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| Volume 49, Number 1, Spring 2000 |
by William Haseltine, Jim Jarvis, and Curt Suplee
The AAAS Science Journalism Awards Managing Committee asked a scientist, a science journalist, and a high school science teacher to talk about the true measures of excellence in science journalism. Dr. William Haseltine, chairman and chief executive officer of Human Genome Sciences, Inc., Curt Suplee, editor of the "Horizon" section at the Washington Post, and Jim Jarvis, a science teacher at Chantilly High School in Virginia, met one evening in the fall of 1999 in Washington, DC, to take up the challenge. They talked about whether the message is being conveyed effectively in science journalism, and how reporters and scientists can better communicate those ideas. They also discussed what level of understanding of science is held by the public. An edited version of their discussion follows.
Haseltine: I would begin the discussion of science journalism by asking, "What's the social function of science today?" Journalism is by necessity a reflection of that social function. There has been a dramatic increase in the social function of science, much of it driven by the economy. We used to think of scientific changes in terms of decades or centuries. Now we think of them much more immediately. And that means there has to be a science press that accommodates that. Stock prices rise and fall based on chip designs or discoveries in medicine and technology.
Our economy is doing well today because we innovate. What's innovation but applied science and technology? It is very important for our philosophy of who we are today. What is our place in the universe, on earth, and in the natural, living world? Who are we in terms of our genes and determination? How am I going to live, and how are my relatives going to live? What kind of child am I going to have?
These are issues that bite. They bite the pocketbook and they bite philosophy and religion. And so there is a broad and profound interaction with science, which I think is new. It's reflected in the media because it is of such pressing interest.
Suplee: It's true that the social awareness of the benefits of applied science has increased. Whether that has driven science journalism, I don't know. My feeling is that the current high mark of science journalism began with the Apollo program and increased significantly due to a combination of the AIDS crisis, which raised people's awareness of virology, and the Challenger disaster, which shattered people's notions about what science could do.
But the news
media are not like the Red Cross. We have a for-profit, free-enterprise
press. In fact, when science reports get into the news hole-the
space that surrounds the ad-it's often because a certain kind
of advertising wants to underwrite a certain kind of coverage.
The rise of personal computer advertising drove a huge explosion
in science coverage. At the end of the 1980s, 100 newspapers in
this country (out of a total of 1,700 dailies) had a separate
science section.
Since then, however, things have changed. There are half as many science sections as there used to be, in large measure because computer companies have merged, gone out of business, or simply saturated their markets and are now looking for corporate buyers.
If my hypothesis is correct, we will see a diminution of science coverage in the years to come. And not a continual expansion as people gradually recognize the value of science and applied science in their daily lives. I don't personally believe they do.
Haseltine: But there has also been an enormous explosion in specialized science media, such as Wired, Discovery, and Scientific American. You now see a lot of science stories on the front page of major newspapers. There's a science story on the front page of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal almost every day.
Jarvis: In the last couple of weeks there's been a number of science stories on the front page and in the A section of the Washington Post. My principal says this is an easy time for science teachers because there's something in the paper all the time-from the Mars orbiter crash to creationism to the feathered dinosaurs.
One insightful article talked about junk science and the difficulty that scientists have testifying in court. Everything in science is tentative. So scientists can't say this is a fact and it's always going to be that way. This is the very essence of science. The evidence can be overwhelming. It can change, modify, or reinforce a theory, but the book is never closed.
Haseltine: That is one of the hardest concepts to convey-that there is no such thing as truth and that the basic job of the scientist is to construct a hypothesis and do his level best to prove it.
Suplee: It is the inherently iterative nature of science that makes it a hard sell in the newsroom. Journalism does not reward intellectual curiosity. The first thing the editors want to know is, "Is this IT?" And, most people will say no, this is not it, this is one of the little its on the way to the capital IT.
We had this problem with the Mars rocks that had ostensible evidence of life. (See related story.) It split the editors right down the middle. Half of them said it could be one of the stories of the decade. The other half said it was worth a paragraph at most.
Haseltine: There is an economic side to scientific reporting-concerning not only the corporate world but also the government. A lot of the stories are basically meant to support the NASA budget. So that Mars rock story wasn't just a Mars rock story. It was a justification for exploration to Mars, which is an enormously expensive undertaking. And that is part of journalism. It's a huge machine, a PR juggernaut. I see it in the human genome project. It can skew reality and it can determine budgets.
