The news exists to inform, not to educate

I’d like to highlight a letter published in Science on January 2. I have many points of disagreement with it but I’d also like others to read and reflect on it, especially if they’re (you’re) also going to disagree with my reading. The letter is entitled ‘Beyond misalignment of science in the news and in schools’.

What scientists want to get out of science journalism is not the same as what journalists want to get out of journalism. One symptom of this confusion — which is also what I’m disagreeing with the letter about — is that the authors of the letter use the terms “science journalism”, “science writing”, and “science communication” interchangeably. They’re really three distinct enterprises with distinct purposes. Science writing is a subset of science communication and science communication isn’t science journalism.

Science communication is concerned with faithfully communicating the structures and practices of science and their outcomes. Science journalism on the other hand is a branch of journalism focusing on science, which is as much about scientific ideas as the social, political, economic, demographic, etc. dimensions of science as well.

Importantly, science isn’t at the centre of the universe of science journalism: as with the other branches of journalism, public interest is. This means the object of science journalism is the public understanding of science — including its demands of governments, place in society, effect on public welfare, and so on, read together with our constitutional ideals, principles of justice and humanitarianism, the law of the land, and so on. It also includes scientific ideas but I think it’d be more useful if scientists understood the clear elucidation of those ideas is the beginning, not the end, of science journalism’s practice.

Saying we have a problem because the practice of science journalism somewhere by specific people hasn’t conveyed what scientists would like to have conveyed on that topic — as the authors of the letter write — is like complaining a film journalist didn’t review a film exactly how the director would have liked or a business journalist didn’t assess the prospects of a company in line with its shareholders’ expectations. Here’s a particularly disagreeable expression of this notion from the letter:

Stakeholders of science communication and education can learn from each other and address the misalignment of science in the news and in schools.

The news exists to inform, not to educate. I find the conflation so disagreeable because, considered cumulatively, news determines whether the education we’re providing/receiving is adequate or if it leaves students out of step with the way the world works. To belabour the point: education is the controlled dissemination of knowledge synchronised with the psychological and political development of society’s members while journalism, whose product is news, is a “history of now”*, capable of surprising us by virtue of being a record of the world’s shared-lived reality, i.e. something we don’t control as much as effect together.

On a somewhat related note, the letter begins by invoking Carl Sagan’s comment 40 years ago that newspapers ought to have science columns as often as they have astrology columns — which strikes me as a very convenient example that says nothing about what the study described in the letter is concerned with: how the press covers science. As the excerpt from the letter below indicates, Sagan’s problem is currently outdated: the press, mainstream or otherwise, covers science today to a much greater degree than it did in his time. It also covers a greater variety of topics. Thanks to the lower costs of publishing on the internet (as opposed to newspapers, which the letter is particularly concerned with), many magazines focused on specific topics have survived for longer than they would have if they were restricted to the printed medium.

… how newspapers projected the nature of science to the public during the [COVID-19] pandemic and on what aspects of science did they focus remain questions. To address such questions, we investigated 1520 news articles from four national newspapers in the United Kingdom for their coverage of different aspects of science during the omicron variant phase. Our analysis was guided by a broad account of science that includes the cognitive (i.e., thinking and reasoning), the epistemic (i.e., knowledge and methods), the social (i.e., values and norms), and the institutional (i.e., organizations, politics, and economics) aspects. An underlying assumption of our analysis was that public understanding of science would be better served through a holistic coverage of science that does not miss out on vital elements of the scientific enterprise. For example, although scientific knowledge is important to understand, it is often difficult to make sense of such knowledge if there is no context that unpacks why such knowledge is important in the first place, where such knowledge is developed, by whom, and under what circumstances.

This said, the conceptual framework the researchers developed to analyse the scientific contents of the four newspapers and their 1,520 articles — especially once it’s shorn of its relationship with science education — could be useful for science journalists to understand how their priorities may have ‘drifted’ during the pandemic, the consequences of their time-varying access to experts and/or expertise in different areas, and the place and value of the (free) press during public crises.

