Science journalism is like music: you have to learn it if you want to play it. It wouldn’t occur to anyone to join a professional orchestra by improvising as a flautist or bassist.
Francine Pelletier published in The duty of last January 26 a column (“The pandemic reviewed and corrected”) containing so many scientific inaccuracies that the editor of the newspaper had to apologize to readers and make corrections two days later. This stunned me. It was one more example of a reality that I find distressing: journalists and columnists do not all know how to read music, but find themselves in the orchestra anyway, sometimes by choice, sometimes by obligation.
The misunderstanding by some journalists of what makes science valid (its method and its rigor) leads to inaccuracies in the texts, going so far as to put forward the opposite of what science says.
It is with my hat as a science journalist that I write these lines for the attention of general journalists, who are sometimes asked to cover scientific news. Colleagues, you could teach me a lot (I don’t have your background), but inspired by this recent story, let me point out a few mistakes to avoid when talking about science.
The balance of points of view
First, upstream of knowledge, science is a system, a method for producing knowledge that is not intuitive. You have to be initiated. Before a study is accepted into a scientific field, it must be verified and validated by other experts in the field (peers), who comment on the quality of the research and the results. They can be approved or rejected at this stage. Beware of studies that have not (yet) been reviewed.
If the study passes this milestone, it can “face” other contradictory findings. It is only after “surviving” these trials that a discovery will become “scientific knowledge”. It is the “bread and butter” of researchers around the world. We taught them. This, and other aspects of scientific research, leads to situations that may run counter to the journalistic principles you have been taught.
Let’s start with the balance of points of view: a minister says something, we give the microphone to the opposition too. But science does not evolve like politics. A scientific study says something about a subject; Okay. If a second study contradicts it, what does a journalist do? As you can imagine, he cannot choose which of the two reinforces his first ideas, that would be intellectual dishonesty. The rigor imposes to present the two contradictory results by acknowledging that science does not yet have a clear answer.
But suppose time passes, research accumulates, and five studies contradict the first. Here the weighting of the “points of view” which is familiar to you is essential: there are no longer “two points of view”, but rather one position more probable than the other. And when 35, or 60, or 95 studies contradict the first, we speak of scientific consensus, against this first study, of course.
In summary ? In science, all the results must be taken into account to arrive at a reliable conclusion. Yes, in my example, there is still a dissenting study, but that’s the science — there are outliers, sometimes explainable, sometimes not, and scientists live very well with that. That a dissenting study exists and that it is named in an article is not a problem. But to use it to support a point, while failing to mention the existence of other and more conflicting results, is downright lying.
Choose the experts
The case of the experts, now. If we are talking about immunology, we cannot bring in a psychiatrist… As Valérie Borde explains very well in a recent text published in News, or the former philosophy professor Pierre Blackburn, not all experts are created equal. For example, we cannot consider the word of a physicist, even a Nobel Prize winner, as equivalent to that of an immunologist when it comes to a pandemic. You have to put your trust in the right people, by validating their expertise according to the subject of the article.
Last point: the sources. There, I’m not telling you anything: if you mention figures, tell us where they come from. How to check if they are true if not? All the facts put forward by a journalist should be verifiable, even more the scientific facts which can have an influence on the evolution of a pandemic.
Some would say that the column is not subject to the same ethical standards as the journalistic article. I answer simply: is this a reason to make misinformation? Is this a reason to share falsehoods? Aren’t there enough of them everywhere these days? And is the typical reader aware of this difference when reading a column?
Dear journalist colleagues: dealing with science is not easy, I know something about that. Not all of you are trained for this, and it can lead to unintended mistakes, which can pose risks to society outright. But you have powers: that of demanding that your directors be trained to do it correctly (the Association of Science Communicators offers training on this subject, as well as certain universities), or of encouraging them to hire journalists specializing in science (there are many in economics, art, sport, etc.). For subjects as sensitive as the current pandemic, the health of society is at stake.