Insights on science journalism
Review by Matthias Kohring
So what runs through … is the question of how science journalism wants to understand itself: primarily as a mediator of science to society or as an independent observer, committed to the non-scientific public, who deals with the influence of science on society — and vice versa.
Insights on science journalism is the third volume in a ‘Journalism Insights’ series which brings together theoretically grounded case studies on a particular journalistic area. This volume is edited by Felicity Mellor, Director at the Science Communication Unit at Imperial College London, who in her introduction contrasts two possible perspectives on science journalism today: the “crisis story” emphasises the dwindling quality, economic weakness and growing dependence on science PR, whereas the “opportunity story” highlights the importance of science journalism during the Corona crisis and refers to the new publication possibilities on the net.
This contrast provides the background from which the contributions in this volume shall be read. Mellor has assigned the ten texts to three main themes: how science journalism established itself as a beat in the 20th century, how science journalists manage the relationship with their sources, and which (stylistic) techniques science journalists use to transform science information into “compelling and engaging output”.
The articles all deal with very interesting facets of science journalism and its social framework, even if they have a descriptive focus, such as Saleh’s sobering look at the current situation of independent science journalists in Russia. Here, the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have politicised science reporting to such an extent that independent reporting within the country has become practically impossible. Nguyen and Tran address the dominance of science news from the North in the countries of the global South, especially Vietnam. The text also mentions some home-made causes, so that the reference to the “reinforcement of the colonial scientific order” as main explanation seems somewhat simplistic.
The first two articles by Swanberg and Mellor on the development of US science journalism in the 1920’s and by Keller about the slowly progressing metamorphosis of science reporting on BBC radio after World War II are definitely worth reading. Keller shows the change from the direct address of the public by the scientist, in which the “journalist” only has the role of the stirrup holder, to journalistic reporting on science, i.e. reporting based on audience expectations. Swanberg and Mellor trace the founding of the Science Service, a news service designed to popularise science and to supply newspapers with science news, initiated by the American publisher E. W. Scripps, and they describe the development of the science beat at the New York Times. The article about the BBC in particular shows the laborious emancipation of a genuinely journalistic view of science.
It is somehow sobering that more than 50 years later, the BBC of all places is proving to be susceptible to churnalism, the unreflected adoption of externally provided news material (see the article by Guenther, Schröder and Tratter). This comes not least from the scientific organisations themselves, which in this way turn the wheel back. The conflict between an emancipated journalistic perspective and the supposedly preferable demands of the scientific system is most evident in Mellor’s lucid consideration of the concepts of objectivity and impartiality as journalistic guidelines.
As far as the observation of science is concerned, the norm of impartiality has attracted a great deal of criticism, some of it justified. For example, it has repeatedly been shown that minority views on climate change have been presented as an equal alternative to scientific knowledge. However, Mellor clearly rejects calls to exclude science from such reporting standards and considers it striking that the balance norm is not applied in the majority of science reporting, which makes science journalism susceptible to strategic interests.
The view of how journalistic science journalism should be and how much it is “allowed” to emancipate itself from science represents a second background for reading the articles. More than once, an understanding of science journalism as science popularisation emerges, for example in Molek-Kozakoeska’s contribution on stylistic means “because it is not at all easy to present scientific content in attractive ways”.
Reference is repeatedly made to the particular difficulty of science journalism because the subject matter is so complex or because journalists are supposedly more dependent on their sources than other journalists. These are classic topoi from the discourse on the function of science journalism, which conceive it primarily as a mediator of knowledge and agent of science popularisation. In her readable case study on the very successful science book, The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks, Kilian emphasises that science topics are challenging because of the “dense content and terminology that may be unfamiliar”. But the book on Lacks in particular is an example of how science can also be told from the perspective of those affected and without any educational claim.
So what runs through as a second theme alongside “crisis or opportunity” is the question of how science journalism wants to understand itself: primarily as a mediator of science to society or as an independent observer, committed to the non-scientific public, who deals with the influence of science on society — and vice versa. The contributions by Gregory on the associations of science journalists and by Broer on the German Science Media Centre can also be read as an indication that a lack of clarity on this issue can lead to a problematic proximity to the object of reporting. Ultimately, the question of expectations of science journalism should be posed primarily to its public. Unfortunately, it does not have a say in this volume.
Matthias Kohring is professor of media and communication science at the University of Mannheim, Germany. He has dealt theoretically with the function of science journalism and, following studies on trust in journalism, is currently working on trust in science. His recent publications include (with F. Zimmermann, 2020) Mistrust, disinforming news, and vote choice: A panel survey on the origins and consequences of believing disinformation in the 2017 German parliamentary election, Political Communication, 37(2), 215–237.