Suplee: A substantial number of the senior science press in the United States agree with you, that we overcover NASA and we overcover astronomy at the expense of a number of deserving subjects. I would include geosciences among the number of deserving subjects that are embarrassingly under-covered.
Jarvis: Think about it from another perspective. Right now we have two or three probes looking around-Cassini, Galileo, and the ones that are going to Mars. Compare it to Europe in the 1500s and the number of probes they had out there to see what was going on. I think it's understandable why astronomy has that allure even though the immediate return to Joe Citizen isn't there.
Suplee: It serves an iconic value in the sense that as this country becomes increasingly fragmented, one of the few things that we have left to share is the space program. We can at least all look up and say, jeez, we all paid for that, and we all in some indefinable way participated in that and benefit from it.
Haseltine: People like stories. Another major problem for anyone who communicates science to the public is the level of understanding of the public. And it must be a terrible problem for journalists, because how does a journalist communicate to someone who intrinsically doesn't have the information or understanding?
First, you must communicate the contents of scientific research, and the content can be interesting or mundane, but it is always going to be to the average person very complex. And, second, you've got to somehow bring into the same story enough educational background so that someone who is essentially illiterate can understand.
Jarvis: A survey of a class graduating from Harvard showed that most of the graduates answered incorrectly the question, "Why do we have winter and summer." Two-thirds of the people said it is because we move closer or farther away from the sun.
People don't use the knowledge they have. Almost everybody knows if it's winter here it's summer in the southern hemisphere. And at the same time they maintain we have winter and summer because we move closer and farther from the sun. They don't think of things they already know. They don't make connections and associations with knowledge that's already there.
And that's what I think the journalist's task is. You have to push the right buttons because a lot of people do know some things-it just has to be brought to mind before you can go into what's new.
Suplee: The single biggest problem in science communication is that we are asked increasingly to communicate in smaller packets. When you make a Supreme Court story shorter, it's not that hard, or a sports story, or even a three-car fatality. Those can be made shorter by eliminating some details.
Science stories cannot be made shorter-the way you guys are doing it, they have to be made longer every year. Because we're not reporting on Louis Pasteur anymore. We're reporting on a new insight on a previous insight five years ago, which stemmed from an insight in the late 1970s that was unknown to the general public and indeed to half the people in the field.
So what we do now is not report the news but the context-if we do it right. That's what makes a good science story. And, that has become an enormous problem for people who are asked to write such a story in 600 words.
Haseltine: One thing we can agree on-there is certainly an enormous increase in the quantity of science journalism. I think there is also an increase in the quality of science journalism. We have wonderful writers. There are now science sections, technology sections, and sometimes technology business sections. I think that's all a very positive sign. It's a whole new profession.
But while we have criticism of the political, economic, and social press, we have no criticism of the science press. And it's a very important institution. Now these AAAS Science Journalism Awards are the opposite side of that. Awards are the good part-the carrots. All the other journalists have the carrots (the Pulitzers) but they've also got the stick-if they don't do well they get beaten. But there's no stick beating the science journalists.
Jarvis: Some parts of science are fact. We look at the periodic table and that's the mass of such and such element. It is not likely to change. However, other things at the edge of research are constantly changing. A question I get from a number of parents is, "What's this all about-can't you guys make up your minds?" A lot of people have a real problem with that. They want a degree of certainty that science is never going to give them.
Suplee: The press has become the principal and most credible informer for many difficult issues. And there are real problems with that because it is the nature of the press-understandably and maybe not even wrongly-to turn everything into a catfight. And, science has many catfights.
It raises an interesting question about what we should do in the newsroom when we're faced with controversy. And that is not an easy call. Traditionally, the main job of science journalism is to report responsible claims asserted. That is what we chiefly do. We are not supposed to be arbiters of truth.
Jarvis: But you are an arbiter of truth. When I ask the students to do research, they look at periodicals and peer-reviewed journals. When they look at the popular press, they see that there has been some sort of review of the items there. We have to teach the kids what is peer-reviewed, what is a reliable site on the Internet, and what is potentially off the tracks.
That's sometimes difficult for those of us who have a science education to do. But take a 14- or 15-year-old who visits a Web site that has some type of official seal or logo, and he won't know that the research presented there has not been peer-reviewed. It's becoming a much more difficult task to try to teach somebody at the beginning of their science education whether an item in the media is legitimate or not.
Haseltine: We agree there is a lot more science journalism. We agree it's better. We agree there has to be criticism. And we agree that the fundamental problem is science literacy, which doesn't really exist. But it's an important thing to get right.
