Science-less in Seattle
Facing a Media With Without “Breaking News Detective Science”
SOURCE: flickr.com/ttstam
Tom Paulson, formerly of the Seattle-Post Intelligencer, now a freelance writer, carpenter, and building contractor, epitomizes the story of the science writer in our time.
Print
Science, Cultured
Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture. 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)
To hear Tom Paulson tell it, his career in science journalism and its environs has been a long saga of “pissing people off.” During the 1980s, for instance, Paulson was working in public affairs at the University of California-Berkeley, where it fell to him to publicize the work of controversial biochemist Bruce Ames, who argues that natural carcinogens can be just as dangerous as synthetic ones. Paulson thought that was “ridiculous,” and therefore instructed a roomful of journalists about how they might “poke holes” in Ames’ claims. And when nobody took him up on the suggestion, Paulson went one better; He wrote a freelance article for the Sierra Club’s magazine debunking Ames and criticizing the journalists who’d failed to cover him with adequate skepticism. As a publicist, he had gone completely rogue.
“Everybody got mad at me, and they tried to fire me, but they couldn’t, cause I was on a fellowship,” remembers Paulson. But the longtime dean of science writers, David Perlman of the San Francisco Chronicle, loved it. “Never do PR,” he advised Paulson. “Always be a journalist.”
Seattle is fortunate that for 22 years, from 1987 to 2009, this irreverent troublemaker of a reporter went un-fired at the Post Intelligencer, where he covered health and science and was for many years responsible for putting out the paper’s weekly science page. During that time, Paulson took the lead on a number of important stories, including raising awareness about Seattle’s serious earthquake risk (now common knowledge, but barely recognized a few decades ago) and covering the 1993 Jack-in-the-Box E. coli outbreak, in which three children died in the Pacific Northwest and 450 were sickened. In the aftermath, Paulson tailed CDC investigators as they tried to figure out how the bad meat got into the system. “I traveled all around the country, went to meatpacking plants, got chased off by guys with guns,” he remembers. “It was sort of breaking-news detective science, and I was trying to explain to people how with a bug like this, we wouldn’t have known about it if not for a public surveillance system.” In the face of more recent food safety scares involving tomatoes and peanut products, as well as the current influenza outbreak, this sort of reporting is critical for protecting public safety and informing better health policies.
Tom Paulson
Over time, however, Paulson noticed a change at the Post Intelligencer. His editors, he says, grew less interested in stories that were “too complicated or in depth.” Paulson wanted to really dig into covering the Seattle-based Gates Foundation and its work on global health, but he was instead pushed into writing what he labels “entertainment science” stories. The science of chocolate. Back-in-time research. That kind of thing. “Everything was being driven by web hits,” Paulson observes. “And if they didn’t think a story was going to get a lot of web hits, they didn’t want me to write about it.” Seattle is a very important research hub, with scientists at the top of their fields in a number of areas, such as the study of the genome. The region is also, of course, a hub for numerous software, microchip, and biotech companies, as well the aerospace industry. Yet Paulson found it harder and harder to sneak real science into the paper.
Many of us know what happened next: In March of this year, Seattle went from a two paper to a one paper town as the Post Intelligencer put out its final print edition and went web-only. It is now the equivalent of a news aggregator site without much original journalism. Paulson lost his job, as did many other journalists. He is currently on a one-year severance as he casts about considering what to do next.
When I hung out with him recently for two days in Seattle—Paulson is head of the Northwest Science Writers’ Association, one of the most active such local groups in the country, which had had me out to speak—we drank “paradigm shift” martinis at the restaurant Andaluca and he explained to me his plan—or rather, his plans. He has some intriguing ideas, not least of which is a book proposal whose contents I won’t reveal. He has also thought about trying to start a U.S. “science media center,” parallel to those that exist in the UK and Australia, to help put non-specialist journalists in touch with scientific sources and stories. Meanwhile, he has of course snapped up a lot of freelance writing assignments.
But at the same time, Paulson is also going back to doing the kind of work he did long before he was a science writer or even a publicist: part time carpentry and building contracting. When I chased him down to chat for this column, he was out procuring materials for a job. Paulson doesn’t dislike the work—a visit to his home in Seattle, much of which he designed and built, shows that he’s a committed tinkerer. But still, there can be little doubt that something serious has been lost in Seattle with the decrease in its number of staff science journalists. In Paulson’s words:
I’d say the media in general here is more subject to spin. Fewer stories are being told through the mainstream media, and if you talk to the press officers at the institutions, they’re very frustrated with the fact that they will send out releases, and they’ll have something that’s a pretty big deal, and it won’t even show up in Seattle media. Because if the Seattle Times science reporter is already busy, it isn’t even going to get out there. So it sounds self-serving, but I think there’s less science news getting out now in Seattle.
Paulson emphasizes that what he has experienced isn’t unique—it’s “the same thing other people are going through too.” But that’s precisely the point. In a science-centered age, we’re becoming a society that lacks a professional and impartial means of informing its citizenry about science—and it’s happening one journalist at a time.
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
So, the disenfranchisement of science is news to Center for American Progress? Certainly it isn’t to ex-science writers and editors, myself included. As a culture, we’ve gone back centuries already, with astrology columns a factor in newspaper sales and breathless, one-paragraph sound bites illustrated with file footage substituting for real journalism in broadcast news. Mr. Paulson knows how lucky he is to be getting freelance assignments–they are few and far between, and they don’t include benefits! The rest of us will go over to the Dark Side–marketing, SEO and if we’re lucky hold onto a job until we can retire. Science writing in America today–R.I.P.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:52 pmVery interesting article…
May 22nd, 2009 at 10:07 amIt seems that journalism always has to straddle the line between presenting news while making headlines ‘sexy’ enough to sell. But it’s truly unfortunate when real science and investigative journalism falls to the wayside.
Its sad and disheartening to read that the Seattle media has no real cutting edge stuff. Is the UW filling that gap? There must be some venue – I see Bill Nye the Science Guy fled to California sometime back though I did see something of his recently. I don’t mean to infer that he is cutting edge but symptomatic of the mediocrity of the current environment. I don’t consider myself to be particularly literate scientifically but I do like to keep up on what is going on – WHY don’t we have this cutting edge stuff? The Seattle Times is apparently not up to it – is that an editorial position on their part? Maybe the Weekly could handle it. I do feel that people are so overextended timewise and maxed out. Are we becoming second rate – kind of looks that way.
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:21 pmIt is shameful Seattle is living through this kind of situation. Shameful too that the rest of the country is ambling along with them. What made America a decent republic is gone and no hand wringing will bring it back.
Science? Every single person I know here in Raleigh, North Carolina ultimately believes the only science they need to know they can get from their Holy Bibles.
I am glad I am 63 years old and do not have many years left to see the world descend into another dark age of religious refusal.
I grieve for my young acquaintances who, even though they claim to be happy about the direction they are going, will have to live with the deeds they have wrought.
Very gloomy reinforcement to much that is already apparent.
May 24th, 2009 at 5:46 pmthis info rocks!!!!1
June 11th, 2009 at 4:20 am