOL - CNN
MS - MSNBC
ISPs:
AOL - AOL
MS - MSN
Travel:
AOL - Travelocity
MSNBC - Expedia
The list goes on and on...
Oh.. I'm sorry.. did I say theory....
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Seed Magazine is attempting to bridge popular culture and and science. I've read a few isssues of the magazine, and the righting is a bit too edgey for my taste (like the recent article on João Maguiejo and the theory of Variable Speed Light. I'm gonna buy another issue or two to continue to evaluate it. I guess that means it's good enough, so far, to keep me buying it.
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
Here's an entertaining idea, let's exhume Mr. Wizard.
Anybody read this magazine? I think its the best science publication out there for the math-challenged layman (like myself) and it passes for entertaining sometimes...
Think of all the Moon landing hoax sites claiming they are fact.
The blessing is smart people will keep looking for answers even after they've found an "answer" they were looking for.
http://www.badastronomy.com/
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Of course it can do a better job. Just look at the front section of Science magazine for an example of responsible, generally accurate, scientific jounalism. But it is not easy to find people who both have a broad understanding of science and who can write. It requires a real reporter, in other words, not somebody whose primary skills lie in rearranging the words in press releases.
If you want people to find scientific things interesting, they must have a higher level of education than they do now. I'm not saying people need to be smarter, but they need to understand what little value an "entertaining" but dumbed-down story about science has. Can you really expect a story about the space elevator to be more entertaining to people today than say, Crappy Karaoke Night (American Idol) or Who Wants to be a Slut? (Joe Millionaire and ilk)?
All I ever wanted was an honest week's pay for an honest day's work.
If scientific journalism is going to be entertaining and responsible, it needs to be meaningfully educational. When I read a story on Slashdot, I frequently don't know a great deal about the subject matter (this is, in fact, why I read Slashdot). So as I read the linked-to article, I'll frequently come across concepts that are new to me. I then go on Google and find out what they're all about. Frequently, it takes quite a bit of reading to learn enough to understand what the article is actually getting at.
Let's have more of this. In printed media, it is very difficult to write about science in a way that really presents the data properly while being open to the lay-person, but some attempt should be made to explain the details so that the article can be widely understood while at the same time being truly informative. In online media, on the other hand, there's no reason the basic article shouldn't have hypertext on every other word, linking to other articles on the same subject, so that a person can actually educate themselves enough to understand the article properly.
I'm a geek, and so I may be a little off track, but almost everyone liked Sesame Street, and almost everyone liked Mr. Rogers. We're learning creatures, and I think if you give a person the ability to use scientific literature to do a little creative learning, that all by itself will be entertaining.
~SL
Right now the foremost science journalists in America are the Reverend Beakman and Nye. (That is if Beakman is still around, that show rocked)
What is really needed is more shows that feature critical thinking skills. Science is interesting to people, by its nature. But when they don't understand how to think for themselves, there is little achieved.
I give a big thumbs up to Pen & Teller's new show 'Bullshit' on Showtime. They apply their... well... style to any issue, from the realitites of bottled water to creationism. It is all underlined by critical thinking skills without beating you on the head with it. And, it is very, very, entertaining.
David Whatley
The world's media is useless at reporting science because people who enter journalism as their career are (sweeping generalisation alert) crap at science. The problem is exacerbated by scientists being (further generalisation alert) crap at giving interviews.
New Scientist is the closest I've found to interesting reading coupled with good science, but even that gets pretty fluffy at times. The BBC generally cover science stories with a 'look what the madcap boffins are up to now, what a waste of their time' angle, and most science journals are aimed at scientists so are dull to the non-scientist.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
It doesn't seem so if there is the possibility of profit by withholding or distorting information.
Sumi Das. Whenever she talks about science/tech on TechLive, I'm interested.
Slashdot always posts the latest crackpot soon-to-be-disproved "discoveries" and leaping to conclusions. "Possible signs of life detected on Venus" my ass. That's called wishful thinking and leaping to conclusions with only a shred of inconclusive "evidence".
Repeal the DMCA!
The trouble is that real science journalism is so easily displaced by the free content provided by corporate PR departments. Real science journalism costs money to do, and doesn't bring in any more eyeballs than press releases about Olestra fighting obesity, etc.
If it is entertaining, that's great. If it's not, too bad.
Reading or watching responsible, well done journalism is a duty we all have. Without the performance of this duty, we hand over power to those that would do great harm to us.
I noticed this in several books I read about complexity some years back --- they all featured the same cast of characters, with the same spin on how they labored alone in obscurity to develop their ideas. After a while, I felt like I was reading the work of a Hollywood PR consultant who specializes in branding the "scientific persona". In contrast, economist W. Brian Arthur's own account of his research focused on how he got inspiration for his ideas from working with Russian mathematicians.
I do think it's possible to weave a compelling narrative out of scientific ideas, it's just harder.
My first inductee into the science journalism "Hall of Shame" would have to be The Double Helix by James Watson, which I enjoyed immensely the first time I read it (shortly after high school) and horrified me the second time I read it (shortly after grad school). Not only is The Double Helix an abominable exercise is self-aggrandizement, Watson proudly recounts their underhanded attempts to gain access to another researcher's work without her knowledge or consent, and of course, without giving her credit later, even though it involved an outright lie in a letter to Nature.
Here's a review of a biography Rosalind Franklin, THe Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox in Scientific American.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
IMHO copyrights create a culture that promote hype at the expense of other more valuable knowledge. In this way, I don't think people should see the failures of hollywood culture and crudy TV as a normal part of free societies.
In a copyright market the information that gets the most attention is the most valuable no matter how worthless it is intellectually, in a non copyright market we would put ourselves in a position that doesn't reward industries that push hype over substance in the same way. Not that there wouldn't be stupid TV or movies out there, but they wouldn't be worth hundreds of millions and they wouldn't be shoved down out throat from every part of our culture.
Just because they say copyrights are an incentive to create, does not mean that they are an incentive to create things that are intellectually and socially valuable. I think as society moves into the information age we really need to rethink the need for copyright monopolies.
Where is this mythical Slashdot, where technical discussions can be carried out?
Between science and pseudo-science is that real science has a bad habit of telling people what they don't want to hear. Pseudo-science has no conscience. And since most people only want good news... well I don't think this is easily resolved.
