Bad Science Journalism Gets Schooled

TaeKwonDood writes "Biology post-doc Dr. Michael White takes a look at the '2007 Best American Science and Nature Writing' and doesn't like what he finds in an article called Bad Science Journalism and the Myth of the Oppressed Underdog. Turns out it's not just political writers who pick a position they want to advocate and then write stories to confirm it. Science journalism gets a scolding and it's been a long time coming."

Comments

obvious != right

[More_Cowbell]

Science journalism would perhaps be the one area where you would expect the author to concisely go out of their way to be unbiased.

Re:Rather obvious

[ChameleonDave]

yes, the majority of writers are biased, either consciously, or otherwise.

More than the majority. I'd say that everyone is necessarily biased about everything, because we can never avoid the fact that we approach every issue with some sort of background or perspective.

However, there are those who are biased, and those who are biased and also throw all logic to the wind.

Re:Science has always been biased

[CheshireCatCO]

If you're a Phd who has spent your whole life researching and proving something then you're likely to opposed someone proving eactly the opposite. This is true to some extent, but it glosses over another even more important point: most newly proposed theories are wrong. (It's a lot like mutations in evolutionary biology.) Many of the theories are still-born, never making it past someone's blackboard before they're shot down, but quite a few get floated. Some get floated quite adamantly by their adherents. A few are better than the older models. After even a little while in science, you see the ratio and it's natural to want to stick to the tested theory until the new guy has been able to provide some strong evidence for itself.

That's sort of the rub, though, isn't it? Only a few new theories which suplant the old model do so with a really compelling single test. We can think of a few of the exceptions: General Relativity and the 1919 eclipse, the Big Bang (which was already pretty widely accepted, but never mind) and the discovery of the CMB, the giant impact theory of the origin of the Moon and the numerical simulations of the 1980s, etc. But these *are* the exceptions. Most theories which will eventually take over do so by slow accumulation of evidence in their favor, not with any slam dunk. As a result, convincing scientists to abondon the older model is difficult and there's no magic cut-off where you can say, "Now the new theory is better than the old one." So are the scientists being bad at science? Sure, it's easy to spin the narrative that way, but I'd say no. They're at worst being conservative and not wanting to leap onto a new model until they see that it's really better.

Anyone expecting unbiassed science to come out of that lot is just a misguided idealist. Now I feel like you're being insulting. Individual scientists are human, we have our flaws and our blind-spots. Some of us have real agendas and a few are even downright dishonest. But as a group, we're contradictory, curious, and anti-authority. As a result, science is pretty good at self-correcting. A single scientist can lie to himself or even lie to others. But that always gets caught eventually because someone starts asking questions and we collectively have no vested interest in covering up lies.

(Any time you hear about scientists being involved in a massive conspiracy, like some anti-global warming fanatics will try to tell you, you can bet it's wrong. Any person who could prove evolution or GW conclusively incorrect would have just made a career and world-wide fame for herself.)