LETTERS

While we appreciate being reviewed in ScienceWriters (Summer 2001), some statements by reviewer Valerie Brown left us concerned about the care with which she read our book It Ain't Necessarily So: How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality.

Let one example suffice. Brown states, "Though claiming it addresses science in general, the book focuses narrowly on statistical research into issues affecting public policy, particularity self-reporting by interviewees in surveys." Here is what we actually say in the Introduction about the scope and aims of our work:

Scientific findings of all kinds comprise a topic of huge scope. It should therefore be obvious that an analysis of the totality of scientific reports would be an impossibly broad undertaking. Accordingly, we have limited the scope of our enterprise in a number of ways. First, our quarry is any information generated by scientific investigation that seeks to affect or has an impact upon a public-policy outcome, . . . where that outcome is substantially energized by media attention to the findings . . . [(A)ll] three components (research generated, media attention to the data, policy engagement with the findings) have to come together for us to consider the scientific claims to be appropriate grist for our mill. We principally examine media coverage of studies of health and statistical accounts of the state of society, since the science that drives public policy mostly deals with these two domains . . .Our examination of scientific research is also narrowed because it particularly concerns questions of measurement . . . That is, we examine the methodological bases for various quantitative portraits of the world that are offered for our consumption.

It's difficult to see how that discussion can be summarized as "claiming (the book) addresses science in general." We could go on.

Dr. David Murray
(for the authors)
Statistical Assessment Service
Washington, D.C.

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