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| Volume 49, Number 2, Summer 2000 |
by Terence Monmaney
Working lately as a reporter covering medical science for one of the Left Coast news media after more than a decade in Washington, DC, and New York City, I have been shocked-shocked!-that a lot of sophisticated science reporters around the country are producing more work than historians are in the habit of checking out. Contributing to that scholarly neglect, the dominant New York-Washington news media are not above acting as though all that other reporting does not exist.
These journalistic realities matter to historians of recent science because a question of growing importance to them is a variation on the old Watergate query, "What does the public know and when did it know it?" And, moreover, how does it respond to this knowledge? To the extent that historians and media critics concern themselves with what Sheldon Krimsky, a policy scholar and biotech gadfly at Tufts University, calls "public hypotheses"-actively debated scientific theories in which the citizenry has a stake, like the safety of silicone-gel breast implants-they must become more subtle as well as more inclusive in their use of popular sources, lest they compound errors that appear in the press by etching them into scholarly or official historical accounts.
Rare is the history or analysis that does not at least mention how the news media represented a particular scientific development, dispute, discovery or non-discovery at the time it emerged into public view. Historians count on those fresh sightings "while all is strange and new," to use Frederick Soddy's lovely 1908 phrase about the early days of radiation. But the considerable patchiness of news coverage makes perilous any simple conclusions about public understanding of events and emerging principles. It also renders dicey the fashion of criticizing the news media for perceived shortcomings in their coverage, as if this vast and unruly plural entity, "the media," were singular. An odd example from my recent experience concerns Dolly, the cloned sheep. Scholars have criticized the press for failing at the time to dispel public fears about cloning people, scolding reporters for not proclaiming the obvious point that any pair of nature's own clones, identical twins, are substantially different beings. Gregory E. Pence, a medical ethics scholar and author of the admirably astringent book Who's Afraid of Human Cloning?, made that point. But, he told me later, he had not seen a front-page story I wrote for the Los Angeles Times only six days after the Dolly announcement, which brought out the identical-twin angle by interviewing sets of them-including a set at a Manhattan restaurant called Twins. So were the 1.5 million people who bought the paper that Sunday not exposed to the issue, as he and some others imply?
The patchiness in the coverage of scientific goings-on poses a sourcing problem, in that scholars and especially historians of recent events rely overmuch on the New York Times and the Washington Post. Scholars have ample reason to comb those publications. The NYT is the newspaper of record and has the largest science-reporting staff, while the Post is so close to the sausage-making of science policy that its reporters should probably wear hairnets. Yet some of the best reporting occurs outside the NYC-DC axis. Exemplary work on the silicone-gel breast implant controversy appeared in the Houston Chronicle. The Sacramento Bee pioneered coverage of misuse of animals in research. The Chicago Tribune ran an unparalleled series on the Human Genome Diversity Project. It was the Albuquerque Tribune that ignited public outcry over government-sponsored radiation experiments on humans. Early on in the AIDS epidemic, the San Francisco Chronicle shone. The Cleveland Plain Dealer did an exceptional series on ethics problems in drug trials, and the Toledo Blade broke ground on beryllium disease and Department of Energy contractors. In this list, no doubt, my own awareness as a reporter covering medicine shows through, but similar trends occur in coverage of other scientific fields.
For an example of what I suggest is a pervasive Right Coast bias among scholars, look no further than the premier number of Recent Science Newsletter. Robert Cook-Deegan, reviewing The Baltimore Affair, noted that the book by Daniel Kevles, a Caltech historian, claimed that the New York Times had made errors in reporting the scandal. To be sure, the Times's coverage, which was aggressive, must be evaluated. But the slap on the Gray Lady's wrist appeared to show excess concern for her efforts at the exclusion of others, while begging the question of how other outlets performed.
Making matters yet more complicated is the rough-and-tumble practice of news organizations stiffing one another. Another example from my files: In May of 1998, New York magazine carried a substantial article on Herceptin, a new breast cancer drug and the first monoclonal-antibody treatment approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The article, pegged to the drug's preliminary approval by an FDA advisory panel, reported that Dr. Dennis Slamon of the UCLA School of Medicine led the long push to invent and test the treatment, with an interesting array of support from, among others, a cosmetic industry mogul, a biotech firm, and Hollywood. The magazine's editors trumpeted the piece on the cover with a line reading EXCLUSIVE: THE BREAST CANCER BREAKTHROUGH.
Translation: DITZY L.A. PRESS MISSES HUGE STORY IN OWN BACKYARD!
But checking the Los Angeles Times archive, I found more than half-a-dozen articles on the drug's research and development pre-dating the New York piece, including a 5,000-word magazine piece and a 2,000-word front-page feature. A 300-word item noted the FDA panel's ruling. Whatever the virtues of the New York piece, it was hardly exclusive. The moral: Even in this wired age, reporting still varies place to place, such that a bureaucratic event noted in Los Angeles as an incremental advance is a "breakthrough" in New York.
Maybe it is time to retire the old notion of the "public understanding of science." My experience of the serious press covering science is that there is no singular public, just as there is no singular news media. Thanks to the Plain Dealer, Clevelanders may know more about shortcomings in FDA regulations regarding drug trials than do Washingtonians. Thus historians and media critics have their work cut out for them. It's a webbed wide world now, after all, and the ready electronic access to vast stores of reporting through the Internet and the commercial service Nexis means that scholars no longer have an excuse to overlook far-flung or provincial sources. A romp through the local library's NYT microfilm cache just won't cut it anymore.
The greatest hazard of overlooking the variety of vastness of reporting is that misapprehensions can become part of the record, perhaps influencing government policy. For example, a prominent medical-ethics authority, R. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin, published a column on actions last year by the Office for Protection from Research Risks, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, against several medical centers. The scholar wrote that OPRR's sanction against Duke-suspending for five days the medical center's license to conduct federally funded studies involving people-was the most serious action the office had taken in recent memory. Not so, as OPRR officials told me. By far the most serious reprimand up to that time was against the Veterans Affairs medical center in West Los Angeles, whose federal research license was terminated. Charo's mistaken assertion is traceable, in my view, to reporting by the NYT and the Post, which played up the action against Duke, a Right Coast institution. Given that the scholar is a member of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, the misapprehension may become part of the official history of federal enforcement of ethical standards. She would not have made the same mistake if she had been reading the Los Angeles Times.
Journalism Off the NY-DC Axis, Recent Science Newsletter, Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 2000. Reprinted with permission.
Terence Monmaney is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.