He Said She Said versus The Facts

Your assignment is to do a story on a life-time smoker dying in the hospital.

Do you talk to the patient and the clerk who sold him cigarettes all those years?

A tobacco company representative and the man’s doctor?

Or should this be avoided and you do a story based on scientific facts? The statistical inevitability of this man’s death, his suffering, the cost to society and to his family?

There is a debate in science writing that journalists tend to go for the he said/she said convention out of convenience while this may not be what is best for the story.

Now, global warming, stem cells, eugenics...which approach is best when scientific things are very much human?