What is music when you despise all sound?
"Can science journalism do a better job of helping people distinguish science from pseudoscience?"
/. which has given plenty airtime to total charalatans in the past.
Hollow words from
A journalists job is to digest complex facts and regurgitate them so that their lay audience can comprehend them. Pure science is full of complex symbols and formulas that only specialists with years of training can understand. Journalese, which is just plain spoken word, is not equipped to handle the fine symbolic details of science. Therefore, it can only provide loose approximations of theory.
So a journalist can write: the planets revolve around the sun in elliptical orbits with slight deviations due to...blah blah blah. Sure that's responsible journalism. And it's very useful to those of us who don't want to research calculus to get a lay person's understanding of the path planets take around the sun. However, it doesn't come close to the accuracy of the mathematical formulas that describe the path of the planets. But who the hell is going to want to read and study a bunch of formulas while reading the New York Times Science section? Not me. The journalist must sacrifice accuracy for readability/entertainment reasons.
But there is nothing irresponsible at all about making rough approximations to help keep an article light and entertaining. I mean, can you really consider it irresonsible to not be as accurate as you can possibly be? Consider that all of our knowledge comes from rough approximations delivered to us by our senses and equipment. Since they are only approximations, does it mean we must throw out all that we know? Is all of science, then, irresponsible because its measuring devices have tolerances?
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Here in the United States we do not place enough emphasis on science and mathematics in our public schools. It is considered socially unacceptable to excel in these fields for many people and only some school systems are willing to support the programs to develop the skills of thes eindividuals at this level. With religious fundamentalists clammoring about how one scientific doctrine or another interferes with their right to bring up their own children, the schools are scared to teach anything that could be disputed (Evolution is the glaring example, there are several others). Scientific journalism for the masses isn't scientific most of the time, especially because it is designed for people with a 6th grade reading level. Technical scientific journals are often difficult to access because most are very expensive (props to the Proceeding of the National Academy of Science, one of the best on the planet, for being absolutely free) or hard to find. I hold a seasonal research job when not in medical school, and it has proven very difficult to get ahold of many journals that would help my (boss's) research. We need to either set up an easily accessible system of free journals for the masses, educate the general populace about science in a much more thorough manner, or both before asking the journalists to take some care in the issue. Remember, most of these media outlets (scientific or otherwise) will publish only what they find interesting and what they know will sell instead of what may be most valuable. The apathy of the general populace in the United States towards science, as well as their dismally low general education level, should thus be treated before making any moves towards a grass-roots movement like this. After all, breaking down nuclear physics (like string theory) or techniques of treating cancer (like inhibiting angiogenesis) loses something in the translation when forced to use 6th-grade terminology.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
One of the first things learned in any communication class is to write for your audience. Unfortunately, this means that science stories are almost always diluted, misinterpreted, scoffed at, or ignored.
One major problem is that the state of science education, at least in the southeast United States, is pretty horrible. There are kids in college who don't know what DNA is, believe hoverboards are real, think creationism is as valid a theory as evolution, and think science is just a "religion". So the local newspaper tends to water down all the science stories (they're writing to, generally, a fifth grade reading level). In magazines, following human nature in distrusting what they cannot understand, they write articles that scoff or raise fear of science and scientists.
Another problem is that science often tends to be dull to the average person. It's not usually the ground-breaking theory that advance science so finding out that some particle doesn't decay as theory suggests would probably not make any headlines.
>Stroke = blockage of blood vessel in brain, kills of brain tissue, causes various bad things from blindness to death >Vampire bat blood = anticoagulant, dissolves blood clot, blood gets to brain tissue, problem resolved >If you want a crackpot story, look for the article in Pubmed (link below) dealing with the use of PCP derivatives to cure strokes, the protein should be called MK801 >http://www4.nlm.ncbi.nlm.gov
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
"Can science journalism be entertaining and responsible?"
Perhaps that should be "Can journalism be responsible?"
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
In particular, journalism should enable people to separate science from pseudoscience. I get very irritated when I see TV programs that show unexplained phenomena for sensationalistic reasons and simply leave them unexplained, leaving the audience to construct their own scientific explanations.
It is absolutely ridiculous to believe that in this day and age, there are still people who believe that the earth was created in seven days. (Contrast a similar culture, Europe, where such an idea would be laughed out of existence!) What's even more disturbing is the dangerous hubris of 'scientific' explanations using the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. There should be TV programs that carefully decontstruct these pseudo-scientific explanations and shoot them down.
In the larger scheme of things though, why do people even subscribe to notions of parapsychological phenomena, the occult and the like? I have heard various explanations ranging from disillusionment with the scientific community to the search for Something Deeper (tm). I think it is because the scientific community might not be doing enough to dispel such crap out of common social discourse. Why should one only look to the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet for science? Why don't mainstream generic-content channels devote time away from ultimately pointless pop culture crap to debunking popular myths and misconceptions?
All science has a responsibility to be responsibly funny, otherwise accidents happen.
What do you think about science journalism?
It's invaluable when it's good, it's depressing when it's bad. It's often put in the wrong hands (propagandized) and this causes entanglememts.
How can it better communicate to the general public about science and the scientific method?
it can start by stopping using the phrase "the scientific method" as if scientists don white coats, head into the lab at 9 and by using test tubes and computers, discover gravity by 5 and head home to smoke their pipes. The scientific method can be boiled down to simple steps: observe, measure, predict. Repeat as needed, and each consecutive time 'observe' serces as 'verify' and the ball starts rolling again.
Can science journalism do a better job of helping people distinguish science from pseudoscience?"
It had better, and damn soon, or else the dowsers and the channelers will be running things in short time. Overly technical sci/tech journalism turns things off - then folks glue themseves to overly-simplified, dumbed-down, corner-cutting explanations of crop circles, aliens, and (insert your favorite FOX show here).
Ask Randi, Mike Shermer, call John McPhee and the likes of Steve Pinker, Steve Hawking and a bunch of others.
More soon, but there's a roast duck coming out of the oven and the keyboard doesn't do drool all that well.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"How can it better communicate to the general public about science and the scientific method?"
Well, you could have the female reporters display more of their anatomy...
