Dumbing It Down | Illumination

This initial finding left Cameron and Geana wondering whether today's biotechnology coverage wasn't akin to what had once happened with the United States space program. In the early 1970s, they recalled, network executives decided to scrap live transmissions from Apollo 13 because they feared moon shots were too passé to attract an audience. Apollo 13's subsequent difficulties and perilous descent, of course, soon caused them to revert to what then passed as saturation coverage.

Could today's journalists similarly believe the public has simply lost interest in biotechnology stories? Not likely, the researchers reasoned. Biotechnology has, they say, been increasing its role in almost every aspect of day-to-day living. It has even begun to play a starring role in popular culture offerings such as movies and novels. Perhaps then, Cameron and Geana decided, they should examine just how "adequately, continually and thoroughly does media cover science?"

Following this line of inquiry led the researchers to some disheartening, if not entirely surprising, findings about the state of science journalism today. The articles he and Geana analyzed seemed not only "intellectually dumbed down" but also "emotionally dumbed down." In other words, they found that science journalists were not just reluctant to help readers penetrate the complexities of modern technologies, reporters were also disinclined to communicate, at least to readers, their own enthusiasm for the science subjects they covered.

"While scientific reporters seemed to have a generally positive approach to biotechnology -- and shared these beliefs with friends and peers -- they were not so optimistic about the beliefs of the general public," Cameron and Geana wrote.

Part of this attitude surely derives from the conventions of journalism, which mandate that reporters keep their own feelings out of stories. But the data also suggests that many journalists equate professional distance and nonprejudicial reporting with an adversarial focus that is rarely appropriate for reporting science. This means they often spin important findings in order to emphasize a hyped-up "conflict frame" they feel audiences would more easily understand.

Although the Cameron-Geana survey offers fresh material, the questions it spawns are familiar to Robert Logan. Until a few years ago, Logan taught the science journalism courses at MU, where he also served as an associate dean of the journalism school. Now he is an administrator at the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

Published by the Office of Research.