‘Why Scientists and Journalists Don’t Always Play Well Together’
Though mainly about stories appearing in the popular press on scientific inquiries, this article from David DiSalvo at Forbes makes the case that the quality of journalism has declined due to competitive and market pressures:
This is undoubtedly true of Reuters (we once read that journalists in the agency’s Jerusalem Bureau are under pressure to produce at least one publishable story per day). At the same time, there are powerful ideological forces at work in Reuters Middle East coverage which contribute to the problem of shoddy reporting. As evidenced on our site, Reuters correspondents are deeply committed to advocating for the Palestinian Arabs and deeply hostile to successive Israeli governments, Jews who choose to live in the territories, and generally anyone who doesn’t share their Arabist or radical-left world-view. This leads to stories which are systematically biased, often dishonest, and carefully contrived to manipulate the audience into buying into that view.Scientists mistrust journalists because the popular market for news can, and very often does, affect how stories are told. This is particularly true now, with the standard-bearers of traditional journalism giving way to the sprawling fragmentation of online news. Many journalists have been forced to become mercenaries in a marketplace with few empires left to retain their services fulltime. The pressures working against survival in this market are severe, and time constraints to produce an enormous amount of copy in any given week are rarely flexible.
But even before this market materialized, the traditional news outlets were showing signs of slippage on fact checking and filtering sensational claims from quality content. And journalists, watching as chips of the stoic walls began crumbling, were under unmanageable pressure to produce to keep their jobs.
DiSalvo argues that many science journalists are committed to faithful reporting:
On the other side, many science journalists resent the fact that these criticisms are unfairly painted across the profession. For those of us who primarily focus on science topics, ‘getting it right’ isn’t an academic exercise, it’s a heartfelt desire born of a passion for what we choose to write about. For any serious writer, not treating their chosen subject with the care it deserves isn’t an option.
DiSalvo is referring here to an article based on a study published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, which found a link between childhood vaccinations and autism. The study was later proven to be fraudulent but the results had already been touted in so many popular media outlets, the damage was done. Today, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary, there are millions of children not being vaccinated by their parents for fear of inducing autism.That, of course, does not mean science journalists always get it right. But the writers I regularly speak to acknowledge this fact and are just as unhappy about it as the scientists. The flip side of the coin is that some scientists are not immune to overhyping findings for a little extra ink. The perfect storm occurs when an overhyping scientist meets an imprudent journalist; shortly thereafter a story about vaccines causing autism appears, as just one example.
As it happens, The Lancet also ran an article last year on alleged damage done to the health of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip due to the war with Israel in 2008-09 and subsequent goods embargo. Reuters journalist Kate Kelland promoted these findings in a story published on the Reuters website two days before the article appeared in The Lancet: (cont’d)