Science reporting in national Media - do you trust it?

r3nu4l

I wanted to get a feeling for how much people here trust the media to accurately portray science and the results of scientific studies.

As a scientist and medical communicator I'm ideally placed to see many facets of scientific communication, both good and bad.

I'll give my own feelings later but I just want to gauge peoples opinions first.

Stargal

I'd look at this from a slightly different angle. As a journalist, I've had to write a few science stories in my time. However, like almost every single journalist I know, my background is in humanities/arts. [Hmmm. I've just thought about that and it's very hard to think of anyone I personally know in the media who has a science background. That's a little worrying...].

So while I (and a lot of other journos) would have done science subjects up to the Leaving Cert and maybe read popular science books, we wouldn't have the same level of starting knowledge as we would about most other topics that we write about.

This lack of basic knowledge about science means that it can take a hell of a lot more background work and explanations of basic terminology in order for the journalist to understand exactly what it is that they're being told when they're writing a science article - and that's where the big problem lies. Often scientists [or the people who are communicating whatever the story is] aren't able to put it in layman's terms so that the journalist can write about it, which means that the reporter ends up using stock phrases that they don't fully understand and which don't help the reader to understand.

Science stories (especially in Irish newspapers) often end up being too full of jargon for most readers to understand/appreciate the relevance of, or else the research gets boiled down to one bullet point which looks good in a headline but may not fully do justice to the research that's been carried out.

I guess the problem lies on both ends; scientists should be able to explain things better and journalists should be putting more work in to do justice to what the story is. Science should be treated in the same way as politics or domestic news, for example, with well-written, well-research and time-relevant stories.

So back to r3nu4l's question - do I trust the media when it comes to reporting science? Kind of.

I think the dumbing down of reporting of scientific research has led to the public becoming skeptical when news of breakthroughs are reported (the 'invisibility cloak' from last year, for example, or when cures for major illnesses are announced). That isn't good for either side.

Papers like the Guardian and the NYT are awesome with their science coverage. They treat it with the importance it deserve. What particularly works is when they use great writers, such as Ben Goldacre who does the Bad Science column in the Guardian, which is accessible, witty and always interesting. Even today, there's a good article in the Guardian where one of the features writers tries to make sense of what's going on in CERN.

I don't think Irish newspapers do this nearly enough, and tend to be far too jargon-y.

That's the view from the other side of the newspaper anyway. Would be interesting to see what you scientist lot make of media coverage of your work.

lostexpectation

how has science reporting being merged with wierd news sections

r3nu4l

WALL OF TEXT ALERT!

Stargal has very accurately captured some of the pressing problems within the media (and science).

She has also captured some of the better sources of science journalism The biggest problem I have with the media going after science stories is that for the most part many of the stories that make it outside of the "Science Pages" are written by journalists with no science background but more importantly, do not seem to need the approval of the science editor!

Therefore we quite often see media reports saying "Chocolate will kill you" one day and "Chocolate will cure your cancer" the next day. Why does this happen?

As Stargal says, there are a number of reasons.

I have written press releases for journalists, I have organised press conferences but I have also written as a science/medical journalist so I know how it works from a number of angles.

Problem 1:
Many scientists do not know how to communicate effectively to non-scientists. They use all the jargon that they take for granted every day.

Problem 2:
Many journalists (as Stargal said) are not scientists and have very little background knowledge.


However, there are many well qualified journalists with excellent science backgrounds, the problem is that they are often left to write the 'science pages' or supplements and are often not consulted when it comes to writing something that will appear on the front page of the paper or the first item on the news bulletin. That is a major problem!

Would a car magazine employ someone to talk about the intricacies of a diesel engine in laymans terms if he didn't know anything about diesel engines to begin with? No. So why do newspapers and television stations allow their journalists to write these pieces. That's a big issue. There is no way the journalist can accurately report what's going on in this instance.

There is another issue too. Stargal mentions the "New hope for [insert disease name here] Cure!" type of story. We see this a lot and yet many patients are still dropping like flies years later. Why?

Well there is a trade-off here from the scientific community. Most basic science research is conducted in University Laboratories. These labs are usually funded by government grants or industry. The Government want to see progress and enhanced reputation in the global scientific community for their financial input. Industry wants to see profit from their investment.

Therefore the University that conducts research into the cause of or ways to stop a certain disease will want to publicise their good results or breakthroughs.

Now, that's the big word "Breakthrough". When a scientist has a breakthrough, all it means is that the results of their work have overcome a problem that nobody else has previously managed to overcome. I'm going to use a metaphor to explain the significance of breakthroughs.

