Science Journalism :: Commentary

News isn’t easy. You’re always in a rush, and yet every bit of information has to be accurate. Your article has to be significant or interesting or both, but hyping a story beyond its limits is misleading.

News of every genre is hard, but science writing is perhaps the hardest. Politicians – their announcements and mistakes – make political writing easier. Business and sports are all numbers and trades, with colourful characters to spice up the section. Arts and entertainment writers can interview celebrities, who make front-page news by definition.

But in science there is an endless stream of challenges. Every science story represents one small step in a complex progression. It’s the opposite of what the news wants, which are only significant new leaps in knowledge. Not to mention that to explain the newest bit you have to wrestle the background into some simplified lesson.

Then there’s the challenge of explaining how the latest piece of the puzzle was discovered, usually through a complex experiment.

Finally, how to convey what it all means? Scientific results come in numbers: percents with statistical significance. Readers don’t want numbers – they want to know what it will mean for them. And that’s a question most scientists are reluctant to answer.

But despite its challenges, science news is more and more important, as progress inexorably ties science to every aspect of life. Science, our new religion, is expected to solve all of today’s problems. And so the public is hungry for the latest solutions.

The challenges of presenting the latest progress without hyping it up were confronted head on last week, when a panel of experts met to discuss Science Journalism: Hype, Spin, or the Real Thing? Two journalists, an editor, an academic, and a scientist discussed – and at times argued about – the problems of science journalism today.

Perhaps the most interesting and controversial question they debated was: Is science news hyped? And if it is, who is to blame? Fingers pointed in all directions.

Margaret Munro, CanWest science reporter, did not hesitate to finger scientists as the source. “The science world inundates media with hype – they send their press releases around the world,” she said. “They’re almost as bad as the movie industry in terms of manipulating the media.”

It’s not a perspective the public is used to hearing. Most people think of science as an objective art, see scientists as hard-working individuals with little desire for personal recognition, and picture research institutions as centres of learning for the sake of knowledge alone. But, as with most things in life, it is not that simple.

The scientific method is objective, but experiments are conducted by real people with a personal interest in seeing their work succeed. The work is done within the walls of a research institute that competes with thousands of others to make a name for itself and thereby secure funding. And it is published in an academic journal that is likewise in constant competition with other journals to attract the best new research.

The result: press releases and the embargo system. Universities, research institutions, and journals all crank out press releases about new research and send them, as Munro said, to media outlets around the world. Press releases from journals come out roughly a week in advance of publication, giving journalists time to write their stories and run them the day the research is released.

Science news is a highly constructed system, based around the fact that publicity is far more important to science than many would think. The effect is bigger in certain areas – particularly in the health-related sciences – but the fact remains that science courts fame.

Of course, not all the blame for science hype can be laid at the feet of researchers and their public relations people. They just lay the seed – it’s up to journalists to take it and run. “I’m not going to defend newspapers on this one,” said Helen Fallding, assistant city editor of The Winnipeg Free Press. “I think editors are subject to ‘front-page-itis,’ which means the effort to sell papers does at times push things further than they ought to go.”

This condition is simply the most dramatic form of ‘make-it-news-itis.’ And science, by its nature, doesn’t make for good news. Chris Mooney, a correspondent for Seed magazine and author of The Republican War on Science, argued it’s near impossible to write daily science news. “It’s basically a trap for journalists filing daily because to have science framed as news you almost have to say, ‘This moves us forward.’ But scientific progress isn’t like that – every new discovery is more like a drop in the bucket.” To understand the significance of a new discovery, Mooney said, you have to wait and see which drops make the biggest splash, and which ripples last the longest. Which are things you simply can’t know the next day.

And how did the scientist feel about the all this? Elizabeth Simpson, senior scientist at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, said, “If the media feel that a science story alone is insufficiently exciting and so they have to hype it up, they shouldn’t be doing science stories at all.”

Perhaps. But that’s not really an option. The public wants science news and they will get it, no matter how difficult it may be to write it right.

Maybe instead of pointing fingers, journalists should step up to the plate. Science is fundamentally about small, uncertain steps, and journalists need to stop avoiding that. Even if adding uncertainty makes the story less exciting. The public only expects every science story to be about groundbreaking discoveries because that’s how every story – science or otherwise – is written. Change the pattern, and the public will get used to it.

Maybe, just maybe, they’ll appreciate it. Instead of being an incomprehensible endower of truths, they would be able to see science as the slow, bumpy process that it is.

