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Last week, we published a story at the Miami New Times linking Florida governor Charlie Crist to a father-son team of chemical castrators named Dr. Mark and David Geier. The Geiers are “anti-vax” autism researchers who believe rigorous chelation therapy, augmented with the castration drug Lupron, is an effective treatment for (some) autistic children. (That's the digest version, anyway. You may find some good background on the Geiers here, courtesy of Respectful Insolence, or you may view our own story here.) From all appearances, the governor's office is attempting to bend a reluctant Florida Department of Health to the Geiers' will, as the researchers seek access to the state's database of millions of confidential vaccination records. The governor's intercession comes at the request of one Dr. Gary Kompothecras; chiropractor, anti-vaxer, Geiers supporter, and – crucially – major Crist fundraiser, with a seat on the Governor's Autism Task Force.
This is reprehensible, but it's not the subject of this screed. In this screed, we'd like to share what we left out of the story: Our queasy suspicion that none of the cynical shennanigans described therein would have taken place if the governor believed his constituents understood science, or had any faith in his state's media to report factually on a science story.
If we're right, it must be said: the governor has not made an entirely unreasonable assumption. We two are skeptics, journalists, and Floridians, yet prior to researching this story we had no idea that Charlie Crist had tapped Dr. Gary Kompothecras to be on his Autism Task Force. (If it wasn't for Respectful Insolence and a neuro-diversity activist of our acquaintance, we'd never have heard of Lupron, either.) And if we didn't know, what chance had the average Floridian of knowing – the one who gave up her subscription to The Miami Herald three years ago and now gets her news from Drudge and HuffPo? None at all.
Our story received a loud and enthusiastic reception from the skeptical and neuro-diversity communities, but constituted barely a blip on the radar of the mainstream media. We hope it's not mere egoism that makes us believe the reception rather proves the point about the wretched relationship between science and the press. There is, after all, a very important election coming up in the States, and the Crist-Rubio-Meek race has been one of the country's most-watched. Imagine any other situation in which a campaigning pol's name became attached to the word “castration” and the event didn't cause pools of saliva to accumulate beneath the chins of the nation's talking heads. There was no drooling this time, because in order to make political grist out of the Lupron story, the talking heads would have had to dismiss the claims of the anti-vaxers and embrace the findings of “mainstream science” as unequivocally true. In other words, they would have had to take a stand on a scientific issue. And that just isn't done.
Why not? There are, after all, some things that newspapers and cable news programs will treat as unequivocally true. For example: Though they cannot know for sure, news outlets from Hannity & Colmes to The New Yorker have taken it on faith that God does not “hate fags,” no matter how voluminously the Westboro Baptist Church may preach to the contrary. Furthermore, every news outlet is happy to report that the 9/11 Truthers are nuts; that Richard Nixon was uncommonly dishonest; that Stalin was bad and Hitler was worse; and that Lady Gaga is not a world-conquering Manchurian Candidate singing in the service of the subterranean reptilian Illuminati. There are those who disagree with such sentiments, yet the media feel no need to offer “balance” (how we loathe the word) by giving these contrarians a voice.
The media is much more tentative on vaccines/autism in particular, and on alt-med or science in general. Why?
Our own (hopelessly circumscribed) experience leads us to finger four particular culprits for the media's science-indifference.
1. If it bleeds, it leads. Yes, it does, and the front page's natural preference for the loud and the splashy does lead to an over-reporting of woo-stories and an under-reporting of skeptical stories. “Angel Rescues Trapped Miners” is news, whereas “Angel Fails To Rescue Trapped Miners” is just kind of depressing. Still, though – science is full of loud and splashy stories. “Castration” is a loud and splashy word! Moreover, science deals with such tantalizing subjects as the end of the universe, sexuality, cancer, cybernetics, AI, life extension, weaponry, and love. If reporters were as obsessed with drama, excitement, screamy-headline-type stories as we suppose, science journalism would be a much bigger deal than it is. But journalists, we suspect, have a difficult time contextualizing scientific data, because their brains have been subtly poisoned by a very bad idea.
