Science Meets the Press: Can Media Be Trusted? : Quest for better ‘gatekeeping’ in covering complex issues
Just as do judges and trial lawyers, the news media have a difficult time digesting and interpreting scientific and medical findings. What is the public to make of contradictory reports on the alleged health hazards of pesticides, silicone breast implants, electromagnetic fields, radiation, caffeine or global warming?
In a series last week, David Shaw of The Times argued that the press has often distorted news on such hazards, focusing on the most headline-grabbing reports and raising, for example, unwarranted fears about dioxin and other toxins. In the same week the Environmental Protection Agency reaffirmed its earlier conclusions that dioxin is a probable human carcinogen.
Given how powerfully, and often irrevocably, press reports influence public opinion, behavior and policy, it is worth examining how good science and good reporting can better fit together. It is no surprise that the press sometimes exaggerates the dramatic and oversimplifies the complex. The larger question is how this can be changed, and to what extent grant-hungry scientists themselves are accomplices in the hype crimes they deplore.
Shaw argues that fear and hysteria over environmental health risks have escalated in recent years even though such indicators as life expectancy, infant mortality and most cancer rates are significantly better. But it can be argued equally that one reason public health has improved is that the press has done an excellent job in spreading the word about the benefits of exercise, good diet and buckling up seat belts, as well as the risks of smoking and illicit drug use. And there was even a handful of reporters who wrote on the problem of the O-rings before those seals caused the explosion of the space shuttle in 1986.
That said, it must also be recognized that sometimes science and medical reporting is less skeptical than other kinds of journalism. Eager for attention, perhaps even awed by their expert sources, some science reporters tend not to give the same scrutiny to major scientific developments that, say, veteran political reporters give the latest pabulum from Washington. Yet when political reporters took over some of the recent stories on Cold War radiation experiments on humans they created a hopeless mess.
Though deadlines, considerations of competition and lack of resources make it difficult, reporters must seek to winnow bad science from good. Obviously news organizations cannot attempt to replicate experiments, but computer databases and other modern resources make it easier to challenge weak data, politically motivated “breakthroughs” and even occasional scientific fraud.
Consider the extreme example of the 1989 announcement by the University of Utah that its scientists had achieved a breakthrough in cold fusion that promised a “clean, virtually inexhaustible source of energy.” The scientists manipulated the media, garnering a gush of uncritical initial stories even though they had not subjected their work to peer review, published it in a journal or even shared it with other experts. They later complained about a hostile press when their work was exposed as erroneous.
The lesson here is twofold: The press must learn to be better gatekeepers of the medical and scientific information it amplifies for public consumption, without making the gates so narrow that heretical but worthy new ideas are screened out. Scientists must do a better job in helping the press translate their important work, and in ridding their ranks of the fakes and hype artists.
