Science Journalism :: Commentary

Prescription for over-hyped science story: Take one set of leading but inconsequential facts. Add pressures of daily news with a hint of scientific illiteracy and voila, a science story that misleads the public.

Case in point June 1st, 2006.

Breaking news! Canadians are filled with toxins. Our bodies are polluted with an average of 23 chemicals and even chemicals that have been banned for years are showing up in our kids. No! Not the kids…

But wait; there is more to the story than makes the headline. It turns out all the chemical levels were below what health authorities considered dangerous. There have been no studies linking these low levels to health effects. So what was the story about when last June, an environmental group released its analysis of chemical testing on a group of average Canadians? Was it that we were getting sick or simply that we were polluted with minute levels of toxins? Was there any substance to the story or was it all hype?

Helen Fallding, assistant city editor at the Winnipeg Free Press thought the story was hype. At the recent public forum, Science Journalism: Hype, Spin, or the Real Thing, she described her reaction to the story as apathetic. After all, she had seen previous studies that said there was little to no evidence that these small amounts of contaminants actually affected you. But change the setting to a room full of editors, the majority opinion was this was a cool story and she was being a drag.

This brings up some fundamental questions about science journalism and the public. I think one of the best analogies is to compare it to crime journalism. In a 2001 review of the public perception of crime, the Canadian justice department concluded that the public’s fear is unrelated to the actual crime rate.

Perhaps the most troubling lesson for this justice study report was that Canadians “overwhelmingly reject the notion that public concern over crime rate is the result of media publicity surrounding high profile cases. Seventy-five percent of Canadians really perceive that crime really is worse now than it was in the past.”

Who am I to throw in some contravening facts? The Canadian crime rate in 2002, around the time of this survey, was the lowest in 25 years.

The same misperception of reality is likely happening in science, or more precisely, health reporting. Andre Picard, the public health reporter for the Globe and Mail made an interesting comment a few years ago after a series of high-profile health scares were reported in his paper. Sure it was important news but, he cautioned, life expectancy in Canada has been rising for years and we shouldn’t be worried. He suggested that the media focused so much on small health scares because society really had few big health issues to worry about.

I tend to agree with Picard, but unfortunately that means we are admitting that health journalism is full of hype. I wonder if crime journalists have admitted this to themselves long ago.

But what can science journalists do to get rid of the hype? Is it always necessary to include a dose of reality with every story we do? Take some of CNN’s coverage of the SARS crisis that reported the facts but also included the reality that the common flu kills far more people per year than SARS ever did. Would that be like doing a story about a school shooting while mentioning that you are far more likely to die from a car accident?

One of the issues facing science journalism is that our job requires us to educate almost as much as it requires us to report. Each new study, each new discovery comes with mountains of background information that the public needs to know to understand the issue. A scientific study is rarely the final answer and brings with it a baggage of previous knowledge. Yet each news story must focus on what’s new (the hype) and the scientific background is often pushed to the end of the story.

In my career as a science journalist I have seen this happen over and over again with misleading studies coming out and scaring the public about a new health threat, a new danger, a new worry when in reality, there is little new to the study and the scientific consensus is unexciting. Invariably, these stories are more hype than substance but they keep on getting in the news. As Helen Fallding seemed to notice, editors who don’t have the proper scientific background seem to think they are cool.

This is an interesting situation for the media to be in when there are a number of articles in the Canadian press about how our society is overreacting to perceived threats. Once again, the focus is on the children: The February 15th issue of Maclean’s cover story asking are we raising a generation bubble-wrapped kids? There has been considerable media coverage of the hygiene hypothesis, a theory that suggests that raising children in too clean an environment will harm them later in life.

Helen suggested that the solution to the problem was to raise a generation of editors who had the proper scientific literacy to avoid the pitfalls of hype. While I don’t disagree with this proposal, it assumes, perhaps rightly so, that current journalists are letting the public down when it comes to science coverage. Yet like Helen, I do not see another more immediate solution. If the ranks of editorial teams are filled with scientifically illiterate people who find hyped science cool, what can the rest of us do? No doubt the public, who is also mostly scientifically illiterate, will also find the hyped news cool and isn’t it part of our job to report cool news? So in the end, we are stuck filling our prescription for over-hyped science stories. The unfortunate thing is that side effects include a public that will act on these stories and that has consequences like a generation of bubble-wrapped kids.