Bad Science Journalism Gets Schooled 212
TaeKwonDood writes "Biology post-doc Dr. Michael White takes a look at the '2007 Best American Science and Nature Writing' and doesn't like what he finds in an article called Bad Science Journalism and the Myth of the Oppressed Underdog. Turns out it's not just political writers who pick a position they want to advocate and then write stories to confirm it. Science journalism gets a scolding and it's been a long time coming."
Science has always been biased (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why Max Planck said: "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
On top of personal professional bias we must now add those extra pressureses exerted on scientists to toe some line so that their funding/department/ access to publishing/whatever does not get cut. Gotta say the right stuff to keep the backers happy.
Anyone expecting unbiassed science to come out of that lot is just a misguided idealist.
Par for the course (Score:5, Interesting)
HIV not causing AIDS conspiracy, Fluoride in the water conspiracy, Cancer being cured but evil corporations in league with all scientists not releasing the cure... I have to endure this every single day.
I think the more interesting subject to explore, is the psychology of why people are so eager to believe the improbable, and far more likely to accept an outrageous exaggeration, a halftruth, or an outright lie, merely to spite the establishment. As a scientist, that's a subject that interests me the most, because I would like to locate the part of the brain that will believe that the herbs in "Airborne" will miraculously prevent you from getting a disease, but will refuse to accept scientific principles and facts that have held firm under scrutiny for decades.
Re:Complaints about writing (Score:4, Interesting)
When there is general distrust of a group of people, all that is left to motivate others to follow their footsteps is pure greed. Lets face it, scientists are not in the top 500 richest people in the world, now are they?
The reverse side of that coin is that there is no positive image of such groups, and this is just another look at the negative. Psychology at work. It takes real dedication to commit to some field of employment that everyone thinks is corrupt or devoid of reward. Much easier to imagine yourself as a WWE wrestler than an astrophysicist when you are young. What is pointed out in a backhand way is that we are discouraging the young by no smacking down the bad ones now.
Well, that was my take
Politically Correct bias? (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps the bias in reporting is due to the "intuitive attractiveness" of the conclusion?
The opposite might be true as well. For instance, I didn't hear much about this study [wikipedia.org]:
You'd think a Harvard professor saying in effect that diversity has a down side might be news worthy, unless that idea isn't attractive to the majority of the news media.
Plays into the hands of global warming denial (Score:2, Interesting)
Who really needs the scolding? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Science has always been biased (Score:3, Interesting)
Even you're buying into this fallacy that the two ideas must be exclusive, which is rather the point of the article: journalists reinforce a publicly held stereotype of underdog scientists bucking the status quo. Your justifications of bias through funding and hubris are a direct result of this stereotype. I don't see anyone being paid to support a position that monolithic kernels are better than microkernels, or vice versa. Individuals do have a personal bias in favor of their ideas, after all, they came up with them and thought well enough of them to write their scientific friends about it. But to imply that science takes a generation to be accepted is probably not quite right.
Biased journalism may lead to biased science (Score:3, Interesting)
Nearly every journalist is biased in some way or another. While journalists may not necessarily inject the bias directly into their story like the example given in the article, the very choice of topic may be indicative of bias. Take for example the Reuters science articles [yahoo.com] on Yahoo! News. Nearly all the articles consist of biology stories or NASA/space related stories. In fact, when was the last time you read a news story in mainstream media on physics or chemistry? It was probably about the LHC or the "Exceptionally Simple Theory". This might be because it is harder to put the same spin on these types of stories. In fact, Garret Lisi's theory is so well known because he's been cast as a brilliant young surfer dude railing against the establishment. (Admittedly, the guy is no where as pig headed and arrogant as the biologist quoted in the article). Even Slashdot seems to be home to plenty of anti-establishment "scientific thinkers" who attempt to claim that nearly every other scientist has got it wrong and dark matter was simply invented to fit into an existing theory*, or our calculations of the age of the universe are complete BS. While I don't claim that the established theories are always right, they are considered to be "established" for a reason: they have a good deal of evidence in their favor.
To get back to my original point however, I would argue that this sort of selective reporting shapes the public view of science negatively. If you only hear about how scientists are wrong, then you might never even believe that they are right. Perhaps of more direct impact to scientists, the fact that the prevalence of this sort of scientific reporting seems to favor biology, can shift the spending of public money. After all, it seems like biologists are making breakthroughs every day and overturning established and outdated ways of thinking while physicists build expensive machines (even condensed matter physics research is expensive) and twiddle their thumbs. There's no excitement in a story that says "BaBar confirms that CP-violation in B-mesons fits within the parameters of the Standard Model" or "Researchers at (insert university/national lab of your choice) discover a method of sub-wavelength optical transmission". But without stories like that, the public sees almost nothing getting done in physical sciences.
