Slashdot Mirror
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
'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
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
Its not an accident that the cast of Friends are made to look good, while scientists are protrayed like "Beaker" in Sesame Street. Its because if intelligence is good, then the journallists/actors/TV anchor men etc are bad. They are not going to stand for that, are they?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
But Slashdot also posts your comments correcting the crackpottery and errors. "Journalists" only publish corrections under threat of lawsuit. And no one can sue them for mucking up science.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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."
The problem is that he was a recluse, or rumored to be one. It was also rumored that he only taught one single 700 level grad course a year since no one ever found his course in the thick course catalog. For that matter, no one saw him on campus, in the library, in the labs, etc, either. Ever.
As a result, when I was at Cornell (7-8 years ago), at the beginning of the fall semester there was always an annual game - "Who spots Sagan on campus first".
So interesting and informative weblog from Sagan? Maybe. Interesting and informative in a class/on campus/in person? Who knows?!?
May he rest in peace with the stars, however.
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.
I had a guest lecturer in university who came in and talked for this 'academia' course I took.
I cant think of his name for the life of me. I know he was an academic big shot, and he had a handful of grad students falling him around like he was Jesus. But he basically came in and gave the best 90 minute lecture I've ever heard about what a crock and phony David Suzuki is.
He opened with a slide showing a quiet stream, with a great big "No Fishing" sign. And he said "2 months ago, David Suzuki was fishing 20 feet downstream from here"
He cut through the man like a hot knife through butter. He picked apart all of Suzuki's papers, his show (Nature of Things).
When I went in, I thought Suzuki was a brilliant scientist. When it was over, Suzuki was an obvious environmental zealot who spouts pseudoscience and conjecture as fact.
I figure this is on topic. Suzuki makes science 'entertaining', but most of what he says isnt correct, or proven through research.
It fits in perfect with this topic - because one of the things I remember the lecturer saying was "Real science doesnt get you a show on prime time - not even on the CBC"
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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
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.
That brings to mind the underlying question: what is science journalism supposed to be about, anyway? Is it reporting just the fact of new results (e.g., from scientific / technical journals)? Then, maybe, ordinary good journalism is sufficient. On the other hand, if the objective is to explain technical results, and their implications, for lay people, I would think it likely that the journalist would need to be a seriously-trained scientist, as well as a very good writer. (Unfortunately, this is not a combination that is thick upon the ground.)
Good science writing is possible. There is a guy (whose name, alas, I forget at the moment) who writes a food science column for the Washington Post, who I think does a good job. (Most of what he writes about is chemistry, and that is a subject I know well.)
There are books, too -- perhaps this is an easier format, due to more time for reflection. I think, for example, Stephen Pinker's books The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works are very well done, as are Richard Dawkins's book on evolution, such as The Blind Watchmaker.
His weekly column is put out by the American Physical Society, and is quite readable.
i prefer the glossy wow-factor of scientific american, but yeah, science news is really good too. i've never met anyone else who's even heard of it! my dad's been reading that magazine for as long as i can remember, and is constantly sending me copies of their articles.
he works for the fish and wildlife department of a big power supplier. SN's level of reporting is very appropriate for someone like him: not a professional scientist, but with a lot of scientific background.
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!
The world really needs a few more Carl Sagans. Ever since his passing, there's really no one willing to responsibly "popularize" science.
.01% of what is actually happening in archaeology ever makes it into the popular press. The media does bear a measure of the blame, as many archaeologists dread talking to reporters who often seem to be listening to their own preconceptions more than they are listening to us. Still, archaeologists could overcome such problems by learning to be more effective communicators....and yet we do not. If you have a Ph.D., or any job of responsibility is a science or science-related field, you should be trying to become a Carl Sagan, at least part-time.
The world needs a damn sight more than "a few more" Carl Sagans. I'm an archaeologist, and though archaeology isn't exactly a science, it suffers from the same kind of problems that most sciences do - namely, that most of its practicioners become so deeply invested in whatever esoteric topic that their research is directly concerned with, that they forget how to connect the little piece they are working on back to the big picture. Moreover, they then also fail to communicate the importance of the big picture back to general audiences.
Archaeology is a particularly interesting example of this phenomenon. After all, archaeology is all about exploration and the understanding of the ancient past, right? What could be more interesting? Nevertheless, only about
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. -Richard Feynman
Have you ever noticed that when you know a lot about an event or person you are associated with that gets written up in the news paper it is --without exception--grossly wrong? I mean positively without exception its always got factual errors or exaggerations or misstatements. So do you suppose that when you dont know anything about a subject and you read an article, its somehow correct?
The problem is in the definition of "responsible". To a scientist, responsibility is about reporting the results as the experiment precisely and accurately. But a journalist interprets responsibility as being about putting a slant on things "is this good for society? should I let this scientist get away with doing this?". That's a fundamental and intractable difference between two world views.
Another problem is that many journalists - not all but many - were already broadly anti-science before going into the profession. Maybe they just hated science lessons at school, maybe they'd already decided that they were anti-nuclear and could never be persuaded otherwise, maybe they've already decided that corporate science is bad and only university science is good. Not only that, but only other scientists are really interested in good news about science, whereas scandal can sell papers.
Take 3 Mile Island, for example. The local population were exposed to no more radiation than a medical X ray. But to hear the press talk about it, it's as if it was as bad as Chernobyl. And they blame Chernobyl on failings in all nuclear technology, rather than untrained operators running unauthorized experiments. Fortunately, nowadays, you can get your science news direct from the lab rather than a mass-market paper.
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...)