Two weeks ago, The Guardian‘s Martin Robbins took a hefty swing at popular science journalism, particularly that of BBC Online. The piece was pretty humourous, but astonishingly it accounted for 15% of all traffic to The Guardian that day. That’s a hell of a lot of people who could relate to the author’s complaint. So exactly what is so wrong with mainstream coverage of scientific issues?

Lots, actually. Thanks in the main to links provided by my scientifically inclined journalistic friend @martinjmckenna, I’ve been reading a bit about the issue. It seems like the scientific community as a whole is sick of journalists reporting new reserach in broad strokes and completely failing to comment on the value or validity of claims. As you can read in Robbins’ follow up article, the use of weasel words and ambiguity is driving readers of science journalism insane.

They’re called ‘Scare quotes’ and they are used by writers to distance themselves from the words inside, or to indicate paraphrasing – unless you’re a cynic, in which case scare quotes are a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows journalists to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the words mentioned.

Should journalism be impartial?

Of course, the easy answer is that news journalists should be impartial, and that’s somehting the BBC takes very seriously. Good for them- I wholeheartedly agree, and the BBC is one of the few sources I trust to be truly fair. But science journalism isn’t about hard facts. Science itself is constantly being revised, and it’s about evaluating the best research available at any time to draw the most accurate results possible. It’s not about absolutes, and it’s all about the relative value of research.  This is expressed much better than I can in a post by Ed Yong on discovermagazine.com. In a nutshell:

It’s about being knowledgeable enough to make a decent stab at uncovering the truth and presenting the outcomes of that quest to one’s readers, even if that outcome lies firmly on one side of a “debate”.
It’s about doing the actual job of a journalist, by analysing, critiquing, placing into context and so on, as opposed to merely reporting.

It’s a damn convincing argument, and one I think can’t really be put down. So why isn’t the BBC doing this? Is it just a tired news journalist not bothering with hard research at the end of the day?

Give the Scientists Control

The most interesting part of this for me is that the BBC have an amazing science department, full of intelligent graduates with a passion for their subjects. They produce fantastic documentary series and interesting and insightful popular shows like Bang Goes the Theory. I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the presenters of BGTT, Irishwoman Liz Bonnin, earlier this year, and the genuine excitment she had for her area of study (wild animal biology) was evident. More importantly for this topic, she had lots to say about the BBC:

“There’s a massive pool of scientific knowledge. I feel very much like part of a family for the first time in my scientific career ... The fact that I wake up every morning and work at something I’m really, truly passionate about is I think, quite rare. It’s a blessing to be doing what I’m doing.”

...

I’m pinching myself most of the time. I’m so fortunate… a lot of our staff would have PhDs, let alone Master’s… it’s an absolute priviledge.

She actually sold it much better than that with her tone and clear admiration. So why are the broadcast science team not curating the science news? I know that scientific knowledge doesn’t make a person a quality writer, but that’s what editors are for. Informed and expert opinion is the heart of good writing, especially within such a complex and important subject area.

Hand the reigns over to the experts, lads.

Posted by in •Journalism •Tech

Comments:

Add a Comment: