Scientist-journalist relations in Science
The July 11 issue of Science includes a short paper on relations between scientists and journalists. The investigation covers epidemiologists (n = 608) and stem cell researchers (n = 706) in the US, Japan, Germany, the UK and France.
Contacts were fairly common (30% had more than 5 media contacts in the past 3 years) and scientists reported mostly positive interactions, the researchers say. (I’d not really call two contacts per year common, though).
As might be expected, scientists reported “increasing the public’s appreciation of science”, “achieving a more positive public attitude toward research” and “a better-educated general public” as their main motivations for contacts with the media. Also, the problem of trust in journalists was a common issue: “[nine in 10 respondents identified the "risk of incorrect quotation" in stories as an important disincentive, and 8 in 10 felt that the "unpredictability of journalists" was also a problem]“. Now, this is not terribly surprising. More interestingly, only a third of the respondents found media incompatible with the scientific culture, and the proportion of researchers who anticipated positive reactions from peers (39%)was almost as large as that fearing negative peer reactions (42%).
Also interesting is the relation between the quality of available scientific reporting and the degree of satisfaction of the scientists (with their media appearances):
Japanese researchers reported being slightly less “pleased” with their latest appearance in the media than their Western colleagues were, and researchers from the USA and Germany were slightly more “pleased” than British and French scientists [...] Assessments of media coverage of science in general also varied modestly but significantly by country [...] German and French researchers rated the quality of science coverage most positively, British researchers perceived it most negatively, and U.S. and Japanese researchers took middle positions.
Now, I don’t know about Japanese science journalism, but otherwise the rated quality of science coverage (national, I presume, even if that’s not evident in the text) meshes very well with what I’ve seen so far. There are a lot of serious popular science magazines in Germany and France, compared to for instance Sweden, while more of the English/American reporting seems to end up in the “cool stuff” area.
I think that if researchers from other countries - ones less well placed on the top-research-countries scale - had been asked, they would have opinions more in line with the British (Germany and France are not really representative for the situation in most countries). Using these results to extrapolate to an arbitrary country would be overly optimistic. But still, positive results in this area is a nice thing.
If the authors had also divided their statistics more clearly in different age/seniority and gender groups, this study would have been even more informative. And if they had included a couple of less prestigious research nations as well… it would have been interesting to see how well the results held up.
Reference: Peters et al, “SCIENCE COMMUNICATION: Interactions with the Mass Media”, Science vol. 321. no. 5886, pp. 204 - 205 (DOI: 10.1126/science.1157780)
Tags: science communication