Today I want to start with a little challenge . Open the newspaper and see whether you can find some scientific news. Chances are that yes. you will. And not just because of Covid or climate change. These issues for sure have bulked it up and have contributed to me finding a lot of issues with this kind of reporting by news outlets. Yes, because willingly or not, I have some knowledge about the latter from my own research and about the former from colleagues and family members.. But it's not just the latest science, no the issue is much more deep rooted... There is a lot of science out there daily even if we take out climate disasters and covid:
from the scientific discoveries up in space (Mars is in vogue these days), to the new species of dinosaur, to some things about the ever so charismatic dolphins (yes, i do love them too but the ocean is not only dolphins, sharks and turtles…). Thinking that it was just back in 2004 when there was the opposite issue where not enough science was being reported in media and Europe encouraged communication and dissemination (necessary in any successful funding application) through this channel Since then , many institutes and universities have taken matters into their own hands with specific media communicators designed to help researchers with outreach of their science . Of course , there is discrimination on the topics - you have to make it appealing for the newspapers. Dolphins are definitely more attractive than boring fishes, and even between molluscs there is a battle for popularity with cephalopods (squids, octopus, cuttlefish.. yes, molluscs!) being far up the newspaper worthy list compared to oysters, mussels and clams (which are maybe up there in the cooking section instead).. Funding agencies will expect your results to be disseminated to the wider public but not all science is fancy science (actually only a very tiny part of it is!) and anyway large part of it will be hard to communicate (mathematical models..yuck!). Yes, there is some ‘boring’ science , perhaps more appealing to specialists in the field than a person reading a paper with a coffee on a sunday morning. Like , who wants to see on the news that mussels have a circadian rhythm? Perhaps the fact that the climate is getting riskier for clam will be more appealing since well it’s quite a big industry (always all about the money) . But even then. The results may get blown out of proportion. See. Just now, I said the climate is getting ‘risky’. In the paper, we used a modelling technique, we used data from the last 10 years for four lagoons and we saw that the waters temperatures are approaching the 'lethal' curve in the recent years, and the years were it surpassed it were the years when farmers reported a high mortality. I could imagine the newspaper headline reading something apocalyptic like ‘no more clams on the plate of Italians’. Which is simply not the case, because maybe they will evolve or we can start cultivating genetically stronger clams (they come from France now as 'seeds', which has a colder climate, what if we changed provenance? Or tried rearing in loco from the start?). So maybe there will be solutions, but apocalypse sells. Cautionary science doesn’t. It’s always all about the money, remember ? Clicks make money. Especially now when it's all based on clicks and ads. This is the thing: scientific papers often have a lengthy discussion sections which can be interpreted as the caution section - small sample numbers , preliminary results , site specificity etc. This is usually overlooked when it gets transposed from science journal to news journal. Yes, because at times papers are interpreted without asking the authors. But I was interviewed by a ‘scientific journalist’ before and have to say , they have a way of getting out of your mouth words you don’t really want to say . It’s kind of twisting without twisting . And even when you answer ‘as a scientist I cannot answer ‘xxx’ to that’ , then they say ‘okay’ and in the morning when the paper is out it reads ‘xxx’. That’s why I avoid journalists with all my heart. I am sorry to the good ones out there. Maybe you can give us scientists a lesson into how to speak with you ? And maybe we can give you one into how to read our confusing papers and not just stop at the abstract or jump to the conclusions ? Or maybe we should just learn how to rewrite science That way we wouldn’t need two people to write the story for two audiences, it could be the same story? With maybe some extra technical stuff to ensure replication in a supplementary part? Plenty of options there And hopefully less click baits warning us about the end of the world. It would just make people used to that, so that when it’s really coming, none will listen…
2 Comments
2/23/2021 04:10:58 am
I wish there was more consistent reporting of scientific facts - and more fact checking! It’s also hard that scientific papers are written in such a way that is often so hard for the general public to understand. Maybe they should start writing summaries in more plain language to go with the technical words?
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I would much rather have the layman's terms translated from scientific terms by a scientist than a journalist, but I guess readers want an exact answer, and science doesn't always give us that. I think that is important for the general public to understand. That's probably why journalist twist your words to seem more finite than the actual answer you are able to give them.
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