This is one of an intermittent series of columns about science communication research that has utility for the practice of science writing.
What do you do with the scientific outlier, the maverick who holds tenaciously to a minority viewpoint?
Science journalists wrestle with this problem across the spectrum of science issues, from global warming to the safety of high-level nuclear waste repositories. Some reporters relish the chance to focus on the scientific oddball, arguing that such individuals would be invisible but for the mass media. Others believe steadfastly in the virtue of balance, giving the outlier the equivalent of equal time; the argument here is that the marketplace of ideas will allow truth to prevail sooner or later. And still others worry that any amount of coverage gives these minority views more legitimacy than they deserve.
A couple of recent studies suggest that, while journalists are privately critical of scientific outliers, they write about them in ways that indeed may legitimize the theorists and their theories in the eyes of readers or viewers.
This legitimizing argument is not new. Some years ago, two scholars studied media coverage of creationist science trials in the South and worried that the "equal space" approach given in newspaper stories to creationists and their scientist opponents lent credibility to the creationist perspective. "The operation of objectivity rules in the case indirectly, but actively, constructed the misleading interpretation that creationism was, in fact, the Ôequal, competing theory of human origins' that the state claimed it to be," they concluded.
More recently, Michigan State scholar Jim Dearing decided to study coverage of three scientific issues driven largely by outlier views: Iben Browning's earthquake prediction for the New Madrid region of Missouri in 1990, Peter Duesberg's long-running critique of HIV as the cause of AIDS, and the (now almost iconic) cold-fusion debacle of 1989.
Dearing was interested in learning how objectively newspaper reporters covered these three issues, as well as the extent to which the journalists themselves lent credibility to the theories and the theorists.
He gathered stories about each of the issues from a variety of newspapers across the country with the help of key word searches in VUTEXT, ultimately collecting 393 articles from 26 newspapers. He then trained coders to distinguish objective (where the journalist's opinion was not manifest) from subjective (the journalist's feelings are clear) components of each article, as well as to differentiate between critical, doubting story elements and supportive ones.
He also queried the stories' authors about their own credibility judgments, ultimately receiving 60 percent of the questionnaires back in usable form from 44 journalists.
While 78 percent of the responding journalists replied that the theorists and their theories were not credible, Dearing's analysis suggested that most of the newspaper stories offered a portrayal of the maverick's beliefs that was more supportive than critical.
Dearing feels such coverage may nurture in readers, "a belief in the credibility of maverick theories and theorists." This is ironic, he notes, "since most of the journalists surveyed did not themselves believe the theories of the mavericks whom they had interviewed."
Another scholar has taken a closer look at media coverage of one of those three scientific controversies: the Iben Browning earthquake prediction in 1990. Wyoming professor Conrad Smith stumbled across a curious discrepancy: While five major newspapers published only eight stories about a scientifically legitimate prediction of a 1989 earthquake that caused $6 billion damage, those same papers published a whopping 68 stories about the Browning prediction. He decided to try to find out why.
Smith started by gathering all the stories he could find about Browning's prediction in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, USA Today and the three network evening newscasts. Ultimately, he located 68 newspaper stories and eight TV stories.
He then analyzed the stories for the extent to which they supported the credibility of the prediction by looking for story elements that might influence the level of skepticism or confidence in the reader. They included (1) whether the story said Browning had predicted the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (he didn't), (2) whether it gave him credit for predicting the eruption of Mount St. Helens (he didn't), (3) whether disagreement between Browning and all other seismologists save one (a scientist at Southeastern Missouri State University) was presented as a legitimate controversy among scientists, (4) whether the headline or TV anchor lead supported the credibility of the prediction, (5) whether the story mentioned a panel of earthquake experts appointed by the US Geological Survey who publicly debunked the prediction in mid-October 1990, and (6) a judgment of whether the story as a whole was supportive or critical of the outlier's position.
Smith also carefully recorded whether or not the reporter doing the story had any science/environmental writing credentials.
He did find some individual differences among the news organizations. For example, the level of skepticism in stories was highest for ABC's World News, which aired two stories about the Browning prediction, followed by The New York Times (8 stories) and The Washington Post (4 stories). Sitting at the bottom of the skepticism pile were USA Today (19 stories) and CBS Evening News (4 stories).
And he also found that stories written by science/environmental reporters were more critical of the prediction than were other stories. However, Smith noted that very few of the stories were generated by reporters with such expertise. "Although Iben Browning's prediction was clearly a story that merited scientific scrutiny," he noted, "the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and New York Times each published only one story about the prediction written by a science or environmental reporter (The Washington Post published three). Although the television networks employ specialized reporters who cover science and environment stories, none of those correspondents did an evening television story about the New Madrid prediction."
But organizational differences aside, Smith found a general pattern of coverage that he characterized as "drama...science...drama." Early stories about the prediction were generally uncritical until the USGS scientists issued their public denunciation in October 1990. Briefly, said Smith, news reports turned to a more critical evaluation of the issue. But then they reverted back to "covering the drama of it; back to describing the human reactions rather than the lack of scientific justification for those actions."
The potential for storytelling may have had much to do with the greater coverage of this unscientific earthquake prediction compared to the scientific one in 1989, Smith suggested.
And the generally uncritical nature of the coverage seems to support Dearing's argument that media coverage may have done more to legitimize this maverick claim than it did to raise skepticism about it.
But how do you know if readers or viewers derived the same meanings from these stories as do scholars? In most cases, we have little data to bring to bear on that question. With regard to the Browning earthquake prediction, Smith notes that a telephone survey of communities in the general area of the predicted quake indicated that about half the respondents believed it was likely to occur. But we cannot directly link media coverage to these opinions.
Journalists themselves seem a bit ambivalent on the issue, though. In the Dearing study, while 66 percent felt that scientific outliers are an aid to scientific progress, 82 percent felt that writers should be more--not less--critical in their coverage of such minority perspectives.
Read all about it: Dearing, J.W. (1995) Newspaper coverage of maverick science: Creating controversy through balancing. Public Understanding of Science 4(4), 341-61. Farley, J.E., Barlow, H.D., Finkelstein, M.S. and Riley, R. (1993) Earthquake hysteria, before and after: A survey and follow-up on public response to the Browning forecast. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 11(3), 437-52. Smith, C. (1996) Reporters, news sources, and scientific intervention: The New Madrid earthquake prediction. Public Understanding of Science 5(3), 205-16. Taylor, C.A. and Condit, C.M. (1988) Objectivity and elites: A creation science trial. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5(4), 293-312.
Sharon Dunwoody, Evjue-Bascom Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication and Head of Academic Programs, Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 821 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706, 608-263-3389, dunwoody@facstaff.wisc.edu.