Climate reporting: good, bad, experimental: 2
Yesterday I looked at an example of bad environment reporting. Janet Raloff’s failure to apply traditional news values in reporting a flawed attack on the IPCC opened up the danger that a ’scanning’ reader of the article, on the US Science News site, could believe the attack had credibilty.
Janet picked up the story from a poorly attended press conference. Which concerned her, but not enough to handle the story in a different way, or not at all. Responding to Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News (which I’ve yet to read… I ordered it for our library, and then some other buggers researchers borrowed it before I got my hands on it), Director of the Science Media Centre Fiona Fox writes a defence of the press conference for getting science stories into the hands of journalists. What does she say?
The earth’s not all flat
Davies’ Flat Earth News is the hook, as his key concept of ‘churnalism’ (that journalists no longer report, but ‘churn out’ unchecked, poorly researched copy to meet their increasingly stretched deadlines) pulls the press conference into its argument. Davies sees PR as “inherently unreliable as a source of truth simply because it is designed to serve an interest”. Fox’s defence is that, through her work at the Science Media Centre:
all the stories we offer to journalists have been brought to us by a number of top scientists and their press officers, verified as significant by our many scientific advisers and written up by specialist journalists who use the briefing to interrogate the experts. In other words ‘churnalism’ is not always ‘flat earth news’.
Fox sees the verification process that her organisation must go through to put out a press call as delivering exactly “the kind of truth-telling stories that Davies champions”. And, she argues, it would be unwise to put all press conferences into the same spun basket, just as it would be to believe that all journalists report in the same way. As she says,
Mark Henderson, the Times’ science editor, would not get so many front page exclusives sitting in his office churning out stories, and some journalists like Sarah Boseley at the Guardian manage to do the diary stuff and then somehow produce a seven page feature revealing the true background to some news story… I also happen to think that our main allies in this battle being fought by science press officers for a better media are the science, health and environment reporters in the media.
Time to experiment?
POLIS Director and author of Supermedia, Charlie Beckett, picks up on Fox’s post to advocate for a more experimental approach to the reporting of science. Beckett focuses in on this issue of the best science being written/presented by science reporters/presenters.
I think science has long been badly reported. This is partly because the scientists themselves are notoriously poor at communications… It’s also because even the specialist science reporters can ‘go native’ and lose their proper journalistic perspective.
Beckett recommends that “hard-pressed hacks have to make more use of new techologies to exploit the vast amounts of data and expertise that the public and other experts have.”
This is slightly contradictory, in that the reality of the ‘integrated newsroom’ is that churnalism is also driven by the commercialisation that now expects journalists to file copy, audio, video and community comments. As Fox reports, her experience is of having to prepare science briefs for “science and health reporters who are routinely working on at least two or three stories a day and increasingly also being asked to adapt them to web news, podcasts, video clips, etc.”
But I get Beckett’s point. Not least because journalists don’t have long to retrain before reporter roles become fully multimedia.
Common S(ci)ense
But is the best journalism written by those who have an understanding of the subject? This would make sense, whether the subject be climate, financial markets or boxing. But the ‘best journalism’ is not always the goal; if the article is technically splendid and factually incontestable, but remains hidden in the science pages, does not engage with popular or populist frames of engagement, or has too many detailed narratives, then the actual science does not get through.
Research by Hargreaves, Lewis and Speers (.PDF) from 2003 (funded by the ESRC), all from the Cardiff Journalism School, shows that science reporting by science correspondents does not necessarily increase the public understanding of science. The reality can be closer to Beckett’s view that
while scientists may feel more comfortable with a story told mainly by specialists, there is a danger, when this happens, of losing journalistic and audience interest. Hargreaves, Lewis and Speers (2003: 16)
It’s interesting to note that the science magazines (e.g. New Scientist, Nature) are rarely drawn upon as sources, despite their important role in breaking science stories. In fact, mainstreaming science into news reporting often works more effectively if the goal is to raise knowledge of a particular issue so that the public can play an informed role in a deliberative democracy.
What can we do?
In relation to climate change, for example, I’ve also been an advocate for a while now of putting the environment into everything I write, rather than writing about the environment. I believe that news and features journalists are the people who will have most impact on journalism ’saving the world’, to quote Beckett from his book, and that science training should be standard for journalists.
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