Hi.
As you can see, I put up there Science in the Media, Fitting
a Square Peg in a Round Hole.
And as I talk, I hope it will become obvious
why I'm saying that.
So, the journey, where are we going to go?
We're going to look at who the main players are when we talk
about science in the media.
How does the media work?
How does science work?
A bit of a think about why we need science coverage in the
first place, criticisms of science in the media,
alternatives to where we are at the moment, how things are
changing, and who controls what science
appears in the media.
And then: the future, how on earth are we going to fund
continued science in the media?
So, the main players, who have we got?
We've got the scientists.
They do the science that the media report on.
You've then got scientific bodies, places like the Ri.
You've got government.
They might fund science, develop science policy, put on
events just like this that then create
coverage in the media.
You then have press offices.
They sit between the science and the journalists.
They kind of interpret what the scientists are doing and
sell it to the media, and that's a job that I've had.
That's been one of my main jobs, is doing that job in the
middle there.
And at the end of the day, key to the media, at the heart of
the media, are the journalists, and they're the
ones who actually do the job of reporting on the science,
interviewing the scientists, and
presenting it to the public.
OK, so the media - what's the media all about?
Short time scale, simple messages, clear-cut yes or no
answers, focus on disagreement and exceptions at its basis.
Science: long time scale, complicated messages, no hard
and fast answers, and it works on consensus.
So already you can see it's quite different.
What the media wants, it's very different from how
science works.
They're kind of at opposite poles.
So are they completely incompatible?
And Quentin Cooper, who presents Material World on BBC
Radio 4, I just thought this was a really nice quote.
He was saying to me, science values detail, precision, the
impersonal, the technical, the lasting, facts, numbers, and
being right.
Journalism values brevity, approximation, the personal,
the colloquial, the immediate, stories, words,
and being right now.
And there are going to be tensions.
But can we overcome these tensions?
And you can see there's a completely blank slide there,
because I was starting to think about why do we need
science media coverage in the first place?
Why do we need science out there on TV, in the
newspapers, on the internet?
And I originally had put down a number of points as to why
we might need it, but I suddenly thought, actually
that's something that you should be thinking about, is
what is the purpose of it?
If it's so diametrically opposed, why do we need it in
the first place?
And just listening to Hugh was making me think.
Already I can think of a thousand reasons how we'd know
about all the stuff that Hugh was talking about if it wasn't
for the media.
But anyway, I left that one blank rather than giving you
all the answers, because I thought that was my job.
So, criticisms of science coverage.
And it does come under quite a deal of criticism,
particularly from scientists themselves.
They would say that the coverage distorts the facts,
is quite arbitrary.
What ends up in the newspapers isn't really representative of
what's going on out in the world of science.
Kill or cure sensationalism, and we've all seen this kind
of thing where one day chocolate is good for you, the
next day it gives you cancer.
You know, it's the same things do one thing one day,
something the other day.
Dumbing down: the science is made so simple as to actually
making it wrong.
In the end it's just completely wrong.
And perpetuating the idea of novelty and breakthrough.
So the way it's reported is that science just happens in
these small bursts of we know this, we know this, we now
know this, when in fact that isn't how science works.
It's a much more gradual process
of coming to consensus.
So, also criticism of science journalists and what they do.
There's big criticism about false conflict, dressing it up
as balance.
So if we take the example of the environment, climate
change, you put two people up against each other, somebody
who says yeah, climate change is all down to humans, and
then somebody who says actually no, it was nothing to
do with us.
Vast consensus of opinion on one side, tiny minority on the
other, but put up against each other as though they're yes or
no in the same way they might do with politicians.
That kind of model doesn't really work for science.
Pack journalism, where science journalists all
cover the same story.
If you look in the papers today, if there's a science
story, it'll be in all the papers, it'll be on the news.
They're all covering the same stuff.
They're not digging up their own stories.
Which is where we come to churnalism, which is a great
term for journalists just churning out stories.
They get the press release, they just completely
regurgitate it.
