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By Ian Hargreaves One of the reasons journalists as
a class aren’t much loved is that they tend to leap into tense situations,
make hasty but vivid judgements and get out. Opinion surveys regularly place journalists
somewhere between politicians and used car salesmen in the league table of ‘people
you can trust.’ Scientists, by contrast, proceed
by careful, peer-reviewed trial and error. They are accustomed to public
esteem and to respect for their authority. Even today, following
controversies over food safety and a series of medical scandals, scientists
and doctors are still at the upper end of the trustworthiness rankings,
although since BSE, if the word ‘government’ is placed in front of the word ‘scientist’,
you get a rather different response. The question is whether chronic
misunderstanding between scientists and the mass media matters, and whether
anything can be done to alleviate it. My answer to both questions is yes, but
not if we continue in our present ways. Our present ways involve science
operating from behind a barricade and berating the news media about their
inaccuracy, prejudice and general ‘dumbing down’, whilst bemoaning the
difficulty of winning public support for complex areas of scientific inquiry,
such as biotechnology. When I hear scientists talk about
the media, I am often amazed at the way they veer between the measured
languages of their own specialisations and a kind of saloon bar rhetoric
about journalists (‘all arts graduates’) heedless of the public’s true
interest (‘panic-mongers’). It is not that scientists are
unaware of the need for popular and political support for their work.
Protests about animal testing and genetically modified food are just two
current illustrations which make the point. But the Public Understanding of
Science programmes which have been built up in the 15 years since the Bodmer
Report led to the creation of COPUS (the Committee on the Public
Understanding of Science) do not appear to have made matters much better. Too many scientists still behave
as if there is something called ‘truth’ or ‘the facts’ which they possess or
are capable of discerning and which the public must be educated to
comprehend. The media are characterised as the distorting lens obscuring
communication between scientists and the public. Although there has been some
excellent work in the sphere of Public Understanding of Science designed to
rid us of these over-simplified maps of communication and to chart the
topography more accurately, the old maps are still very much in every day
service. You can inspect them on a regular basis in The Lancet, for
example, or the BMJ. Thus, when the GM food controversy
broke, politicians and scientists alike immediately pointed a finger of blame
at the media for conducting what the Prime Minister called "an
extraordinary campaign of distortion." Even a more considered analysis of
media coverage of the GM affair, led by Professor John Durant of The Science
Museum, for the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, divided the
media into ‘campaigning’ newspapers (by implication distorted) and ‘reporting’
newspapers (by implication reliable), when even the most cursory examination
of the language and attitudes of both types of newspaper reveals a profusion
of in-built assumption and prejudice – what social scientists more kindly
label "social construction." This is not to defend the accuracy
of the Express newspaper’s famous page one headline (‘Mutant Crops Could Kill
You’) or to say that all newspaper reports are equally reliable or
unreliable, but it is to insist that all media, including specialist
scientific media, must be read more carefully, for the assumptions of the
author and the audience and for their context. A lot of what Professor Durant says
in his report is correct. It is indeed "in the interests of the
scientific community to ensure that policy and practice remain generally
respectful of the public." But when it comes to assessing the place that
"the media" hold in this process of communication, it is essential
to examine not only the daily newspapers (to which the Durant study largely
confines itself) but the numerous other forms of communication available to
citizens in our information-saturated times. Here we must include not only the
obvious media, such as television, radio and new on-line media, but other
public and private circuits of communication too: from the type of
information supermarkets gather for instant analysis from their check-outs,
to work done with focus groups by political parties and the messages
transmitted directly by pressure groups to their supporters. When you stand back from the
attempts which have been made to understanding these intricate circuits, what
you see at best is patchy, under-funded work. Very little media analysis has
the wherewithal even to log and analyse in the most straightforward terms,
work across the media of print, television, radio and the internet. It is
rare to read a survey probing the attitudes of journalists, or of public
relations professionals. Worse still, if you search the
journals of media and cultural studies, you will find much more interest in
the world of science fiction than of science fact. In the last 20 years, the
worlds of science and media studies have passed each other not so much like
ships in the night as ships sailing in opposite hemispheres. There are, of course, exceptions
to these rules, like the American sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, whose 1987 book
Selling Science and other works have probed the important and growing
area of risk communication and which took aim at the tendency of science
journalists to be too close to (i.e. too friendly towards) science. Or Bruce
Lewenstein, whose excellent analysis of the cold fusion saga does indeed
offer us a picture of multi-dimensional communication flows and which led him
to argue for "re-conceptualising our idea of what science communication
is." What is needed, in short, is
sustained effort by social science to comprehend the forces at work in the
citizen’s assessment of scientific issues, a task which requires sustained
and high quality tracking of public opinion and mediation, not with
occasional sallies into the press clippings, but with careful examination of
all the circuits of communication which come into play in an era of instant
and ubiquitous public communication. According to the recent House of
Lords Select Committee report, Science and Society, "society’s
relationship with science is in a critical phase ...Public unease, mistrust
and occasional outright hostility are breeding a climate of deep anxiety
among scientists." This report also reached the
welcome conclusion that scientists would be better advised to work with the
mass media as they are, rather than denouncing them and demanding special
treatment. It then, however, rather
undermines this by throwing its weight behind the Royal Society’s proposed ‘guidance
for editors’, which seeks an extension of the Press Complaints Commission
guidelines to warn journalists against paying too much attention to the views
of scientists in a ‘quixotic, minority’ - a suggestion which transferred to
the sphere of, say, politics or education would be regarded as dangerous. If we want truly to understand the
way that science communication works, there is no alternative to understanding
the myriad of ways in which science is mediated. The only other answer, when
you’re annoyed by something in the press, is to do as the Chief Executive of
the ESRC, Gordon Marshall did – don’t write a letter to the editor, write a
book. Ian Hargreaves is Professor of
Journalism at Cardiff University and former Editor of The Independent. His
report: Who’s Misunderstanding Whom? – Science, society and the media – is
published by the ESRC and is available at www.esrc.ac.uk
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