Science Journalism is Still just Journalism

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.