The Creeping Death of Science Coverage
And How We Must—Must—Fight Back
SOURCE: SP
The news that CNN is eliminating its science reporting team is just the latest blow to mainstream science journalism. But an informed democracy needs good coverage of issues that touch virtually every aspect of our lives.
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A month and a half ago, I wrote here about the decline of newspaper science journalism, taking up the story of Peter Calamai of the Toronto Star, who recently took a buyout and ceased to be the paper’s fulltime science reporter. One sad but central aspect of the story: When Calamai departed, not only was there no replacement, but there was also no public outcry. And that, in essence, is the tragedy of science journalism today. In hard economic times, what are media outlets going to get rid of: The section nobody will call in to defend, or the horoscope and sports pages?
Science, Cultured
Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture from Los Angeles, California. He is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.” (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)
Since then, the economic woes have continued, and so has the slaughter in the science journalism field. A few weeks back we learned that the Weather Channel, owned by NBC Universal, owned by General Electric, killed its “Forecast Earth” program, which focused on climate change and featured the respected on-air climatologist Heidi Cullen (it is unclear if she is leaving the network entirely). This occurred in the context of a 10 percent workforce cut—many experienced meteorologists were also let go.
And now we learn that CNN, owned by Time Warner, has let go of its entire science, technology, and environmental unit, including Miles O’Brien, respected producer Peter Dykstra, and numerous others. O’Brien, a veteran reporter, was known for being tough on science issues—including holding accountable Senator James Inhofe, the leading Republican global warming denier and a veritable misinformation machine. A CNN spokeswoman said the network wanted to “integrate environmental, science and technology reporting into the general editorial structure rather than have a stand alone unit,” and observed that Anderson Cooper 360 will continue to cover our “Planet in Peril.” But the fact is that with fewer science journalism experts on hand, we can only expect to see less science coverage over all from CNN, and worse coverage when we do get it.
Environment and energy issues appear (at least to me) to be growing in attention and interest, but covering them alone is no substitute for full-fledged science coverage.
Cable news was a tough place for science-related journalism even before the recession. In its 2008 “State of the News Media” survey, the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that in 2007, cable news outlets gave science and the environment drastically short shrift. If you were to watch five hours of cable news, the report noted, you could expect to see 1 minute of science and technology coverage and 1 minute and 25 seconds of environmental coverage—compared with 10 minutes of celebrity and entertainment content, 12 minutes of accidents and disasters, and “26 minutes or more” of crime.
But while cable news may carry less substantive science than some newspapers, let’s not forget that science coverage is struggling across the board. The pinnacle of newspaper science journalism is the hallowed Tuesday New York Times science section, but as Andrew Revkin of the Times notes at his blog DotEarth, “we (like everyone in print media) are doing ever more with less.”
Moreover, don’t be fooled when a CNN, or some other outlet, points to its “green” coverage in order to underscore a continuing science journalism commitment. Environment and energy issues appear (at least to me) to be growing in attention and interest, but covering them alone is no substitute for full-fledged science coverage, any more than medical coverage or tech coverage are a substitute.
Science journalism should cover important developments in knowledge, where science is taking us, how science education and funding trends affect the competitiveness of the nation, science policy, and much else. Not only does science touch virtually every aspect of Americans’ lives—from health to economics to the Internet—but the federal government finances an enormous amount of research and development with taxpayer dollars. This year, that amount was more than $142 billion. Informed citizens deserve to understand more about what they’re getting from that investment. Medical, tech, and environmental coverage, though they may draw on science, rarely get into such areas.
Science journalism, at its best, should also be a vehicle for making ongoing advances in science relevant to non-scientist members of the public. Personalized medicine, designer babies, space militarization, geoengineering, brain-computer interfaces…how far away are such advances, and how will they affect people’s lives? Science journalism should put such questions on everyone’s radar, and then provide the best possible answers. It should help us forecast the future—and prepare us for it. Without such forward-looking journalism, we run a grave risk of not seeing what’s coming until it’s too late.
So what can we do? We have two options. We can continue to watch the economic contraction in the media business (witness the recent bankruptcy of newspaper giant Tribune Co.) destroy science coverage, and wring our hands whenever the latest dire news comes in. Or, we can take action to turn the tide.
For my part, I can say that the folks who created the ScienceDebate2008 organization are eyeing declining science coverage in the media and wondering how we might try to stick our thumbs in the dam. We’re convinced that disinterest from the press was one of the key reasons that we couldn’t get the candidates to commit to a live, televised science policy debate. Moreover, we know that while we’ve already lost a painful amount of science journalism, there is more yet that can be saved. However, it may require science defenders to actively raise money, whether by small donations over the Internet or bigger philanthropic ventures.
The CNN move last week did trigger considerable ire in the science blogosphere, so now may be the time to rally ourselves. My hope is to be able to write more, soon, about precisely how we can do so to greatest effect. In the meantime, I am very open to suggestions.
Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”
Comments on this article
I hate to say it, but I have to agree with Matt Nisbet on this. Journalism has been subsumed by the entertainment industry, and news coverage has been fragmented beyond recognition.
If we want real journalism to continue, we need to find a way to fund the best citizen journalists, so they can do their work full time, at least occasionally. Distributed (crowd-sourced) sponsorship is one option, institutional funding, either from government granting organizations, or NGOs is another. The latter will inevitably lead to (probably justified) suspicions of bias, or conflicts of interest, and similar (probably better funded) citizen shills for industry groups.
What to do with the resonant opinion chamber?
December 9th, 2008 at 2:44 pmHow might crowd-sourced sponsorship of science and health reporting work?
December 10th, 2008 at 2:41 pmMany of the journalistic problems of science begin in academia. Science is fettered by a system of tenure that blocks the flow of ideas with a huge plug of bureaucracy.
