UNFOCUSED BOOK FOCUSES ON SCIENCE MEDIA

by Valerie Brown

I got the e-mailed press release for It Ain't Necessarily So: How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality (Rowman & Littlefield) around the same time one of my editors informed me that henceforth the maximum length for articles in his weekly newspaper would drop from 1,000 to 850 words. This made me very grumpy. Just as the journalistic bed becomes yet more Procrustean*, here comes another volley of potshots! And the book's subtitle made me laugh. Do you believe you control the "scientific picture of reality"?

The authors (David Murray, Joel Schwartz, and S. Robert Lichter) find much science reporting misleading or inaccurate because it is incomplete, failing most often to include details about data collection. My first reaction was "So what else is new?" I loathe the Hobson's choices I'm forced to make to squish even one research report into something that will snag a distracted reader, and the structural details of the research often fall first.

As I read further, I began to suspect that the authors commit the very sins of omission they find in science writers, painting a deceptive picture of their own. Though claiming it addresses science in general, the book focuses narrowly on statistical research into issues affecting public policy, particularly self-reporting by interviewees in surveys. No space is devoted to "harder" science writing about, say, the Higgs boson or coronal mass ejections. The examples of bad science reporting selected for analysis include research on campus rape, poverty and hunger, climate change, electromagnetic fields, and sperm counts. Such questions as whether there is any such thing as an economic "trickledown effect," whether immigrants really take jobs from natives, or the possible causal link between gun ownership and gun injuries, do not find a place in their critique.

According to the press release, the authors are all affiliated with neutral-sounding think tanks, but Schwartz is an adjunct at the Hudson Institute, widely considered a center of right-wing political punditry. The book repeatedly notes that the media have a politically liberal bias. I did not see an overt declaration of an intent to correct toward the right. That's their subtext. Once they make their statistical and logical corrections to vagueness and misconstruction in selected reportage, the original issues seem to evaporate or appear much less acute. As the examples pile up, their weight seems to imply that these issues are imaginary. Are poverty, campus rape, climate change merely figments of hysterical liberal imaginations?

This is not to say that the book has nothing useful to offer. It gently exposes and combs the eternal snarls of statistical research such as definition of terms, sample size, the many pitfalls of survey question design, and uncritical reliance on proxies. In an elegant, economical sentence that would save print space (but whose syntax would daunt readers), the authors observe that "Newspaper reports too seldom make apparent the deep ambiguity of data."

However, these criticisms and advice are more properly directed at researchers themselves. Moreover, the book examines only daily newspaper reporting, and analyzes individual articles rather than looking at a paper's coverage of an issue over time, which is the only way to enlarge the dailies' Procrustean bed. The authors also seem to include articles based on only one piece of research, which are inherently incomplete.

I don't believe it's possible to understand modern science by relying solely on short pieces in daily newspapers. The reader must go deeper, and when she does, those daily stories make more sense and their biases are easier to detect. It Ain't Necessarily So ignores the wide range of science journalism that does a very good job because it can take an hour of television time or more than a thousand words on paper or a Web site to do it. After all, these authors had a whole book in which to make their case.

It Ain't Necessarily So is really about the inadequacy of statistical methods and interpretation as guides in making complex political and moral decisions. Reading it stirred up for me all the old questions media scholars gnaw on: the press's role as gatekeeper and watchdog, whether journalism should be education, whether science writers are a form of advocacy press for a vast entrenched research establishment, whether environmental writers are the same for the vested interests of failed liberalism, and so forth.

The authors are social scientists rather than working journalists, although "each of us has undertaken either an intensive study of journalism in its cultural and institutional practices, or served in journalistic capacities, writing and editing news accounts." Now, far be it from me to say nobody but the infantry should be able to comment on strategy and tactics-I had no professional journalism experience before I went to graduate school-but I think if these authors had spent more time in the Procrustean bed they would be less likely to blame reporters for systemic insults to media integrity such as multinational corporate owners continually shrinking the news hole in order to follow the siren song of New Economy profits.

I conclude that the book is an excellent companion for readers of science writing and can be a useful reminder to science writers and researchers, but its aim is a bit off and everyone should be sensitive to its subtle subtext.

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Valerie Brown is a freelancer in Portland, OR. Formerly a professional musician, she has a master's degree in journalism (University of Oregon, 1991) and usually votes Democratic, although not always happily. She has written about climate change, sperm counts, salmon, and many environmental health issues. A half-finished novel occupies shelf space in her home.

*After Procrustes, a mythical Greek giant who stretched or shortened captives to make them fit his beds.