In 2006, 77 percent of Americans believed that there was solid evidence that the earth was warming.1 Although fewer Republicans accepted the evidence that Independents or Democrats, the great divergence of opinion did not occur until 2008 and 2009. Many have tried to explain that divergence. Part of the reason may be the news sources that people depend on.
The underlying premise of this paper is that narratives matter. Not that there aren't "real" interests at work, but politics is also a battle of narratives, counter-narratives, and counter-counter-narratives. We know that the story is in some ways the most popular form of human communication, and that stories--narratives with a plot (a beginning, a middle, and an end), a cast of characters (heroes and villains and victims), and a point--have the power to shape beliefs, evoke emotions, and appeal to values. Of particular interest are the stories that the media tells and transmits. Whatever else they are, the media are in the storytelling (and selling) business. Sometimes, journalists and commentators are the direct providers, sometimes they are brokers between those who peddle a tale and those they hope will hear it, but always the currency is the story. (source)
Frederick Mayer was a Shorenstein Fellow in Fall 2011, and he analyzed the stories that different news outlets told from 2001 to 2010. The figures above illustrate the differences between ABC News and FOX News. (Click on the images for full-size versions in a pop-up window.) As you can see, viewers of ABC news saw stories dominated by what Mayer calls the "climate tragedy" narrative, while viewers of FOX news saw stories dominated by the "hoax" narrative or the "he said/she said" narrative. Is it any difference that viewers of these two networks would see very different worlds?
I am participating in a seminar involving undergraduate journalism students and graduate students from my department (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology) and the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment. Its purpose is to give journalism students a chance to practice their interviewing skills and to give science students practice at communicating their work to reporters. For our last meeting this year, we decided to talk about the #arseniclife episode. What I've collected below are links and resources we'll use in our discussion.
Participants: All of the resources linked to below are relatively short and easy to read (except for Rosie Redfield's posts -- just try to get a sense of her objections, don't worry about the details). Scientists will especially want to ponder the question of how peer review works in very public science, and journalists will want to think about Carl Zimmer's take on Tom Clynes' Popular Science piece about the controversy and Clynes' response. The Deepak Singh video gives a non-biologist, non-journalist take on the role of Twitter in the controversy (hence the hashtag in the title of this post).
Media advisory from NASA announcing an astrobiology discovery (29 November 2010)
WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on
Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact
the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the
study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the
universe.
NASA press release accompnaying news conference (2 December 2010)
Researchers conducting tests in the harsh environment of Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its cell components.
"The definition of life has just expanded," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it."
Rosie Redfield's blog post criticizing the paper1 (4 December 2010)
Here's a detailed review of the new paper from NASA claiming to have isolated a bacterium that substitutes arsenic for phosphorus on its macromolecules and metabolites. (Wolfe-Simon et al. 2010, A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus.) NASA's shameful analysis of the alleged bacteria in the Mars meteorite made me very suspicious of their microbiology, an attitude that's only strengthened by my reading of this paper. Basically, it doesn't present ANY convincing evidence that arsenic has been incorporated into DNA (or any other biological molecule).
Some scientists are left wondering why NASA made such a big deal over a paper with so many flaws. "I suspect that NASA may be so desperate for a positive story that they didn't look for any serious advice from DNA or even microbiology people," says John Roth of UC-Davis. The experience reminded some of another press conference NASA held in 1996. Scientists unveiled a meteorite from Mars in which they said there were microscopic fossils. A number of critics condemned the report (also published in Science) for making claims it couldn't back up. And today many scientists think that all of the alleged signs of life in the rocks could have just as easily been made on a lifeless planet.
The controversy over the Martian meteorite still sputters on today because they contain only a few alleged fossils, rather than living bacteria. There are only a limited number of tests that scientists can run on the rocks, and their results remain murky. Fortunately, that's not the case for GFAJ-1. Critics say that a few straightforward tests on the bacteria would show whether they really do have arsenic-based DNA once and for all. And the NASA scientists say they're ready to hand out GFAJ-1 to researchers who want to study it. This controversy may be burning brightly at the moment, but it probably won't burn for long.