They don't even ring up to get their own quotes.
They don't even dig a bit deeper.
They don't see if there's anybody who's saying, hang on
a minute, this isn't quite right.
They churn it out.
And so at the end of the day, people say science
journalists, they're no longer being journalists.
Now what does this all matter?
My son was quite concerned that wouldn't be big enough.
I think that's quite big.
It's a cartoon from the States, but I
just quite liked it.
You start out with these scientists.
Here he is saying, oh, A is correlated with B, given C,
assuming D, under E conditions.
So there's a bit of a relationship between A and B,
but there's all these little caveats.
But then it goes to the press office.
They put out a press release about it.
They're quite good about it, because they say they find a
potential link in there under certain conditions.
By the time it gets into the news, onto the internet, A
causes B, then A causes B all the time.
What will this mean for Obama?
Sorry, this is an American slide.
Then it gets onto the local news.
What you don't know about A can kill you.
A: the killer amongst us.
At the end of the day, your grandma comes back to you as a
scientist, saying, I'm wearing this hat to ward off A. So you
can see how something that starts out quite measured goes
through the cycle and comes out black and white: A causes
B.
So what?
So what does this really matter if it's not completely
accurate, if the media kind of misinterpret it to fit into
their model?
Well at worst, you can have serious consequences for
public health.
The example of MMR where there were a number of reports all
about the fact that the MMR vaccination
would lead to autism.
And there was in the end a big drop in the number of children
having the vaccination, a rise in the number of measles
cases, and it did have an effect on health.
So that is quite a serious effect.
But what about non-health stories, stories about physics
or chemistry, for example?
Does it really matter if the public don't understand the
full nitty-gritty of scientific research, and if
it's all slightly wrong?
And is it the job of the media to be educating the
public in any case?
Is that really their role?
Now what's an alternative scenario?
And this is something that's happening at the moment,
scientists going out there, talking direct to the public
via blogs, via podcasts - the opportunities the internet has
given to us.
And scientific bodies doing exactly the same thing, they
create their own news, so they produce their own news about
their own work.
And this is already, as I say, happening
here and in the States.
But think about this.
Isn't that just self-serving publicity by organisations
with their own agenda to promote what they're doing?
What best serves the public interest?
Are we better served by journalists doing the job of
journalism, investigating, criticising, getting to the
truth, or by scientists and scientific institutions
telling their own story?
So hearing it from the horse's mouth.
Also another thing to think about.
Who controls what appears in the media?
The stories that are out there today, who is actually sort of
making sure some story's there, and some aren't?
Is it the media itself, or is it the science establishment?
And who serves the public interest better - if the
scientists are in control or if the media in control?
Now there's been a bit of a shift here over the years, and
it used to be very much the media were the gatekeepers of
the science that ended up out there.
But now because - there's a number of
issues I've put here.
There's probably all sorts of different
factors involved in this.
Multi-platform coverage - journalists used to just have
to write a story.
They now write the story, they have to blog on it, they have
to do a video, they have to sing the theme tune, write the
theme tune.
There's just so much more for them to do.
They don't have time to go out there, find their own stories.
So because of that, the science PR people, the
scientists, the scientific organisations, they hold much
more power.
They put out the information there.
The journalists as we said, they just regurgitate it, that
churnalism effect.
So the power more in the hands of the science establishment -
good or bad?
And at the end of the day, the biggest challenge, it all
comes down to money, which most of these things do.
And one of the biggest challenges facing the media is
how we're going to fund journalism into the future
when everything is readily available
for free on the internet.
So how are we going to fund it?
And the first to go when there will be cutbacks are the
specialist journalists, the specialists being the science
journalists.
So at the end of the day, how might we fund those science
journalists if in fact you feel that we
still do need them?
Or is it better that we just hear everything straight from
scientists?
So we're getting something to think about.
Anyway, a bit of a whistle stop tour, and more questions
than answers, but that's what I was told to do.
So I hope that's given you some food for thought.
Thank you.
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