By Viviane Callier
If there was one take-home message from the workshop on Covering Controversies, it might be that science journalists have the obligation to investigate whether something is a legitimate controversy — and if it’s not, the obligation to avoid covering it at all.
The panel, moderated by Rick Borchelt of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and composed of Lee Rainie and Cary Funk of the Pew Research Center, Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and Seth Mnookin of the MIT graduate program in science writing, discussed how to handle issues ranging from vaccines and autism, to climate and energy.
Rainie began by noting that science issues have become so central to civic issues in our culture that the Pew Research Center conducted a study to better understand the attitudes of the American public and AAAS scientists towards science. They found “tremendous gaps” between public opinion and scientists’ opinions on issues like GMO foods, climate and energy issues, the origins of the universe and origins of life, and even things like whether it’s appropriate to use animals in scientific research. The public was divided on some issues, and the researchers attempted to pin down the reasons for these differences; for example, to see whether the differences fell along political lines, or were largely predicted by religious beliefs. But, Rainie said, “The striking thing is that there is no single cause for these differences and no single explanation for American public opinion on a variety of science issues.”
The Pew Research study found that religious differences, politics, education, age, and gender all matter for beliefs about evolution. For childhood vaccines, age seems to matter the most — older Americans are more likely to say that the MMR vaccine should be mandatory for all children. And there are big gender differences in public opinion about the safety of genetically modified foods or the use of animals in research. “The point is that there is no single divide that separates the public into groups,” says Funk. “We need to be prepared to come at these issues from multiple perspectives.”
Jamieson discussed the failures of the scientific and journalistic communities in the context of the scientifically problematic article by Andrew Wakefield in the Lancet that first linked vaccines to autism — a myth that was perpetuated in part by a failure to retract the paper in a timely manner. She contrasted that with the successful handling of a fraudulent stem cell paper in Nature that was rapidly disproven and retracted thanks to critical investigations by scientists and journalists.
Mnookin, who wrote the book The Panic Virus about vaccines and autism, emphasized the importance of making sure that a controversy is a legitimate one before giving it any kind of press coverage. “Our job as science journalists is not just to report on what scientists are doing, but to query what’s going on and see if it deserves your time and attention,” he said. “Now, this can be trickier and trickier. You don’t get paid for not writing stories,” he conceded. But journalists have an obligation not to perpetrate harmful myths. For example, the myth that vaccines cause autism has led to thousands of hospitalizations and many deaths due to measles. “Covering something controversial under the guise of just letting the reader decide can really be damaging,” he said. “Our obligation as science journalists is to make sure that when we are covering controversies, that they are real controversies, and it’s not one or two people making one point and everyone else making another.”
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