The problem with science journalism: A lack of answering “why?”
Michael Swan Laufer appeared at the What Is Journalism? conference in Portland, Oregon, in a black shirt and pants, accompanied by a purple vest and tie. He sported a thick beard and clean shaven scalp.
During a presentation he gave before a room of about 20 people, Laufer showed a slide of himself just a few months ago ,and the screen displayed a noticeable difference. He had a thick head of hair. He hadn’t cut it since he was 14 (21 years ago) and had it wrapped in a ponytail.
And Laufer didn’t shave his head by choice.
See, Laufer contracted Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) — an anti resistant infection typically caused by overuse of antibiotics — and ultimately lost his hair because of it. He used this to explain his overarching point: Why isn’t science journalism communicating risks like these to the people?
“That breakdown is the failure of science journalism to be sufficiently pervasive that ‘Oh, everybody knows you shouldn’t take antibiotics all the time,’ it’s really dangerous,” Laufer said.
If it had been publicized to the point of it becoming common knowledge, the predicament that he and many others are faced with may have been avoided. For Laufer, that’s a reason why the problems he sees in scientific journalism hit so close to home.
Laufer was introduced as a mathematician, but he has several titles. He’s a physicist, a teacher and also a journalist. His specialty involves differential geometry.
Plenty of his profession includes analysis and explanation, which he says doesn’t exist as it should in science reporting. As a kid, Laufer became increasingly angry about this lack of in-depth reasoning in storytelling.
“Say you’re not a trained scientist but you’re interested in science,” Laufer said. “You go to the bookstore and there’s all this popularized stuff, but it doesn’t give you any tools if you want to muck around it yourself.”
In essence, Laufer wants the “why?” to be included in science journalism. He says prestigious publications like The New York Times are behind the curve when it comes to this aspect.
“I believe very much in the Vonnegut formulation,” Laufer said. “If you can’t explain it to an 8 year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
That Laufer’s problem: He sees a take it or leave it mindset in which a reader is expected to take what’s published and purvey it as the consensus truth.
At the What is Journalism? conference, a lot of the conversation was directed to audience engagement. What does your reader want? But Laufer isn’t a fan of that discussion entirely.
What’s most important for a reader to know about? Why should we care? Those are questions he says need to first be answered by the journalist. Then it becomes, is the journalist telling it in a understandable way. Right now in science, Laufer says not enough journalists are.
