Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America

4. Transformations of Scientific Discourse in the News Media

4 Transformations of Scientific Discourse in the News Media Scientific Facts, Human Interest, and the News News reporters and the purveyors of mass media have an ostensible commitment to a realist, even a positivist, epistemology. They are supposedly devoted to the facts. In principle, their brand of objectivity resembles that of applied scienee, a hardheaded insistence on maintaining their own perspective against the pressures and intrusions of governmental and corporate powers. Even the quickest analytical pass at the discourses ofapplied seience and mass journalism, however, will reveal divisions that make this kind of comparison seem trivial. Above all, scientists who write and read denotative discourse based on personal involvement with experimental data are less dependent on uncertified secondhand information than are journalists, most of whom depend exclusively on interviews (micronarratives); and if a particular source proves to be more willing about sharing information or to have a more interesting slant on a particular story, journalists may eonsciously or uneonsciously privilege that source and thereby betray their own objectivity. Moreover, the frantic pace at which news reporters work, unlike the more leisured pace of scientific data collection, makes it difficult for the journalists to get sufficient distance on a story before they go to print. Then there is the much-discussed problem of time and space limitations in the mass media, which fail to allow for sufficiently developed stories on even relatively uncomplicated issues, much less the complexities of environmental science and politics. 1 But even more important than these differences in the way informa133 134 (l ECOSPEAK tion is generated in the two fields are differences stemming from the journalists' understanding of information value, which ultimately ensure that the facts ofscience will be distorted or reinvented altogether when they are presented in the news media. Information Value: The Concepts of"News" and "Human Interest" The mass media's interpretation of information value rests upon two related conventions of journalism-the concept of "news" and the concept of"human interest." For a story to be considered "news," it must tell readers something they don't already know, something they haven't already heard or become accustomed to. News dwells upon the unfamiliar, the strange, the huge, the surprising turn of events, the trouble spot, the crisis. In this sense, news reporting is the rhetorical equivalent of crisis-based government. A story doesn't "break" until its effects are already dramatically evident and are certain to have a broad impact. And once it has broken, it is no longer news; thorough follow-up reports are rare unless the effect~ of the crisis continue to make themselves felt in a dramatic manner. A shipwreck that causes millions of gallons of oil to be spilled in Alaska is news even if that spill represents only a small fraction of the total amount of oil leaked into the oceans every year. Smaller spills are weekly occurrences. They are nothing new, so they are not news-except perhaps as background to the larger crisis that commands media attention. Similarly, the daily ploddings of the scientific laboratory, the adjustments of theory, the small but significant contributions to understanding cannot be reported as news unless they lie along the trail to a "breakthrough," a big science story. And what makes a big science story? Human interest is the leading factor in determining what scientific activities will be covered as big stories. This approach may occasionally involve journalistic portraiture, especially on the local level; a scientist taking an unusual approach to an old problem or one who has won a large grant for research may become the subject of a back-pagc feature story. By and large, however, there is a strong tendency first to focus on applied research-especially research connected with human problems that are already established as "issues" worth dealing Scientific Discourse in the News Media () 135 with-and second, to confuse science with engineering, a discipline structured entirely around solving human problems. Some magazines , the ones devoted exclusively to science journalism-New Scientist , for example--or prestigious journals like Science and Nature, which have sections for science news, report on a broader range of scientific activities and do cover theoretical developments. Yet even in these journals, choices must be made about what to include, for there is a lot of science in the making and not all can be covered. Thus the tendency to focus on applied science and issue-oriented questions prevails...