- GP

Dr. Elizabeth M. Simpson
Senior scientist, Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, UBC:

I think that somebody said that people think the science story that actually exists is insufficiently exciting, and that one has to hype it beyond that in order to sell newspapers. I think that if the media feels that way they shouldn’t be doing the story in the first place, because the hype can be to such a degree that the story becomes inaccurate and misleading.

So it certainly happens. Is it the norm? I don’t know, I’ve never done any stats on this. But I had a story that came out about my work in the Globe and Mail. In that particular case the writer was very interactive and we went back and forth a couple of times to be sure that the facts were correct. I never saw the story but she checked and stuff. Then she called me the day before it went out and said, “You’re not going to be happy.” And I said, “Why? What happened?” “The editor wrote the headline.”

And I wasn’t happy with the headline. I mean what was all the time and effort we put in to putting together a really good, accurate, but still interesting story together, and then splash garbage over the top. So yes, I think it happens and probably more than it should, to the detriment of the actual science.

Margaret Munro
Science reporter, CanWest News:

I never defend those headline writers, I don’t write the headlines. But you know, I have this whole issue with this whole business of hype because the truth is, the scientific community inundates reporters with hype. Every week I’ve got Science and Nature for next week already sitting in my mailbox and they come complete with the headline, they tell you what the story is, the phone number, the internet, and you know the guy or girl is ready to talk. I can tell you, if I was actually starting with the science paper they wrote, most of those stories would never see the light of day.

They send these around the world, and they time them. They are like little “McNews” stories. They’re often really good stories, but they very much are McNews stories, and you have to run them. Like tomorrow there will be a story in the papers about this little asteroid that spins itself up, and you have to write it tomorrow because it came out today. They are almost as bad as the movie industry in terms of manipulating the media. There is this big, scientifically endorsed machine out there. Most of the hype comes off that machine. It’s not the media that’s driving it; it’s the scientific community and the scientists are party to that. So I’m just a bit tired of the hype. I know that the scientists themselves are drawn into it, but it’s not like we’re sitting there dreaming up these stories. Sometimes we do spin them up, but I think Edna’s colleague, Tim Caulfield, did a study and he actually showed that the media is not hyping them up. In fact, they were actually pretty bang on to what the press releases said that the scientists put out.

Dr. Edna Einsiedel
Professor of Communication Studies, University of Calgary:

I have to agree with Margaret. I mean Tim Caulfield and Tania Bubela did that study where they looked at stories on gene discoveries. They looked at how it was covered in the original journal article and how it was covered in the media, and they did document the fact that hype does start at the front end. Journals are very sophisticated in the way they promote scientific material. There are rules about embargos that they put out when it’s a story that they think is going to be newsworthy. So I think this promotional effort is occurring everywhere, it doesn’t just start at the media.

Helen Fallding
Assistant City Editor, Winnipeg Free Press:

I’m not going to defend newspapers on this one. I think that we’re subject to what I call “front-page-it is.” It plays out something like this: There was a science story that was going to go on page ten, but it’s a slow news day and there’s nothing to put on the front page. The editor goes to the reporter and says, “Can’t we do something with this one?”

For example, it might say something like, “Study demonstrates that farmers are putting too much phosphorus on their fields,” and he’ll say, “Can’t we say ‘Farmers are killing Lake Winnipeg?’” You have a lot of back and forth.

The effort to sell papers does sometimes push things a little farther than they ought to go. Especially in headlines and especially in the lead, which is the top paragraph. If you’re a science reporter who’s really committed to accuracy because you know that whoever you interviewed will never talk to you again if the story isn’t accurate, you can have a bit of a fight on your hands with editors who want to ramp these up a notch.

Chris Mooney
Washington correspondent, Seed magazine
Author, The Republican War on Science:

I’ve been listening to all the other panellists, and this is what has occurred to me. There’s really a trap here for the science journalist who’s filing daily or regularly, because then their stories are framed as news. Then they are writing on the latest scientific publications. When they’re doing that, because it has to be framed as news, they always want to say in some sense, "This moves us forward", "Here’s the big new thing that we know".

That’s not really what the scientific process is. Every study is more like a drop in the bucket. Follow a science story over the course of a year, especially a controversial one, again I’ll do hurricanes and global warming. There were the two studies that got massive media coverage, and they were like, “Oh god now we’ve found the signal.” Then if you watched over the course of the year you found that no, that was just the beginning of a long running debate that is going to continue to run. But those were the stories that everyone was like, “Wow we discovered something.” So there is this inherent tendency to treat one scientific paper as a new truth when it almost never is.