Last week I posted a spoof of science journalism that to my complete surprise went viral. Since then, I've been trying to find answers. What's wrong with science journalism, and how do we fix it?
Bizarrely, the most read article on the Guardian website last week wasn't about Ed Miliband or the Labour party conference, but a quirky special-interest piece spoofing science journalism which I assumed only about three people would get. Apparently I hit a nerve, but why? What's wrong with science journalism? How did it become so dull and predictable? And how do we fix it?
My point was really about predictability and stagnation. The formula I outlined – using a few randomly picked BBC science articles as a guide – isn't necessarily an example of bad journalism; but
science reporting is predictable enough that you can write a formula for it that everyone recognises, and once the formula has been seen it's very hard to un-see, like a faint watermark at the edge of your vision.
Journalism - Analysis = RSS Feed
To see what I mean about predictability, take a look at the BBC Science & Environment news page. At the time of writing I can see the following headlines. Spot the recurring theme:
- UK 'needs domestic wind industry'
- Painless laser 'can spot disease'
- City life 'boosts bug resistance'
- 'Ghost particle'
- Neanderthals were 'keen on tech'
- Fossil flower 'clue to daisies'
- Winds 'may have parted Red Sea'
- Malaria 'caught from gorillas'
- LHC finds 'interesting effects'
I could go on, but you can see 'the pattern'. They're called 'Scare quotes' and they are used by writers to distance themselves from the words inside, or to indicate paraphrasing – unless you're a cynic, in which case scare quotes are a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows journalists to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the words mentioned.
This habit is so deeply ingrained at the BBC that even the question of whether 'effects' are 'interesting' is deemed too thorny an issue for the headline writer to give an opinion on. God forbid that in calling a piece of research 'interesting' the BBC should sully its reputation for robotic impartiality.
The defence from some corners is that reporters should be neutral, that their job is simply to report what has been said without passing judgement on it or challenging it in any way.
Cobblers. Ed Yong recently explained how daft this is:
If you are not actually providing any analysis, if you're not effectively 'taking a side', then you are just a messenger, a middleman, a megaphone with ears. If that's your idea of journalism, then my RSS reader is a journalist.
A science journalist should be capable of, at a minimum, reading a scientific paper and being able to venture a decent opinion. A more reasonable excuse is lack of time. Full-time reporters are expected to cover breaking stories quickly, and churn out several articles a day. Under that sort of pressure, even if the journalist wants to delve deeper into the murky depths of a story they may simply not have the time to do it justice.
Ultimately, though, if all you're doing is repeating press releases, and not providing your own insight, analysis or criticism, then what exactly is the point of paying you? What are you for? What value do you add for me? What right do you have to complain if you're going out of business?
Death by a thousand restrictions
Many of the problems in science reporting come not from the journalists or editors themselves, but as a result of the pressures and constraints they're under, and journalists at the BBC are under more constraints than most.
The Curse of the Undead (Ceefax)
Have you ever wondered why the first few lines of any BBC website article are often particularly stilted and awkward? It's because thanks to the BBC's multi-platform publishing guidelines, the first few paragraphs of any news story need to be written in such a way that they can be cut and pasted into a Ceefax page.
To see an example of this in action, take a look at this article and then this Ceefax page.
It also means that there's a pressure for things like the journal, university, and so on to be mentioned by a certain point so that everyone gets proper credit in all versions of the article. In 2010, news stories on a website are actually being optimised, and reorganised for Teletext. Seriously.
Science for All
Another issue affecting style is the need to reach a diverse audience. This puts pressure on commercial media groups who need to secure page views to generate advertising revenue, but also on the BBC which has a mandate not only to provide news accessible to as many people as possible, but to represent the UK, its regions and communities to an international audience.
At the Daily Mail, that pressure manifests itself in the form of acres of female flesh and breathless, lascivious descriptions of barely contained breasts, toned tummies and voluptuous, sun-kissed thighs. At the BBC, it means expressing things as plainly and simply as possible, avoiding any slang, cultural references or colourful language that might obscure things for those with poor literacy, or who speak English as a second language.
The cynics among you might use the pejorative phrase 'dumbing-down', while others might talk approvingly of 'plain English'. It seems pretty fair to me, but does the same formula have to be relentlessly applied to every article? Could the BBC not, amid the vast sea of simple, clear reporting find space for a modest island of meatier, spicier prose for those of us hungry for something a little richer?
Arbitrary Word Limits
As a writer, word limits are both a blessing and a curse. Many bloggers would have their writing immeasurably improved if they stuck to a word limit – doing that forces you to plan, to organise your thoughts, and to avoid redundancy and repetition. On the other hand, some stories need more time to tell, and sticking dogmatically to an arbitrary 800-word limit for stuff that's published on the internet doesn't make a lot of sense. The internet is not running out of space.
Conventional wisdom says that after a few hundred words, people start to lose attention. Conventional wisdom is a load of bollocks, as online magazine Slate neatly demonstrated with their experiments in long-form writing. Detailed, investigative pieces running to tens of thousands of words netted millions of page views, and proved that audiences aren't quite the infantile content-junkies they're often made out to be.
Fundamental Units of Science
Another set of problems spring from the attitude journalists seem to have towards science – or at least those who aren't still describing researchers with the faintly bigoted and dehumanising term 'boffins'. Science is all about process, context and community, but reporting concentrates on single people, projects and events.
The Race to Mediocrity
A couple of months ago I happened to be in a meeting at The Guardian's headquarters in King's Cross as news of the most massive star ever found broke. It's no exaggeration to say that half the newspaper's staff were involved in covering the story for various sections.