Why should Journalism be entertaining? People like entertainment. I belive it when Fox News says they're number 1. Fox News is pretty entertaining. But are they good journalists? When I was O'Reilly spout off on hippies and California and anybody who opposes war in Iraq, I get a good chuckle. But I certainly don't learn much about what it really going on in the world.
Entertaining journalism may appeal to a wide audience, but obviously at the cost of some journalistic integrity. It's obvious that networks such as Fox News are far more concerned with ratings than with reporting what's truely significant. I don't mean to be cold hearted but one mexican girl gets a botched transplant and it makes headlines. What about the other million people that died that day? The editors decided those stories weren't as popular.
Real journalism is about reporting information in an efficient manner. We can evaluate journalism by the signal to noise ratio. In my hometown newspaper, which is roughly 75% ads, there is really only 25% left for real news. And most of that is filled up with crap.
I guess I really try to draw a line between work and play. Reading the paper, watching the news, that's work. That isn't supposed to be entertaining. I might enjoy it, but that doesn't make it play. I enjoy it BECAUSE I'm aquireing information. If the information is diluted to male it more "entertaining", my enjoyment is lessened. Play is playing CS or watching Cowboy Bebop. That's what entertainment should be.
Perhaps there is space for entertaining journalism. I do enjoy the political comics, sometimes, and Doonsbury. And like I said I do get a kick out of O'Reilly. But that stuff is the desert, not the healthy meal. Don't forget that.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Scientific Journalism can be a great thing. After all, most people find science extremely boring and would rather watch fiction because they think it's more interesting. They don't realize just how magnificent and fascinating the REAL world can be.
However, just like regular journalism, it's going to fall under certain temptations: to give the audience what they want. The flash and fireworks that don't actually mean anything, but people can't get enough of. The scientific equivelent of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman breaking up.
And sometimes psudo-science can have more flash than the real thing... after all it often promices the world but gives nothing.
I think the way to keep people's interest isn't through the information, but the presentation. Good writing can make almost anything interesting. I had a biology class and a chemestry class in the same year back in high school. My biology teacher was incredibly interesting, and the chemestry teacher was boring as hell. Guess which class I did better in?
A while back the BBC put out a series of "edutainment" shows about space staring Sam Neill called Space. That was both interesting and educational.
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
Ira Flato, Science Friday, National Public Radio
Living on Earth, NPR
New Scientist
BBC news
Hubble web site
National Geographic
Archaeology Today
David Suzuki
The job of a science reporter is severely hampered by the fact that the general audience they are reporting to is so broad and often lacks required knowledge. As an example, most small city newspapers here in Canada are written for someone with a Grade 8 level of education. National newspapers do slightly better - they write for someone with a Grade 12 level of education. This simply doesn't allow a reporter to get at a really interesting aspect of a story since they need to spend so much time informing people about background info. It's also why CNN does its best by boiling down a research article into " THE Liver cancer gene has been found! - and what this means to the war with Iraq!" Interesting science news will only really be entertaining to those with an adequate background on a subject.
"Nokia is not a country, it's the capital of Finland!" -Moderated "Informative". Yeesh.
Have you ever seen "Connections," or its sequel series, "Connections2"? It was produced by PBS, and although it didn't cover just recent innovations, it talked instead about science, invention and discovery over time, drawing amazing links between events, people, discoveries/creations, and the situations that played a role in all of the above. I remember watching it when I was much younger, and I can recall many of the episodes clearly today.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I'm English (which technically makes me European, to the chagrin of many of my countrymen).
:-)
One of my housemates (who is Northern Irish) is a fervent believer in a literal seven days creation. I didn't discover this until I'd shared a house with him for a while - it came up in conversation with another housemate.
Now, I'm a Christian. I believe in a more metaphorical interpretation of Genesis. But no one laughed at him. I respect his strength of belief, even though I personally don't believe that's how it happened.
I realise your comment was rather off-the-cuff, but thought it was worth pointing out that it isn't just the US where people have these 'preposterous' beliefs.
imho i think it has very much to do with the narrator of the subject wether its interesting i.e. there was a show on national geographic(cant remember its name) with alan alda which took up different subjects up like why does water lay under the sand(or vice versa) and although the questions and answers could become quite specific they were still not dull or to scientific because the narrator(alan alda) was both interested and curios bout the subject
might be "Can science (as practiced by Western tradition) be totally unbiased?" (USA specific)
This bias may or may not revolve around questions like "How to make a buck off this *now*", or even "This just doesn't fit into our current schene, and we invested the last 100 yrs/$xxx dollars into our current scheme!!!"
It sucks to say this but IMHO the practice of science in the USA is being seriously fubar'd by the ROI and the political types. Meanwhile, the Japanese and the Euros continue to blow our doors off within pure research, simply because:
They didn't tie their research funding into their political processes, or much else, for that matter. Rather, private citizens in the form of corporations (if necessary) fund such research and development out-of-pocket. More power to them if they can make a buck that way.
Zaurus and Treo come to mind.
CERN comes to mind, even.
So anyway, my opinion as a native US citizen is that the method of funding pure research in this country is seriously fubar'd
C|N>K
The vast majority of people cannot, or will not, think. Thinking is rather necessary to evaluate scientific claims or appreciate the subject.
As Heinlein put it, 5% of people simply can't think, 5% of people can think and do think, and 90% of people can think, but don't.
At one point in time, science declared that the Earth was flat, and that there were 4 elements.
(for Westerners, anyway)
The more important thing IMHO is to review how the practice of science is funded and implemented in the Western viewpoint. Perhaps we could even avoid the "flat-earth" thing in the future?
These publications are great, but they're preaching to the converted.
I think the biggest problem is that education tends to emphasize rote memorization, which stunts students' critical thinking skills. If you make it all an exercise in regurgitation, then everything becomes an appeal to authority. Well, who's to say that your high school chemistry teacher is more of an authority that the person who writes the feng shui column in the LA Times? Hey, the feng shui columnist makes more money, so isn't he probably smarter than your chem teacher, who drives an '89 Celebrity?
Another problem is that science educators don't always know as much about this kind of stuff as they should. Physics teachers should know that Newton did alchemy, but they should also know that he did not, as the urban folktale would have you believe, practice astrology. They should know that acupuncture works, but they should also know that it works just as well if you ignore the complicated charts and just insert a needle in a random place. They should know the difference between "intelligent design" creationism and the "young-earth" version, so they can be prepared to refute creationist arguments.
