Just wondering what the smart people thought on this one. Does the media, and how they protray science have any effect on what is actually researched? How about the political climate?
Media helps bias idiot lawmakers to make laws limiting research. But biological research is largely influenced by money (what is profitable), and i assume the other sciences are as well.
this is based solely on my experience in medical research, and with respect to that research. that is, i am not commenting on scientific research in general.
first off: our goal is to design a system, which would probably cost about $30k top to bottom, and we are the most science-oriented of the groups who are attacking this problem. other groups throw 40 engineers at something, just to get a commercial product out.
anyway, it is nuts how much research is affected by things other than the desire for knowledge. since we have a clear medical goal, though, i don’t think that’s a bad thing, necessarily. getting funding for something is very much dependent on the goals of the funding groups, and the desire to do something that no one else is doing also has a lot to with it. without funding, we could go nowhere. no one would get paid, no tools or computers would be purchased, and the development price is quite a bit higher than just the top-to-bottom price of the whole system. so, the state of things has a lot to do with what we research in many different ways.
as far as the media goes, i don’t think the media concerns itself much with hardcore scientific research, and institutions funding such research as a result, don’t care much about the media. we are trying to use the media to increase public awareness of our research, so people can say “wow, that’s cool,” and hopefully it will become a more popular part of medicine. if we fail to do that, because the media doesn’t think it’s worthwhile, i could see how that might end the research. but how it was started in the first place wasn’t really affected.
Yeah, I’ll answer this one.
The media has an impact on how science is viewed by a whole lot of people.
For example, the theory that Global Warming is caused by man made polution went from a ‘THEORY’ to a ‘FACT’ thanks to the media. The Global Warming idea is a theory that should still be considered just a theory. There just isn’t enough information to prove the theory either way yet the media is reporting it as a fact. At the same time the ‘Theory of Relativity’ is still considered a theory even though there are boat loads of evidence that the theory is pretty much true.
Another Media Based Lie regarding science is that Thomas Jefferson is the father of Sally Hemmings daughter. In fact what the DNA tests proved was that Jefferson was one of multiple people who could have fathered the child. Link Somehow this morphed from “Jefferson could be the father based on DNA” to “Jefferson is the father”. (Note, I don’t really care who the father was, I just found it insane that facts were thrown out the window and no one seemed to care)
The Media is incompetent when it comes to reporting science issues. Sadly that leads to an uninformed public which then causes voters to endorse science programs that have nothing to do with reality.
At least that is my take on it.
Slee
I’d say that the media definitely influences what scientists choose to investigate, since fame and money are powerful motivators for both researchers and their backers.
However, which ideas get accepted as scientific doctrine is based on peer-review, not personal motivation. And peer-review is not a kind, friendly process, no sir. It’s more like a Klingon manhood ritual. Except that the guys with the shock sticks want you to fail, because to become a man you have to challenge their manhood. And even if you do survive, you have to do it again everytime a worthy challenge is offered (i.e. one that survives the same ritual).
So I don’t believe that the media biases scientific doctrine.
Hey Sleestak, I pretty much agree with everything you said, but don’t agree with this part. You are getting caught in a common confusion: English and science have two different languages.
In science-speak, a theory is as close to a fact as an idea can get. Gravity is a theory, not a fact. Proposed ideas which haven’t been accepted yet by the scientific community are hypotheses.
In English, a scientific theory is a fact, and a scientific hypothesis is a theory.
Can’t blame the media for getting confused, really. IMHO, the scientific terminology should change.
Btw, global warming is no longer disputed, and so in science-speak went from a hypothesis to a theory, and in English went from a theory to a fact. The Earth is definitely getting warmer - how much of the warming is human-caused is still debated.
It seems to me that the media certainly does have a bias, towards alarmism. The media loves to talk about the imminent doom of global warming, the terror that is global cooling (recall 30 or so years ago), the horror of aresnic in the water, blah blah blah. If some scientist somewhere says that life on Earth is in mortal peril, it will be reported. If another scientist of equal credibility says we’re all fine, it will be ignored.
While the phenomenon is unfortunate and certainly more than a little dishonest, it’s not surprising. What’s going to sell more papers? “Life As We Know It About To End”, or “Everything Just Hunky-Dory, Say Leading Scientists”?
Jeff
Not to mention how many more paper’s the next scare is going to sell as opposed to how many papers this might.
“You know that thing we got you all worked up about? Well science says we were wrong.”
If you mean mass media, I don’t think very much. The mass media reports on things when they are about to be published, which is way too late to affect research starts. I agree that they usually mess up the reporting - but don’t complain unless you’ve tried to report on something you don’t understand very well.
The scientific media however, has a big impact. I’ve noticed that a paper delivered to a standing room crowd at a major conference inspires many more papers on the subject the next year. Yes, grant money has a big impact, but grant applications take a lot of time, and what is hot definitely inspires grant proposals. In my experience, the funding officers do not push certain agendas, and the peer reviewers of the grant have a lot more clout than then guy working for NSF. There are exceptions - Licklider and ARPANet/Multics is one.
