Emerging Technologies Consulting

Ars has a good story up detailing how stories like the Facebook one I mentioned earlier this week end up slanted the way they are. It would be good reading for any student to help them understand that what makes it to our newspapers and on news programs isn’t always completely accurate.  In this case, Ars points out that the Facebook story that claimed that students who used Facebook more had worse grades.  This is actually true, but it’s a correlation not a causation, something the first news story (which set the tone for many of the rest) did not emphasize.  So the story wasn’t inaccurate, but some sloppy reporting made the results appear different than they actually were.  Ars explains that often journalists (or their editors) will exaggerate or emphasize findings that are more sensational in order to grab readers.  Unlike science journals, newspapers and news shows are out to make money and that sometimes causes them to skew their reporting.  There are even more examples of this in areas outside of science–politics, crime, etc.

Ars points to several issues in science reporting that lead to this problem.  One is the embargo system, which does two things.  When a journalist breaks it, they get to set the tone and direction of the story, even if they have it wrong, as happened in the case of the Facebook story.  Two, it can mean that regular folks have no access to the real paper on which a story is based, so that the public could judge for itself how accurate the story is.  Another problem is the general reduction in staff for science reporting, leading non-specialists to do the reporting or leaving overworked journalists to work, perhaps less carefully, on all the science stories.  And a third problem is the press releases themselves.  Some are quite good and present research accurately.  Others are sometimes the source of the sensationalism (in an attempt to gain attention for the institution) rather than the newspaper or news program.  Scientists sometimes don’t give these reports the careful reading they should or sneak in implications that wouldn’t make it past peer review.  Ars says that readers should learn to be more skeptical, but also,

Scientists could stand to further develop the skills needed to communicate their work with people who aren’t part of the scientific community, and to ensure that these skills are made part of the graduate education program, so that the situation improves.

One way that scientists and readers alike can circumvent this problem is through blogs.  Scientists learn to communicate their work to a general public and/or comment on others’ work in a way that the public can understand and readers get an inside look at how science really works.  There are a few places to find these blogs.  The most popular is Scienceblogs.  I read quite a few of the blogs there and check in on many of them fairly frequently.  I’m not a scientist, but I’m interested in science and love the way that these bloggers make science understandable and also explain some of the work that goes into science.  Another place to go is the Academic Blog Portal’s science section.  There is some overlap here with Scienceblogs, but there’s some non Scienceblogs listed there as well.  Finally, if you want posts that specifically convey academic research for the layperson, go to Research Blogging where you’ll find academics writing about research so that the rest of us get it.  Finally, it’s worth searching blogs for more.  Google’s Blogsearch and Technorati are places to start.  You can put the exact link in usually and see who’s commenting on the story.  As I pointed out, a researcher whose blog I happened to read had debunked the Facebook story as it originally appeared.  There are enough academic bloggers out there that if you have suspicions about a science story, you can probably find someone who has analyzed the story from a scientists perspective.