Find free books.
New Scientist used to be far better than it has been of late. It's articles are, if not 3 months behind other sources available online, just plain wrong. Either that or so wildly hypothetical that it makes me wonder why devoting 5 pages to it is really necessary. I mean a page at most, with the 'scientists' hypothesis is really enough. But for some reason they go into huge amounts of useless detail, probably to pad it all out.
After having bought NS every issue for a year or two, I stopped at the point when it only gave me enough reading matter for about 10 minutes, and that was cover to cover browsing for something worthwhile.
I find it far more interesting to spend time doing research into any issues that come p that I am interested in, chiefly online, which does of course necessitate the use of a damn good bullshit detector.
As for science journals, they are good for that research, you only read the bit you're interested in, and you're going to get a hell of a lot more, useful, information than from any media story on the issue.
The media either dumbs things down, takes things that aren't true/possible, or as you said of the BBC, talks about utter bullshit research some 'scientist' carried out in his 'lab'.
for scientist see: idiot
for lab see: garden shed/garage
Most people outside Australia wouldn't have heard Adam and Dr Karl doing their Sleek Geek show. Really entertaining, and accurate stuff. Adam Spencer is a DJ at JJJ, and also holds a PhD in mathematics. Dr Karl is a regular visitor on Thursday mornings since it seems time began. See some of his stuff here. Recently, they got together for a tour called "Sleek Geeks" .. and here's a report on it by New Scientist.
It can be done !
Bitter and proud of it.
No they can't or more precicely they won't. Look at the level of intelligence required to read the daily newspapers across America. It requires just an elementary school reading level to read the average newspaper. The letters to the editor are far more intellectual than anything the editors can produce and they only choose to print the ones that the editors can read themselves. It is pathetic. They can't even get the facts straight on simple stories, let alone something that they have no conceptual grasp of.
They print crap that they haven't bothered to research and verify the facts of and yet it is something so trivial to verify. I would much rather that the general media didn't touch the scientific stories as they can't even get "human interest" or book reviews correct. Ever read any of the books the New York lists in their Notable Books list? Didn't think so as nobody else did either.
My name fits again.
I think anyone who will start to read an article with a science topic headline, regardless of the publication, is willing to wade through any reasonable explaination. No need to make it graduate level but the writer can probably feel free to get a bit technical. After all, anyone who isn't interested in science isn't going to look past the headline anyway.
I know a New Scientist reporter who has an M.Sci. in physics, one more reason to trust them :-)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
In the United States the networks are hopeless and, alas, even PBS has dropped the football. NOVA is now dumbed down, loaded with re-enactments and the softest of the sciences while NPR's "Science Friday" is mostly about technology and medicine.
It's hard to do good science reporting because the reports have to understand what science IS. The fast majority of journalists seem to have taken the bare minimum of courses related to science and still mistake science for engineering. They see science as memorizing facts instead of a process of discovery. Until that changes we won't have science reporting worth diddly squat.
...because that's what we're trying to do over on Sci-Fi Today. See if we are succeeding...put our headline box on your Slashdot home page here...
It distributes science and exposes superstition.
Just a question...
Integrated application integration with synergistic synergized synergy
I haven't seen Penn and Teller's new show, but I have taken delight in seeing them puncture some of the mythology of "magic" without sacrificing the entertainment value. (They probably make the field more difficult for less talented magicians.)
For many years now, I've argued that Magic (sleight-of hand, stage magic, etc.) should be a mandatory part of the high-school curriculum. I believe that schooling in the methodology of deception would give students a healthy skepticism that could help them spot nonsense and lies wherever they appear.
(I still like this idea, but it comes perilously close to setting off my bad-idea detector with the following trigger:
Any social or political reform that calls for changing the way everybody thinks is probably a very bad idea.)
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
...hahahahahahaha!
A little shameless self promotion for my employer Vanderbilt University. Here is the URL of our online science journal.h tm
http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/home.
I'm somewhat/occasionally involved with its creation, so I'm partisan, but folks outside the university (especially educators) are appreciative of our work. It's a struggle to present sometimes arcane research in an accurate, informative way without presenting too much "technical" information, and I think the folks who put this together do pretty well here.
Some of the work is done by student interns in our Science Communications program. Vandy doesn't have a journalism school, so a lot of these students are English or other liberal arts majors with an interest in science communications. As part of the program, students spend a semester working in a research lab getting a feel for what day to day science is like. Their response to "real" research lab work vs. the pablum they were fed in high school is charming.
I see a lot of science articles from The New York Times, especially linked to on slashdot, but when I read the articles I generally think they are awful. The reason is that reading them gives you no substantive understanding of the science that is going on. They often seem to choose subjects like string theory or loop quantum gravity, which are extremely complex, and then try to explain them at an elementary school science level. This is simply a futile endevor and they end up saying basically nothing. I am working on my Ph.D. in theoretical physics and even I can't often tell from the article what the theory claims, and often I know of several theories they might be talking about and am not even sure which one it is because the coverage is so vague. I can't see how anyone could read these and getting anything of use from them. Frankly I don't know how you could explain string theory to someone at such a basic level, even in an entire book, much less a news paper article. Especially when even many physicists (myself included) don't know that much about it.
I think they should really focus on science they can explain, and make sure to explain how these things are based in fact and come from experimental evidence. This is the basis of the difference between science and pseudoscience. Bob Park, a frequent crusader against pseudoscience, hypothesises that these insubstantial, vague accounts of outlandish modern physics that are often given to laymen make science sound basically indistinguishable from pseudoscience, and thus help bolster beleif in pseudoscience. I'm not sure I beleive this, but I do think it's a possibility. A good example is an author I heard interviewed who wrote a book about how ESP could be based on quantum entanglement. This is an absurd claim if you know anything about entanglement and quantum decoherence, but does sound sort of reasonable if you just take some very vague notions about quantum mechanics (namely, it's hell-a-weird).
