Will Science Blogging Absolve the Mainstream Media of the Need to Provide Science Coverage?

Nick Davies’ corruscating Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media was warmly received by some readers and commended by some commentators who welcomed his pitiless assessment of the parlous state of journalism. Other readers have produced a measured disagreement along the lines of “Yes. But not us and you’ve overstated your case“. Still more indulged in faux outrage and managed to publish their over-wrought reviews in newspapers where they happy-slapped some of Davies’ arguments; or criticised Davis in radio interviews and blog pieces. Others appear to be genuinely angry and say so when interviewed: Kamal Ahmed is one example.

Davies explores the phenomenon of churnalism and the recycling of falsehoods and PR releases. Davies argues for the unremarkable truism that mainstream media is concerned with cutting costs and generating advertising revenue rather than acting as the knowledge intermediary and truth-checker that is commonly portrayed as the leading driver for journalism.

Dr Ben Goldacre has made similar arguments in his Bad Science columns (he has an entire category of “equation for X” journalism). In 2007 Goldacre lamented the credulous, widespread coverage given to a particularly wretched story about evolution theory. Interestingly, Goldacre writes:

the trivial problems in this trivial essay are not the issue: what’s odd is how it became a “boffins today said” science story, all over the media, with the BBC, the Telegraph, the Sun, the Scotsman, Metro and many more lapping it up, without criticism…

More and more, empty “science” stories are being generated by public relations companies, who team up with academics, and commission some spurious piece of “research” that will be attractive to the media, where the company is name-checked…I spoke to friends on other newspapers (the Guardian didn’t cover the story, mercifully) who told me they had stand up rows with news desks, explaining that this was not a science news story. But the selective pressure on national newspapers is for journalists who compliantly write up this kind of commercial puff nonsense as “science news”…

Peter Wilby observes that there are widespread jeremiads and argues that some commentators are “stronger on diagnosis than cure”. Wilby offers:

one tentative suggestion. The Northern Rock debacle has led to proposals for “narrow banking”, whereby some banks would just look after your money for modest rates of interest without doing anything fancy or risky with it. Perhaps somebody could start a paper that carries only “narrow news”. Every statement would be rigorously checked and attributed to named sources. Its journalists would never speak to PRs and use press releases only if they could corroborate the contents from other sources. Editors would apply some kind of test to distinguish the important from the trivial.

Even as I describe it, I realise this narrow newspaper would be utterly weird. But it would be quite different from anything else available and, who knows, there might just be a market for it.

Much as I like this utopian vision, ‘utterly implausible’ might be more accurate than “utterly weird”. The Royal Society guidelines on health and science communication (here for some extracts) are impeccable and thoughtful. However, if these guidelines were followed, there would be even less science coverage than there is now. If quality and accuracy were included as criteria for assessing coverage, then the true level of adequate science and health reporting might possibly paint an even bleaker picture. The Project for Excellence in Journalism offers a sobering State of the News Media 2008: An Annual Report on American Journalism. It is unlikely that the figures would be substantially different for the UK.

So, is that an argument for continuing the present state of affairs where the reporting on science and health pays scant regard to the tenets of accuracy or plausibility? No.

27 March Nature ran an editorial that drew upon that report: Critical journalism. They lead with the finding that in 5 hours of US cable news you will see “one minute on science and technology, slightly more on the environment, and only a little over 3 minutes on medicine and health care. This is not just an issue with cable”. However, Nature is not at all dispirited by this and takes heart from the report that:

the Internet is overtaking television as the public’s main source of science news. This means that a larger global audience can now access, on demand, a great diversity of science coverage from media outlets around the world…The Internet is now the first place people go to took for more information on a scientific topic, such as stem cells or climate change. That to the Internet, in short, one could argue that the overall state of science communication is better now than at any time in the past.

If this seems overly optimistic, they do sound a note of caution that chimes with the arguments of Davies and Goldacre while offering a proposed solution.

As the media industry moves online, some shakeout is inevitable. Straight news is becoming a commodity, which will be dominated by fewer players. Independent science desks and media can have a future in this environment, but only if they move up the food chain and provide proactive, deeper, must-read analyses instead of me-too articles reacting to the latest press releases.

In that context, perhaps the most worrisome finding in the Pew report is that this type of resource-intensive science coverage is precisely the most threatened: as the newspaper industry responds to falling circulation with sweeping cuts, science desks are among the first to suffer.

