The War on Science. Shawn Lawrence Otto
can quickly and objectively demonstrate that Bob is right. Not so fast, a politician might answer. How about a compromise? Soon we see a new law affirming that 2 + 2 = 5. This is democracy’s problem, in a nutshell, in the age of science.
The modern journalistic approach does not work when applied to scientific questions, and it tends to skew public policy in counterfactual directions, as the above example shows. This is a bit ironic because journalistic techniques were originally developed as a means of fact-checking, akin to replication and peer review in scientific research. For example, reporters would get multiple sources to corroborate a story (which is an account of events in our shared, objective reality), establishing a relative confidence in its veracity, or they wouldn’t run the story. But today, journalism schools teach a mantra that scientists will say is completely false: “there is no such thing as objectivity”—a phrase frequently repeated by some of the profession’s leading figures, and contained in many newspaper reporters’ guidelines.
This conceit may be true when reporting on politics or interviewing the witnesses to a crime, but it is decidedly not true when it comes to reporting on events or issues that have large inputs of objective knowledge from science, even when those issues or events are political. For such stories, we have developed a unique, reproducible, peer-reviewed method of scientific research whose very purpose is to create the objective knowledge reporters seem to think cannot be had. The process of science is designed to cull out reliable knowledge—no matter who does the investigating or reports on the outcome—from our gender identities, our political identities, our religious identities, our sexual identities, our cultural identities, and so on, trimming away all those subjective forms of bias reporters think we can never escape until we are left with knowledge that is provisionally objective in the stories we tell about reality. While it may not be possible to attain total objectivity, approaching it is what science is all about, and the reliable knowledge it produces is responsible for every advance in the modern world. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Peabody-winning news anchor Don Shelby lectures journalists about this misconception often.
“Some journalists don’t even attempt to establish the reality or truth of a story. Instead, they go out of their way to present ‘both sides,’ as if this were admirable,” he says.
And what I tell them is that “balance” doesn’t mean you present stories evenhandedly. It means you present them like a set of scales, and if the vast weight of the evidence is on one side of the argument, that’s the side that should get the vast weight of your reporting. You don’t push on the other side to falsely balance the scales. You tell the truth. That’s the “balance” we used to talk about in journalism. Today what we too often see is called “false balance,” because it presents both sides as if they have equal weight of the evidence, when that is objectively not true.
The first casualty of this “false balance” is journalism’s own credibility, and journalists’ ability to speak truth to or about power, which is one of the field’s main functions. (It is, incidentally, also one of the functions of the journalistic aspect of a scientist’s recounting of an experiment.) If one side’s account is based on the accumulated knowledge gained from tens of thousands of painstaking experiments done by thousands of scientists working over fifty years taking and reporting on billions of measurements reproducible by others, as in the case of climate science, and the other side is a persuasive opinion articulated by a passionate advocate who is intent on convincing viewers of the rightness of his or her perspective, by presenting them as a debate, journalism becomes an implicit advocate for extreme views, weighting them and presenting them to the public as if they had equal merit with tested knowledge. Journalism thus fuels the extreme partisanship we see in public dialogue today, and feeds into the hands of the very power journalists exist to challenge—vested interests who seek to circumvent evidence and undermine the democratic process to achieve a desired outcome.
It should be noted that many journalists argue that their job is not to establish truth, but simply to relay information fairly. This laissez-faire, hands-off view has come to dominate mainstream political journalism. David Gregory, NBC News’s chief White House correspondent during the George W. Bush administration, put it quite clearly in his defense of the White House press corps for not pushing President Bush on the lack of credible evidence of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” and the inconsistencies in Bush’s rationale for invasion before the United States entered Iraq. “I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you’re a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn’t do our job,” said Gregory. “I respectfully disagree. It’s not our role.”
But if it is not the press’s role, whose role is it? How are the people to make well-informed decisions about momentous policies without accurate, reasonably objective information and a questioning of the powerful, asking for evidence?
Similarly, the tendency of politicians to look for compromises on disputed questions of fact instead of basing decisions on an objective standard of knowledge is eroding the country’s ability to solve its problems, leaving it mired in policies that don’t work and political battles that go on forever. And by allowing the teaching of “alternative theories” on politically contentious topics like evolution or climate change or birth control in science classes, those same politicians damage children’s ability to learn critical thinking, to compete in a science-driven global economy, and to live in a world increasingly impacted by climate disruption.
This dumbing down of the people for ideological reasons is, of course, not new. It is an age-old authoritarian tactic. It happened in China during the Cultural Revolution. It happened in the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Renaissance Italy, twentieth-century Russia, and Nazi Germany—all of them societies whose leaders turned their backs on science, making it subordinate to an authoritarian ideology, and the societies collapsed.
The Great Dumbing Down
In trying to understand why mainstream journalists weren’t fairly covering the important science issues of the day, I continued probing editors and news directors, and I learned something else. There is a long-standing tradition in newsrooms for editors and news directors to forbid political reporters from covering science issues and to rarely place science stories in the politics pages. Science has been relegated to its own specialized section, and those sections are being eliminated.
This is a problem in a time when science is so central to our policy challenges. No other major human endeavor is so ghettoized. The religion and ethics beat has long since crossed over into the politics pages, as has the business and economics beat. Military affairs and foreign policy have been there all along.
Partly, this growing ghettoization is due to economics. Facing increased competition from cable TV and a largely free model of news on the Internet, commercial news media have been trimming costs. Among the first things to go were the most expensive: investigative and science reporters. A Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy report from 2005—early in the science-news crisis—showed that from 1989 to 2005, the number of major US newspapers with weekly science sections fell from ninety-five to thirty-four. By 2005, just 7 percent of the approximately 2,400 members of the US National Association of Science Writers had full-time positions at media outlets that reached the general public.
In May of 2008, the Washington Post killed its famed science section. In November, NBCUniversal fired the Weather Channel’s entire Forecast Earth staff—during the NBC network’s Green Week promotion—ending the station’s only environmental series that focused on global warming. In December, CNN fired its entire science, technology, and environment news unit. In March of 2009, the Boston Globe, located in a worldwide capital of scientific research, closed its renowned science and health section. Later that year, Columbia University announced that it was closing its Earth and Environmental Science Journalism program because of “current weakness in the job market for environmental journalists.” US newspapers had ninety-five weekly science sections in 1989, but just nineteen were left in 2012. The bloodshed continued. In early January 2013, the New York Times closed its environmental desk just two months after Hurricane Sandy (which scientists say was made worse by climate disruption) decimated the city. That