Last December, Felisa Wolfe-Simon announced the discovery of a microbe that could change the way we understand life in the universe. Soon she found herself plunged into a maelstrom of bitter backlash and intemperate criticism. A dispatch from the frontiers of the new peer review.
Carl Zimmer's blog post commenting on Clynes' article (20 October 2011)
It's a good article. I won't be forgetting the opening scene anytime soon, when Wolfe-Simon is ambivalently posing for a television crew, and she sinks into the mud of Mono Lake, where she first encountered GFAJ-1.
But I do share some of the reservations that science writer David Dobbs expresses over at his blog Neuron Culture. As a genre, the profile is one of the most addictive and enjoyable of all. It doesn't matter if the profile is of a hero or a scoundrel; the story is good as long as it's full of human nature in all its extremes. But profiles of scientists are tricky, because science transcends any single individual scientist. To do the science justice, you may need to pull the spotlight away and get into the less human stuff, like chemical reactions and pH levels.
To that end, I'd like to add a bit of context to a paragraph that you quote, regarding the storm of criticism and the paper's authors going "underground." You follow the excerpt with your comment that "Clynes has us believe that this barrage of extraordinary, brutal criticism (or perhaps questions from journalists) forced Wolf-Simon and her colleagues to go into witness protection."
Actually, I don't believe that, nor would I have my readers believe it. I think it would have been useful to your readers for you to have included my next paragraph, which makes it clear that I am in fact spotlighting both sides of a polarized dialogue regarding this particular point:
Microbiologist Jonathan Eisen of the University of California at Davis called the lack of response "absurd" and told Carl Zimmer from Slate, "They carried out science by press release and press conference. They are now hypocritical if they say that the only response should be in the scientific literature."
Though I didn't state my opinion in the story (better for readers to decide for themselves), I will here: I think that Eisen is on the money here.
I'm not going to do any more work on this - not going to do experiments to find out why arsenate stimulates growth, unless the mass spec shows that there really is arsenic in the DNA of arsenate-grown cells. The growth stimulation I'm seeing isn't a replication of Wolfe-Simon et al's report that their cultures grew with arsenate but not without it, but it might reflect the same biological process.
Deepak Singh3 provides a video overview. Read the posts above before you watch the video. The video won't make much sense without that background.
If you really can't get enough of #arseniclife, here are some more links:
The version of the Wolfe-Simon paper as it originally appeared on ScienceExpress: (2 December 2010) The version of the Wolfe-Simon paper as it finally appeared in Science: (3 June 2011) Table of Contents for Science (scroll to the bottom for the technical comments): (3 June 2011) Links from The Guardian through the end of December 2010: (Story Tracker) Various blog posts I made in which I mentioned arsenic-based life (Uncommon Ground) Bora Zivkovic' comprehensive collection of #arseniclife links (A Blog Around the Clock) A one-year anniversary update (Cosmic Log)
Disclaimer: That title is not original. It is copied verbatim from the original at The Guardian where Martin Robbins introduced me to the term "churnalism" with the addition of the word "journalism" at the end. I'll follow his example and quote from Wikipedia:
Churnalism is a form of journalism in which press releases, wire stories and other forms of pre-packaged material are used to create articles in newspapers and other news media in order to meet increasing pressures of time and cost without undertaking further research or checking.
There's even a tool that allows you to detect churnalism (or at least churnalism that appears in national newspapers in the UK, on Sky News, or on the BBC). Martin tried it on 18 stories released by the press office of the University College London and got the following hits:
Translation: 14 of the 18 stories didn't show up as churnalism. That could mean either that the stories weren't reported or that when they were reported, they weren't churned. Sorry to say, I suspect it was the former. In any case, of the four hits at churnalism.org, all showed substantial "recycling" from the UCL press releases. The BBC and the Times were better than others, but even they showed nearly 50% overlap with the press released.
I tried a search on a couple of recent biology-related press releases from the National Science Foundation and neither of them came up. I doubt that U.S. national newspapers are doing that much better than their counterparts in the U.K. I suspect that merely means that U.K. newspapers are, properly, reporting on research coming out of labs in the U.K.