Does good science make interesting journalism? Well, I think a lot of it can if it's well told, because science is fundementally a mystery story, and most people like mysteries. Just look at the success of CSI. I think we must stick to work that has widely acknoledged validity, though, and to work which is experimentally grounded. We must also get through that when you read "A Breif History of Time" you are not getting the whole picture. Gernally, being ignorant of something is far less hazzardous when you're aware of your ignorance.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
However I feel that there is a genuine need for some simplification when it comes to science journalism. For example I once interviewed a researcher at the aforementioned university about his project on video codecs. You and I probably both know what motion compensation is. So I asked this man "Wat makes your new implementations so special?" And he went off for over 15 minutes and a whiteboard full of complicated formulae. All well and good, and I could probably reproduce the gist of it in my article, but that's not the point. The point I wanted to make was that this professor was in fact doing something revolutionary and explain to my readership the practical implications of his work. The man just couldn't explain those to me in plain language, so he gave me a paper version of the formulae on the whiteboard.
It's then the "stupid" journalist's job to turn those into a digestible article. Here's a quick knock-up of what I wrote in the university magazine:
At the end of the article I included a URL for the reader to find the techy details.
Joe Sixpack would have probably abandoned my article straight away. Instead:
The above paragraph is a translation, the original was in Dutch and written in 1998 so I'm not inserting the man's name. Don't want to accidentally misquote him.
I hope my example illustrates somewhat the dillemma faced by journalists every day. They always have to write for the weakest link to understand things, otherwise sales go down and the media company's bottom line is obviously connected to the individual reporter's bottom line: his job.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
If anyone ever used visualization as a tool knows how powerful that can be, this gives me an idea; Einstein visualized things like time and speed of light, imagine using DreamWorks type graphics to bring these to the screen?
I don't know...Perhaps an anti-X-Files show where the Dana Scully type character is the one that is always right, whilst the other agent who believes in every weird is always wrong...Yet the explanations can be still be fascinating.
Unfortuantely it seems that the media cannot think outside their own self imposed box with regards to this as they seem to believe real science to be bad on the screen...I'm not so sure about this in every case.
StarTux
Why only science, why not include engineering? Everytime I drive down the road and see a factory I feel it contains all kinds of magic I'd like to know more about.
In print, make sure to use diagrams and pictures. If for no other reason this breaks up long blocks of text and gives basic structure to the article that can be taken in really quick encouraging the reader to continue reading. On tv, use animations, static ictures, and a gy just talking tend to bore the reader more than animations.
I miss the old Journal of the New York Academy of the Sciences, a/k/a The Sciences. It was an incredibly entertaining magazine, and illustrated solely with fine art. It surely must have been a major undertaking for an art director to illustrate articles about abstract math & physics, biology, etc. solely with paintings, sculpture, etc. but it worked incredibly well, it was inspiring. But alas the NYAS ran into hard economic times and suspended the magazine. There is some discussion of bringing it back.
This may sound extreme, but I've completely given up on so-called science journalism. Whenever I see anything about my own field in the serious news outlets, I'm appalled about the picture that gets painted: granted, the journalists do a decent job at taking notes and correctly quoting the scientists that they interview, but still the end result is a very skewed picture, a patch work of one anecdote here, one off-the-cuff remark there, and some hand-waving and cloud-shaped drawings yonder.
The worst reporting is when the journalists, directly or indirectly, affirm the old and tired stereotype that science is generally hard and inaccessible, and only god-like geniuses can and would want to do it. But, as with any craft, if you have some basic talent and passion for it, give it ten years and you'll probably be good at it. Oh, and yes, in the popular media there is such a thing as "science" and it's all alike. In (my) reality, even minor subfields differ so much in their approaches, theories, and methodology that it's hard to see any unifying principle, other than "theories come and go; meanwhile, do take your data seriously".
The most acceptable form of science journalism IMHO are popular book-length introductions that are thorough while not assuming any background; very few books meet both criteria. I don't know how a layperson would pick out the good ones from the big pile of crap, though.
Marklar: marklar
The problem with real science reporting is that it runs the risk of offending advertisers, or even potential advertisers. That's why we'll never hear the real truth about diets and health, auto safety, the federal budget, the cost of war with Iraq, the real costs of insurance, or whether Prozac causes people to flip out occasionally. In the interest of "balanced reporting," every truth must always be presented with some vested interest's counter-truth. This leads people to believe that no one really knows, and cannot really know -- so it's OK to just follow one's emotions, which is what advertising is all about. Ultimately, media's customers are not the audience but advertisers, so that's who they pander to.
can journalism of any kind be responsible?
Why would big media want to report the facts about cold fusion, life on Mars, alien landings in New Mexico, or anything else? Why kill a good story?
Very slightly offtopic...
But I wish in mainstream, and even in the slightly more scientific areas (new scientist etc), they would back up percentages with standard deviation, or variance.
I cannot stand seeing some statistic without even a very rough idea of its distribution.
No. It can't.
Next please.
Sience journalists must be BOTH scientists and writers. In the field I studied, Astrophysics, it is obvious that most journalists don't know the first thing about basic physics, and were probably sent to that American Astronomical Society conference because their editor hates them or lost a Super Bowl bet.
Seriously, people need to know what they are talking about, and almost no science journalists do. Since about half of scientists speak through their ass anyway, you must have writers that can cut through the crap and differentiate between what is real science, and what is some theorist's pipe/wet dream they are using to get funding this week.
Oh yeah, they have to be able to write too. Unfortunately most journalists can't do that either.
SetupWeasel
75 Monkeys down.... infinity to go.
As has been stated, people do not have the education to understand most of the research going on today. As I see it there are two key factors which accout for this. First and foremost, science is an attempt to explain and discover how the world works based on physical evidence. It is extremely difficult for someone who thinks the world was created 6000 years ago by a deity to grasp the concept of the cosmic microwave background.
Second, because humans hate being wrong (as if nothing is ever their fault) they will not concede any proven facts. So even if they could logically deduce that the world is much older than 6000 years, they would refuse to based on stubborness.
As someone who has from time to time been the victim scientist in the company press release its awful. people assume you were bragging or dont know dick about your own work, because some reporter shaped your words. If you make a simple analogy to say base ball, you can bet your whole research program will become a giant metafor beginining with you hitting one out of the park.
its embarassing and gives people the wrong impression of you. plus every dorkl in the world then writes you an e-mail to say how you got something wrong.
