Science Journalism :: Feature Article :: Journalism, Science and Democracy

Enjoy writing about science? Today you have more options than ever before for learning about a career in science journalism. You can attend schools such as Boston University’s Centre for Science and Medical Journalism or UBC's Science Journalism Program, workshops such as The Banff Centre’s Science Communications Program, or you could dig into some of the links on this website.

Plentiful options like this didn’t always exist. In fact, professional, dedicated science journalists didn’t always exist. Covering science was once just part of a journalist’s job (and in many cases still is). With so many new graduates holding specific science journalism degrees, and heading out into the media landscape in the hopes of covering nothing but science, it seems fair to ask: what role do we expect science journalists to play in our democratic society?

No easy answers here. But the history of science communication does have deep roots that say educating the public about science is of paramount importance to democracy. How “paramount” is a subject of much unresolved debate, but with today’s science journalists producing so much information about science, I think its worth reflecting on what type of education we want from a science story in the media.

Travels across a Chasm

I used to study science. I spent the five years studying a forest-dwelling slime mould called Dictyostelium, which is one of the fastest moving amoebae you will ever see. I watched these amoebae because I had, as Peter Medawar extols in his book Advice to a Young Scientist, something of an “exploratory impulsion” that “Immanuel Kant spoke of [as] a ‘restless endeavor’ to get at the truth of things”.

But, science was not my only love; writing seemed bound to science. The books of Carl Sagan, Thomas Lewis, Edward O. Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould seemed to echo this connection. These “popularizers” instilled in me (be it their intention or not) a view of science as a pure pursuit, in search of only truth, in which scientific facts were like bricks that were impenetrable to emotions and values (not until my twenties did I began to question this view). So, near the end of a Ph.D., I sought out opportunities in the media.

The chasm I crossed still strikes me. In the laboratory, I spent months to years on a single variable, testing to see if what I was looking at was reproducible. In contrast, as a journalist, I faced short deadlines, space constraints and concerns about economics. There was also a feeling that my journalism lasted for only the day it was published—a syndrome where today’s news is tomorrow’s fish wrap. It therefore struck a chord with me when Richard Gallagher, editor of The Scientist, described science and journalism as “a clash of cultures”. Something I would describe today as a conflicting set of norms.

Why Read Science Journalism?

With fish wrap syndrome, it is clear that nobody has to read science journalism. But many scholars would suggest it is important that people do – why?

Personally, I like science journalism. It feeds into my desire to understand the natural world and has always been a source of conversation with my father. Although the reasons may not be the same, it’s also a widely held view that the media is a large source of scientific and medical information for most of the public. A 1997 report, Americans talk about science and medical news, by the U.S. National Health Council is one example of this. The report is a survey of 2256 adults and revealed that 75% pay attention to medical and health news and that 58% have changed their behaviour based on this information. In this sense, the information provided by science journalism helps people to make choices about the world.

Such choices are not trivial. And neither is the ability to make them. In fact, Sheila Jasanoff, professor of science and technology at Harvard University, argues in her book Designs on Nature, that science is now the primary institution onto which the modern nation-state is built. Other institutions, like governments, the economy, health care and the education system, are now heavily underwritten by science. As such, governments often rely on science to set policy and to support knowledge claims about how they govern.

Taking this reasoning further, understanding science—which based on the above statistics is influenced by journalism—is important for the public’s ability to decide if the risks (e.g. eating genetically modified foods) posed by science are acceptable. So such risks, as well as benefits, of science are something that a democracy should decide together.

This all seems to suggest that either everyone needs to take five years out of their lives to study something like a forest-dwelling slime mould, thereby seeing the inner working of a laboratory, or a democratic responsibility for journalists and other communicators to provide information to the public in support of general scientific competency. Having done the former, I’m not sure I would wish it on anyone. But, having also done the latter, I’m quite convinced the simple transmission of information—a process that is a weak form of education—is not enough either.

Regardless, it seems evident that education is a theme in science journalism.

Journalism Gets Recruited into Scientific Education

Education and science journalism have a history. They’re part of a movement that had been going on in various forms for decades and often referred to as the ‘public understanding of science’, but more accurately comprises a general interest in science communication. Simply put, it is an effort to educate the public about science so that they can make better decisions about public affairs that require such knowledge.

