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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?"
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....
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"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.
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.
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.
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!!!!
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.