The part I dread the most is that they often send you an advance copy to correct. And its always unsalvagable. you correct as much as you can but by construction you cant real change the gross distortions.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Science journalism is a wonderful thing for forwarding discussions, publishing findings and debating top minds in the field about your scientific ideas. Unfortunately, it is slow, expensive to buy if you're in the private sector, and (necessarily) written to a target audience, which is generally the other top brains in your sub-sub-sub-discipline.
How can it better communicate to the general public about science and the scientific method?
How can't it? I worked as a geological assistant for 4 years in a government funded marine geology and geophysics institution. Not only did I get to play with cool toys, but I had to proofread dozens of papers (not to mention all the ones for my courses) for all the bigwig scientists there. Just for fun, I would instant-message various paragraphs from these papers to my buddies (all university grads) and try to see if they could figure them out. They couldn't. It's impossible. Every discipline invents its own language of jargon. This makes it impossible for media to read it. Therefore, when being interviewed, scientists always "boil it down" for the public, and try to add some hook, often based in science fiction, to bring popularity to their research. And you wonder why the media can't report it properly? Because they can't read it! There should be more journals devoted to explaining new findings in everyday language that people can understand if they want to communicate it better!
Can science journalism do a better job of helping people distinguish science from pseudoscience?
Of course... you can always do things better. In this case, stop trying to add the "hooks". It only fuels rumor. Don't say "we teleported something!" when what really happened was they destroyed a photon, measured it and reconstructed it. The media can't even get Einstein's famous lines right...how can they distinguish the difference between that and teleporting matter?
Obvious pseudoscience needs to be publicly questioned in an entertaining way, so that frauds and mistakes are exposed and popularized. Whenever pseudoscience is ridiculed in the literature, it's done in jargon and subtlety. We need some scientist reality show, where they test each other's theories and the winners get to go on a date or something. Hilarity ensues!
That said- if mainstream media would do a better job of citing sources, critically evaluating credibility (even when less credible sources say more entertaining things), and giving reasons and deductions instead of rote facts, people might learn that science is a process, not a dogma.
The same problem exists for science ed- if you don't tell students how we got from Darwin's observations and theories to empirical tests, the compelling stories of trusted parents and friends will outweigh the rare knowledgeable biology teacher. For every fact, people should have an idea of the process of thinking behind it. (And maybe the world could use more stories of heros who succeed with knowledge, rather than manipulation and smokescreens.)
...and I can tell you that while it's astonishingly easy to think of fascinating ideas for science films, it's damned tough to think up a format that is fresh, emotionally engaging, and revelatory. Everytime I go the bookstore or the library and wander around for a few hours, I leave with my head swimming with ideas that make me feel passionate and excited, ideas that make me want to run up to strangers and say "Jeezus this world is mad cool." Yet, in the course of a year, if I can turn six of these ideas into show treatments, and three of those into shows, I am beating the game.
The reality is, it simply doesn't matter how "good" a show is if no one watches it. In fact, an otherwise high-quality show that fails to be interesting to millions of people can poison the well for other shows down the line. Discovery, PBS, National Geographic, take your pick; they're all in a perpetual scramble for eyeballs. No one at any of these places has yet figured out a fail-safe algorithm for finding and producing shows that people will watch without clicking through to the next channel. All they know is that the most-watched shows hook viewers emotionally. If they don't see the potential for that in your proposal, it ends up in the circular file.
I don't lament this. We live in an economically free, market-driven society. Ideas and stories, like other products, compete among each other for our money and (especially in television) our time. A lot of the comments I read above implied that if we as a society could only impose, from the top down, a grand realignment of the values we place on science and knowledge, our science journalism would become both smarter and more mainstream. Fine, as long as we're at it, let's also impose from the top down a hunger for good government, spiritual advancement, and healthy living. All admirable goals, but unfortunately, utopias are far easier to applaud than they are to implement. Kind of like software development schedule utopias. (*cough, cough*)
So back here on planet Earth, pragmatists chip away at problems from the bottom up. Successful science shows and journalism seek to tap the emotions of viewers, knowing that if you win their hearts, their minds follow. To that end, these are the goals of a good science journalist: to not only inform, but reveal; to not only show how things work, but to incite strong feelings that this knowledge is important and sometimes even miraculous; to make clear that this world of disconnected parts is actually connected beneath the surface by beautiful and unifying principles; to show that if you understand why a whip cracks you also understand why an F15 booms and a nuclear reactor glows in blue Cherenkov light under water. And just as importantly, to also make science seem as much a natural and exciting part of life as getting laid, carving on a snowboard, fighting with your brother, and watching Shawshank Redemption for the third time. Connection.
I did a show and a website on El Nino for NOVA a few years back. (Yes, it told a human story as well as a scientific story.) It was re-broadcast in Germany last year, and four million people watched it. I sit here at my desk sometimes and think about that kind of thing, and I have never gotten used to it. I read, I think, I drink coffee, and then I type while I play mp3s. In other words, I'm pretty much like the rest of the crowd here on Slashdot. Yet sometimes, the ideas embodied in those keystrokes end up being injected into four million skulls. Trust me, the responsibility you feel to use that privilege wisely and effectively is enormous. Maybe that's what evangelical Christians feel when they hear the "good news" and want to spread it.
It's knee-jerk easy to say we need less Joe Millionaire and Britney, and more NOVA and JYW. However, this ignores the reality that we are complex social primates driven far more by emotion than Western science has traditionally admitted. Even a solitary, consuming interest in science is ultimately an emotional urge. Are you hankering to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, uncover the faint traces of Pluto somewhere among fifty thousand starfield photographs, or invent a way of copying fragments of DNA? Andrew Wiles, Clyde Tombaugh, and Kary Mullis each threw themselves into science not because they were excited by university labs, jargon, and academic papers, but because they fell in love with their ideas, pined and trembled for them, stayed up late and got up early in hopes of seeing if they could use them to recast the way we see the world. The rest of it is just window dressing.
Unfortunately, many people were inoculated against science in school the way they were inoculated against Shakespeare. After something's been forced down your throat like cod liver oil, you lose your taste for it. (I still remember my old physics teacher's dandruff, droning voice, and drudgerous lab assignments.)
