SCIENCE, CULTURED

Science Evaded

When the Brain Trust Stepped Up, the Media and Candidates Took a Pass

Tomorrow, along with Science Progress editor Jonathan Moreno, I’ll be at the University of Mississippi—the site of the first of three official presidential debates—for an event that may be as close as we come, geographically and perhaps substantively as well, to achieving the explicit goal of the ScienceDebate2008 initiative. Ole Miss has planned a variety of events in the run up to the big show on September 26, and thanks to the initiative of philosophy professor Neil Manson, one of them will focus on science policy and the election—our panel.

I was invited down to Mississippi because of my role in originally helping to impel the ScienceDebate2008 push—I was one of six founders and currently serve on the steering committee, although in this column I speak only for myself—and for my many commentaries on the relationship between politics and science over the past several years. And coming from this background, let me say that at Ole Miss I plan on taking the opportunity to state some strong opinions. Although I suppose this could still change, I’m not happy with the minimal role that science has played in this election. I find it a revealing comment on the media and the political process today.

These responses, though I’m very glad to have them, do not substitute for a science and technology policy debate.

In fairness, we who have worked on ScienceDebate2008 are pleased and heartened that in the past few weeks, Barack Obama and now John McCain have both answered the fourteen written science policy questions that we put to their campaigns, questions winnowed down from an original field of some 3,400 submitted by our supporters. The replies have gotten considerable blogospheric pickup, and make for some interesting reading, especially if you’re inclined to do a compare and contrast (which is not the purpose of this column). It is not unprecedented to find presidential candidates answering science policy questions in writing—George W. Bush and John Kerry both did so for Science magazine in 2004, for instance—but we’re glad that it has happened in this election just as it did in the last one, and that the responses are quite meaty and substantive.

Still, I’m not completely satisfied. Although I’m sure the candidates agree with and approved them, let’s remember that these responses are coming from the campaigns, not the candidates directly. Their mass media pickup, as opposed to their online pickup, has thus far been relatively small—nothing remotely comparable to the mass attention paid to Sarah Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy, for instance. And they do not show us the candidates intellectually engaging with science policy or with each other in a dialogic way, so that we can determine how they think and how much they really know.

In short, these responses, though I’m very glad to have them, do not substitute for a science and technology policy debate, and neither do they achieve the central goal of ScienceDebate2008—namely, to dramatically elevate the prominence of science policy in this historic election, and to do so in a nonpartisan way.

Why didn’t we get more? Well, one central factor is the role of the mass media—and especially the television news media—in all of this. I’m fairly confident in saying that if the year had been 1958, not 2008, and the nation’s scientific brain trust had called upon its presidential candidates to discuss science policy just one year after the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the politicians would not have turned down the opportunity. That’s because science was far more prominent in American life those days, and the call for a debate would have garnered much more concerted attention in a much less fragmented, frantic, and entertainment- and spectacle-driven media environment.

By contrast, today the story with ScienceDebate2008 and the media has been the same from the start: Specialized science-oriented media outlets and blogs are very interested in the initiative, but mass TV news media outlets—the CNNs, the NBCs, and so on—don’t seem to think it’s news that the American scientific community has organized like never before to call for a presidential science policy debate. They’re wrong, but nevertheless, they’ve made their call, and they play a very large role in setting the agenda.

And what of the candidates and campaigns? First, they respond heavily to the agenda setting power of the mass media, so it’s a no-brainer in this respect that they would not participate in ScienceDebate2008. Furthermore, I suspect their political advisers aren’t very keen on the idea, perhaps seeing plenty of risks in the prospect of such a debate and relatively few rewards. So especially if the media isn’t blaring away about it, why take a chance?

We achieved a lot with ScienceDebate2008, especially when it came to mobilizing the science community; perhaps it’s over-optimistic to think we could have accomplished everything we originally sought. But I think we have to keep pushing. The goal here, as I see it, is nothing less than to restore the prominence of science in American public life—and we’re still a long way from achieving it.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Tags: Media, sciencedebate2008

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