2. Objectivity is a false god. Yes, it is. Modern journalism is an American invention of very recent vintage, and newspaper writing prior to the American Civil War was floridly and nakedly partisan. The enormity of the war led to an increasingly somber and clinical tone among news writers, even as advances in telegraph technology led to a surplus of news and a resultant shortage of paper. By the early 1900s, the flat, info-packed style of American newswriting existed in more-or-less its present form, though “objectivity” wasn't yet its stated goal. That came in the following decades, as the result of arguments within academia and internecine conflicts within individual dailies. Those in favor of pure objectivity won the day (or at least a plurality of advertisers), and now most newsfolk think “objectivity” was something handed down on Sinai. It wasn't. But even if it was, it wouldn't be any more attainable. What gets printed or aired in a news story has everything to do with which sources get back to a reporter before deadline, who looks best on camera, and what angle might make a story juiciest and thereby more appealing to an editor. (This last applies mostly to television media, though we print people are not entirely juice-resistant.) That said, objectivity is a fine goal – as long as a reporter actually thinks about it. But we tend not to. Consider the slogan “Fair & Balanced.” It's popular, but meaningless. “Fairness” is telling the truth; “balance” is undermining every truth with an equal and opposite untruth. Reporters are distressingly committed to the latter, unless the untruth in question is so obviously ridiculous as to be beneath mention. This is the case with the ideology of the Westboro Baptist Church and the suggestion that Lady Gaga is a Freemasonic cyborg. You'd think the notion of a link between, say, vaccines and autism would be in this category as well, but it's not. And that's because:
3. Journalists don't know much about science. True. The scientists have graphs. The anti-vaxers have graphs. The scientists sound a little saner, but how can a poor, bedeadlined journalist be sure? He can't. And so he plays it safe, offering up nice, balanced stories like this one, which secretes several good points amid several bad ones, trusting in the readers' scientific expertise to sift the one from the other. Similarly written pieces are likely to be published for a while, because:
4. Journalists don't think science is cool. True. Remember the flap about the Virginia Heffernan article in the New York Times Magazine? In that article, Heffernan launched a nasty attack on the good folk of ScienceBlogs.com while fruitlessly namechecking a few post-structuralists from the last century, as though Darwinism was a mere social construct but Derrida was channeling God. (And as though the spiteful polemic was a weapon solely licensed to journos. No pharyngula allowed!) Defending herself in the comments section of a colleague's blog, Virginia excused one of her errors on the grounds that she “has no training” in science, and was so unaware of the existence of climate change “denialism” that she failed to recognize denialist literature when she saw it. She claimed this even though her screed was, in part, a strident argument against strident arguments against climate change denialism. The substance of those arguments aside, we hope you'll agree with this assessment: If Ms. Heffernan had been writing about literature, politics, food, or sports, she wouldn't have felt nearly so comfortable claiming ignorance as a defense. Only when writing about science, apparently, may journalists write before bothering to learn anything about their subject. Take a look at Nancy Gibbs' story from a June issue of Time, in which she editorialized about synthetic biology while acknowledging in the first graf that she needed the phrase “synthetic biology” defined for her before she could write about it. Does that inspire your confidence? (In the same story, Gibbs tentatively suggests that we avoid manufacturing bacteria, as bacteria can mutate in unexpected ways. She never gets around to explaining why this isn't equally true of the bacteria in her own small intestine.)
Carl Sagan often opined that understanding science isn't as difficult as lay people imagine. Consider the complicated data syntheses occurring within the brains of rabid NFL or FIFA-fans – that's hardly less complicated than the attainment of an amateur-level grasp of physics or biology. It's certainly a good deal more complex than a basic understanding of the hows and whys of critical thought. But just because journalists could and should learn science doesn't mean they will. They're busy people.
We submit that the only way to create a science-literate press is by hitting journalists where it hurts: In their egos. At a recent lecture in Gotheburg, in Sweden, James Randi was asked by an audient: “What would be the best suggestion you have to us in Sweden to do something about the media's problem?” His response is applicable well beyond Sweden:
“Complain! It works, folks. When you see something absolutely non-sensical on television, write a formal letter with your address and your telephone number expressing how displeased you are. [Write a letter] saying that you're not stupid, and you don't want to be treated like a little child. Say: I'm a citizen of the moden age! Don't drag me back into medieval times.”
Right on. If the skeptical community was to use its considerable erudition to issue an en masse challenge to the media, we think it likely that the media would respond. Journalists don't want to be wrong, and they pride themselves on their skepticism. Indeed, it was a naturally skeptical bent that led most of them to journalism in the first place. Journalists, especially investigative reporters, are individuals almost pathologically suspicious that they are being lied to by the rich, the powerful, and the cynical. They can sniff a dissembler from miles away, and take a visceral pleasure in the exposure of fraud and hypocrisy. Not a gullible bunch. They could and should be our closest allies.
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If i started to write a sports colum, one would find that rather quickly readers would avoid it like the plague. Not knowing about sports, one can not really be a sports journalist.
If i were to write an article on the internal functions of, or the asthetic beauty ( or lack thereof) of cars much the same situation would take place.
But how many scientific articles have you seen that were written, read or otherwise performed by someone with little to no grasp of science. And this would be okay if they were only talking about very basic concepts. But for some reason when discussing science if one says " i don't really know that much about this...." that is translated to " the people who do know about this arn't so smart, so listen to this..." and people believe it.
And that is not even scratching the surface of this type of thinking that we encounter in day to day life. How many times has someone started a conversation with " i don't know too much about the science of it...." and gone onto then explain why vaccines are bad, or how homeopathy is the best thing since sliced bread?
Someone saying they don't know should be an indication to not listen to their opinions on technical topics. If my advice is next to useless when discussing a car, how is someone with equivelent knowledge of science suddenly someone who's opinion should be given weight?