In a review of this movement, Robert Logan, from the University of Missouri-Columbia, highlights how leading American scientists from 1900-1930s used “almost-missionary zeal” to push this agenda. As Logan relates, some of its philosophies included:

(1) cultivating the idea of lifelong learning for citizens,
(2) helping persons live healthier and longer lives by promoting scientific awareness,
(3) encouraging support for the scientific method as a strategy for public officials to assess complex public affairs choices,
(4) helping citizens and public officials better understand the connection between investment in science research and the United States’ economic future,
(5) improving public investment in science,
(6) fostering more interest in science as a career among American youths,
(7) enhancing public goodwill and support for science among taxpayers, and
(8) nurturing a public will to support science as a nonpartisan staple of national investment in the future of America’s economy and culture.

In some senses, the above list is similar to what philosopher John Dewey put forward as to how democracy might lead to the perpetual education of the public.

I find it hard to accept the above list on face value. It comes with some implicit assumptions, such as science being the answer to all of society’s woes and that top-down passive education will lead to the public accepting this stance. One might also wonder about the line between engaging citizens in democracy and elitist notions of educating the masses for the betterment of society.

Nevertheless, as a historical grocery list of the desired results of science education on America, the above reveals how communicating science originally drew heavily on education. This purpose was largely conceived in a top-down manner, where the objective presentation of scientific fact would be absorbed by the public.

These same American scientists (which included Slossen, Heyl, Millikan, and Hale) also recognized the importance of journalists, and how they could broadly disseminate scientific findings. They even made appeals to news magnates like E. W. Scripps to create a science news beat. So even seventy years ago, before science journalism became its own recognized profession, journalists were specifically being drawn into using information to educate the public about science.

Enter the 1980s, and it distinctly apparent that efforts to increase the public’s awareness of science were not making huge strides. As Robert Logan relates, by some measures only 10% of the population was considered scientifically literate. Around this time, scientific information in general was becoming a premium commodity and growing as a political force, needed to build nations. So efforts to communicate science were doubled, and in some minds, the burden of responsibility was placed on scientists and journalists, who needed to become “civic”, and lead the effort to improve the quality of scientific information available to people.

Questioning our Educational Purpose

Today, it appears we haven’t moved much beyond the 10% of the population that was considered scientifically literate in the 1980s. (Although some scholars, such as Steven Hilgartner, suggest we might simply be measuring the wrong things.)

This forces me to wonder why audiences are apathetic and disinterested, as well as the reasons they have been neglected, or neglect things themselves, with regard to scientific information.

It’s hard not to jump to current criticisms of science journalism when asking these questions, since journalists have struggled with challenging scientific topics like global warming and genetically modified foods, where their work has sometimes been called polarizing, misleading, sensationalistic, and unable to connect with the public.

However, beneath such criticisms—let us not forget, for a profession that sets before itself a very challenging task of explaining topics like somatic nuclear cell transfer and quantum string theory—a more fundamental problem exists in the foundation used to develop strategies to communicate science. This foundation is partly built on an education base that turns to the transmission of understandable information, through agents such as science journalists, as a means to realize the philosophies outlined by American scientists in the early twentieth century.

Implicit in this educational foundation are several assumptions, including (1) that science is grounded in absolute fact, which is separate from our conceived reality and merely tapped into by scientific inquiry, (2) that such a process is too specialized to be comprehended by the general public, (3) that an intermediate form of scientific knowledge is therefore needed, one which requires a “third person” (i.e. science journalist) to be communicated effectively, and (4) that this third person can do this by simply calling on linguistic translations (See Massimiano Bucchi’s book Science and the Media: Alternative Routes in Scientific Communication).

Alas, these passive assumptions misrepresents the nature of science itself, which is learnt through personal interaction, active experimentation, and often creatively on the fly. The realization that scientists are active inquirers reveals how the above “science-centric educational” base is only presenting an idealized version of science, one which calls upon a troublesome approach to communication.

This approach reminds me of an old physics professor who called me a “sponge”, which he would fill with liquid numbers. Amusing as I found it at the time, he likely did a disservice to my ability to think for myself about physics. So its not that those interested in scientific communication haven’t researched and written about it, but that we still have a lot of thinking to do to work out science journalism’s philosophical base in sufficient detail.

I am not alone in thinking this; as Robert Logan writes: “researchers began to suggest that science communication’s classic conceptual underpinnings might be insufficiently holistic to account for the social dynamics that scientists, journalists, communicators, and citizens faced”. The question on many minds: is there an alternative way to communicate science that allows citizens to better participate in a democracy?

David Secko is a science writer and a post-doctoral fellow at the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics, University of British Columbia, 227-6356 Agricultural Road, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, V6T 1Z2.

Email: dmsecko@interchange.ubc.ca

Funding support provided by Genome Canada and Genome British Columbia, www.genomecanada.ca; www.genomebc.ca