There is an antidote. I said it earlier, but it bears repeating. If you win their hearts, their minds will follow. The best science shows are the ones that make viewers feel caught up, and emotionally invested in, the underlying science story. If you're a good writer, you find a way to do this naturally, from the bottom up. It turns out that Aristotle's dramatic principles apply to science stories like any other flavor of story. The shitty shows I've seen (and they are legion) try to fake it. You can tell when the people who made them did it for money, not love. Ultimately, in this business, you either love what you're writing about...or you're a hack.
So the question was, "Can science journalism be entertaining and responsible?" In other words, can science journalism thrill your heart as well as your head? Kinda like asking if your girlfriend can be both entertaining and responsible, can give your, ummm, heart a shiver as well as your mind. If she can't...better change the channel.
Not while people in the UK are spending £15 per session to talk to Dianna from beyond the grave. There appears to be a significant desire for many to believe in paranormal and pseudoscientific poppycock. It makes my teeth itch, but there it is.
Not that I want to make any kind of a political statement for or against anything here, nor to beat up any religion or creed. Well not most. It is just that relatively few people seem to be able to analyze documents or to understand basic scientific realities.
It might be interesting if there was a free resource which parents could use to teach their kids and they could stay a story or lesson ahead. They could read some interesting things about astronomy or SETI and then pass on the spark of interest to their children.
Of course this would be good for computer science too, it is just that most people replace concentrated analysis with a street smartsy "I don't trust [insert your personality/company/government official here]". And computers for example are generally seen (for good reason) as big silly blobs of sometimes idiotic, and often near-obsolete, rules and responses.
So instead of understanding the basics of information technology the user is often reduced to ("it always does this.." or "I can never get it to..") and most scientific artifacts accessible in daily life have computer systems embedded in them at one layer or another.
Yeah the twins had a show in France called "temp X" and whereas sometimes there was a bit of normal science most of the time it was bad science or pseudo science which went thru. But a lot of people bought it as "Morning gold".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The solution is not to improve science reporting, its to stop pseudo-science reporting from masquerading as hard evidence. How? Perhaps there should be a legal presumption in factual reporting that readers are likely to trust what they are reading and act on it. Therefore journalists owe their readers a duty of care, and if they misreport the facts to the readers detriment (e.g. by praising some quack treatment) then they should be liable.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Well it's not about the scientific method but Douglas Adams wrote some interesting things about endangered species (Last Chance to See and some articles which can be found in The Salmon of Doubt)
Very accesible/entertaining but also informative. And learning about endangered species also helps to educate people about things such as eco systems and evolution.
...as you said of the BBC, talks about utter bullshit research some 'scientist' carried out in his 'lab'.
t 's-have-an-ethical-debate' scheme. Maybe it's worth complaining about other, less than scientific contributions.
I make sure that I send an email of complaint to the producer of any programme which wheels out the self-publicising Captain Cyborg. I think the 'PM' programme has twigged, as we haven't heard from him since his ludicrous child chipping, or 'we're-going-to-mutilate-a-child-but-meanwhile-le
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Scientific journalism is a modern oxymoron, given that journalism is not as clean and ethical as it was originally intended.
Science is about questioning - and the journalism associated with Science should give that to the reader. It should promote discussion; it should ask questions - and it should be objective (unlike all other forms of journalism that is mucked about with politics, etc.).
Scientific journalism should educate, and should allow the educated reader to ask questions. There should be no sensationalism - which I fear Popular Science has gone to get more circulation.
Constantly trying to increase demographics (in journalism) dilutes science. The audience of scientific works ebbs and flows, and so should the circulation.
This is why I read Scientific American, New Scientist - and why I have stopped reading Popular Science.
The nature of journalism is simply one person's diary, and the nature of science is knowledge. Diary entries about knowledge are not well-classified, but the most common misunderstanding is that physics and chemistry represent the pinnacle of knowledge.
In those categories, or disciplines, there is a broad gap between the dry technical writing for peer-review, and the explanations to people with non-specialised knowledge about physics and chemistry. Industrial interests probably do the best job in this gap because they want to market technical products to the most people in most situations. Writers are filling the gap as well, and I believe the foundation on which a bridge can be built lies among the principles, or laws, that physicists and chemists have uncovered.
There is just no getting around the fact that any journalism is going to be biassed or diluted in some way or another. Last time I watched to the BBC News, I saw a brittish journalist so unbiassedly being pro-war that I got scared. The BBC allways was a reasonably unbiassed and objective organ in my book, but even the BBC makes mistakes.
The struggle for objectivity.. people should be aware of this all the time when looking for news, and doublecheck stories with other media households. And I think the larger the media concern is, the more distorted and colored the news is giong to be. I think if you can gather as much views on the matter as possible, and compare it with eachother, you end up deciding for yourself what you believe is true, which is imho still better than to trust someone else to make that judgement for you. I watched the better part of CNN while Powell was proclaiming his cause in the UN, vs Iraki Weapon's Inspector Hans Blickx. I also watched French, German, BBC, Holland and Belgian news, and I must say that the view on things was so squarely opposite that you can't help but laugh about what parts were cut from a conversation, which are empahasised, what background music goes where, what is shown here and there, and best of all, the comments that follow by the editors.
The same goes for scientific news. Untill something is not double checked by another independant organisation, there is no 100% guarantee that what is said is true. In fact, it can take decades or more to convince people of a certain scientific 'truth', like e.g. quantum physics or the general relativity theory.
As for the concept of entertainment in science news, I do see that some people have a hard time reading or accessing certain science, and I think for them it is not bad to supply them with science in ways they can understand, grasp, make them curious.. That makes the rainbow of flavours in science news large and varried, and anyone can select the news in the language that he can understand. I don't know if I have to think about Tom & Jerry explaining superconductivity in this way, but it would certainly get me curious
Of course, that doesn't mean that everyone has to play the entertainment card in order to sustain itself and attract more audience. That would be a dangerous evolution and degrade the quality of the top level research magazines.. but as long as some people are willing to invest in top level science magazines, and acknowledge that they have a primary role to play in the education of the masses in general, things are still ok.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
Oops. I forgot to make paragraphs out of the whole bloody thing yesterday AND put it in HTML instead of text. Thanks for cleaning it up and taking serious time to respond to the post, I'll be more careful in the future. Your point concerning researchers and teachers is well-taken, at my undergrad we had numerous profs that would be cool to work with but not to get lectures from, and vice versa. Those rare profs who can teach and research are often prevented from doing both due to time constraints, though every so often there are a handful that somehow pull it off (though I have yet to meet one who can do this and have a family to tend to sinc ethey often end up teaching extra sessions so late into the evening...). Thanks again and good luick with your students, note that if you're into building things Junkyard Wars is taking applicants as of a few days ago.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
scripsit Amroarer:
It's not just the U.S. and Northern Ireland, they have 'em in Australia and South Africa too. Hmm. Maybe there's a pattern there...