Before a bunch of biologists start to flame me, I'd like to note that I don't think that biology is meaningless, or that biologists are pretentious pricks. It's just that journalists seems to draw an excessively large amounts of attention to biology, at the expense of other fields, almost always through no fault of the scientists.
*Dark matter does in fact have plenty of evidence for it. See the earlier Slashdot story of galaxies that don't have dark matter and gravitational lensing in the Bullet Cluster. Dark Energy, however, may in fact be a purely theoretical construct.
Re:obvious != right (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Rather obvious (Score:0, Interesting)
Real science shouldn't be the interest of the mainstream media, which wants to fill the pages with human interest stories. Stories about science, rather than about personalities, are generally "boring" and results-oriented, and don't really belong in the mainstream press. The news media should only really need to cover a science story every so often, when a major breakthrough comes to light. (For example, the big to-do over the first discoveries of extrasolar planets. Even here, though, no more than a little blurb is really warranted; in an effort to fill space, journalists engage in a lot of navel-gazing to go into the backgrounds of the researchers involved, etc.)
I think the real problem is that the media has "science journalists" that need to justify their existence by filling "science sections" with ever-more "content." A typical bureaucrat's competition for resources.
I expect the opposite.... (Score:4, Interesting)
The real problem is that the public want science to be wrong. Look at global warming, it's been known for over a hundred years, there's tens of thousands of studies which back it up but you publish one article or make one documentary which says it's wrong (eg. the Channel 4 one) and you'll have an army of followers. It's human nature.
It's all about the story (Score:3, Interesting)
The author has a good point: mainstream media outlets focus far too much on the story and not the science, so much so that they will lie and equivocate to generate conflict. Yet, I would rather see a light science articles that are interesting and easy to read than none at all, as long as the science is actually correct.
"Science is interesting, and if you don't think so, you can fuck off." This Dawkins quote sums up the other side of the argument. It bothers me that people would be so protective and elitist about having science portrayed perfectly in the media that they would rather it not be written about at all. We need to be criticizing the accuracy [themanitoban.com] of science journalism, not its glamorization.
Re:Politically Correct bias? (Score:3, Interesting)
What the hell is "diversity" in this case? My high school was 96% white, but by 1900 standards it would probably be incredibly "diverse," with folks of English, German, Polish, Irish, and even (gasp!) Jewish "descent" intermingling. But ironically, once this "diversity" reaches a critical mass and a few generations pass, it all gets folded into the norm and nobody considers it "diverse" anymore.
So if this guy's right and "diversity" has a caustic effect on community, we need to hurry up and start making babies with people of other races so that racial "diversity" is no longer discernible in a generation or two. (Attractive nonwhite ladies, I'm ready to do my part.)
Anyway, I've seen plenty of science reporting with the same flaws TFA pointed out that had no "political correctness" value at all - stuff about mathematical constants in astrophysics, etc. - all using the same "underdog" theme.
Not sure (Score:1, Interesting)
Can you cite these? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Par for the course (Score:3, Interesting)
That above statement needs some qualification, so here's what I've come up with (for myself). People who work in the scientific field (for convenience I'll refer to them as scientists, even through I'm referring to doctors, dentists,
Add to that the fact that science is not absolute, and
It's this lack of confidence that leads people to trust pretty much anytihng that is fed to them, as long as it fits the following criteria:
1) Sounds believable
2) The person presenting the evidence seems trustworthy
3) The evidence being presented is convincing enough to the lay person
4) The new theory ("fact") is something they want to believe
Additionally, scientists often see themselves (or at least, well known members of their community) as being infallible (to a degree), and expect the average lay person to believe everything they say without proof (and here I mean proof that the lay person understands). This is an unrealistic expectation. Scientists themselves will not believe experts in other conflicting areas of study (who often are hucksters and frauds, but not always) because they don't understand the evidence presented. What I'm saying here is that people in general don't like being forced to accept as proof something they don't understand, whether ot not it is true.
Exacerbating the problem is the entire issue of religion and faith. I believe in God. I also believe in science (and believe those who hide behind religion are idiots). The two are not mutually exclusive, in fact, to me they compliment each other perfectly. Yet many scientists (and here I'm talking less about doctors and other "soft" scientists, and perhaps only a vocal minority of the rest) are critical of me and others like me who believe in God. This adds to the lack of credibility in their eyes. (Please bear in mind that we are talking perspectives here, perhaps helping to explain a perception. This is not a war of God Vs. Science).
I think the only solution here is for scientists to be more open about what they do and don't know, as well as developing a more measured approach to dealing with things they are unfamiliar with. It definitely won't make the problem go away, but it will help.
