Press releases and scientific publicity
Apr. 23rd, 2006 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinGavin of RealClimate struggles with the issue of distorted and sensationalistic press releases. He also mentions a recent paper that I think deserved more attention than it got, implying that the certainty usually imputed to the IPCC's climate sensitivity prediction is actually too timid, and that the real value is very likely to be somewhere in the middle of the predicted range rather than a reassuringly low or terrifyingly high outlier.
I've been watching the interactions between science and journalism for a long time, and I've probably said this before, but this has always been something that amazes me: Much of the time, the distortions that get into news articles aren't the writer's fault at all but come directly from the university or other organization's own PR office.
It's not just for politically loaded stuff, like climatology. I see this constantly in, for instance, all the strange releases about nifty Bose-Einstein condensate research that kinda-sorta imply that the funny things the condensates do to electromagnetic waves somehow contravene relativity, and the reports about quantum measurement experiments that mis-describe strange and counterintuitive, but predictable, confirmations of quantum mechanics as if they were somehow unexpected radical results. There's also some of what Gavin mentioned, press releases that are OK on the specifics but have sensationalistic headlines or opening sentences. If I were a scientist working on any of these projects I'd be irritated if not enraged. Yet there doesn't seem to be a lot of oversight.
I've been watching the interactions between science and journalism for a long time, and I've probably said this before, but this has always been something that amazes me: Much of the time, the distortions that get into news articles aren't the writer's fault at all but come directly from the university or other organization's own PR office.
It's not just for politically loaded stuff, like climatology. I see this constantly in, for instance, all the strange releases about nifty Bose-Einstein condensate research that kinda-sorta imply that the funny things the condensates do to electromagnetic waves somehow contravene relativity, and the reports about quantum measurement experiments that mis-describe strange and counterintuitive, but predictable, confirmations of quantum mechanics as if they were somehow unexpected radical results. There's also some of what Gavin mentioned, press releases that are OK on the specifics but have sensationalistic headlines or opening sentences. If I were a scientist working on any of these projects I'd be irritated if not enraged. Yet there doesn't seem to be a lot of oversight.