When standing in line at the
grocery store, a special rack advertises celebutante’s faces tying to sell
magazines through the gossip of the rich and famous. “This isn’t news, who
reports this?” And yet there is a large, hard working business of writers and
photojournalists and editors staying up through the night to get their products
to print in the next issue. The sci/tech sphere of journalisms similarities to
celebrity news sadly doesn’t end at the writing staff. Although, yes, a
scientific study is much more acceptable to read and call “news”, the way in
which both types of articles are written, selected for print, and published
parallel in more ways than just facts in a magazine.
In M. Killingsworth and Jaqueline
Palmer’s book EcoSpeak, the pairing
and conflicts of news and human interest plays an obvious role in the
overarching process of journalism. Because news can be a transmission of any
new information, human interest “is the leading factor in determining what
scientific activities will be covered as big stories” (Killingsworth Palmer
134). Depending on what is going on in the individual spheres of all of the
readers of the news source, stories are chosen as to what will be most read and
liked by the readers. In their example, Killingsworth and Palmer talk of the
1988 drought and the domination of news reports on global warming. “Despairingly
called the ‘popular image of science’”, the more read science news sources
including Time and Newsweek played heavily to the global
warming epidemic because of it’s affect on the masses, sometimes overplaying
the issue, even so far as to making “the ‘Endangered Earth’ the ‘Planet of the
Year’” (141). Although global warming was a legitimate issue that needed to be
addressed, its urgency with the populace and the peaking of peoples’ interest
created an exigence to produce as much information as possible on the matter. A
chapter in EcoSpeak starts with the
quote by Stephen Schieder, saying “The public’s perceptions, of course, are
primarily shaped by… the media, which thrive on the four D’s: drama, disaster,
debate, and dichotomy.” The selection of what gets front page treatment with a
magazine, whether it’s a science magazine or a paparazzi tabloid, depends
heavily on it’s popularity with the readers before the articles are even
printed.
When a target audience is chosen,
(the largest audience, preferably), the journalist must pander to his audience.
In the article “Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Science Facts” by
Jeanne Fahnestock, the intelligence of a mass audience is analyzed and can
hinder the efficiency and information in the article itself. An inserted quote
by Einstein sums up the argument by saying an author “succeeds in being
intelligible by concealing the core of the problem and by offering to the
reader only superficial aspects or vague allusions, thus deceiving the reader
by arousing in him the deceptive illusion of comprehension”. Because the target
audience of the article would not be as scientifically aware as the rhetor or
rhetors who produced the story, either a necessary and long explanation is in
order or the information must be spoon fed to a comprehensible level. Einstein
goes on to say that the author has the other option of giving “an expert
account of the problem, but in such a fashion that the untrained reader is
unable to follow the exposition and becomes discouraged from reading any
further” (Fahnestock 276). For the sake of both the audience and the success of
the article, the appeasement of the audience’s intelligence on the matter needs
to be kept in mind.
The sad truth is that celebrity
gossip capitalizes on both aspects that the science community must work towards
to retain readership: they are simple, easy reads that the common audience
feels relates to them and peaks their interest.
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