Re: Issues

In article <dapr3b$2fmt$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Larry Moran <lamoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>On Sat, 9 Jul 2005 09:17:44 -0400 (EDT),
>> "Larry Moran" <lamoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>> Who asked these questions?
>>> Kindergarten students?
>>
>> Science journalists. Who have apparently been trained to pretend
>> they are talking to kindergarten students, even in a magazine
>> read only by serious researchers and AAAS members.
>
>This is really sad. Many of the questions are stupid. They reflect
>a profound misunderstanding of the field. It looks like science
>journalists are guilty of believing their own hype.
>
>I expected better from Science and from AAAS.

Having met some science journalists, I'd go easy on them. They often are
people who have PhD degrees but decided on journalism rather than active
science. However they are under a lot of deadline pressure and can't take
time to really understand areas, and of course most of the areas they
report on are outside of their original area of competence. They go to
meetings and sniff for Controversy, but when they find it they mostly
rely on the folks they talk to. This means they end up dependent on one
viewpoint in a controversy (I know, I've exploited that at least once).
Also for newsworthiness reasons they are strongly biased towards questions
where there are dramatic alternatives rather than areas where there is
incremental progress.

The difficulty is that the public sees science through their filter.
This can really distort things. For example, in evolutionary biology
many readers are convinced that the old stuffy boring neodarwinian
synthesis was long ago thrown out and replaced by some exciting new
theory involving Complexity and Punctuation and Cladistics. Only it's
not at all clear what this new theory is (for a simple reason, namely that
there isn't a coherent new theory that connects these buzzwords at all).
Filling in the details and explaining the context is not a strength of
science journalism. They are on to the next area and the next deadline
instead.

--
Joe Felsenstein joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Department of Genome Sciences and Department of Biology,
University of Washington, Box 357730, Seattle, WA 98195-7730 USA

.

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