The breakthrough result usually gives more information about the disease and allows a scientist and the scientific community to complete one more piece of the jigsaw, thus making progress. These pieces are usually significant pieces to the jigsaw but they haven't completed the jigsaw. Completing the jigsaw is finding the cure but quite often when we make a jigsaw there are several key pieces that allow us to move on and get further towards completing it, each of these key pieces is a breakthrough piece.

So why do journalists lead us to believe a cure has been found or is imminent? This is the trade-off I mentioned earlier. When concocting a press release a company or university wants journalists to take note, they want the investment of money to be worth it and quite often the money to be gained from global/local publicity is worth it. Hence the press release will use phrases such as "These results are significantly placed to lead us closer to a cure for..."

Journalists need to learn how to decipher not just scientific jargon but also press releases. "significantly placed to lead us closer to a cure..." is very different to "cure found". The results may be significantly placed but "how close are we to a cure and how many years will that take" is a simple question that almost never seems to be asked. Professionally written press releases (such as ones I've written) tend to use very little jargon, have a glossary to explain the jargon used and also tend to be very specific about what the results are while also making very vague claims as to what the potential future outcomes and possibilities are. Unfortunately many journalists latch onto the potential future outcomes and blow them out of proportion.

I haven't yet mentioned agendas of particular media outlets but that is always a factor.

Do I trust what the media write? Not really. The media focus too much on the potential future (usually pie in the sky) outcomes and not enough on what the current results they are reporting actually mean.

magicbastarder

Stargal wrote: »

What particularly works is when they use great writers, such as Ben Goldacre who does the Bad Science column in the Guardian, which is accessible, witty and always interesting.

am working my way through his new book, also called 'bad science' and would highly recommend it. i haven't reached the chapter which specifically deals with science reporting in the popular media, though.

Irish Halo

I love the "I'm not a scientist" cop out by Journos. Yes I have science training and yes I do science communication for a living but guess what my training is in chemistry and my job is hardcore particle physics/IT based things my chemistry course didn't cover in massive detail surprisingly. Heck occasionally I have to talk about biology stuff and I haven't done any biology since my JC which is 12 years ago now.

Despite what many seem to think the virtue of having a science qualification does not mean you know everything about anything in all of science, it is frankly lazy journalism. Most of the really good science writers I know from various publications or freelancers, have biology/medical backgrounds and they write stories covering everything from super symmetry to proteomics and do it well because they do this mad thing called research that a lot of their profession could learn from.

Another problem is some journalists (from major papers not just the nibs in The Metro) can't read/listen. I have seen people interviewed who are clear, concise and very good at explaining their work as simply as possible (why they were chosen) just have everything they had said ignored even to the point where they have explicitly said "It is not X, Y or Z" but when the article has come out the article states the "Boffins have done X, Y or Z".

The ones who write good science just have pride in their work, you wouldn't go to print with a half written piece on a new bill being passed by the government so why do it with science? Oh yeah because "no one understands this science thing anyway so I can write what I want and no one will know any better and those who do are in a minority so meh".

Believe the mainstream media about science? I don't believe them about anything.

lostexpectation

when we read a story we doubt we spend five to ten minutes searching the net, and seeing what other people have read, blogs are good at this as they dissect the story and source links directly, i don't know why journos can't do that, although maybe journos get press releasesand they might not be that much on the internet about it until it put out there, but hey certain newspapers could wait a day or towo if they cared about accuracy, i don't think its sciencetists fault.

prob is most science story are just wire repeats, newspaper don't bother to do they own checks , casuse they couldn't care less about standards.

r3nu4l

The thing is that haven written press releases I can tell you that companies are very careful about what they want said.

When a major pharma company makes a press release it has to be approved by the product medical team, marketing team and legal team. On the whole they are dry pieces of work but written to be understood by science journalists.

I don't disrespect science journalists as a whole, some of them are excellent. However, the nature of the business is that some stories have to be 'sexed-up' by the journalist if it has any chance of appearing in the paper.

Editors don't want a headline that says "Drug x, showed a 25% improvement in overall survival amongst advanced metastatic renal cancer".

They want a headline that reads "Boffins cure kidney cancer!!!!111" type of headline.

In many cases, it is editorial policy that drives this hype. Until Editorial policy changes we will always have poor journalism...unless it is stories confined to a dedicated science section of the paper (weekly pullouts, for example). Anything that makes it into the 'news' sections has to be seen to be exciting, hence "Major advance in therapy!" headlines for a single study whose results showed a potential for an advance in 5 years time.