Ben Goldacre speaks the truth on science and the media
If you missed Ben Goldacre’s fantastic article on how the media sets up science stories and then gets them wrong, then go and read it. Now. I’ll wait.
Extract:
It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science.
All I can say is that it rings true, again and again. Yes, science stories aren’t well-understood by anyone up the chain of command in newspapers. Often the people who are involved with the stories aren’t familiar with how the statistics that are being used in the stories fit together. (I did statistics at A-level, and it gave me a healthy distrust of (1) statistics (2) people who quote statistics - perhaps that means I distrust myself?)
Goldacre:
..people periodically come up to me and say, isn’t it funny how that Wakefield MMR paper turned out to be Bad Science after all? And I say: no. The paper always was and still remains a perfectly good small case series report, but it was systematically misrepresented as being more than that, by media that are incapable of interpreting and reporting scientific data.
Really it ought to be compulsory reading for every news editor and executive editor and editor. And then framed and put over their desks, and re-read occasionally.
Of course the problem is that “news” is stuff that’s surprising, remarkable, and science doesn’t often offer that; as Goldacre points out, science moves by gathering little bits of data, putting them together, creating a matrix.
The other criticism, though, that “authority figures” are quoted too frequently to give a story spurious authenticity, is true too. Sometimes the media create their own authority figures, even if those people have no credibility. It used to incense me that papers would quote the wild and untested (or even untestable) hypotheses of Harash Narang during the BSE crisis. He maintained that BSE was caused by “single-stranded DNA”, and that the disease had passed to chickens. Neither hypothesis stood up to experiment, but that didn’t stop papers seeking a shock-horror comment from someone about how some aspect of BSE/vCJD was being “ignored” from phoning him up. I always resisted any mention or use of his ideas in the paper because I thought it wasn’t science, it was scaremongering.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
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- How Wi-Fi phones threaten 3G investment, the evil of the Coolwebsearch spyware, and the Moon mystery (17 November 2004; score: 33.08%)
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September 9th, 2005 at 1:10 pm
I think the problem is systemic, and applies to all specialisms, almost all subjects, that newspapers cover. The specialists worth having are those who know enough to keep stories out of the newspapers. The specialists who get ahead are those who get most column inches. The only solution I see is to have more featurish coverage in the “broadsheets.”
September 9th, 2005 at 4:06 pm
Indeed. Try doing a law degree, and then reading reports about law or crime in the newspapers.
A few months after I graduated, the newspapers screamed that gay adoption was being brought in. Except gay people had always been able to adopt. The change was that unmarried couples could adopt a child and both become its legal parents.
(Before, only one would actually adopt the child, so that there was no need for the courts to decide custody if the couple split up).
As part of my degree I did criminal justice and penology, where we looked at crime statistics. That’s what really makes me want to cry: people saying stuff about “crime” when they couldn’t even explain the difference between reported crime and the BCS.
September 9th, 2005 at 4:41 pm
The best solution is a grass-roots one. Students are able to opt-out of science lessons as young as 13 (except where they are obliged to take at least one science course) and the number of science A-levels and Degrees being taken are dropping. I think a good science education is as important as a good English education. The less people know about basic scientific concepts, the more suceptible they are to the pseudoscientific nonsense such as homeopathy. Nice joke in the same paper yesterday too - Did you hear about the person on a course of homeopathic treatment? He forgot to take his medicine one day and died of an overdose.
September 13th, 2005 at 1:21 pm
hey, is that the andrew brown who wrote the unbelievably long article about the tucson consciousness conference in 1996 for the independent? i quoted that article the other day in a drunken row as an example of how science reporting doesn’t have to be flaky and contemporaneous.
September 13th, 2005 at 1:57 pm
yes.
September 13th, 2005 at 1:58 pm
except it was in wired UK, which rather proves my point about newspaper science coverage, since I was on the staff of the indie at the time, sitting next to our host here.