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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
Or pick up a news magazine that targets intelligentsia like the Economist . Just recently, I picked up an issue with remarkably good coverage of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the organization that publishes Science. In the science section of that issue was a remarkably lucid description of photonic-crystal optical fiber and how it works, and there was also excellent coverage of competing theories in evolutionary biology and of work being done with adaptive optics to study the human eye, IIRC. Of course, the journalism in the Economist tends to be head and shoulders above most other newspapers and news magazines, so maybe it's not so much a problem of bad science journalism as it is a problem with bad journalism.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Amen. The last episode of "The Nature of Things" I watched was a hook, line and sinker appreciation of the 'science' of ESP. Not a critical sentence expressed. Suzuki is no Sagan.
I agree- I used to devour Skeptical Inquirer for years. But I slowly burned out on it, the cyclical Sisyphusian effort to quash pseudoscience left me depressed. The way I look at it now is something like a vaccine strategy: we will never overcome magical thinking, but we must be vigilant and relentless with our debunking.
I think the biggest problem is that education tends to emphasize rote memorization, which stunts students' critical thinking skills.
In a review of Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", Marianne Flashfrozen writes:
Another problem is that science educators don't always know as much about this kind of stuff as they should.
I think there should be some kind of "boot camp/ retreat" for interested educators, liberally subsidized with money from Skeptic organiziations, to provide teaching tools for debunking urban legends, popular pseudoscience, creationism, etc. Imagine how different things might be if everyone could have a Carl Sagan as a high school science teacher.