Jarvis: In the education field we're concerned about straight letters literacy-how the kids read-as well as general science literacy. One parent told me that she thought the biggest problem with the kids is a general knowledge deficit. They know certain things very well. But they don't have a broad base of general knowledge.
For example, a new biology teacher this year was discussing carbon with the teenagers. She mentioned coal and it came to her that they don't know what coal is. Three quarters of the kids have no concept of coal. They've never seen it and they don't know it burns.
Haseltine: Part of the reason for the lack of science literacy is that the way things work is no longer so obvious. If you look at a Model T's engine, it's very obvious how it works. You take a look at a new car or a computer, it's hard to know how it works. It's working by very complicated principles and you cannot take it apart and figure it out. You are not going to build a home computer like we used to build crystal radio sets.
There is a growing distance between those people who can engineer and create computers and machinery and those people who use them. It used to be everything was made out of leather and wood and the blacksmith down the street could make it. Then it got more specialized. There's a growing distance between technology in our everyday life and our ability to comprehend and understand that technology.
Suplee: And that puts an even larger demand on journalism. But, unhappily, education is not one of the traditional self-definitions of the press. It's not what we do. We do reporting, not education. There are many people who feel we should-most of them are science writers. It is probably going to be one of the hardest-fought issues in the next 10 years. How much should we educate? How much should we report? What is our responsibility to increase the public understanding?
Jarvis: We have a responsibility to make sure schoolteachers can provide students either answers or directions to find things out. But most of the teachers in our elementary levels are not well-trained. To get a license at the elementary level, you need only one or two science courses. And none of them are comprehensive-maybe it's rocks for jocks or physics for poets. But the point is, they are not educated about the scientific method and the way scientists do things.
One of the areas that's common to all the standardized tests right now is scientific inquiry, which has been ignored for a long time. The whole process of how scientific thought takes place is something I think can be put into any type of instruction. What is the evidence, what do we know now that we didn't know before, and how did we come to know it? A lot of people don't grasp the idea of scientific inquiry.
Haseltine: Let me give you an example of what I think is good science journalism and bad science journalism. Good scientific journalism contains the facts of what actually was done. Bad science journalism occurs when you read a paper, call six people, get six opinions, and publish the opinions without ever communicating anything but people's opinions.
Jarvis: What really concerns me is the lack of general knowledge because there is little reading across the entire liberal arts spectrum. Then even the lab instructions become hard to communicate to kids. The number of kids who are really literate is very small.
Also, the number of people who maintain a degree of knowledge outside their own area is shrinking. I think that's an area we should be concerned about. That's an area where journalists can say, "Hey, even though you're a biologist, there are other things going on in the world of astronomy and physics."
Haseltine: That's a specialized function and I think it's a very effective one. The fact that scientists reading the lay crafts can learn about other disciplines is a very important aspect in communications. Certainly that happens in Science magazine but it also happens in the general press. Most working scientists or geologists might read biology in the New York Times or the Washington Post--even though it is a small audience.
Suplee: But it is not traditionally one of the functions of a newspaper or a broadcast station to satisfy that particular audience. I see this role as enormously imperiled in large measure because we live in a democracy and newspapers and broadcast media are among the most quintessentially democratic institutions. Yet they don't hear from the scientific constituency. Scientists don't call a managing editor if they think the Post has either screwed up a story about genetics or missed a big one.
It's been my experience that the most silent constituency of consumers of news is the people who have the greatest stake in it, which is very peculiar. It is not true of any other discipline. When we write something about Israel, every Arab in the readership area calls us. When we write something about the Dallas Cowboys, every Redskins fan calls us.
But when we utterly mismanage, ignore, or misreport a major science story, we don't hear anything good, bad, or otherwise. You ask why isn't there more science coverage in the paper? Well, where's the feedback? In part it's because the science establishment considers itself above this. They're just interested observers of nature. But the coverage of your entire life's work may be in peril, because you become the silent constituency.
Haseltine: I think that there isn't enough feedback. And, I think that feeds into the idea that there is no real organized criticism of scientific journalism, whether it's in the scientific community or in the media. Every institution needs accountability, and this is one without it.
I'm surprised it's as good as it is. Because on the whole, I think scientific journalism is good. There is more good science journalism than bad science journalism. There's a lot more of it and I hope it will continue to increase. For example, there's a real hunger for health stories. Whether there continues to be a hunger for other stories depends on how economically relevant they are. But when they are relevant, you'll read about them.
(Source: A Measure of Excellence: Honoring 50 Years of Science Journalism, published by AAAS) [See page 32 for ordering information]