Yes, although the latest evidence, as summarized by the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) and NAS (National Academy of Sciences) studies, is that most of the warming seen in the last half-century is probably human-caused. Also, there is a general consensus around the prediction that human-caused effects will lead to warming of 1.4-5.6 degrees C (2.5 to 10 degrees F) over the next century. Even the few remaining “global warming skeptics”, such as Patrick Michaels, often predict numbers in that range (usually the low end, of course).
As to the general question from the OP: I think the media does a so-so job reporting science. I don’t think that the reporting is horribly biased but I do think that there is a tendency to oversimplify things, not surprisingly.
As for alarmist tendencies, while I can understand the pressures people have identified in that direction, I also think there are countervailing pressures. For example, on global warming and such, the tendency of the media to go for “balance” means that a few people (like the “global warming skeptics”) with very sparse publication records in the scientific literature tend to get quoted way out of proportion to their contribution to the science…I.e., the media can sometimes give the impression that there is more debate than actually really exists, which I think they may have done on global warming until recently.
Another pressure on the media is the fact that they are often owned by large corporations that have a stake in some issues … I.e., doesn’t GE own NBC and that could affect the issue of the science around cleanup of PCBs in the Hudson River, for example. Even when they don’t have a stake (e.g. the other networks besides NBC), there may be a tendency not to start a “war” by reporting a nasty story about GE so that NBC is tempted to run something nasty about Disney.
Finally, there is a lot of funding, much of it rather covert, that corporations engage in to influence how the media reports on various scientific issues that affect them. See “Trust Us, We’re Experts” by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber.
Science: Often full of jargon, math, Long Words That Are Hard To Saysub[/sub], lengthy explanations, proofs, posits, references, evidence, and written material encompassing a hundred pages or more.
Media: Anything longer than a 10 second sound bite is discarded.
Is anyone really surprised that anything remotely intelligent gets dumbed down by news reports?
I think the media in general do a poor job of reporting scientific issues. However, if the OP is asking what the impact of this reporting is on the conduct of scientific work, I’d say it varies. I don’t believe my wife’s medical research is affected too much by the media. There’s surely no direct impact. There might be a slight indirect impact, insofar as media may influence how much grant money is awarded in various research areas.
Americans are pretty ignorant about science - except “science” like parapsychology or crytozoology - so most media coverage of science is of the gee whiz variety. This AM I saw a piece on nat’l news which was introduced with the teaser Face Transplants" (!) which turned out to be a rather less spectacular story about skin grafts. But it got my inital attention.
I would tend to think that media attention can help funnel reasearch money - breast cancer for example. I believe more $ has been available since it became a hot issue.
the media biases everything and seems to mostly try to keep people confused in the name of fairness. it varies depending on where you look.
the History Channel did a 1 hour show on computers and mentioned John von Neumann and von Neumann machine for 2 1/2 minutes.
in 1992 there was a series on PBS called THE MACHINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, supposedly about computers. 6 hour long episodes. they mentioned Alan Turing and the Turing Test, they showed films of ENIAC that von Neumann worked on, but no mention of von Neumann. almost all computers today are von Neumann machines, very strange.
on the global warming thing i considered the theory HIGHLY PROBABLE ten years ago, but in the last year the media has switched from somewhat possible to fact. you never can tell who is pulling what strings to propagandize us with what.
the schools don’t seem to teach science worth a damn so the media may be full of know nothings anyway. remember Capt. Kirk said ONE TO THE FOURTH POWER. DUH!
Dal Timgar
Especially if the news stories are titled something like:
BREAST cancer research
Au contraire. A theory is a theory, a fact is a fact.
That the pencil falls to the ground when I drop it is a repeatable observable fact. Gravity is the story I use to explain it.
It is a very persuasive story, and accords with all that I know. But the history of science has many instances of better explanations coming along, sometimes after many many years.
I would suggest that the desire for scientists to give us absolute, eternal answers about the nature of reality is much more a theological desire than a scientific one. Hence, the oxymoron of “scientific doctrine”
Right, and that’s why, when actual working scientists will tell us that they cannot give us “absolute eternal answers”, a lot of the public gets annoyed, says “you really have no agreement on what the truth is” and decides to switch to some other explanation that satisfies that desire.
Going back to the “Global Warming” hijack: A rise in average temperatures in the last couple of centuries, as read in collected weather reports, is an observed fact. HOW COME that has been observed and what happens next… that is what theories are about.
An answer to the OP:
Yes.
Exactly.
Even this has been called into question though, what with how we only began to make systematic measurements of global temperatures around 1900. The measurements of temperature at various parts of the globe were a lot more sporadic before 1900, and thus the data we use to compute the global average temperature before 1900 is not as reliable.
Or as a scientist would say, before 1900, the error bars were a lot wider.