Covering Science in Cyberspace
March 12, 2007
Tom Sigfried opened his talk with, “It’s time to stir things up.” Balance, he said, is a bad idea: it’s a journalist’s responsibility to weigh the evidence and draw a conclusion. Merely citing sources leads to the implicit equation of good science with bad or pseudo- science. Science writers should strive for reliable information above all else. That necessarily involves a deep knowledge of the field.
Which raises the question:
Whose responsibility is it to make sure that the public gets reliable information?
There certainly should be accountability at every level for mistakes made. But if the public at large, undergrad psychology majors, and in many cases the scientists themselves can’t grasp statistics, how can journalists be expected to catch everyone else’s oversights?
Practically speaking, the battle to educate science writers to evaluate all the evidence themselves may not be worth fighting. Asking journalists to know more than scientists about their topics is certainly unreasonable. In some sense, they have to be able to trust their sources, or at least the consensus among many of their sources.
Adam Frank noted that it must be difficult for journalists to know which scientists to trust. It takes scientists themselves a while to learn who rushes to publication and whose work is consistently careful and good.
Alexandra Witze rejoined that there are at least a couple of areas in which journalists can and ought to have a couple of trusted sources (climate change, stem cell research).
Charles Petit pointed out that these problems with properly weighing the evidence provide journalists with a chance to emphasize the self-corrective nature of science. Science journalists should embrace botched articles as a chance to tell people what science is all about: finding and fixing mistakes.
By Mark Lescroart, 03/12/07 at 1:02 pm
Posted in Science journalism | Resources
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March 12, 2007
by Andrew McGregor
When I was teaching English in Beijing I faced a problem of how to explain the concept of a nerd to a Chinese student.
“It’s someone who studies a lot and is good at math and science, but they do it too much.”
“Like Bill Gates?”
“Yeah.”
“And it is bad to be a nerd?”
“Yes, kind of.”
“Why?”
Without the cultural context of life in America it was very difficult to explain the concept of what a nerd is.
The internet is dragging science journalists into the future with demographically violent trembles affecting the entire field. The internet allows unparalleled access to science news and information, but this access comes at the price of analysis and context so crucial to science journalism.
Internet search functions are predicated on connectivity and the popularity of websites: the googleization of information. Within this process there is no human arbiter to provide the appropriate scientific context and meaning. One can use the internet to access studies from labs across the planet on esoteric components of quantum mechanics. However, without an appropriate scientific context it is unlikely that the findings will be adequately conveyed or understood.
Essentially, the internet is facilitating unprecedented access to information but this is coming at a direct cost of science writers being able to explain what it means.
Internet use also means that science writing will have great opportunities like the exploration of online programs that can allow a user to be a climatologists and run tests on what adding carbon dioxide will do to the atmosphere and things of this nature.
It is uncertain what science journalism will look like as the internet continues to change the way media is consumed. What is clear is that science journalists will have to play a dual role of protecting the intellectual credibility of their craft while employing the nascent technologies that may lead to its degradation.
By Andrew McGregor, 03/12/07 at 11:18 am
Posted in Science online
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March 12, 2007
Part of the problem in communicating science to the public is the scientists themselves.
“Scientists have a responsibility to communicate what they do,” said science journalist Tom Siegfried this morning. “Part of the whole purpose of science to communicate what you found out to the world at large.”
Michael Lemonick, who has declared himself the morning’s iconoclast, argued that that would require too much of scientists. “You’re asking people to do something beyond their job,” he said.
Even if communicating with the public is not a responsibility of a scientist, it is an essential part of being successful. In order to write a successful grant, you must convince the funders that your research is important. In order to get a faculty position, you must explain your work to people in different specialties. Even fellow scientists will have no idea what you’re talking about unless you can explain it in something close to plain English.
Scientists usually like to talk about their work, and if they have achieved any prominence, they are usually very good at talking (and writing) about it. But we are not taught to communicate.
Even though we are funded by public money (the NIH is paying for my PhD!) and work in the public interest, communication with the public is not emphasized. Instead, we learn how to talk in the jargon of our field, to write scientific papers, grants, and give research presentations. We use words like elucidate, attenuate, and potentiate. When we do talk about the significance of our research, we are instructed to condense it into one long, unreadable sentence; “These studies may help elucidate the role of the neurotransmitter transporter GAT1 in contributing to epilepsy, stroke and excitotoxicity.”
Cartoonist Larry Gonick said that there should be a class called “Verbs for Scientists.”
I say “Please!”
By Katherine Leitzell, 03/12/07 at 11:00 am
Posted in Science journalism
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March 12, 2007
Science is complicated. Seeing it with your own two eyes is almost impossible these days, even for scientists. Some things are too small (the spin properties of a single molecule) and some things are much too big (the mysteries of the universe), and some things are just plain invisible. However, the closer we can get to “seeing” something, the more we believe it. Consider how reputable the TrimSpa creators look in their white lab coats, while they stand among beakers and flasks. However, eye-witness accounts are rarely found in science stories.
This is why explaining science is so damn hard. Rarely does the public catch a glimpse of a real scientist in action. And even if they could, who knows if they’d enjoy watching? Often, the crawl of scientific evidence doesn’t make for a compelling scene. But then again, maybe it would.
According to some conference participants, some websites now have “lab-cams” to catch scientists in action. This means that someone, somewhere, wants to see what goes on behind closed laboratory doors. As a young(ish) person starting out with the hopes of communicating science, this is an important lesson. I don’t mean to say that watching a researcher pipette her sample into tubes is inherently beneficial. But rather, knowing something about the set-up of a lab or the smell of a certain room lends itself to a deeper understanding. And these days, science is in desperate need of de-mystification.
By Laura Sanders, 03/12/07 at 10:48 am
Posted in Visual science
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