Jeffrey Brown
Thank you all for coming. My name is Jeffrey Brown with the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. I’m very grateful for the invitation to come. Among other things, Boston is my home town. I grew up in Belmont, just outside of Cambridge, for those of you who are local. So I’m glad to be here, especially on a weekend where I’m among people who care about the New England Patriots for once. That’s nice for me. I don’t think my wife wanted me to come until after the game because she doesn’t get it, but I’m among you now.
I do a fair amount of this kind of moderating for live audiences, and I’m always struck: television is both an intimate medium, in the sense that we come into people’s living rooms, and I have people come up to me a lot and say, "Oh, I have dinner with you every night. " And I say, "Really? What are we having tonight? " But it is true in that sense that we are right there. On the other hand, there is a formality and there is a distance. Most of the time I’m in a studio and I’m talking into a camera or I’m interviewing just a few people, and while I hope that there are several million people out there, I don’t actually see them. So whenever I do this—and I do it regularly, so I should be used to it—I still have that moment where I say, "Oh my goodness, people! There you are. " The purpose of it is to communicate. It’s nice to see real faces, welcome.
The subject, our subject, of "Science in the Media " is one that I have found filled with promise and peril. The promise is in something that’s very important to me and to us at the NewsHour: to try to expand the idea of what the news is and how it can be done. We have traditional senses of news, and that’s clear every night we’re doing the nightly news. We’re in Washington and we’re doing the national news and the international news and all that’s clear. But we have had a real strong sense of trying to expand that, and one of my issues for many years has been getting into culture, the arts, religion, all kinds of issues, one of which certainly is science.
The peril with science is in doing it right, doing it well. I get people and I’ve had people here at the conference come up and say, "Thank you, you’re the only ones who spend a little time on it. It’s so nice that you actually go into detail. " That’s great to hear. But I have no blinders on. Going back about ten years ago, my father-in-law, who is a retired physicist at Berkeley, was at a session of scientists—a session much like this no doubt—about doing science in the media, and when he came back he sheepishly told me that Exhibit A for how not to do science was a segment from the NewsHour. So I’ve heard both sides. I know how it can work, and I know how it can not work.
My disclaimer to you is that I am not a science journalist. I am, like most journalists I guess, a generalist. My experience that I think gives some value here is that I have spent a lot of time as a producer overseeing and thinking about how you do science on a nightly news program. And then as a correspondent for the program in more recent years, I’ve tried to tell a number of those stories. And stories that I have done have been things like nanotechnology—very hard, no pictures, can’t see the stuff. I’ve also done a story on intelligent design and evolution—the subject of an earlier session today where I had the experience of going to a creation museum in Kentucky and seeing a dinosaur with a saddle on it because, of course, people would have ridden dinosaurs. So that was very interesting. So I’ve had a number of ways of looking at it but also broadly looking at how you try to incorporate science into the nightly news.
Let me just tell you how I think we can proceed here because I’m a big believer always in letting people know how that will work. We have four distinguished panelists. What I would like to do, and what they all will abide with me here, is to let them speak introductory comments for five or ten minutes, not go on too long, and then I would like to have as much of a discussion and conversation as possible. I have lots of questions that I want to ask them, and let them bounce ideas off each other and keep it rather free-wheeling rather than long speeches, and I certainly want to let you all be involved and ask your own questions.
So I have further comments on how it all works for us, but I will come after our panelists. Let me start with Timothy Ferris. He is the well known author of many books on science. He has made two films and another one in process and is an emeritus professor at my alma mater, at UC Berkeley. Tim Ferris.
Timothy Ferris
Science programs have been appearing on television for more than half a century now, and they have been consistently popular as such things go—that is, when measured against other programming of similar factual rigor. Yet the field remains fraught with confusion and concern. We hear that science shows ought to be more entertaining or more informative or both; that the audience is growing dumber or less attentive; and that young Americans in particular are getting harder to reach. As always, we are advised that we should be doing more, and doing better—which is understandable, given that we live on a planet where science has so recently appeared, like a gleaming spaceship landing amid a swamp of ignorance and squalor to be inspected with polite curiosity by some of the locals while others prefer to throw stones at it.
Without pretending to clear things up, I thought it might be useful to discuss presenting science on television in terms of three dichotomies:
1) Teaching and learning
2) Intellect and emotion
3) Entertainment and art
With regard to teaching and learning: When television first burst on the scene, it was assumed to be a promising tool for education. Public TV was routinely called "educational, " and the commercial networks tried harder to educate their audiences than they do today. The conventional wisdom is that this expectation turned out to be false—that television either proved to be poor at education, or was prevented from reaching its educational potential by commercial greed or by some other dynamic (insert your favorite villain here). But that’s not what really happened. Television has actually turned out to be quite educational, although in ways different from, say, books (more of which Americans are reading than ever before, by the way) or classrooms (which don’t play well on TV).
Admittedly, television is not very good at teaching. Those among my fellow professors who thought there would be a large video audience for their lectures have been disappointed; TV audiences are not invested in the process of traditional education in the way that college students are. Absent tests, reading lists, and the rest of the time-tested apparatus that surrounds formal teaching, viewers don’t retain much of what they’ve seen and heard. Studies show that if you interview people about a documentary that they watched a month earlier, typically they can recall only about one fact from the entire program, if that: Three facts is a high score. So if you go about making a science TV show with the intention of conveying information that will stick in viewers’ memories, you’re unlikely to succeed.
Teaching, however, is only part of education. There’s also learning, which can take place with or without—and sometimes in spite of—us teachers, and which involves much more than absorbing and retaining information. When I think back on my top students over the years what strikes me is not so much that they memorized a lot of facts, although many certainly did that, but that they learned how to learn. They made the transition from passive to active learning, picking up the ball and running with it for themselves. Such students are the ones we seek, for example, when serving on admissions committees—not the plodding regurgitators of information, but those who love to learn.
Love of any kind is an emotion, which brings me to my second dichotomy, between emotion and intellect.
Television—like cinema or any other process that involves watching moving images on a glowing screen in the dark—is more an emotional than an intellectual experience. It can get you to laugh or cry much more readily than it can teach you how to calculate the mass of Saturn. But this very limitation is telling us something. It suggests that TV can incite you to fall in love with a subject, whereupon you may go forth and learn more about that subject for yourself.
Such an epiphany can arise from as little as watching a single TV program, as I was reminded quite recently. Arriving to give a talk at Berkeley I was approached by an undergraduate who had waited patiently out in front of the hall to tell me that he had come to Berkeley to study astrophysics as a result of having seen a ninety-minute film I made more than twenty years ago called The Creation of the Universe. (He said he had a class and so would be unable to attend the talk, but wanted to shake my hand and tell me that the show had changed his life.) Immediately after the talk I met another undergraduate who told me almost precisely the same thing: She had seen a rerun of The Creation of the Universe, was incited to learn the relevant science, and as a result was now studying astrophysics at Berkeley. Needless to say, neither student claimed to have been taught so many facts by the show as to be able to pass his or her astrophysics exams. Rather, the show had incited them to learn, and they’d followed up on that impulse.
The Internet provides a splendid way to help such individuals move beyond a program’s content and broaden their learning. At present I’m working on a PBS special about stargazing called Seeing in the Dark, based on my book of the same title. The accompanying Web site will provide viewers with stargazing tools. If you watch the show and care to go out that night and perhaps learn a constellation or two with your kids (or if you’re a kid yourself), we can provide you with a star chart for that night in your location, and show you how to fashion a red-light, night-vision flashlight from materials already around the house—within about ten minutes. If you care to go deeper into stargazing we can help you with each step, all the way up to making images of galaxies millions of light years away through our remote-controlled telescope in New Mexico. There are many such instances of information technology helping viewers learn for themselves what TV may not really be able to teach.
Which brings me to my final dichotomy, between entertainment and art.
Most of what’s on TV is entertainment. What entertainment does, in the main, is to reinforce ideas and values that the audience already had before watching the show. We like romance, and enjoy stories in which the painful disappointments of youthful infatuation lead to true love in the end; we root for underdogs, and are gratified to see them triumph over their frustrations and humiliations; value bravery, and like to see it rewarded. Because entertainment is so prevalent on television, we hear that science programs ought to be entertaining. And that’s fine, so far as it goes—certainly we don’t want to be boring—but it doesn’t go very far, does it? Science isn’t about reinforcing extant ideas and values; it’s about changing our ways of looking at the world, challenging our preconceptions, and awakening an awareness of how little we really know. Entertainment doesn’t often do that. Art does. To endeavor to make a science show merely entertaining is, therefore, self-limiting. What one ought to do—not that one will necessarily succeed—is to raise science programming to the status of an art.
I am not arguing for making shows "arty. " What I am urging is that we producers of science-television programs do what artists do. Innovate and take chances, rather than just repeating what has worked in the past. Challenge viewers, by giving them a taste of just how wild and unfamiliar our subject really is, rather than laboring to make it resemble what they already know: If the subject is tigers give them tigers, not housecats. Most of all, try to make a show the quality of which reflects the quality of the scientific endeavor it is reporting on.
One way to do this is to involve artists in the production. It isn’t easy—you’re bringing wild tigers inside, and they will occasionally eat your lunch and tear up the sofa—but the results can be vital and original. Seeing in the Dark draws on the work of artists like the composers Mark Knopfler and Guy Fletcher, the cinematographer Francis Kenny, the editor Lisa Day, the sound designers Kate Hopkins and Walter Murch, and the special-effects wizard Don Davis. Such artists don’t approach a project by asking themselves what the audience wants; they leave that to the entertainers. Instead, they search in themselves for what is personally exciting about the subject, then look for fresh ways to convey that excitement and sense of discovery. This approach seems to me to be particularly well suited to reporting on science, which shares with art a caustic skepticism about received opinions and a burning desire to see the world through new and more revealing lenses.
Art can be effective in bridging the gap between television producers like myself, who tend to be old enough to have demonstrated that we can be trusted with the substantial amounts of money that it costs to make these programs, and the young people we particularly want to reach. Throughout recorded history it has been the habit of older generations to slander the young, and we hear this today when we are told that young people don’t read, don’t want to learn, are afraid of science, and are preoccupied with popular entertainment. That’s not true, and it’s not fair. The best and brightest young people may resist being taught, if teaching means telling them what we already know, but they do want to learn. Being fresh and new themselves, they have a vested interest in the novel and the original—and that’s what art and science have to offer. They will respond to science if they’re exposed to its originality, its disdain for authority, and its life-changing potential, rather than being fed a watered-down version of science that’s been decanted into the vessels of entertainment. They are open to science, as they are open to art, but to reach them we need to do our very best. We don’t need to use TV to teach or preach to them or try merely to amuse them. We need to awaken in them the same ideas and emotions that make science so fascinating for us. The challenge is not just what they are capable of; it’s what we are capable of.
Jeffrey Brown:
Thanks very much. As I hoped, you raised a number of things that we can come back to and talk about. Jennifer Lawson is next, general manager of Howard University Television, longtime producer and programmer, among many other things she co-produced the 2001 series Africa. And as head of national programming for PBS, was very instrumental in the scheduling, promoting, and creating of very successful series such as Ken Burns’s Civil War and, I want to note, some of the important children’s series like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. Jennifer Lawson.
Jennifer Lawson
Thank you. If there were a theme, a single theme that I’d like to communicate, it would be summed up with the song, since Tim brought up songs, and I’m not going to attempt to sing mine, "The Times They Are A-Changin. " What I’d like to speak about for a few minutes is the fact that in media, the field is changing dramatically. We’re quite privileged to live in a time when there is such a real evolution in media technology. And that technology is affecting media, all of media, quite profoundly.
When it comes to television, the area that I know most, it is just remarkable to see the impact of broadband and digital technologies on our field. Television as we know it, all over-the-air broadcasting, will convert from the analog system to the digital system in February of 2009. In addition to giving us high definition and much better picture and sound quality, CD sound quality, it gives us so many other opportunities as well. Many public television stations, including the one that I manage, are converting to broadcast four streams of programming. So that means four channels where previously there was one. And this is across the board. You already can find that with the Discovery Channel, HBO, and several others--there’s HBO 1, 2, 3, and 4. And you’ll find that there will be a proliferation of even more channels in that respect. There will be more television, and for some people that is not necessarily good news, although I think it can be.
So there’s proliferation and change in that way, but there’s also the Internet, which is taking such a central place in the media landscape. Tim just mentioned some ways in which the Internet and Web sites are becoming quite central to the development of television programs, but now we are going beyond that. For example, the science series NOVA, on public television, if you missed an episode, you’ll find it neatly archived on the NOVA Web site. You can go there and download the podcast of many NOVA programs or you can stream the entire episode right there on the NOVA site. That’s also the case with some series, like The Elegant Universe, a beautiful, beautiful series. You can watch the entire series right there online.
That’s one of the wonderful things, and of course many of you who are familiar with public television’s programs know that there are also teachers’ Web sites to accompany those series and specials, and a lot of material for educators and for students themselves, lots of games and other activities.
It’s changing, too, in commercial television. Some good news there is that we are beginning to move away from some of the stereotypical scientists on television and we’re getting a little more diversity, a little more variety in the kinds of scientists that we see on commercial television. I think that you know and trust that as long as public television is there, you will definitely see science as a prominent part of public television. There’s just recently been a lot of research that has been commissioned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that ensures that that will be the case.
On commercial television we’re beginning to see more now, too, in a different way. We’ve always had people like Don Herbert and his Mr. Wizard in the world of commercial television. Sadly, you don’t see much of that any more, the actual scientist of the Bill Nye variety on TV, but you do find now there’s the phenomenon of the forensic scientist, of which we are beginning to tire. It’s a good thing that they are diverse so we know that they can be Latino, they can be female, but you know, let’s move on. We can certainly go beyond the CSI effect. Now we have things like Numbers, so we have mathematicians who can solve crimes using math. Good news there, but a little stereotypical to me in what I would call the "nerd " factor again of portraying scientists as people who are very poorly socialized, and while they can do complex formulas to solve a problem, they can’t quite figure out how to go out on a date.
I don’t think that will be terribly inspiring to young people, but there’s the opportunity for us to weigh in. One of the nice things is that Numbers, which is a commercial series on CBS, does have a Web site and does invite comment. In addition to having lesson plans and material for teachers, it does invite comment. I would hope that we can respond and help them shape the series and make it more palatable, not just for that series but for future series that might involve scientists.
With this greater choice comes responsibility. We are no longer in the role of being passive viewers; now we can truly be participants. When I was funding programs I used to feel that everybody was a producer. You ran into somebody and they said, "What do you do? " and you told them, and then they said, "Oh, I have an idea for a program. " Well, the lovely thing about today’s world and broadband is that now we can all be producers. For very little cost and using just consumer equipment, you can indeed make a program.
If you believe that an experiment or a way of teaching would be useful to others, you can put it on YouTube and give it a whirl. You can notify other teachers or others around the country to check it out and see how well it works. This is one of the delightful things, and it’s important to experiment with that. It’s really important for people of my generation and others to do these experiments and use YouTube and other places because that’s where young people are going. More and more, younger people, people who are age 25 and under, aren’t using conventional television as much as they use the Internet, and they rely upon it for information. It behooves those of us who really care about media to begin to also learn and make sure we can go where they go so that we’re there with them as well, and can try to create science programming that they indeed will use and watch. We should also be respectful of and look at what they are creating so that we learn from them.
I’d like to close by saying that in being responsive in that way, public television is conducting an experiment. On the PBS Web site, if you go to PBS.org/science, there are three pilots, three science programs, and they are looking for viewer feedback. You can stream the programs online. One is called "Twenty-second Century, " another is "The New Investigators, " and the final one is "Wired Science. " You can look at the programs and then weigh in with your vote and comments about which one should be made into a series. That’s what I love, that we are in this time where we can truly interact with the media. So I look forward to your questions and real dialogue among us. Thank you.
Jeffrey Brown
Thank you, Jennifer. Now we move to print journalism. Deborah Blum had a long career as a daily science writer for newspapers, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Congratulations. She is the past president of the National Association of Science Writers, has written a number of books on science, and now is in the business of teaching a new generation of science writers as Professor of Science Journalism at the University of Wisconsin. Deborah.
Deborah Blum
Thanks. It’s great to be here, and I thought I’d actually start by telling you a story about my son who is now a junior in high school and last year was taking biology and came home and said to me, "Biology is the most boring science in the world. And I said—and I have spent a lifetime, of course, as a science writer, writing about biology. I said to him, "Well, why don’t you just drive a stake through my heart? " And this, in the way that discussions with teenage kids go, actually turned into a discussion of his long suspicion that I was a vampire and did not get him back into biology. This year he likes chemistry much better, but I wanted to use him in part as an example to make two points.
One is, science journalism is not post-secondary education. I quite often, when I’m talking to scientists, will hear them talk about us— "us " as in journalists— as if we are a part of a great education project. And we’re really not, we are not going to salvage someone who did not get a good science education. It’s simply not going to happen. The one exception to that, I think, might be more internationally. And when you’re working in a system where elementary education or K-12 education is not functioning very well, if we’re able to raise the level of science communication in some of those areas, I think it could make an enormous difference. And the National Association of Science Writers is now involved in a mentoring project with—actually, we’re mentoring the Arab science writers—but we’re part of an experiment to try to pair up countries like this with developing nations and raise that level of science communication, and we have high hopes for it.
But, having said that, what journalists do very well is what I think of as subversive education. And the idea of that is that we are going to tell you a story that will teach you something without you being aware that we’re teaching you anything. If we can do that right, if we can reach out to someone who has always thought of science as scary, or boring, or not for them, or not part of their life, or not something that they use to help guide their decision making. And if we can just bring them into a story, then we can sneak in the lesson itself. I mean, and in journalism school we’ll talk about this as the classic "SI "—some of you have probably seen this, story-information-story-information-story-information way of writing—enough story to suck someone in, enough information until you think you might lose them, back to the story, "SI-SI-SI " all the way to the end.
And an example of that from my newspaper career would be lying chickens. Chickens, as you I’m sure all know, lie, just like we do, and it tends to be males lying to females, not necessarily a surprise. And so what happens is chickens have a number of calls—predator calls, flying predator calls, ground predator calls, sex calls, food calls—and every once in a while, the hens are just not interested. And so the male chickens, the roosters will like say, "Food! Food over here, food! " And then the females come running. The annoying thing is they come running every time. They never learn.
Jeffrey Brown
I feel like there must be another side to this story.
Deborah Blum
No, none. Absolutely none.
Jeffrey Brown
I want to interview the male.
Deborah Blum
So when I write that story, and I did do this, it was on the front page of the Sacramento Bee which was not known for front-page chicken stories. I’m writing a story that is really fun and is going to suck you into that, and subversively, you are going to learn something about animal behavior and how those studies are done. You’re going to learn something about an unexpected kind of sophistication in another species—deception extending far beyond our own—and you’re going to learn something about the really world-class ethologist Peter Marler who did the work. And at the back of my mind, that’s what I’m trying to get in there that I don’t want you to know. I want you to read the story and take all of that home. And that is something that I do think journalists do really well.
And now I think of myself kind of as a blue-collar journalist. I’m not always interested in only writing to the science literate. We’re a roomful of science literates so… The audience that interests me is, in fact, the people who walk away. They’re the ones that I think need to be brought into the general discussion. And so I am always trying to figure out ways to sell them on science in a way that they’re not quite going to realize what I’m doing. And I think as a science writer, you know, a science literate audience is easier to write for, right? And fun to interact with in some interesting ways. What I do, I had an op-ed on science in The New York Times in late December, you know, and I spend days answering emails from people who have an opinion and know something about it and want to add to my knowledge base. It’s a fantastic experience.
But nevertheless, it’s more fun and more of a challenge in some ways to try to reach the person who isn’t in that group and isn’t already connected and doesn’t already know about what I’m talking about. And I think when we start thinking about who we want to bring into the discussion, we need to make some intelligent decisions about who’s already in and who’s being left out and how we bring them to the point that I think is so important, which is science is life, right? That science is life, science is something that we need to make decisions based on, and to make those decisions well, we need to actually understand what science is. In the same way that we’ll talk about civic literacy, that’s what science literacy is about, it’s about making good decisions.
And one of the other things that I then tried to do is to give everything I write—I mean, not everything, but most things I write—a kind of a back story, because if I’m not going to persuade you of everything—and this is another journalist trick—I’m at least going to try to make you think about the issue in a different way. And so when I write about animal research, which was, primate research was what I won the Pulitzer Prize for, in my mind I’m saying to myself, "And what I’m going to teach you is that animal research is really about us. Number one species on the planet, able to make all these decisions about closely related, smart, social, interesting animals. " What does that say in those decisions? And if you actually looked at that series, it’s sixteen stories, each one framed around a person and a decision they made, and it looks at environmental issues and it looks at social issues, and it’s never going to say in the series, "Animal research is about us, " but that’s the message I’m going to get across.
Or the last book I did, which came out in the fall, was called Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. And it reached a much wider audience than I usually reach, as you might imagine. It’s a history of science book that looks at early efforts to try to prove the supernatural, and it in fact was the subject of my latest New York Times op-ed to some extent. But it also reached people that I don’t normally reach. And so the other thing I wanted to mention, when we talk about the limits of audiences—and I’m sure this came up some in the Pseudoscience session and parts that I missed—but what about the intractable audience? I mean, you know, at what point do you say, "I want to bring all of these people into the discussion, but is there a point where I’m just going to beat my head against the wall, so here’s where I need to effectively put my energies in a way that it’s going to bring people in who may not be fully in the discussion? "
And I really thought about this. After the book came out I ended up on a radio show called Coast to Coast AM with George Noory. Anyone ever stayed up all night to listen to George Noory? And it was on in Wisconsin—it’s an LA show dealing with the supernatural, on from 11:00 pm to 2:00 am in LA, so in Wisconsin it was 1:00 am to 4:00 am. And so I had drunk enough coffee to float the Navy by the time I was on. And I’m on for three hours, and when they go to a commercial break, every time they have this replayed section of a man who had called George Noory to report the fact that he had sighted a gnome in his campground. And he was like camping in Minnesota with his brother and it ran by with its little red hat. And about the sixth time I heard this, I thought, boy has my career hit an all time low. I am on a show where people call in their gnome sightings. And then I thought to myself, now why would a gnome dress like a garden gnome? Where did he get the little red hat? By 4:00 am, I was really into the gnome metaphysical issue.
After I got off the show and complained about gnomes to my friends for a day or so, I thought, okay, how would you bring that audience into the discussion? The gnome-loving audience, right? They’re a tricky audience. Maybe we could say, "Okay, we won’t put all our energies in the gnome range, we’ll try to come in a little closer to center. " And I do think that’s a nice example of how great the challenge can be. And those are people who have really decided, I mean, when you talk to them—and I got emails for a month after that show from people who had daughters in haunted dorms and other problems—but after you talk to them you realize that to some extent they’re just saying, "Okay, science is not relevant to these decisions. Science has written off what I think is important about this and I’ve cut it loose. " And how you bring those guys back into what I think of as the mainstream rational side of the room, say, is really a difficult challenge and one that I think at least has to be acknowledged in some of the planning for how to do this.
I want to briefly make two points and close. They may seem a little like non-sequiturs. I wanted to follow up what Jennifer said about the enormous change in the way that media is working today. If you pick up almost any newspaper on any different day, you’ll see the fallout for that in the print industry, and the print industry is in a huge stage of revolution. I think none of us expect, by the time this all shakes out, that the newspaper that I grew up with, and I was a newspaper reporter for twenty-odd years, will be the same or look the same or function the same. I think most people believe that newspaper companies will evolve into some kind of multimedia form of which niche journalism—that would include science and medicine—is a strong part, but that the more general reporting will probably be primarily Web based.
And all of us, both as journalists and as journalism instructors, are trying to figure out where that’s going to take us, and for those of us who loved the old newspaper world, you know, some of that is depressing. It’s hard to let go of an institution you really admired. But I think at the same time, it makes it a great moment of opportunity. I mean, we’re right at a point where the media is changing. Half of us are talking about how we want to help redefine it, where it needs to go, and it’s exactly in that state of flux that if you’re looking for ways to sort of change the dialogue, it’s much more open to new ideas and to new ways of doing it. So this is great timing for this conference and I’m happy to be a part of it. Thank you.
Jeffrey Brown
I don’t know if your career was hitting a low with the gnomes, but you’re on an upswing here with us, with this audience. All right. And now Larry Klein, who I talked to the other day and I was interested to learn started his life as an historian and found his way into filmmaking and then into science filmmaking. He’s produced many films in the commercial, cable, and of course, in public television, notably for NOVA, and that includes the Emmy Award winning documentary, Why the Towers Fell. Larry Klein.
Larry Klein
Thank you. I’ve been asked to talk about how TV producers take on the challenge of trying to create programs that are entertaining or compelling, but also have serious science content in them. And I was really glad to get this assignment because most of the time, I don’t think about that. I mostly think about how to get the thing done on time, and what’s happening to the budget, and whether the camera in the back of the room is actually working. But it’s really good to ask us to think about this, because I think it does take thoughts that we’ve had and kind of brings them together. The first time I seriously began thinking about this issue was five years ago when Paula Apsell of NOVA brought over the upper crust of the BBC’s Horizon science series to Boston to talk to us American producers about why they were so successful. Horizon had been languishing and falling in the ratings until they made a fundamental shift in the way they made programs that caused their ratings to skyrocket. So we were all ready to hear what they had to say.
It was a very frank discussion and they gave us, happily, three principles to their success. I only remember two, but I think that they’re the important ones. One: everything takes a backseat to story; and two, science content should be included in that story on a need-to-know basis. Now, what does this mean? It means that you don’t let the science get in the way of good story telling. If that science is complicated, you downplay the complications or leave them out entirely. You concentrate instead on developing human characters and presenting a story of ever ratcheting tension and ultimately, discovery.
Now I think most of us, when we hear, "Only put in the science on a need-to-know basis, " those of us who try to make science programs, are kind of shocked at that. But if you’ve seen Horizon, I think you can’t deny that they’re very well made and highly watchable. For the most part, I like them very much. But there are many, many times that I find myself flabbergasted by what I’ve seen; by scant editorial corroboration of some critical point or theory by scientists who are, in my estimation, on the fringe of what you might really call science; and by narration or music or both that proclaim far more doom or accomplishment than the facts actually deserve. But their single-minded devotion to the primacy of story, even if they sometimes nudge that story into the realm of the not so credible, this is nonetheless a successful way to keep people watching. And if this is all just science "lite, " as a lot of people call it, viewers are getting "some " science which would not have happened if they didn’t watch at all.
Now, I think the real answer for most of us in the room that day was to think about finding a more satisfying compromise between the elements of a good story and presenting the elements of good science in our shows. Now, that’s not easy but it can be done. There are two drawbacks though. One is you just don’t do programs on things like string theory; it’s too hard to tell a discrete story. And another is that it puts a great deal of pressure on the personal integrity and editorial oversight of the people making those films. Once you’ve said story is a prime motivator for how you’re going to present your program, you’re then confronted with what are you going to leave out, because you are going to have to leave out something.
Fortunately, maybe unfortunately, most top executives in TV know so little science, they wouldn’t know what you’re leaving in or out anyway. And if your ratings are good, they’re going to be very happy. So much comes down to the personal integrity of producers and the executive producers who oversee them to be the guardians of this kind of integrity. And I use the word "integrity " instead of "fact " or "truth " because I’ve personally never known as much information as any of the people I interviewed or focused on. I try to understand the science that they are explaining to me and I do my homework and look for differing points of view, but in the end, I’m just relying on my instincts that what they are telling me is what I want to relate to the public.
Now sometimes those experts are wrong, and therefore I’m wrong. And we almost never have a chance to set the record straight. But I recently had that rare opportunity. For the five year anniversary of 9/11, we at NOVA looked back at a program we previously made, "Why the Towers Fell, " before we began a new NOVA called "Building on Ground Zero " to see just what had changed since our first program was made. In that earlier program, we detailed the exact mechanism of the Towers’ collapse, or at least we thought we did. Let’s show the clip.
[clip played]
"Most computer simulations show the mostly aluminum planes shredding on impact, but the steel engines tore through multiple floor trusses and the fast spreading fires subjected them to intense heat. So in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, many experts wondered if these trusses were too weak to handle a building under stress. ‘Had the floor system been more robust with much stronger connections between the exterior and the inside, I think the buildings probably would have lasted longer.’ Would they ultimately have collapsed? Maybe not. Another suspect was the fireproofing that covered the trusses and other steel members. It was clearly blown off by the airplane impacts, leaving the steel exposed to the fires. ‘Once you lose the spray-on fireproofing, you have bare steel. And once you have bare steel, you don’t have a fire rating any more.’ ‘Prior to 9/11, the public, I believe, felt that steel was fireproof and was not affected by fire. In fact, all building materials are affected by fire. When the temperature goes up, each building material that is used loses strength.’ This was particularly true for the lattice-like floor trusses. They were thin and difficult to fireproof evenly. And after extensive testing, NIST found that some of the longer trusses did not meet the two-hour fire rating mandated by the building code. But as they studied the minute details of the collapse, they made a remarkable discovery, one that would not only provide a final verdict on the trusses, but would completely revise previously theories of how the towers fell. In 2002, NOVA depicted a scenario envisioned by many experts at the time, that the truss connections failed in the extreme heat, causing the floors to fall onto one another, precipitating the collapse. ‘When you did it previously, you showed that the floors actually pancaked, and we did not see any evidence of pancaking in the videos or photographs we have.’ By creating computer enhanced images of the exterior walls, NIST discovered that the truss connections did not fail. In fact, the trusses stayed connected to the columns even as they sagged from the heat. They pulled on the columns, bowing them inward nearly five feet in some areas until the columns reached the breaking point. ‘Suddenly the columns snapped and as a result the entire top of the building came down pretty much in free fall because the kinetic energy that was unleashed was just huge.’ After months of analysis, NIST concluded that the World Trade Center had no structural flaws that could account for its collapse. It was the interplay of impact damage and fire that brought the towers down. ‘It was the combination of the impact, the fireproofing that was dislodged, and the jet fuel fires that caused the buildings to collapse. These buildings were sound, well designed, highly innovative, and there was nothing that could have changed the outcome on 9/11.’ This was the same conclusion Corley had reached four years earlier and would finally close the books on the engineering of the World Trade Center. For Leslie Robertson, so anguished by the tragedy, the criticisms of his building had hurt him deeply. ‘Initially many architects and engineers stepped to the cameras and spoke out about the project without having very much information. And that has done us as a company, and I would say that the relatives of the survivors, a disservice that was totally unnecessary. The structure was very robust and that’s what all structures should be.’ But on 9/11…. "
One of the things I tried to do besides setting the record straight in this short clip—it needed, I think, a little more buildup—but the idea here was that all the critics pointed to those trusses being too weak. But in fact, they were not only not too weak, they were so strong that they held onto those columns to the bitter end. And in fact, after 9/11, New York City banned the use of floor trusses in construction of all buildings and that was a mistake. But what I wanted you to see was that in the first program and in this one, we focused on the engineer, Leslie Robertson, and telling his story, his personal reaction to what had happened in the first story, and to see what happened to him by the time we produced the second show. That storytelling device I think was very successful in helping to combine the compelling nature of this clearly anguished man to the science of the tragedy. And that story was actually put into the film by our co-producers on "Why the Towers Fell, " BBC Horizon. And so I think that what we did in the first show and then in the second show was a way to achieve the compromise of combining good storytelling with good science.
But there’s a postscript. The Web site devoted to the conspiracy theories about how the towers fell - people placing bombs in the towers that brought them down and all that kind of stuff, and how the Bush administration really was behind the destruction of the Towers—that Web site, then and now, got far more hits that ours did. And their spokespeople, the conspiracy theorists, got a great deal more national air play and promotion and publicity than we did. And our ratings were pretty average when the show finally aired. But maybe this issue is for another panel and another discussion. Thank you very much.
Jeffrey Brown
By highlighting science, my hope is that we’re in a process of normalizing science. By highlighting scientists, I hope we’re showing that scientists are real people doing real things. That goes back to what I was talking about earlier, about my notion and hope for expanding the idea of news. One of the things I’ve been very concerned to do at the NewsHour for many years is, you know, we’re very well known for newsmaker interviews with secretaries of state and Senator So-and-So every night. My case, and it’s not a hard one to make because I’ve got bosses who agree, fortunately, is that cultural newsmakers should have a place in the news. So the artists and the writers and musicians can have a place because they’re making stuff, they’re doing their part of daily life, they’re informing our world, they’re creating things that affect the way people live. So we’ve made a place for that. The same case needs to be made, and we keep trying, with science. And the NSF grant has helped us very much to portray, to profile, to capture a little bit of what goes on in the scientific world.
But there continue to be cultural differences, I think, between what science does and how scientists do their thing and the way journalists do our thing. There are different urgencies to timing, there are different senses of where the story begins and ends in these realms that cause a kind of tension and at their best make for good stories in the world of media, but it’s something we need to be aware of. And I think at the same time, and I hope I see more scientists also being aware, that they need to—and this was also addressed partly in the morning—that they need to address a general audience and be part of a public discourse that helps everyone. After all, in the end, the idea is to help the citizenry. So why don’t I ask some of our panelists first about the notion of the gap itself. How do you define it? Tim Ferris?
Timothy Ferris
Thank you. Well, it’s all around us, and I suppose one reason for it is that science is young. It’s only about four centuries old. And although that sounds like a long time, human culture is ancient, it’s very tough, it’s strong, and its endurance is based on having a certain inherent conservatism about innovating and changing itself, and there hasn’t been a lot of time for science to get into the mainstream of culture. We’re an odd situation in this country in that science really is at the center of our political and economic culture as a liberal democracy. And yet, most of our citizens are not at all comfortable with science, so they’re left in a strange world. There’s no Buddha saying that to the unenlightened the world is a house of fire, which I think about every time I watch the evening news. And a lot of things become clearer if you look at them in scientific terms.
Let me give you give one example that’s from mainstream journalism. One often hears this is from economics, which is a science, by the way, although a much derided one. One hears all the time—just to pick two examples that I jotted down as we were talking here that worldwide poverty is on the increase, and moreover that the gap between rich and poor is increasing, making for a shameful situation. Those statements, I Google them from time to time, I look them up on Nexis, they’re quite common, they’re referred to quite commonly in journalism. And both of them are false. It doesn’t take much time or effort to determine that globally, poverty has been going down, both in absolute and relative numbers for a generation now, and the gap between rich and poor is not growing, it’s shrinking. So the gap even penetrates to the degree that professional journalists often don’t think to use scientific resources that are readily available in an area as relevant as economics to challenge their own assumptions.
And we’re living in a curious time in that regard, in that many people, not just that 45 percent that disbelieves in evolution that we keep hearing about and so forth, but many people are just so attached to assumptions about the way the world works that are clearly false that they live in a house of fire. So one message of science is that although, sure, it’s challenging and it does involve challenging these deep assumptions, the outcome of that doesn’t have to be a gloomy desperate one. It’s often rather more sunny than that.
Jeffrey Brown
Jennifer, do you want to address the gap that you see?
Jennifer Lawson
I see the gap in a couple of ways. And I think that the gap is, one, between the science community and media, you know, as Tim outlined. But I also think that then the third part of it is with the public, and that that’s a critical part of how we bridge that gap, how we communicate better with the public at large, whether as scientists or as journalists or as part of the media. And part of that is just the skills of communication, and it’s an area where I think we should all consider ourselves eternal learners because it’s an ever changing situation, so I think we must also learn and change with it. As Larry was illustrating, the whole notion of how do you communicate information to a public, and as Deborah and Larry both said, I think that a large part of that is telling stories and using story as a way to convey information. And that’s as old as people sitting around the campfire, the importance of storytelling.
On the other hand, what’s very new, while storytelling in itself is a really old skill in a sense, what’s really new is the medium that we’re using now. I mean, how does one convey information better when you’re doing a blog; you know, that’s a new form for us. And many of us don’t yet know what makes for a more effective blog, or a podcast. We’re now talking about segments of stories rather than full stories. Do you make a television program differently if you know it’ll be available as video-on-demand or that it can be repeated by the consumer whenever he or she wants because it can be TiVo’d or recorded? So I think that’s also a part of how we bridge the gap that we have to constantly learn how to use the technologies that are available to us better and how to combine storytelling and information with integrity to provide the best possible science information.
Jeffrey Brown
Deborah, given the huge rise in programs for science journalism and the specialization in science journalism, why is there still, or to what extent do you think there is still a gap between those two communities, media and science?
Deborah Blum
It’s true that it seems that almost every month another university comes up with a science-writing program. Nevertheless, science journalists and science writers are a very small part of the journalism enterprise. The National Association of Science Writers has 2,500 members, which is a very small part of the number of journalists in this country. So odds are very good that when you’re interviewed by a journalist, you’re not going to get interviewed by a science journalist, right? There’s just not enough to go around, basically. And there are scientists at universities. When I was working as a newspaper reporter in California, there were scientists at some of the UCs who would tell the press office they would only deal with science writers, because the general-assignment reporters had gotten it so wrong. I was actually at NIH once doing a story on lung disease and the scientist I wanted to talk to—I still find this incredible—wouldn’t do an interview with me because he had just done an interview with a reporter who had asked him to explain the location of the lungs. And, hard to miss, you would think, but then he said, "That’s it, no journalists. I’m done with journalists. "
I mean, I think some of it again goes back to the fact that I’ve talked to a lot of people who say, "Well, I didn’t want to be a science writer anyway. Science is scary, science is hard. " You get people who come into all kinds of professions, including journalism, who feel alienated from science, and that ripples through the industry. And just as a brief close, David Goodstein at Caltech talks about our education system as a filtration system that filters out those that are suitable for the scientific priesthood and lifts them up to the altar and then discards everyone who doesn’t make the cut. And if you really look at some of the ways science programs work, in fact there is some of that filtration system going on and people end up feeling alienated.
Jeffrey Brown
Larry, you said in your remarks that you usually don’t think about these questions because you’re usually worried about, you know, where is the camera and is it on and all that kind of stuff. Do you think about the audience? I mean, who are you doing this for?
Larry Klein
Yeah, I do. Usually it’s me, because I don’t know very much science so I figure if I can understand it, anyone can. And basically speaking, I look at an audience that wants to know. I mean, at the end of the day, that clicker is prime. It can go anywhere it wants to go. And if someone chooses to click you on, you of course have to make that beginning of the show really compelling or they’ll click you off right away. Then I feel like I’ve got them, I can engage them with stories or with extraordinary pieces of information that would really make them stand up and take notice. But I also wanted to respond to one thing about this gap because I actually don’t think the gap is unique to science. Every so often they do these surveys among the public, adults and older kids, on how many senators do you have, who’s your representative, that sort of thing. And I find that there’s just as little understood about the political process, about world affairs: it’s stunning how little Americans know about world affairs.
So I think in the end, just to get to the bigger question, the gap is an education gap. I mean, I do feel strongly that over the years, and I know Tim is absolutely right about income, but I do feel a pulling apart between a more educated elite in this country and people who aren’t there. And as we talk about how we reach those audiences and what have you, I do feel that it is a challenge that is getting harder every day. And I don’t have good answers for it, but I do feel that the gap is much broader than science.
Jeffrey Brown
Do you as a producer, then, feel a duty, a responsibility; is that why you’re doing what you’re doing, to try to bridge that?
Larry Klein
I think so, somewhere. It’s always there.
Jeffrey Brown
Mostly you’re trying to raise money.
Larry Klein
Trying to raise money. No, but I do think so. What I try not to do is dumb it down. If you look at the numbers of who watches, I mean, the demographics of who watches science programs and who seriously goes to science museums and that sort of thing, it does tend to be a more educated audience. But what I try to do in the programs is to treat everyone equally and try to find a way to satisfy both of those groups. But it is, as I say, as I talk to people, show things to people, it is getting harder. And I don’t think simply jazzing up our presentations, although that will have, I think, some short term help, you know, getting young bubbly hosts going on location to scientists and saying things like, "Is that your computer? " I think those sorts of things will help, but I don’t think they’ll last. I mean, at the end of the day, if there is going to be a role for broadcasting, I actually think we’ve just got to make the programs better.
Jeffrey Brown
Tim Ferris, how do you think about the audience, do you think about the audience, who are you doing this for?
Timothy Ferris
Not very much, because it’s hard enough to make the show better. I mean, I think ultimately, the only way I know to connect with a wide audience is to just do the best job I possibly can. And I’m always gratified when it turns out that a large audience or a broad audience did watch it. And, so I like to incorporate elements just because that’s me, but let me just tell a story, I’m not sure what this illustrates but it has to do with, I think, sharing the values of a large audience in terms of what makes quality. I was talking about music earlier. I did a planetarium show, years ago and the afternoon before it premiered, this was in Salt Lake City, we did a kind of a dress rehearsal for an audience consisting of students from a reverse magnet school. These were kids that had been kicked out of every other school in Salt Lake City. These kids were barely in school at all any more. And the music that played when you came into the planetarium was a Brian Eno composition; Eno did some of the music for the show.
So these kids came in and they were what you might expect, primed with disrespect for science. They were viewing this whole thing as another dreadful waste of their time just like every other school-related experience. And after they’d all sat down this one guy came in who was sort of the alpha male of the entire reverse magnet school—leather jacket, the whole thing. And he walked to the center and looked around and then he chose a seat which happened to be occupied and he walked over to it and the guy in that seat jumped out of it and so did the two to either side of him. And he sat down and some girls behind him were talking sort of louder than usual, I think, in hopes of impressing the alpha male. And after a moment he said, fairly quietly, "Shut up. " And everybody in the place stopped talking. He said, "That’s Brian Eno. " So I think it’s possible to connect with large audiences in ways that don’t have anything to do with understanding exactly how they’re put together but simply sharing some of their own tastes.
Jeffrey Brown
Where does it begin for you? If you’re, I mean, we know you from books or your films, but for you, what begins it?
Timothy Ferris
What’s "it "?
Jeffrey Brown
Well, the "it " is the final product. But I mean, what starts you on your way toward a particular subject or story….
Timothy Ferris
It’s just a desire to tell, a sense that it’s really good, you know, that it can be made good. Wow, I’ve got two microphones now. I feel like I’m at the United Nations, which is not as good an audience as you might imagine. Not as good as this one. I just think my sense is that if I can get a piece of writing or a piece of film or a piece of music to the point that it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck and changes my life—and we’ve got some moments like that in this film I’m making now already—it’s very rewarding for me. Then someone’s going to have that same reaction and if they don’t, then I’ve still, I’ve still got it, you know. I’m perfectly prepared to lose my audience in any particular medium as long as I’ve done my best. But it’s a tragedy to not do your best whether you gain the audience or not.
Jeffrey Brown
Jennifer, I wanted to ask you about the nuts and bolts here. I mean, we’re talking about what everybody would like to do, what we feel like we’re able to accomplish, but there are a lot of things in the way—there are money issues, there are carriage issues. You’ve been involved in a kind of big picture about what gets on television, for example, and what doesn’t. How much does that determine how much science journalism we see and the quality of that journalism?
Jennifer Lawson
That, of course, plays a real role. But the good news is that there is a real appetite for science and for programming about science. And in the world of very limited resources within the public broadcasting universe, as I mentioned earlier, there’s a real interest in science programming. CPB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, spent several years doing extensive research around the country to try to identify which programs on public broadcasting really resonated with people, and NOVA and Scientific American Frontiers, the science programs always came up to the very top of that. And so as they began to think, Well, where, what kinds of programs, if we have more channels, more opportunities to put more programs on the air, what genres should be considered? And again, science bubbled right up to the top. So as a consequence, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS created a science initiative and then invested recently $10 million or more into new science programming, and the three pilots that are now online have resulted from that. But separate from that, the National Science Foundation, through the ISE program and others, then does continue to invest considerable funds in science programming as well. There’s no question that creating new programs for television is a very challenging and difficult thing for any producer. But the prospects for science programming—and that’s science programming for young children like PEEP or the programs for older children like ZOOM and Cyberchase and some of the others—there are still greater prospects there. And the corporate side, you know, Texas Instruments and other corporations, also in many cases find it quite attractive to identify with science-oriented programs. So I think that it’s a brighter picture for producers of science programming than it certainly is for performance programming, for example. So it’s not easy but it’s certainly better there.
Jeffrey Brown
In your opening remarks about the Internet you said we’re coming to a point where we can all be producers. But what about the quality? Can we all be good producers? Because we can all see what is on the Internet—all kinds of opportunities for more information and you can go to YouTube and watch all kinds of things. But do you want to watch?
Jennifer Lawson
In some cases you do. And in a lot of cases you don’t, and it’s your choice as to whether you do or don’t. But the wonderful thing about YouTube and other places like the Open Media Network, OMN, is that you can create material and place it there and there are many cases where there may be a Nobel laureate or someone who is doing a fabulous lecture that may have been available only to the live auditorium of people and now that material can be placed and archived there at no real cost to the institution, and it’s there for so many others to appreciate and to take advantage of.
So I do think that quality is sort of relative. I mean, if you go on YouTube, you find three zillion of those silly Mentos and Diet Coke experiments. But no one cares that they weren’t shot in high definition. They don’t need to be shot with better equipment. They are what they are. The same is true for some lectures. It is perfectly okay that they are shot with more simple camera equipment. On the other hand, when Tim Ferris does a work, like his "Creation of the Universe " and other things, we want the Brian Eno music. We want all of that beautiful imagery—and there you want the higher cost and the greater beauty of it all. But other programs, like Myth Busters, which has a lot of people watching, a lot of people interested, you don’t have to have the glorious pictures.
Jeffrey Brown
Deborah, you painted a different picture of the print world which is very much in flux, as you said. We had a period where it seemed like every paper was getting a science page or a Science Times. Now we see papers that are cutting back on all kinds of things. What do you see going forward?
Deborah Blum
It used to be that—and I’m really thinking, you know, a good decade ago—that science sections, say, were very trendy. And now you’ve seen more and more papers pulling those sections back. And just to give you a good example, the Dallas Morning News, which used to have one of the best science sections in the country, folded that into its Lifestyle section and fired its editor. And it’s just history. And if you look at Science Times in The New York Times, what you’ll see is a gradual shift there. It’s still the best newspaper science section in the country, but it’s much more what they tend to call "news you can use. " Health-oriented, less of the high-energy physics, less string theory, less of all of that and more health-related news. And so what you see especially in the print media I think is a loss of sections where you can do basic research, instead of stories that don’t have a news element that are just interesting science. There’s a greater emphasis on health and medical writing over the other sciences. I think that’s a trend no matter what shape newspapers end up taking.
I’ll tell you that I go back and forth on science sections myself. You can write some wonderful things for them that are very difficult to get in other parts of the paper. But they also, to some extent, ghetto-ize science. You know, the geek section, the nerd section, and you know, so that people who have been saying to themselves, "Ugh, I’m not a science type "—there it goes. Whereas if you have science in other sections, in the Lifestyle section, in the A section, mingled in with the regular news, it sends a different message. It sends a message that this is news, it sends a message that this is part of your newspaper, it sends a message that this is just part of the way we do business in the world and it reaches out in a different way. So I don’t think it’s entirely a tragedy to lose science sections, as long as we continue science coverage.
Jeffrey Brown
All right. We’ve been talking for about an hour and a half here, and I’ve got lots of other questions, but maybe it’s a good time to open things up a bit and take questions from the audience, and a lot of hands go up. All right, now, I spent the first session in the back, and I know that they were frustrated back there so I’m going to start in the back. Okay, right back there.
Audience
I’m Bari Scott, and, I am very pleased to be here with the panelists. Deborah Blum, love your book, use it a great deal, it’s a great service to all of us who are out there trying to communicate. I had a question for Larry. And you talked about that the blog and the conspiracy-theory Web sites got more visitors than the one that you did that seemed to have had the more scientific evidence about what happened to the towers. I guess I want to know why that is, and is it because the people there who responded on those blogs were there first, and that you came in later, is it—not to say, I love your work, so it’s not a criticism of you in any way—but is it the storytelling that’s different or better? I was just wondering what you might think of that.
The last thing I was going to say is that I find that the audience really wants to know, and in some of the opportunities for scientists to come forward early, they were very slow about doing so. And so I was just wondering whether or not, in terms of closing the gap, the scientists or the science is too slow for whatever processing that has to happen, going through the methodology or just being chicken to come up with answers about intelligent design or responding to the bell curve, and all of these other folks are out there putting out the information or the wrong information. So I was just wondering what you thought may explain why those stories or those particular blogs had more responses.
Larry Klein
I think there are a lot of things going on in that, but I do think it actually ties into some extent, and what Deb was talking about as well, with when we were doing Rx for Survival. This was a big series on global health, we were trying to engage newspapers, magazines, other television programs in trying to talk about the issues that were so critical to the health of millions of people around the world and we couldn’t make any headway. But as soon as the tsunami hit, everybody was out there 24/7, from all the different media outlets, covering that event.
We tried to make the point that in terms of preventable deaths each year, there’s a tsunami every two weeks, you know, that that’s how many people die from preventable diseases compared to who died in the tsunami. And yet we get no play, we get no coverage because it doesn’t get attention. And I think to some extent that the old adage about squeaky wheels and all that sort of stuff does take over here—the media itself gives that kind of story, whether it’s real like the tsunami or not real like the conspiracy theorists, a lot of play. And I don’t know if there are other psychological reasons why people want to believe that there is a conspiracy, why people don’t trust science—I know why they don’t trust the administration, I’m not so sure why they don’t trust science. And so I don’t know that I have a very good answer, but I do believe that at least from my experience of doing this show, the coverage that that stuff was given was extraordinary and there was no real coverage around some very important things happening about how to change building codes to prevent that kind of stuff from happening. No one was covering that.
Jeffrey Brown
Deborah, you want to address the other part of the question about science and how active scientists are themselves?
Deborah Blum
You know, it’s never been my experience that people in the culture of science love to dive head first into controversy. And instead, when they see a journalist coming up who wants to ask them about a controversial issue, they tend to duck, or hide or disappear. It’s just so, it has tended to be that there’s been a kind of retreat. And when you were asking about the bell curve, it reminded me of way back in the nineties I was doing a story on the biology of behavior and I was looking at some of the things that the bell curve scientists had said, particularly Phil Rushton from Canada and Richard Lynn from Ireland. And one of the things that’s really interesting when you look at their work is that a lot of the work is not their own.
What they do is they take other people’s studies and then—I’m going to say misinterpret it because that’s my read. And one of the things they had done, they had taken a study that an anthropologist, a physical anthropologist, had done looking at skull size, especially skulls from prehistory, and concluded that the skulls were larger, the general brain cavity was larger in the Caucasian northern Asian realms and smaller in Africa. And these guys had taken that to say, well, of course, that explains the lower IQ theme that they were running.
So I wanted to talk to the scientist who had done this study and I must have called him almost every other day for about two weeks and he did not return my phone calls. And finally I called his office and tracked down his office hours and hunted him down, and when he answered the phone I said, "My name’s Deborah Blum, you’ve probably heard it 17 or so times in the last week. " And he said, "Oh, yeah, " he goes. "Well, I never talk to journalists about this issue but since you’ve trapped me I will talk to you. " And he said, "I do not want to get involved in this controversy, " but basically they’d gotten his work completely wrong. And if he’d had the guts, I mean, I really felt if he had had the guts to stand up and say, "Wait a minute. You’re using my study, you’re saying it wrong, " he would have made a difference. And he shouldn’t have waited for some journalist, and I was lucky because the paper had given me a long time to do that project. Lots of times we run out of time, we’re on deadline.
So I usually think it’s important to say two things. One is that, yes, you know, in our discussion of science and the media, it’s not just about what the media does, it’s about what scientists do and their role in participating. And one of the mistakes I think that scientists tend to make is because they don’t want to be, quite often, the public voice of a particular issue. They hand that off to science reporters, science journalists, science programs. And then I get to frame the issue, and I’m the one who says to the public, "Here’s what’s important about science and here’s what’s not. " And there are times when really you might wish that a scientist would do that instead.
Jeffrey Brown
Tim.
Timothy Ferris
Just going back to television for a moment, on the sort of glass-half-full side of things, I think we have a natural tendency to focus on obstacles that we haven’t overcome as partisans for science, the proliferation of pseudoscience and the difficulties we have. But let me just give you a few numbers to suggest that there is something in the glass. Larry’s film, of which we just saw a clip, was seen by over six million people. A science show on PBS with a really mediocre, normal rating might be seen on the night of its premiere by two million people. That’s more than the total audience for the entire United States for that entire week for the top-grossing feature film in the country. PBS television is viewed by 50 million American households in an average week and by 67 percent of American households each month.
And increasingly on the high end—there’s a lot being done on the blog end and so forth—but particularly because I like the high end because I think science is so beautiful and, you know, I have a beautiful presentation when possible. In television we used to envy the theater experience because we just had this little screen, but now what you see at home is often better than what you can see in theaters. Flat screen televisions are selling worldwide at a rate of one per second. So there’s a lot of bandwidth being opened up out there, and it’s not just all on the Internet. So I sympathize with the difficulties we’re having and that science should be much broader, but let’s not underestimate the fact that there are a lot of people who watch science.
Back when I made my first film, cable television only had a penetration of about a third of American households. My executive producer was reading the Cable Television Journal and it had a survey of their viewers asking what would you like to see more of on cable television? Sports came in first and news was second, and it went on down until it was a fraction of a percentage and it still hadn’t gotten to science. So he called the editor and said, "Gee, just, you know, we make science shows. Just how bad was it for science? Did no one check it? " And he said, "Oh, well, you know, there was no box to check for science. We didn’t think to put it in. That’s a good idea, we’ll put it in next year. " So he put it in the next year, and it came in third.
Jeffrey Brown
(Identifying an audience member) You right here. It’s very competitive here, and she jumped fast.
Audience
I didn’t get in the last time because I was sitting in the back, so I sat in the front to get in.
Jeffrey Brown
Oh, see, you got the wrong moderator, but now you’re okay.
Audience
My name is Maray Miller and I’m a science writer/producer at the Exploratorium and we try to live in that gap between the media and science, and I wanted to actually address something to have it talked about a little bit differently. We like to tell the story of science and the process of science using scientists as the storytellers, and we sort of frame it and help them do that, but I often times run into problems, and this happened recently with a Nobel Prize winner, where they don’t want to talk about anything but the science. Their own story, their passion, how they got into it, the kinds of things that people connect with as story, as a compelling narrative, they don’t want to get into it. And I’m just wondering, since we have such a distinguished panel, what do you do to help soften them up—or when do you give up, when do you just say, "Okay, I’m going to respect your privacy even though I’m not feeling like I’m invading your privacy. " But there sometimes is a real line where they don’t want to get involved in telling stories.
Jeffrey Brown
You know, recently, when the last Nobel Prizes were given out, I can’t remember which prize it was, but one of the winners, his father had won years before, so we talked to him on the telephone and he was happy to be interviewed and he was doing interviews with his father. So I got the assignment to interview them and I think they were in California, so, there is no softening up, I mean, it’s live and it’s down the line and we’re not talking to each other eye to eye. And I wanted to talk, of course, about the science that he had won for, but I also wanted to ask about the human interest. I mean, after all, it was fascinating. So I tried to ask the young man, the younger man, the winner, "What was it like around the dinner table? Did you learn anything from Dad? Is this what you guys talked about all the time? " Well, he didn’t want to talk at all about his father. So I turned to the father, and that’s where more of the human element came in. He also didn’t want to take anything away from the son, but it was a very interesting dynamic to try to make happen on live television where you’re trying to get the news and you’re trying to get the science out, but a little bit of the human element as well. Do you want to address?
Jennifer Lawson
When I wear my producing hat, because I’ve produced some programs, too, I find that the element becomes trust and that in some cases you don’t have necessarily, like Jeffrey was describing, you don’t necessarily have the time to build up that trust because you’re doing something live. But if you’re doing a documentary or some work where it’s going to be done over an extended period of time, then part of the pre-production work is then trying to identify people who will be trusting and open enough to share that kind of information, who will trust that you will not use their private information, in that sense, their personal information in a way that either would make them look bad or embarrass them or make them feel vulnerable. And so it’s worth the effort and the time that it takes to do that patient groundwork of working with people to get them to that more open stage, or in some cases where they would be the perfect person to be on camera, but because they’re not forthcoming, then sometimes you end up having to move on and select someone else because they bring other qualities that will make it a much more engaging and a much better program overall.
And that’s where I think that the combination of the Web is so wonderful, too, because the ones who won’t be as personable on screen, you can then capture that useful information from them and place that on the Web. So that’s where sometimes a lot of secondary information that is equally important can be archived on the Web in association with the program.
Jeffrey Brown
I will tell you one little trick because often I do have plenty of time to read the book; you know, I interview lots of authors, novelists, and non-fiction writers, and scientists, and whatever. And they’re so used to the person interviewing them not having read their book that I’m in the fortunate position where a lot of time I do have the time and interest to read the book. I mean, I often choose to interview people because I want to read the book. So a little thing that I do very early on before we even start our interview is find a little way to let them know that I’ve read their book. And I see this moment of recognition where their eyes kind of go, "Oh, my, that’s so nice. " And it’s the tiniest little human thing, you know, this is nothing about journalism, this is just about life. If you want to interact with people, you have to show an honest interest in what they’re doing and an honest attempt to interact with them.
Timothy Ferris
Yeah, you make it clear you’re not like the others. I mean, there are three things that really matter. One, is the quality and preparation of the question. Secondly, the shortness of the question. A lot of good questions are ruined because they go on for a minute and a half. That’s way too long. And third, listen to the answer. I’ve been interviewed so many times by people who cut—particularly if there’s tape running. They ask the question and then you’re answering and they’re on to the next. The best interviewers, like Jeffrey here or Charlie Rose or a number of others one could mention, they listen to the answers and they’re perfectly prepared to start questions based on what you actually said rather than what’s next on their list. And those three or four tips will help.
Deborah Blum
I want to just follow up on something that Jennifer said, which is that sometimes you have to just write people off. And I don’t, I’m reluctant to stand here and give away all my journalist’s tricks for getting people to talk that don’t want to talk, and I realize that working for a museum you have to be a lot nicer to people than I do, right? They’ve actually done a study that shows that when you’re doing an interview, if the person answers the question and instead of really responding, you just go, "Hhhm-hmm, " and wait, they nervously go on. And you can get much better, "Hhhmmm, hhh-hm. " See? You’re not really sure if you like what they said but you’re not going to say anything. Silence is effective. And then, frankly, and I doubt you could use this, baiting people works most of the time, right. So…
Jeffrey Brown
Your mama told me this, or—
Deborah Blum
Right, that’s exactly it.
Jeffrey Brown
I don’t know what baiting—
Larry Klein
One more quick thing is that, and this is really true for shorter pieces, because usually in museums there tend to be shorter pieces, is that you’re going to go into interview someone, and particularly someone at that level, with a whole lot of questions you want to ask and quantitatively it’s not going to end up in your show. So one thing to do is, yeah, try to get all the good stuff you can, but think about the two answers you want, and those are the ones you really want to get. And I’ll tell you, Jennifer’s point about doing your homework beforehand, the shortest-changed part of any budget for TV these days is the development part and it really shows, because that’s where you find your best people. They could be a Nobel Prize winner but they couldn’t talk in plain English if their life depended on it, and you don’t know that very often.
And I’ll just share one more thing, too. If you think that that person really trusts you, and that’s an important thing to build, you can actually do something like, "You know, that was such a good answer, but it’s too complex for my audience. It’s going to end up on the floor. If you can say it better, quicker, more understandably, I can use it. If you can’t, I love it but I can’t use it in the film. "
Jeffrey Brown
All right, let me go to the back again.
Audience
I want to play devil’s advocate here and ask a question which I think is more fundamental. What has the media been doing in the past? How successful have they been, and are they doing it right? We’re living in age where there’s broadband, cell phones, and everything that we did not have thousands of years ago, a hundred years ago, even ten years ago. Yet on average, every other American doesn’t know that the Earth goes around the Sun. Yet, on average, MIT graduates don’t know how to light a light bulb with a battery and a bulb and an electric cord. So what I am trying to ask is, there are some fundamental questions about science that we’re not addressing here and how can we enhance the public awareness of science in this type of current society through media, and how can we actually encourages people to think critically about what’s going on?
Jeffrey Brown
Well, I think we’ve been addressing that for a good while here. Does anybody want to—go ahead.
Jennifer Lawson
Well, I have had the great privilege of being a panelist several times with the National Science Foundation and I say it’s a privilege although it is a lot of work, an incredible amount of work. But, in doing so, I have seen then some of the many projects that are there for funding or have been funded. And one of the requirements that the NSF has is that the projects use a great deal of research, both in the formulation of the project and then also evaluative research at the end to begin to assess some effectiveness of those projects. And it is just wonderful, you know, it’s something where the portion of the NSF that funds the media projects is a very, very small portion. And I just wish they had far more funding because I just think that some of the projects and the effectiveness of them is quite remarkable, and this goes from everything from the IMAX large format films to radio programs, the Voice of the Planet, and many of the other radio programs that go out daily on commercial and public radio around the country. And those projects that are NSF funded, whether it’s NOVA or some of the others, are evaluated and I think that there is then that kind of evidence of their validity and their usefulness in helping to solve the problems that we’re talking about.
Are they the total answer? Of course not. Do we have a lot of work to do, all of us, including parents, just ordinary citizens? Yes, we have a lot of work to do. But I think a lot of what has been done is quite effective and that’s where I think that for some of the other programs, we have the responsibility of weighing in and letting the public, whether through commercial media or public media, letting them know when there’s something we value. We need to let them know that, and when we don’t, when we feel that it’s counterproductive, we also need to let them know that, and in the case of things like the newspaper and the science supplements and all, I really do think it’s a case of use it or lose it, that these are sections of papers and resources that will disappear if we don’t make our voices heard in showing whether we value it or not. And that becomes a form of evaluation, too.
Jeffrey Brown
Okay, right here.
Audience
Thank you. Mun Choi, Professor of Engineering from Drexel University. On your theme about the broader impacts, I think, the National Science Foundation does a great job. They’re looking for intellectual merit, which is a science part. But the broader part is that, in many cases universities and the faculty are trying to partner with schools in the local district to convey to teachers and the students the importance of science and engineering. But the unfortunate part of all of this is that the NSF budget is at $6 billion. Now, it’s supposed to double in ten years, but they’ve been saying that for the last three years. And how do we, with those limited budgets, how do we continue that process, because $6 billion spread across the entire nation is really not enough. And when we talk, it’s my impression that shows like NOVA and the Science Times really are great, but they’re more for the well-to-do spectrum of our society. But there are a lot of children in inner-city schools who really can benefit by having more exposure to science. So how do we get at that population?
Larry Klein
I agree with you, I just want to give you a little example, and it’s about engineering. Several years ago I did a series that received NSF funding called Building Big. It was with a man named David McCauley. And one of the things we built into the project was not my idea, but was an extremely creative effort in which engineers who we worked with from the American Society of Civil Engineers went with some of WGBH’s people into shopping malls all over the country with little building materials and what have you and did these little kind of building contests with certain principles at the base—although we never even used those words. And I think, I can’t speak to why there isn’t more than $6 billion but I can tell you that what NSF does, it really does make you as filmmakers focus on the life after its airing. And I believe that that is at least an initial way to spread those ideas to what people like to call "non-traditional learners of science. " And the best projects do that pretty well.
And you know, probably Hyman Field, who used to be at NSF, supported and pushed that more than anybody I know. I’m sure we’ve all been involved in stuff that didn’t work. I mean, there’s no guidebook out there that tells you how to do this. But I think the effort, the thought to extend the life of that series, is important. In the clip you saw there were all these icons that came up, we producers hate them. You know, that say "Learn more about how something happens, go to the Web site " or what have you, and then there are other things that we do in connection with them. Multi-platform ways to take the actual broadcast—remember a one-hour show doesn’t fit in a classroom very well because they’re still it’s too long. So finding ways to do that, I think, has been maybe one of the great benefits of NSF grants, although Lord knows, we hate to write out all that stuff.
Jennifer Lawson
I also just wanted to comment that I think that there’s no question that for producers—no producer that I know, whether at NOVA or anywhere, sets out to say, "Here’s my program and I really hope it’ll only reach this segment of the population, I hope it will only reach this demographic and these zip codes and I hope it’ll never go to the people on this side of the river or this community. " Instead, people really do wrestle with the question of, "How can we make the programs more appealing? " Will we get more African-Americans viewing if we have an African-American host or if we have younger hosts to a program or if we—I mean, all of those considerations do go into the programs to try to broaden the appeal of them, whether it’s the music or whatever. And for some of the programs for young people, I think that there is usually a real concerted effort with the outreach elements.
And now, I’ve grown to joke about it, about how if I see one more project that’s being done with Girls, Inc., The Boys and Girls Club, or the Girls Scouts. And it’s true, I mean, I manage a public television station in Washington and I found myself speaking before rooms full of Girl Scouts or kids from the Boys and Girls Club. WGBH is doing the Design Squad, a program about engineering and again, it’s one where they’re coming to Washington because they want to engage the kids in the inner city there as a part of the creation of the program, to show not just cultural diversity but even that kind of regional diversity, recognizing that we don’t all sound the same or look the same across the country. So there is a real interest and effort to try to broaden the programs as much as possible.
Jeffrey Brown
I think the NSF grant in science and some others for us have had a similar beneficial impact in terms of thinking about a wider life, you used the multi-platform example, but a wider life for the kind of work we do. Whereas, typically on the nightly news, we do it and we come in the next day and it’s gone. Now, it’s no longer gone because we have an online NewsHour which is very active. The stories then have a life online with all kinds of components to it, which after the piece airs on the program, we will then say, "For more on this, go online. " That’s one small way to direct people. But we’re also thinking more and beginning to do more, because this is still sort of new for us. As I say, if you’re thinking about just turning out a product at 6:00PM every night, it’s a different mindset to think about where else that product can go. But we are thinking more about these pieces in science and arts, and all kinds of things that we do—we can go to museums, can go into schools, I mean, they’re great teaching tools. So there is more of that going on, and there has to be even more.
Deborah Blum
And I think the other part of it that we’re just starting to figure out has to do with the increasingly diverse nature of the audience we’re trying to reach. I was thinking about this. I was on an advisory board in California looking at communicating health. And one of the people who came and talked to us was the founder of a network of Hmong radio stations in the Central Valley. They have a huge Hmong community there. And you know, some real relocation problems as well. But one of the points he made is that that’s a very verbal, oral culture and unlike ours—what I always think from living in California, our Anglo habit of sitting down with a newspaper—their culture did not effectively work that way and so radio was a far more effective way to reach that community than anything that I might do in print. And they were trying to bring science writing and medical news into that radio network, and in a kind of "dang " kind of moment, I thought, well, when we’re talking about audience we need to think beyond the Anglo audience. We need to really think about what are the effective ways of reaching the many cultures and communities in this country, and I think we are still figuring that out.
Audience
Hi, I’m from Washington, D.C. I’m a filmmaker as well and I want to ask a question. All of you do remarkable work and it’s fabulous and each of you work with publicly funded—
Jeffrey Brown
Is there a "but " coming?
Audience
No. No, I just kind of want to go beyond PBS and BBC and these other environments that nurture a really wonderful reverence for science and move into the realm that I work in a little bit, which is the commercial broadcasters, where trying to sell science, if it’s not forensic or if there’s not a body count, is a really difficult thing. And I don’t know—Tim might be able to speak to this—how important it is to have allies within the scientific community, because I know that a lot of the work I do wouldn’t move forward if I couldn’t find voices to kind of encourage the work that we’re trying to get on the air.
Timothy Ferris
In some ways the situation has improved. About a half century ago, I found in an old textbook that it was almost the consensus position among scientists that they didn’t want to talk to reporters at all and that it was considered bad form to appear in public media. So we’ve come quite a long way largely because there are these areas that aren’t commercial television. The big barrier with commercial television and the big thing about public outlets, if you think of an average teenager or someone in their early twenties, so much of what they experience in the media is being sold to them. They’re of interest to its purveyors really as consumers. And so it’s a much steeper slope to do science or do other things that haven’t proven their ability to sell tickets, basically.
And I don’t think we’re going to win that one, frankly. I don’t think that, popular commercial television as we now know it, is going to start to incorporate a lot of science any time soon. And I admire someone like yourself who is willing to try to get more of it in—and there has been somewhat more in—but I suspect that what will happen more likely is that the media will continue to diverge. There will be all these different channels. Increasingly people can find what they’re interested in through everything from satellite radio to Web blogs. To actually crack prime time moneymaking television with something that has the character of art rather than entertainment seems pretty unlikely to occur, I’m afraid.
Many people have tried it, and it’s just such a cut-throat business and it relies so much on telling people what they want to hear. And really the ethic of those shows is not to tell them worse things than they want to hear. These draw the line at least at something that’s sort of more or less factual and it’s when they go over that line that we start criticizing them for doing pseudoscience and so on.
Audience
Thank you. My name is Bob Lichter and just to set the stage, I’m a chemist, I’m not in science communication but I’ve been involved in it in one form or another. I used to run a private foundation and now I do consulting projects. And this is a follow up to Jennifer Lawson’s comment, for which I want to thank you for raising the issue of diversity. And the comment by Deborah Blum about recognizing that there are a diversity of audiences and that one size doesn’t fit all. But you raised a question about, does it matter whether you have an African-American as a host, does that attract more African-Americans, does having a young host attract more young people? And the question is, are there data on that? And that’s what I’d like to hear. But I want to put a context in this, which is that one of the things that I do is that I’m a member of the NSF Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering, which goes by the unsolicitous name of CEOSE, and it issued a report while I chaired that reviewed the entire history of NSF’s involvement in promoting and broadening participation, to use their term, promoting diversity, since that committee was formed in 1980, and that report is a public report. If you search for CEOSE on the NSF Web site, eventually you’ll find it. And one of the conclusions from that report is that there just aren’t enough of the right kind of data, not enough data, but the right kind of data. And so I’m wondering what data exist in the field of science communication that address the issue of how you broaden public engagement among the more diverse audiences? What works and what doesn’t work or what do we know about how to find out what works or what doesn’t work?
Jennifer Lawson
And to my knowledge, there is very, very little data and very little useful data. I think that most producers, and Larry may know more about this, too, I think most producers simply make good-faith efforts and try to see what works and what sticks and keep experimenting in that vein, but I don’t think there is much by way of actual data.
Deborah Blum
Yeah, that’s my impression, too, and I’m not picking up much on it in the university environment, either. Like I said, I think we’re really slow recognizing this issue. It’s sort of suddenly come upon us in a big rush so we’re figuring it out—I hope.
Larry Klein
Well, again, I don’t have any data either. I work primarily within the public broadcasting system and we know the audience demographics in that system and it’s not those audiences primarily. And although many, many, many programs and efforts have been put out to try to reach those audiences, the non-PBS audiences of all sorts—and maybe Jennifer knows a little more about this—it doesn’t cross over very much. The fact is that when people watch television—and I think it used to be easier job when they had to stand up and turn the knob—but when you’ve got a clicker and you’re not on that menu, you’re not getting clicked. And if you don’t get good coverage in newspapers and other media to get people to click on you, you’re not going to get clicked. And it’s really quite a challenge if you’re working in a system and that system has an audience that doesn’t include the audiences that we want to work with. So I don’t know. I do know there isn’t good data, I do know that, but I also know that we haven’t really reached those audiences very much.
Jeffrey Brown
Without the data but almost anecdotally, I do think that the audience for PBS is more diverse than it’s usually given credit for. I just don’t think it’s right to say that it is an elite white audience. I know that anecdotally from when I travel—who comes up to talk to me. So I sense that. It’s not what we want it to be, of course, but—
Jennifer Lawson
I just want to be clear about which data I was referencing there. For one, there is data available. PBS subscribes to the Nielsens, of course, and so through those Nielsens they can make some assessment of who is watching public television in a very general way and that that’s where, as Jeffrey was saying, the good news is that the audience for public broadcasting is quite diverse and it generally echoes the audience for the population of the country. So there is a real diversity in the audience for public broadcasting. In the specifics, though, what I thought the question to us was, Do we have evidence that if there are African-Americans, say, hosting a program or an Asian- American woman as the host of a program, do more people of that particular ethnic group tune in? That’s where I think that we rely far more on anecdotal evidence than we do any hard numbers or any really good qualitative studies. That’s what we don’t have much of.
CPB is doing more research and there is some really interesting research there. It sadly points in the direction that Larry was talking about, which is that in the future, whether you will be seen or not will depend on whether you’re on people’s favorites on their interactive program guides.
Audience
Hi, thanks very much for taking my question. I thought a great way to end the session would be hear some dreamcasting from this panel of experts. We’ve heard a lot about the challenges, so what I wanted to hear was, if you had all the resources, and time, what questions would you delve into, what would be the ideal entry-level science journalist, what would be the ideal way to teach them?, what are some promising new directions that you see that can close the gap between science and society?
Timothy Ferris
Well, a couple things very briefly and then I’ll pass the microphone. I would just like for science to be viewed like any other subject. Right now we’re in the situation where sports writing was more than a half a century ago—it’s kind of a sub-genre. All I’ve ever wanted to see for science journalism, science filmmaking, and so forth is for it to be on the same footing with everything else and to compete as stories against everything else. And when we were talking earlier about representation of minorities, I wanted to say a word about a majority. Speaking as a feminist and the son of a feminist, I would like to issue an appeal to those scientists who happen to be women to appear more in the media. I did a show called "Life Beyond Earth. " I thought it was going to be easy to have a lot of women scientists here. It’s the biosciences and those statistically attract more women and so forth. And it wasn’t. I found so many women scientists who didn’t want to put themselves forward, they didn’t want to become icons, they didn’t want to recommend their colleagues for similar reasons. My advice is, get over it! We need to get more women into science.
Larry Klein
I think it’s obvious that there is no one answer to your question. I think that there are many things we can do to make our stuff a little better and more resources that we can gain to do that. I think that one of the key things is that as we explore ways to spiff up our productions—using that vast treasure trove now of digital tricks that we can do, using the Internet, using the web, using all those different ways to access narrow-casted groups of people—we have to remember that those things tend to be very faddy, they don’t last that long. And I think at the end of the day, what we really need to do are a couple of things. One is we have to create budgets that allow programs to be promoted, that allow us to be able to talk to or encourage or somehow get the journalists who are charged to write or talk about what we do to be interested in what we do. If they don’t talk about us, we’re just going to continue to preach to the converted. We have to go out beyond that somehow.
And I do think that our media partners are going to be key to that. The budgets are so tight we just don’t allow enough money to do that. I think that’s key and I think another key is, just to echo exactly what Tim said, I think at the end of the day, it isn’t about science, it’s about good communications, whether it’s a science topic or whatever, and to really continue to work hard at trying to do that well. And at the end of the day I think that’s going to be the real answer, rather than YouTube, for example.
Deborah Blum
This sort of follows up what Tim says, but I understand the problem with women, and I don’t understand it, but if I’m going to follow up the problem of women scientists holding back, I think it tends to be true also across the science community in that there is not a lot of reward for science, for being public scientists. And I would love to see the community of science itself, from associations onward, make that something that was career rewarding. It tends to be outreach, which is added on to everything else that scientists do, and they feel overwhelmed enough. And it can be punished, right, "You’re popularizing yourself, you’ve sold out to the media, " and it has improved. When I decided to be a science journalist, my father, who is an entomologist, was horrified. And the first thing he said to me when I told him I was going to major in science writing was, "Well, don’t interview my friends, " because, the shame! He came around eventually, and these days you don’t have as much resistance as that, but I would like scientists actively rewarded.
When I was on COPUST, which is another horrible acronym but it’s the Committee on Public Understanding of Science and Technology, I was forever whining about the fact that AAAS gives a lot of awards to journalists, science journalists, and one to scientists. So it’s like fifteen journalism awards for communicating science and one science award. And really, it would be great if that was reversed or at least equaled out. So I do think that in journalism, good journalism is good journalism. It doesn’t really change, I hope.
But we are seeing one thing that I want to mention which could be a very positive force and that is that as journalists become more wire-based, our relationship with our sources changes and journalism becomes more interactive. And actually that’s something that people are starting to study. And it allows journalists to I think get a better sense of what matters to their audience. And it allows people who are readers or viewers to influence in interesting ways and to feel that they have some power in shaping those directions. I’ve seen that in Wisconsin where I work. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is doing a statewide Web site that imparts citizen journalism and where they’re encouraging people to be part of the journalistic process. I mean, it’s scary territory in some ways but I think it’s actually a fascinating experiment.
Jeffrey Brown
Thank you Deborah. And I would like to thank all of our panelists for offering their expertise on the nature of science communication today, and their varying and exciting perspectives on new ways of reaching and engaging the public in the scientific process and conversation.