The need to sell news in an evermore crowded information marketplace leads directly to the scarification of readers, viewers and listeners with lurid images of impending death and catastrophe. In a world of proliferating news sources and ever greater competition for the news dollar, the tendency to media-generated panic is intensified.
The availability of user generated video, as in recent apocalyptic footage of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, adds to the sense of impending calamity.
Today, fuelled by digital technology and UGC, health and other kinds of scares go global at the speed of light, as information is disseminated around online networks with unprecedented immediacy.
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Governments and policy-makers are bounced into making hasty, ill-thought out statements which may or may not reassure, but certainly give the story fresh legs for another round of the 24-hour, always-on, real-time news cycle.
As for the scientists, they are under pressure to package their work in neat soundbites for ease of media consumption. We (and I count myself amongst them) are advised to present our research findings in terms likely to grab an editor’s attention on a busy news day. Hence, the endless iterations of ‘coffee/red wine/fatty foods give you/protect you from cancer/heart disease’.
The ‘news’ about this or that newly-discovered risk factor for this or that disease or condition rarely bears scrutiny, even if the research on which it is based might have some value as a contribution to a complex and intellectually demanding debate.
The qualifications and nuances which typically surround scientific research findings are often sacrificed in the search for publicity and the headline which equates to ‘profile’ and ‘impact’ in the eyes of funders and academic managers. We are all in the business of public relations now, urged to feed the media with sexy data, even where the truth is more prosaic.
All of this makes for good teaching material in university lectures on the sociology of risk and the media’s role in generating misplaced public anxiety. But in the era of anthropogenic global warming the debate about media coverage and public understanding of science has become a matter of life and death.
If we get the science on climate change wrong – the journalists, the scientists, the politicians, the public – we are in for a hellish time down the road.
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So what can be done to improve the coverage of science in the mainstream media?
Editors and journalists should be better trained, for a start, in the interpretation of scientific research and the data it generates.
We need more science correspondents with science degrees, and the ability to translate the science into common discourse. We need more scientific input to journalism education.
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