December 10th, 2008 at 2:47 pmTapping into this this trickle doesn’t produce a lot of good stories but it is easy.
It seems rather foolish to anticipate anything of value to be expected from Modern Media.
1. The media is corporate owned.
2. The purpose of corporate media is to aggrigate an audience to sell advertising.
3. The goal of advertising is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices. (Noam Chomski)
Corporate media cannot be expected to cover anything regarding serious science.
December 10th, 2008 at 3:07 pmThe most direct answer is to stop avoiding the reality that science that matters involves the public from the get-go–even when there is a trend toward user biases, at least until we figure out exactly how to solve this problem. George Soro’s writings in his 2008 fiscal paradigm reflects this thinking when he criticizes the economic presumptions of market theory that are based upon the outdated concepts of “perfect knowledge.” Now hard-core scientific exploration faces the same reality when fast-moving scientific discoveries promise benefits to real people but their internal biaes about objectivity get in the way. We simply must learn how to do more exploration that incorporates the messiness of democracy. The NIH is offering at least two innovative grant opportunities at this time. They both refer to the integration of behavioral factors into core biomedical and related discoveries. I’m in the process of preparing proposals for these in a way that would directly benefit Latinos with cross-generational substance abuse issues (long-term abuse is associated with genetic modifications). My work will focus on the behavior elements figuring out how to allow us community-based projects to become inside-the-stem-cell-world observers of discoveries as they happen so we can figure out what they truly mean for people in need. I suspect that if this actually happens (and there is much reason to believe NIH will not live up to its own expectations) it may be possible to make scientific advancement more immediately important to the people who make the media so important. I’ll keep you up on the progress, even if the NIH uses procedural hurdles once again to stop the very kind of answers they are probably really looking for.
A good discussion on this with the Obama administration wouldn’t be a bad thing. Though I suspect people who think this way may not make it into the “change design” cloakrooms.
December 10th, 2008 at 3:14 pmMerrill:
There are some existing models for crowd-sourcing community journalism, like the Knight Foundation-supported spot.us, which features pitches for individual stories and solicits small donations from the public to fund freelancers who do the reporting. If a major outlet buys it, donors are reimbursed. If not, the content is released under a Creative Commons license.
Seems plausible that a similar experiment in science and health reporting could be fruitful, but that’s just one model.
December 10th, 2008 at 4:01 pmYes there is disinterest from the press. Several years ago I applied to be on the Editorial Board of the Des Moines Register. I thought that they might find my dual degrees in chemistry and writing useful to them. This position was not paid. It was volunteer. They did not accept me. They did however keep someone else from my hometown on their board. He wrote and got published an editorial against Darwinism (his term, not mine). It was more important to them to appeal to an ignorant following and to generate controversy than to have real science in their respectable newspaper. I now write an occasional column for a local on-line newspaper. Sometimes I get get paid $25 an article for it. Sadly we have to care enough about science news to make it a labor of love.
December 10th, 2008 at 10:58 pmPerhaps we are looking at this problem too much from the wrong end. Chris’s column is largely about the networks, newspapers and other media that serve the public as sources of news with scientific implications. But those media are in part responding to a lack of interest from the consuming public. Thinking about science is relatively demanding relative to the various sitcoms and drama shows, those relating to celebrities, sports and the like, or newspaper articles about travel.
December 11th, 2008 at 12:29 pmPeople are put off from learning about science because it is rather hard to follow, and they don’t see the material as applicable to their immediate life situations. Because they don’t know much science, they don’t have a good basis for placing what they are told into a meaningful context. So when we think about this problem, we need to recognize that all the push from the top will not really do a lot to improve public science literacy, and thus understanding of the science underlying salient public issues. As the world has become more complex, driven by science and technology, fewer and fewer people have an intellectual formation that enables them to understand it’s workings,whether those be in the domain of science or law, finances or other areas.
Our challenge may be to formulate social organizations that can serve to distribute scientific and technological information and insights to the public through politically and socially useful structures that will in all likelihood not involve a large fraction of the populace. That’s where we are now, isn’t it? Science education in early schooling is of course critical to improving scientific literacy, but we don’t seem to be making rapid progress in this area.
I’ve just finished wrestling with some of these ideas in a new book on the authority of science in society, to be published by Penn State University Press, out next summer. Science’s influence in society often arises in the context of clashes of authority with other social domains, such as religion, law, and government, both regulatory and legislative. These very confrontations are in fact the occasions that most effectively bring science and technology to the fore in the public sphere. Ironically, they are, therefore, the most effective vehicles through which science can engage public interest. We have to learn how to use them to greater advantage.
I agree, Mr. Brown, from a historical perspective. I believe that moving forward, however, we should be more engaged in taking what is learned from scientific exploration and incorporating it into “entertainment” type medias as well. I’m writing my novel on the concept that a very true-to-life hero or heroine could, in fact, utilize prgramatic science (including technological connectivity) as the source of his or her “super hero” powers, and thus could help creative real but exciting role models for younger generations. Put another way, we need to demonstrate how science can be integrated into real life for people seeking real solutions–which will inspire more overall interest. I found it fascinating that a Google top executive noted in the press recently that the direction of the Internet in the future will be determined by the ideas of our 13 year olds! While this is fun and interesting to contemplate, it definitely downgrades the true science that has gone on behind connectivity advancements. Imagine if a good in-between was a mindset that rewarded advocacy in action by utilizing the advancements to make life better. Not all heroes or super-duper successes need to be exploited by CGI representations instead of good-hearted, smart and inventive real people. If this happened, I believe policies, politics and even corporate ideals would follow and all boats would rise.
I’d love to know more about your book.
December 18th, 2008 at 3:03 pm