The overall findings from our study showed that the social and institutional aspects of science were emphasized to a greater extent than the cognitive and the epistemic aspects in all the newspapers. When we unpacked each aspect to examine the details, different patterns emerged. For example, within the institutional aspects, the political dynamics of science were covered to a greater extent in all newspapers than any other aspect. Some of the social aspects were downplayed in all newspapers. There was hardly any coverage of scientific ethos that would capture scientific norms. … Likewise, social aspects of science that involve peer review processes in the validation of scientific knowledge were mentioned to a limited extent in all newspapers. When we examined the cognitive and epistemic aspects, we observed that there was hardly any reference to scientific methods.

… in a related study in which we used the same sample of newspapers and focused on nonpharmaceutical interventions, our findings suggested that it was neither the number of COVID-19 news articles nor the actual number of cases and deaths, but the treatment in newspapers of specific aspects of science, particularly scientific knowledge and methods, that was associated with mobility change during the pandemic. The way that newspapers discuss epidemics may potentially influence changes in human mobility, a key factor in containing the spread of infectious diseases.

I’m also gladdened by scientists’ interest in such exercises and hope they engage directly with journalists to develop conceptual frameworks that aren’t susceptible to misunderstandings of what science as well as journalists are or aren’t capable of. For example, here's a short excerpt from a conversation I’d had last year with IISER Bhopal philosopher Varun Bhatta about the problems with invoking ideas from philosophy in a journalistic article, which I think is also implicated in the letter’s authors’ argument that while “scientific knowledge is important to understand, it is often difficult to make sense of such knowledge if there is no context that unpacks why such knowledge is important in the first place, where such knowledge is developed, by whom, and under what circumstances.”

… all journalism needs to be in the public interest, and I’ve no idea what a philosophy in the public interest sounds like, which is because I don’t know what constitutes philosophy news, that could lend itself to news reports, news analyses, and news features. Is there a community, collective or organisation of philosophers in India that’s trying to reach out to more people? Where can I engage with an articulation of what I’m missing out on when I skip a comment from a philosopher for a news article? On a related note, many of us in journalism have studied journalism, which is its own field – just like philosophy – with its own tools to develop ways to frame the world, to make sense of it. I have no idea where philosophy is situated here, if at all. …

We also need to be clear there are differences between newspapers and magazines, their sizes, remits, and frequencies of publication. Publications that take it slower and with more pages than a newspaper – or, more generally, articles that are composed over a longer time (much longer than news reports, of course) and are also lengthier (more than a few hundred words at least) are also likelier to have the time and the room to include philosophical deliberations. This is the sort of room we need … to lay the groundwork first. Otherwise, such ideas just vanish under the unforgiving demands of the inverted pyramid.

Now … If I have to pay a writer Rs 5,000 to write a 1,000-word article about some idea or event that’s of interest in philosophical circles, and I expect (based on historical data) that 10,000 people will engage sincerely with the article, I need each one of those people to be able to readily contribute 50 paise to the publication for me to break even – and this is hard. The size of the engaged audience will actually be more like 1,000, requiring each one of those people to contribute Rs 5. And this is extraordinarily difficult given the prevailing ratios of the sizes of the overall audience, the engaged audience, and the paying audience. Similarly, if I add another page in the newspaper so I can accommodate more philosophy-centred material and charge readers Re 1 extra to pay for it (assuming here that advertisers won’t be interested in advertising on this page), will I have enough new readers to offset those who will stop buying the paper because of the higher cover price? I doubt it.

Against this background, in fact, it will be useful if scientists’ efforts to improve science education — by examining what students are taught and how that relates to the “public understanding of how science works” and its effects on people’s choices — focused instead on the genesis, constitution, and evolution of public interest. This is because the public interest, apart from railroading what narratives ought (or ought not) to be present in the news, has a strong influence on which combination of business models and ideologies a news publisher can adopt in order to have both a persistent readership and a sustainable revenue stream.

* As a professor of journalism once put to me.