Science Reporting Needs More Skeptics

Loren Collins is the author of Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation, published in October 2012.  Since 2009, Collins has blogged (intermittently) at Barackryphal, debunking birther rumors and conspiracy theories related to President Barack Obama. Loren is a practicing attorney in Atlanta, Georgia.

In late 2008, CNN cut its entire science and tech news staff. The attitude behind this move is hardly uncommon; many news organizations have to deal with tightening budgets, and they believe that science news can be covered sufficiently well by regular journalists.

Unfortunately, the same skills that make, say, a good political reporter don’t necessarily make a good science reporter.  A reporter’s lack of familiarity with scientific work can easily result in shoddy reports and articles. It may stem from an inability to distinguish legitimate science from pseudoscience. Or it could be that too much faith is put in one news-hungry scientist, and his authority is trusted when second opinions should be sought. A journalist might misrepresent some new study to an audience, having misunderstood what the actual findings were. Despite being capable of getting all of this right, a news agency might choose to get it wrong, simply as a means of producing SEO-friendly headlines that attract clickthroughs and Facebook shares.

The UK’s Daily Mail is one of the worst offenders in this latter category (although the Daily Mail’s failings as a reputable news organization are hardly limited to its science coverage). Here’s a short sampling of some science-related headlines the paper has run in recent years:

• Feline good: Asthmatic cat treated with acupuncture
• Psychic powers: How thought premonitions and telepathy are more common than we think
• Another flight of fancy for conspiracy theorists as ‘UFO’ is caught on camera off Cornish coast
• Minority Report has arrived: Maryland and Pennsylvania using computers to predict future crimes

The asthmatic cat story is nothing more than an anecdote from a self-described alternative therapist; and although the article seems to offer a supporting quote from a veterinarian, the vet is also a full-time alternative practitioner who (according to other sources) performed the acupuncture on the cat in question. The veterinarian is an involved party, presented as though he were giving a second opinion.

I’m not sure if the psychic powers article can be summed up any better than by simply quoting its last line: “On Monday: Could your pet be psychic too?” How this article (heavily adapted from a book) can possibly be classified as “news” is a true mystery.

The UFO article gets credit for including a common-sense explanation for the photo (it’s a blurry seagull)…in the eleventh paragraph. But that’s the only skeptical analysis in the 15-paragraph piece.

As for the Minority Report article, here the Daily Mail makes a different mistake. Unlike the other stories above, the subject underlying this article is interesting and newsworthy, involving (as the subtitle suggests) a program that crunches data about parolees’ personal histories to determine who are the most likely to reoffend.  It’s more sabremetrics than sci-fi, but the newspaper didn’t opt for the Moneyball reference. Rather, the Daily Mail directly analogized the software to the psychic crime fighting of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and included no less than five screenshots from that film. By framing the story this way, the paper grossly misrepresents the actual research to the casual reader.

The Daily Mail is hardly alone in this kind of silliness. For instance, a local news station in Denver last year reported on an amateur UFO video that most skeptics immediately recognized as showing nothing more exotic than Rocky Mountain insects.

Even CNN is guilty of such pandering. In late November 2012, the front page of CNN.com included this featured story in the bottom center:

Of course, scientists had determined nothing of the sort. The actual story was that a Texas veterinarian and bigfoot researcher had put out a press release claiming she had found DNA from a “novel unknown hominid.” No research was produced outside the press release, no further details were shared, nothing was peer-reviewed, and the press release itself was written by a Michigan woman who claims that bigfoots (bigfeet?) regularly visit her backyard to eat blueberry bagels.

To be fair, CNN’s Carol Costello did report the story on-air with a noticeable air of skepticism in her voice, but the headline nonetheless read “Scientists: DNA proves Bigfoot real”. For people skimming the site’s front page who didn’t click-through to watch the video, they left the site with a completely erroneous impression. All because CNN not only covered an unscientific story, but reported it in the most unscientific way possible.

Three months later, in mid-February 2013, the hyped Bigfoot research was finally published, but not in a recognized scientific journal. Rather, the research appeared as the first and only paper published by DeNovo Scientific Journal, an online-only publication whose website was only weeks old. Moreover, the research was published behind a pay wall, requiring curious readers to shell out $30 apiece. As for the research itself, early reviews aren’t kind, pointing out that even the researcher’s hypothesis (that humans and Bigfoot share a common ancestor from just 15,000 years ago) is scientifically untenable.

CNN reported another story this past December, featuring pictures you may have seen passed around online.

Skeptical viewers might find it hard to believe that modern technology has produced a real-life equivalent of a Harry-Potter-esque invisible cloak. And they’d be right, because these photos aren’t real. But they’re also no hoax.

Quantum Stealth, the company that produced these cloaking pictures, plainly states that the photos are “mock-ups.” CNN, however, failed to share that detail. So did multiple other news sites. The company president of Quantum Stealth eventually added a note to the company website stating, “The photos are mock-ups to show the concept, we have never told the media that these are photos of the real technology and in fact we’ve asked them to mark the photos as mock-ups or explain it on T.V.”

Did that critical detail get omitted because reporters failed to notice this fact in their research or because they weren’t skeptical enough to be suspicious of the seemingly-magical photos? Or worst of all, did reporters intentionally leave the information about the pictures being mock-ups out of their stories to make the story more popular? Whatever the reason, an uncritical and unscientific approach to the story led audiences to believe that admittedly-artificial photos were actually real. That’s inexcusable.

After wrong information has been reported, how can it best be contained? News agencies regularly fact-check political pronouncements, but how often do we see corrections on scientific errors (or more precisely, on scientific errors that aren’t directly tied to politically-charged issues). How often do we see follow-ups stories that admit that a research study was misinterpreted when it was initially reported on? Such reporting would naturally fall to dedicated science journalists; but in their absence, who’s left to serve as the bulwark against shoddy research and pseudoscience?