It’s not a science journalism problem, it’s a journalism problem

Late last month, Martin Robbins wrote a fantastic spoof of science journalism for The Guardian’s website – This is a news website article about a scientific paper. In his subsequent commentary on the reaction to that spoof he wrote,

Science is all about process, context and community, but reporting concentrates on single people, projects and events … Hundreds of interesting things happen in science every week, and yet journalists from all over the media seem driven by a herd mentality that ensures only a handful of stories are covered. And they’re not even the most interesting stories in many cases.

As with this rest of his piece, it’s a thoughtful explanation of the problems science journalism runs into. However, this point is not simply one about science; it is about journalism more generally. It is the same issue in a different set of clothes as the one I talked about in The flaw in war reporting from Afghanistan:

“The kinetic stuff” (that is soldiers and shooting to you and me) dominates mainstream TV footage … Yet the big problem with such footage of frontline fighting dominating is that the situation in Afghanistan is about much more than only the frontline fighting. It is a wider military, economic, social, diplomatic and political issue.

So having reporting about Afghanistan in mainstream TV dominated by the kinetic stuff provided by journalists embedded on the front line for a couple of weeks is rather like trying to cover the economy by embedding Robert Peston in a Manchester McDonald’s for a fortnight.

The problem common to both examples, and many others, is that journalism prefers the event to the process.

The publication of a new research paper can be news. The accumulation of wisdom through many research papers is not. A military confrontation is news. The slow process of rebuilding a country is not. A famine in an African country is news. The growing success of the country’s agriculture in other years is not.

In each case, concentrating on the short-term and the dramatic (or at least what can be made to be dramatic) greatly distorts the overall picture, but those bigger trends and more slow moving events more naturally find their homes in books, not news bulletins.