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This is a blog entry about an (un)scientific news article
By ucapslo, on 30 September 2010
This piece in The Guardian’s Lay Scientist blog on Monday, does a lot to remind us that there are still many scientists who are quick to bash the media for failing to communicate science ‘properly’.
Certainly useful as a teaching aide, if only to get our students who are studying science in the media to unpick why the way it represents science in the media is unfair, and where maybe it does make points with more merit. If nothing else it serves simply as a contemporary example of scientists’ unscientific characterisations of science in the media.
I wonder what the Science Media Centre would make of this view after all their many efforts over the past years?
5 Responses to “This is a blog entry about an (un)scientific news article”
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Jane Gregory wrote on 30 September 2010:
The Guardian article is provocative because, like all parodies, it has its elements of truth. The bulk of science reporting is formulaic and, consequently, rather dull. The trend towards homogeneity in content and angle in science news across the western world has been noted recently by several researchers, including Trench, Kiernan, Gopfert, and, if I may say, Bauer & Gregory.
Science journalism is not especially difficult – it is only as challenging as any form of specialist writing, and the usual stumbling block with scientists learning how to do it is that they fail to recognise it as some other profession’s specialism. Scientists often try to write news like it was a lab report, and it comes out upside down. Once you respect the rules of news-writing, it’s no trickier than writing a sonnet, an essay or a tweet.
But journalists themselves report that professional pressures are making it very difficult for them to produce any articles that are developed beyond a very basic news form, and they can not develop background or a critical perspective. With fewer jobs in the profession, an increased demand for news, and the tight but rolling deadlines of digital media, the few workers are stretched thin. They don’t like it, but they don’t pretend that this hasn’t compromised their journalism. This situation is reflected in the pan-European study reported in the Leeds thesis by Atonio Granado, and supports Kiernan’s claims along the same lines.
One short-cut these hard-pressed journalists take is to rely heavily on press releases issued by journals and universities (the Science Media Centre that Simon mentioned is part of this press release industry). If you buy five different newspapers on a Thursday (a good science day), you will find the same stories, reported with the same angle, the same quotes, and the same voices, and you will find this whether your newspaper is left-wing or right-wing, popular or elite, and whether it is published in Italy or Belgium; and it will look like the parody in the Guardian.
We don’t have to like what the article says about science journalism, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have something important to say. The homogeneity of science reporting, and the decline in quality, is something worth taking seriously. As Gopfert points out, it isn’t just bad for science journalism; it’s also bad for democracy.
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The Perils and Pitfalls of Communicating the Science of Food » Consumer Culture in an Age of Anxiety (CONANX) wrote on 19 October 2010:
[…] of science as time-pressed journalists simply recycle the data and quotes pressed upon them (as Jane Gregory points out at STS Observatory). Rather than improving the quality of scientific communication, this risks reducing the journalist […]
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Steve Miller wrote on 22 October 2010:
Jane Gregory raises some extremely important points about the pressures that (science) journalists are under in a world of media relations, press offices and the globalisation of sources (such as “Nature” and “Science”, the two world-leading science journals). And the point about “bad for democracy” is a good one.
That’s why STS (and ESConet) take seriously the training required to do “good” science writing (and other forms of science communication), so that there can be a much greater range of sources and stories to go into the mass media.
I’m not sure that Jane is right, though, when she says that science journalism is not especially difficult. Much of what scientists do can be rather abstract and deeply rooted in mathematical formalism. Even if they get the news-writing (or sonnet-writing, for that matter) “formula” off pat, many researchers lack the patience and empathy with lay readers to explain their work in an approachable way. It can be very hard to find a handy metaphor to bring it within the realm of everyday experience.
I agree that all writers trying to popularise specialist subjects have similar problems. But it seems to me that quite a lot of the world of scientific research is just that bit further from daily life to make the task more challenging. That’s why there are so many activities and initiatives to make science more accessible.
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Md Abdul Awal wrote on 25 June 2013:
I agree that all writers trying to popularise specialist subjects have similar problems. But it seems to me that quite a lot of the world of scientific research is just that bit further from daily life to make the task more challenging. That’s why there are so many activities and initiatives to make science more accessible
Get more information………..http://news.blogentry.in/
In my view, this article is a cheap dig. It’s the kind of thing that lots of other people could have written at any time in the last three decades (and much earlier, I’m sure). And it plays horribly into the prejudices of scientific researchers that journalists are lazy, superficial, and unskilled.
As part of the ESConet project (www.esconet.org) Kajsa-Stina Magnusson, Marta Entradas and I have spent 5-and-a-half weeks running science communication workshops for some pretty bright and senior researchers right across Europe. One of the exercises these researchers have to do is to write a press release (which is quite similar to a short news article). They find it extraordinarily difficult to do anything that gets remotely close to what journalists do several times a day every day of the week.
About the one-and-only thing that most of them get out of the exercise is a bit more respect for, and insight into, what it is that journalists have to do. (Okay, some of them do produce something that is reasonable.)
Students on our HPSC 3003 “Communication of Scientific Ideas” have to write news articles, which they also find challenging. So my advice would be if anyone wants to use this article for teaching purposes, then it should come with large pinches of salt and billboard-sized health warnings.
It’s easy to sneer at work done by (science) journalists and other science communication practitioners. It’s a lot more difficult to do it yourself and to teach others to do it.