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
What's worse than journalists who don't know science, is journalists who don't know how to communicate, period.
There's one incident that I still remember. A few years ago, I wrote a complaint to a science journalist for ABCnews.com, Kenneth H. Chang, who had written an article on CP violation, involving one species of kaon particle turning into another. (Actually, I complained about it online, and somebody else forwarded it to him in email.)
It was vaguely irritating when he removed all the names of the particles and such (kaons) -- as if people would run screaming if they were told what the particles involved were called.
However, the worst part was his idiotic analogies. He likened parity reversal to turning Democrats into Republicans and vice versa, while
charge conjugation is like giving everyone a sex change operation. Decay products like when politicians retire. Then he constructed some elaborate analogy involving politicians changing parties, getting sex change operations, retiring early, and passing various kinds of legislation.
He obviously had no clue what the point of an analogy is: to compare some unfamiliar process to a familiar process with which the reader has more intuition. But it doesn't do any good to just call the kinds of kaons "Democrats" and "Republicans", because there is no familiar process of "Democrats turning into Republicans" that is in any way similar to one kind of kaon turning into another.
I mean, if I say, "there is a legislative process that turns Democrats into Republicans", how does that help the reader understand the physics any better than if I'd just said, "there is a nuclear process which turns one kind of kaon into another"??
Then he had to add all sorts of ad-hoc modifications to his analogy to make it come out better, bringing in "early-quitting Democrats" and "long-lasting Republicans", as an analogy for kaon ages. In this case, you could equally well write "early-quitting Republicans" and "long-lasting Democrats". An analogy that consists of the arbitrary replacement of one word with another isn't a good analogy --- it would work just as well, or poorly, to speak of "early-quitting mangoes" and "long-lasting bicycles". The analogy would only be worthwhile if, in real life, Republicans do tend to last longer in Congress than Democrats, and the reader has an intuition for that. If they don't, then recasting the discussion in more "familiar" terms doesn't work, because the reader isn't any more familiar with the analogy than he is with the original situation.
So, what response did I get from the guy? He laughed at me, condescendingly told me that I knew nothing of science writing, and ignored me. (I was trying to be reasonable too, at the time...)
Nice one. He is exactly the kinda guy I was talking of. I mean how is it science!? Wow he can make doors know who he is. This is a good thing!? I think I'll remember your technique for next time I see him mentioned on anything.
Better yet, send emails congratulating them on using Barry Fox (not affiliated in any way, other than as a reader of New Scientist I assure you) whenever the BBC wheel him out. As technology journalism goes he is pretty damn good. My Mum, a fellow Radio 4 listener (who - bless her, has trouble using a mouse without looking at it) understands a surprising amount of what he covers - and there's still enough technology content to interest and more importantly not irritate me.
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I can 't believe no one in this entire thread mentioned this. The role of good science fiction is to demonstrate the relevence of science to human life. That's why we scientists are so annoyed by the painful science blunders in most -so-called- science fiction. Science journalism is a hopeless basket case, and it 's just going to get worse as science gets more complex, and people don't give a d.... And why should they if it seems so irrelevent to their lives. An example of an entertaining and equally provocative, informative movie was Minority Report. Lots of issues were raised which are quite likely to come to pass.
tcboo
There is a radio show in Australia that has been going for 20-30 years called The Science Show. It has covered just about every scientific advance and debate during the period, including surviving an atomic war and creationism.
:)
Streaming from a site near you
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Then you probably still read Hugo Gernsback's scientifiction magazine ?
Really, it is possible to write good science fiction without even mentioning science. If science fiction were really only about scientific things, we would soon have read all those stories.
For the most part, science fiction is still about what if, and then using good logic to control the story line.
It is not as if hyperspace has been discovered, or instant transportation is reality, or faster than light travel is possible, or that there is life on Venus or Mars.
For the most part, most science-fiction books are much more accurate than science-fiction television series or science-fiction movies.
I'm a journalist with science background. I actually read books about things I don't know so I can explain them.
Many people I work with are not English majors nor are they broadly "anti-science." Many actually have computer geekness in their souls.
The point is that journalists use what you give them. If you don't reiterate your main points or explain them clearly or concisely to someone who doesn't know much about nuclear physics you won't have a good story about what you're working on.
You have to take responsibility for your own media and find someone you feel is unbiased, well-read and knows something about what they write about.
Aside from the few dinosaurs in my newsroom, most of us are willing to learn new things and meet new people....that's why we became journalists.
Now go start bad-mouthing the medical profession for God's sake!
c.
Obligatory reference: I am a journalist and I think....
There are some great science writers in the world. Journalists who really know their stuff...but in a newsroom editors are not interested in the number of polysyllabic words you can use, they're interested in how easily it flows. (I just tried to use the word "flange" and they nearly had an aneurysm.)
We're supposed to write at an eighth grade level, although for many it's now a sixth grade level, and even I try to throw in a college vocabulary word once in a while. I think we should all have to learn a new word sometime.
I think the few journalists that pull off entertaining and informative (I'm not even putting in responsible because that's ethically a given....if they're irresponsible they will most likely be fired) are people who've been in the business a while and have lots of institutional knowledge to present it in a fresh and accessible way.
Science journals aside, the regular reader is looking to learn a little about science but not enough to make s/he get a book to read about it. Think Psychology Today. Some psychology information with much more entertainment about how it relates to sex. Sex, teehee!
c.
I work in print, not TV, nor do I really stand for anything except my paycheck.
c.
I know their "journalism" consists of topless women on Page 3. You'd think they'd be happier.
c.