Nature argues that media have a responsibility to withstand the misrepresentations of science that are promoted by anti-science groups, multinational corporations, or politicians — or scientists who hope to game funding. Nature accepts the report’s findings that, around two-thirds of all those who search online for news are after science and health news and they say that this trend is confirmed if a recent report by the EU Commission although they don’t identify it.

It is interesting that some consumers may be alerted to science or health stories in various media and then turn to the internet. However, it would be surprising if it has been established that such searches are for more information and more in-depth coverage. Or that it is available…except in blogs.

18 February, there was a provocative Editors Weblog piece that took a surprising tack: Blogs are more influential than the New York Times. This refers to a study carried out by the Long Now Foundation in which they revealed that for “2007’s five most important news items (in the US), blogs were ranked higher in Google searches for four of them”. However, this possibly reflects timeliness and a search for a condense overview. Roger Cadenhead conducted a similar study and remarked:

our most trusted source on the biggest news stories of 2007 is a horde of nameless, faceless amateurs who are not required to prove expertise in the subjects they cover.

Which rather seems to miss Davies’ point that media proprietors survive by sales, not by acting as impeccable knowledge intermediaries. And it misses both Davies’ and Goldacre’s point that we are too frequently served science journalism that has been written by generalist journalists with no specialist knowledge and not even a basic understanding of general scientific principles. Or, even worse, opinion pieces written by journalists who congratulate themselves for switching off their critical faculties and emphasising their emotions.

The SEED empire is extending its range of Scienceblogs and is now promoting its german outpost. Goldacre seems to have more modest ambitions: Why you should start a blog and how to do it. From time to time, Goldacre offers podcasts of his talks. The Skeptics Guide to the Universe offers weekly podcasts.

Which is all quite exciting, but, sometimes, good accounts of science need access to the original journal papers and the authors (something that not all bloggers have). Illustrating a point might need the support of good graphics or quality animations. Things that cost money and require resources that self-financing bloggers don’t have. (H/T to SkeptoBot for a link to the Lessig Method and probably, at some point, Lessig’s video, if we can ever get it to play.)

And, ultimately, it doesn’t feel as if science blogs have that high a readership. Even the most popular ones do not have the reach of (even niche) mainstream media. Which might explain why Goldacre recently presented a 2 part special on The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists on Radio 4. And why the excellent Steven Novella is currently engaged with a television project, The Skeptologists.

Yet, understandably, pace Cadenhead, there is a lot of hand-wringing over the quality of the information available on the internet. Famously, we have Jenny McCarthy’s argument that she understands the complex aetiology and science of autism because she typed ‘autism’ into Google and clicked a few adverts. Similarly, there are certain commentators who, with no sense of proportion, claim, “I looked at mankind from the dawn of creation and found no autism until 1931. That coincided with thimerosal being used in vaccines”.^[1] Damian Thompson made an elegant argument for the role of the internet in the dissemination of counterknowledge. Blogging on science can both contribute to noise and disinformation and provide interesting perspectives.

Neither the occasional science programme nor blogging can absolve the mainstream media of the need to provide high-quality science and health journalism. It is a frequently made point that nobody would tolerate regular football commentary from somebody who doesn’t understand football. Yet, because science journalism does not generate direct revenue, we are supposed to accept second-rate coverage.^[2] And, understanding the basics of science is not a discrete part of life; it is intimately bound up with the sort of critical thinking skills that are essential in all areas of personal and public endeavour.

Notes

[1] You may be interested to read an overview of the Justin Kruger and David Dunning paper that discusses how difficulties in understanding one’s own incompetence can lead to inflated self-assessments.

What’s even more amazing is that when they then shared the performance of other participants with the people who performed poorly (hoping that they would then adjust their self-perception downward) people who scored poorly failed to adjust their self-perception of their performance. In other words, they are completely unaware of their own [in]competence, and can’t detect competence in others.

It really it a very helpful paper that explains many otherwise inexplicable actions.

A Photon in the Darkness likewise offers a helpful discussion of this paper: The Arrogance of Ignorance
[2] Holford Myths takes a closer look at some of the inadequate economics model arguments Clay Shirky and Nick Carr: A Tangent on Science Blogging