Well okay, it's a big exaggeration, but it's true that the media went into a sort of bizarre mass hysteria as newspapers, TV, radio and magazines raced to cover a slightly-larger-than-normal ball of gas with feature articles, diagrams showing small circles next to bigger circles, video packages showing small circles moving next to bigger circles, and interactive fact panels. Probably someone somewhere was staging a re-enactment with two appropriately rotund celebrities.
The result was a self-propelling explosion of journalistic effort that resulted in hundreds of virtually identical articles scattered across the face of the internet like some sort of fast-growing weed. What did all this effort and expense achieve? Hundreds of interesting things happen in science every week, and yet journalists from all over the media seem driven by a herd mentality that ensures only a handful of stories are covered. And they're not even the most interesting stories in many cases.
In the Shadow of The Event
Members of the public could be forgiven for believing that science involves occasional discoveries interspersed with long periods of 'not very much happening right now'. The reality of science is almost the complete opposite of this. We spend centuries incrementally building little piles of knowledge, and it's extremely rare that an individual paper or piece of work is really that profoundly important.
One of the biggest failures of science reporting is the media's belief that a scientific paper or research finding represents a conclusion of some kind. Scientists know that this simply isn't true. A new paper is the start or continuance of a discussion or debate that will often rumble on for years or even decades.
Often we can only assess the importance of research with hindsight. It was several decades before the full significance of the 1896 observation by Svante Arrhenius that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere would lead to an increase in global temperature became obvious. Or at least obvious to all but a minority of ideologically driven morons.
Trying to report science by picking out random interesting papers to look at is like a food critic attending the opening of an Indian restaurant and deciding to sample a bit of cumin, then a splash of ghee, and maybe a few grains of rice. All sense of meaning, of context, of the whole dish, is lost.
Disconnection from the World Wide Web
The world wide web is built from links. That's why it's a web, and not just a library of pages like, well, Ceefax. Bloggers have understood this since even before anyone had made up the word 'blog', but for some reason links – especially links to the research itself – have remained mostly alien to online media. Why?
Journals Behaving Badly
No discussion of science journalism would be complete without a mention of The Dreaded Embargo. It works something like this:
- The Journal of Something or Other is about to publish an interesting paper, so it decides to issue a press release and a preview copy of the paper to journalists.
And that's sort of okay, except for two snags. Firstly, with tedious regularity it turns out that many journals don't publish the paper when the embargo ends, some waiting days or even weeks to get it online. Secondly, many of the papers are pay-walled in any case, and organisations (like the BBC until recently) decide there's no real benefit from linking to a pay-walled site.
This matters for two reasons: firstly, it means that the journalist can't provide a link to the study, which is annoying for people who want to see more; secondly, it destroys accountability by preventing other journalists, bloggers, scientists or interested people from seeing the source for themselves and judging the merits of the claims made by researchers, university departments or reporters.
The Blue Revolution
As I said recently, links are beautiful. They take us beyond whatever we happened to be looking for, on journeys to places we never even imagined existed. Every minute of every day, millions of curious apes click billions of links, each tracing their own miniature voyages of discovery.
By providing links to sources, journalists can show that they're honest, open and trustworthy and allow the reader to judge whether the interpretation they've presented of someone else's work or words is the correct one. They can also open up avenues for exploration and discovery to their audience, providing the reader with far more value than one journalist could provide on their own.
It's taken a long time, and a considerable amount of lobbying to get the BBC to take links seriously, but they have begun to move in the right direction, and for that they should be praised. It would be brilliant if other news media could do the same, and bring traditional media up to the standard set by bloggers.
Five Ways to Improve Science Journalism
A number of people responding to my spoof set me a challenge. Could I write an example of a good piece of science journalism? At the risk of ducking the challenge (which I'd be lousy at, since I tend not to do much reporting on research anyway), that misses the point, because I don't think there should be a set way of doing things.
But what does that mean in practice? What should, say, the BBC do to improve their coverage? I can think of a few things that would make an impact right away.
- Stop racing the pack. It's undignified, seriously. Commercial companies at least have the excuse that they need the page views to survive, but the BBC is unique in being paid for by the licence fee. That should allow it some flexibility to sit outside of the free market rat race. Let the tabloid schmucks race to produce three hundred near identical pieces on whatever giant star they found this week. Repeating what other people are already doing isn't adding any value for customers or for licence fee payers.
What happens in the next five or ten years is anybody's guess, but the point is that while some rules are useful, trying to stick religiously to them now would be like someone in the 16th century declaring that they'd found the best way to write a print article. Rules can be useful, but don't be dogmatic about them, let people break them – not every day, but from time to time.
Fading Out
Science is crazy. The things that we can do are absolutely ridiculous; whether it's peering trillions of miles into the void of space in the search for new life, deciphering our own genetic code, pulling apart the stuff that the universe is made of, or halting the spread of disease, or just enabling this article to be sent through light beams and thin air to your computer.
And there are hundreds of beautiful, amazing writers who can take this craziness and put it in a way that we can all cope with, whether it's Dawkins bringing evolution to bloody life, the genius of Feynman bringing particle physics to the masses, David Quammen's heart-wrenching descriptions of the death of the last dodo, or Ed Yong and his life-long obsession with writing about animal sex.
And yet, somehow we're left with mainstream media coverage that's often sterile, formulaic, unimaginative. Writing covered with the stench of the intellectual decay that inevitably comes from the meek acceptance of often-arbitrary rules. Science deserves better, and as science blogs rack up ever increasing millions of readers every month, traditional media companies still dragging their feet will need to respond, sooner or later. That, or face irrelevance.
Anyway, that's my opinion. Tell me yours in the comments.
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