And finally, don't forget that there are many, many thousands and millions of idiots out there.
Re:Rather obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is this. Researching a story properly (not just science), a good story, should, unless it is breaking news take anywhere up to a month to perfect. First you have to understand the field the story is in, be it science, politics etc. Most Journalists specialise so getting the basics for this process shouldn't take too long. However most journalists aren't specialised enough. Having a science correspondant with a major (or worse minor) in physics is pretty close to useless if the story is about some new technique in microbiology. So instead of needing a day to get up on the material, it should take a week. However, since you have to publish publish publish you cant afford to take that amount of time.
Now you know the facts of the story as they were relayed by the PI or one of his or her lackeys. Now you need to interview experts in the field to get a feel for how ground breaking the research is and how novel it is. Of course you don't know the field and don't have time to reseach it, so the PI gives you a list of people you can talk to about it, who through design or accident happen to be all his chums in the field. You would go and check thier credentials (beyond is their degree real) but you don't have time. So now you find out how novel the idea really is, or you find out how novel the PI's friends think it is. However you have already spent time on this and you need it to be publishable. So what do you do? Well it might stand on it's own somewhat, then you take what is probably an exciting piece of work, and you present it as though it were the golden panacea that will save the universe from the crab people. Or it turns out to be something that while important scientifically, probably wont be of much interest to the public at large. So you either find crazy cook 17 and get them to say something contraversial about how this reseach is another example of the establishment attacking their crazy idea, or you try to find some way to make it look like it runs counter to the established idiology of the evil facist scientific shadow conspiracy. Sure it's not a breakthrough but maybe it's the lone hero fighting off the dragon and having his way with the hot blond princess (oh how your article would be read more if you could only put a picture board of that happening at the bottom).
So now you have sexed it up and you write your piece. A piece you should have taken another week to understand the science of, but you have a deadline. What is worse, what took you half a day to get your vague understanding of people will only read for 3 minutes on a bus half awake on thier way to work. If you don't dumb it down even more then they are going to read about Britneys latest stupid hair cut instead. So you simplify things to the point a retarded goat could understand it. Now that the actual science content is comperable to the back of a pack of smarties, your mind turns elsewhere. As you are writing your piece you keep in mind that if you are going to avoid getting fired you have to ensure your stories get run, so you make sure regardless of the science the article reflects the axe that your editor/publisher/guy with all the money has to grind.
End result, a bias, unclear, poorly thought out piece of work, which will sell (not as well as trashy gossip, but well enough), but not inform. What is worse, if you did do things the 'right way' there would be less science in the newspapers and magazines, and what science there was, only a small number of people would read.
Re:great old column by ben goldacre (Score:3, Interesting)
It's an educational experience to be "backstage" in a running story. I, or my family, have been personally involved in a few things that made the news for a while.
Newspapers are good at getting facts right. The individual facts they print are, in my experience, probably true (or, at worst, difficult to prove false). They are very good at picking and choosing facts to make a certain, apparently pre-determined, conclusion.
There is also the arrogance factor. I was in a meeting where some of us questioned the reporter present. He said that the newspaper stood behind the notes taken, and therefore we had no reason to doubt him. The first part of the reply was reasonable, but the second part?
These stories were in the main part of the newspapers, where you would expect the best journalism. There are parts of most newspapers that are dominated by press releases, and then there's sports journalism, where there isn't even much pretense at objectivity.
There's no reason to think science reporting is going to do any better.
Re:"experiment" with Global Warming? (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems you're right, but for the wrong reason. It would seem there's sevearl definitions of university. One is "an institution of higher learning". A more strict/original definitino is "a corporation of students". Since a corporation is a legal entity (ie, one recognized by a government), then by definition governments must have come first.
Having said that, I misspoke and am probably mistaken. Perhaps the first universities were government funded (either through religious orders or grants by a king). And perhaps, for quite some time, universities were under governmental control. But, eventually universities broke free much more and became much more independent (mostly as a result of the incongruity of religion and science/philosophy, I'd imagine), funding included. And when people other than government became wealthy, they had the power to fund universities themselves. And since that wealth derived primarily from trade, and I don't see trade stopping short of near complete human annihilation (many governments collapsing would only pause it for a time), I don't see universities, government sanctioned or otherwise, disappearing.
Of course, I very much doubt I'll live long enough to test that hypothesis.
My personal experience (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a serious issue in terms of the effects it has on the public opinion of science.
Re:Actually, there is way (Score:2, Interesting)
Ie, stories about the evidence that eating cabbage causes cancer, followed the next month that not having enough cabbage causes heart disease, followed the next month by cabbage flatulence leading to the greenhouse effect, and so forth.