A quick glance at the category archive listing in the far right column of this page makes one thing abundantly clear. I've written a lot about science communication, more than about any other topic1 That's because I think it's our responsibility as scientists to make our work accessible to the public and to share it with them.. For reasons Philip Kitcher explains well in the concluding chapter of Science, Truth, and Democracy, that obligation derives from our obligations as citizens of a democracy to contribute to its orderly functioning, and part of that orderly functioning depends on citizens being well informed.
I mention this because I just ran across a project that I'm going to have to learn more about,
NeuWrite is a collaborative working group for scientists, writers, and those in between: graduate, post-doctoral and faculty researchers, fiction and non-fiction writers, as well Journalism and MFA students at Columbia. The group serves as a writing and science resource for members pursuing their own projects, and as a forum for collaborative work. (source)
In particular, one of the projects linked to from neuwrite is the NeuroJournalism Mill, a "site dedicated to sifting the wheat from the chaff of popular media reporting on news about the brain". It looks like a very worthwhile project. If there are readers of this blog interested in trying something similar on environmental reporting, drop me a line. I'd like to "talk" with you about whether an EnviroJournalism Mill would also be worthwhile.
"This is a sprawling complex story. By creating both an editor with an overview and specific beats, we hope to help our journalists continue to focus on their elements of the story," [Mike] Oreskes said. "Designating an oil spill editor to take overall command of the story, and be free to focus exclusively on all the elements of the story, is one part of that commitment."
In addition to the three new hires, who will focus exclusively on the oil spill, the AP has about 20 full-time staffers in the Gulf who are involved in the coverage and another 50 or so reporters and editors who have been working on the story in the region, Oreskes said. ("Why the AP is Assigning Oil Spill Editor, Reporters", by Mallary Jean Tenore, Poynter Online)1
20 full-time staffers in the Gulf and 50 reporters and editors working on the story. They even have a page on their web site highlighting the work that they are doing.
But so far, Randy Olson still seems to be the only person to have compared this spill with the Santa Barbara spill 40 years ago -- and he's a filmmaker, not a reporter. Don't you think we might be able to learn something from those who lived through and covered the Santa Barbara spill? The Seattle Times did have a story comparing Deep Horizon to the Ixtoc 1 oil spill,2 but when I did a Google Search on "Santa Barbara oil spill", I didn't turn up reports from any major news outlets.
Over at The Benshi Randy Olson has a post asking "Where have all the science and environmental journalists gone?"1 He points out that even though nearly every report on the Deep Horizon disaster mentions the oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara 40 years ago, no one -- no one -- has visited the special collections archive at the University of California Santa Barbara to look over their collection of photos and news clippings for insights and perspectives.
Here's a little of what he has to say:
What's happening here? I've seen plenty of articles mentioning
the Santa Barbara spill. But why aren't there journalists digging
into these resources? Don't tell me it's not that big of a story. It
has been THE lead story on the evening news of virtually ALL
television news shows since late April with segment and after segment,
story after story being done.
I think there are two things at work here. First, there are so
few science and environmental reporters left that nobody has
the resources to afford the time to dig into the past. And second,
in the age of the internet, most reporters probably view Wikipedia
as good enough.
A fourth-grader in Beesville, Texas appears to have been the victim of a cruel hoax.
On June 5th the local newspaper in Beeville, a small town in Southern
Texas, published a story about a local 4th grade student who had it said
had just won the Junior Division of the National Science Fair for a
project entitled "Disproving Global Warming." The student, Julisa
Castillo, had received a package containing a trophy, medal, and plaque,
along with a letter purporting to be from an official at the National
Science Foundation and announcing her selection as the first place
winner out of 50,000 projects entered from 50 states.
There is no "National Science Fair". The closest thing is Intel's International Science and Engineering Fair, which used to be known as the National Science Fair. The award letter came on what looked to be official National Science Foundation letterhead, but according to Marla Zacharias, head of media and public relations at NSF, "The letter is not authentic, Linda [Slakey] had no knowledge of it, and it
amounts to fraudulent use of our name and logo."1
The incident has been referred to NSF's inspector general. Stay tuned. And click through to the Yale Forum for more details.
