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Bad Science in the Press
An anonymous reader writes " An editorial in The Guardian presents a good run down of what is wrong with science reporting today and tries to point out why this is. From the article: 'Why is science in the media so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong? Like a proper little Darwin, I've been collecting specimens, making careful observations, and now I'm ready to present my theory.'"
I think the type of publication is a very significant contributor to the prevalance of Bad Science reporting, even more so than the article's thesis of "Humanties Majors run amok."
If you look at many general interest news publications, whether they be monthly magazines or daily papers, you'll find they don't often even have a dedicated science reporter. Even when they claim to, it's really a "Health" reporter, who's often much more likely to cover the latest exercise craze or green tea fad than actual metabolic research from the NIH (incidently, at least one major science journalism prize now specifically excludes "health" articles for this reason.) Even when they do have science reporters, the Guardian's article makes a good point: unlike the financial or politics pages, the science beat reporter must assume no, or very little, prior knowledge of science, and this is enforced by their editors. While this may (sadly) be a perfectly reasonable thing to do, as scientific literacy among the public is appalling, you can see how it's a vicious cycle kind of thing. And it's the rare general interest publication indeed that would have more than one staff reporter or editor dedicated to covering science.
But I think there's still good science journalism out there, in the science and tech magazines, like New Scientist or Discover. Not only can you assume the audience knows what the terms "volt" or "DNA" mean, you can get much more space to give a real explanation of what's going on. While stories are still supposed to be timely, they're not usually tied to the daIly press release cycle either. And this type of publication is much more likley to employ people with science backgrounds. Here I should state my possible bias: I'm a science journalist for a monthly emerging technology magazine with a university education in experimental physics! But I should say that one of our best writers here, if not the best, was an English major in college. But after a few years now on the semiconductor beat he probably knows more about, say, dielectrics, than I ever did, not least because he had the time to learn, time often in short supply when one is the sole science reporter on a newsstand publication, and so have to cover the entire scientific waterfront. Reporters for science/tech publications can usually focus on a few areas at a time and really learn them in depth, and that makes a huge difference.
This is why I feel the publication makes a much bigger difference than some seething secret Romantic resentment from journalists to the quality of science reporting. It's the publishers and editors which set the standards for articles, not individual reporters, after all.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
I would add that The Economist is also usually a very good source for science news, even though it doesn't come with the frequency or pagecount to warrent calling The Economist a scientific publication.
I'm a longtime and mostly happy subscriber to Science News. It's weekly and seems to hire educated reporters.
Here's a nice analysis of the dubious claims made by Crichton in his speeches and in the footnotes of his novel State of Fear.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74
>Whether "intelligent design" or "global warming", science is being used as a tool of politics - which is something it is not and never should be.
You can't do this by reading the mainstream press, but on the web you can disentangle scientific information from politics by reading what climatologists think. That site draws a sharp line between political questions (should we ratify the Kyoto treaty?) and scientific questions (why do ice ages end before CO2 levels go up?).
While Einstein left his secondary school early without qualifications, it was not because of academic slackness. His work in primary school had been excellent. Here his mother writes to her sister:
He went on to a further education college to obtain the qualifications for university entrance. He got fairly high marks here (top in maths and physics, etc).
Some of the "Eintein did badly at school" reputation comes from the difference in Swiss and German marking systems. Switzerland where Einstein studied used 6 as the best grade and 1 as the worst grade. Germany used 1 as the best and 6 as the worst. In time his results of 5 and 6 (good results in Switzerland) were transposed into the German system, making them seem bad. I'm not sure, but I did hear that Switzerland now uses the German system, thus compounding the problem.
Nope, sorry, your chronology is 100% wrong. The traditional date for the fall of Rome is 476, when the last Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by a Gothic chieftan, who instead of putting up another puppet emperor simply crowned himself King of Italy. Conversion of the Northlands to Christianity didn't even *begin* until the 800s, and wasn't completed until the 1100s. The coming of Christianity to the Vikings marks the end of the Dark Ages, not the beginning.
Chris Mattern
Scientific American has been frequently lousy for quite a while. The slide started in 1986 when Holtzbrinck Publishing Group bought it. Dennis Flanagan was the man who made the magazine great, editing it from the late '40s, when he and G. Piel bought the largely hobby and shop-oriented magazine. He presented serious science in a way that an educated layman could understand, never compromised accuracy for sales, and maintained the pratical orientation of the magazine with the Amateur Scientist column. The next editor, Jonathan Piel, who was the son of the long-time chairman and former co-owner, Gerard Piel, was not terribly good. John Rennie, the editor for the past 11 years, has really made the magazine into a more political version of Discover, and eliminated the Amateur Scientist and thus the idea that science was something that didn't belong just to the credentialed authorities.
New Scientist is definitely at a higher level than SA now.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry