Ben Goldacre: There is one university PR department in London that I know fairly well ... [and] until recently, they had never employed a single science graduate. This is not uncommon.
Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely – since they’ll be the ones interested in reading the stuff – people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it’s edited by a whole team of people who don’t understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given “science communication” chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they’ve got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.
amoebic vodka: As for scientists taking responsiblilty for communicating science to the public, we have to ask why? In most cases companies and government bodies don’t expect the people responsible for decision making and doing the job to talk to the media. They employ spokespeople or entire PR departments to do that for them.
MostlySunny: What you have quite rightly highlighted in your column is the powerful effect the
media has on society in shaping popular “opinion” and “morality”. The media defines for society “good”, “bad”, “right” and “wrong”.
John A: I have often read both scientific papers and the newspaper reports and have found that the reporter has completely misunderstood the paper and even added conclusions that just didn't hold. If a factually false and conceptually misleading article is written concisely and clearly is that good science reporting?
Disseminating knowledge from the scientific community to a scientifically undereducated public requires effort on the part of all those involved. Scientists communicate all the time at conferences, in papers and indeed to anyone who shows the remotest interest (as many have learned to their cost at parties). It is the media's job to inform and educate the public, not the front-line scientist's. If the media is incapable of understanding scientists and unwilling to employ those who can, it is lazy and unfair to demand that scientists should come to them while they remain resolutely fixed.
amoebic vodka: We disagree that it is the job of the media to educate and inform. it is the job of the media to sell more copies, get more viewers or whatever it is the company in question needs to make money. In most cases this means the purpose of the media is to entertain (the exception perhaps being the BBC).
It’s not just science, the media misinterpretation of statistics in particular affects other subjects too. The annual ‘exams are getting easier’ stories for example.
Debate taken from 'Bad Science' blog, see here
Implicit here is the idea that advanced artists (and Lenins and Maos)
see things ordinary people cannot, and therefore have a right to lead -
or at least to special autonomy. So: "Avant-gardism is grounded in the
dangerous notion that there exists an elite class possessing enlightened
consciousness."
This is blunder number two, and it leads to the
hoarding, rather than sharing, of information; to obfuscation and
dissimulation, rather than openness and transparency; and to the
deliberate blockage of autonomy and mutual self-empowerment.
[Gene Ray]
Art Schools Burning & Other Songs of Love and War, Chap. IV, para. 12
Scientists are generally a complex bunch who are extremely introverted
but also love talking about their work to anyone who is interested.
That's the problem. The 'public' aren't interested unless there's a
'sexy' conclusion or headline that can be given in the 20 second slot
they'll allocate you on the evening news - at a workshop I attended
(entitled something like 'communicating with a non-science audience and
the media') I was told this about my own research by someone who used to
be the editor of the financial times, and someone who used to be the
news editor for Radio 4 (our supposed 'high brow' radio station)and
apparently a well known presenter of Watchdog in the 80s.
The man from radio 4 was putting words into my mouth and drawing false conclusions from my work within 30 seconds.
Not
sure about any 'deliberate blockage of autonomy' - maybe we don't
communicate because we can't, in the conventional channels anyway. At
least, we are blocked from communicating by a select few who choose what
is and what is not interesting..
Further, there's the adjunct
issue that everyone has different brains which are expert in different
areas and interested in different areas. I have great difficulty
digesting any engineering papers - this prevents me from bulding bridges
and complex metal structures, but do I really want to anyway? The issue
there is co-operation and collaboration. We can't do it all ourselves,
so we need community to capitalise on those who are experts in those
areas to help us fulfil our own goals.
[Debbora]
Adorno is allergic to the power-relations involved in propaganda and
commercialism. For him, to countenance using something as imbalanced as
the mass media to put over a "progressive message" is to agree with
manipulation, setting up the artist in a hierarchy above the audience.
'Theodor Adorno and Mass Culture'
In 2004 Marxist sociologist Michael Burawoy's presidential address to
The American Sociological Association called for a public sociology.
Burawoy considers the point that sociology has a role to play in the
public domain and suggests that the academic sociologist should be more
involved in public debate.
One of the main differences between
the role of the critical sociologist and public intellectual is the
ability to have a relationship with popular media resources outside the
academic realm.
'Pierre Bourdieu'
Wikipedia
When Mr. Smith enters the board room of his company, he is expected to
limit his thinking narrowly to the specific purposes of the company or
to those of that part of the company which he "represents."
Mercifully
it is not entirely possible for him to do this and some company
decisions are influenced by considerations which spring from wider and
wiser parts of the mind. But ideally, Mr. Smith is expected to act as a
pure, uncorrected consciousness - a dehumanized creature.
[Gregory Bateson]
'The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation'
, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.452
A lot of the internal processes of these organisations, are devoted to the propagation or
diffusion of the same ideas across thousands of different offices and organisations. Thus policies acquire an
inertia, as more and more actors buy into them and further these policies in their own small ways.
It is very hard to sell many people at once on complicated ideas, and so there is inevitably an emphasis on
simplicity and
an absence of strategy. The ideal policy in this environment will be one where more of a given action is good and demanded, and less of a given action is bad and to be abhorred.
[eugyppius]
'Government by Vampire Zombie Squid',
eugyppius: a plague chronicle
Related posts:-
In-between
Interdisciplinary Teams
The Medicalisation of Everyday Life
The Larger Mind
Boxed Off
Tasteful Distance
Social Practice in regards to art can be looked at as anything that isn't studio practice.
