SCIENCE IN THE MASS MEDIA

The mass media's influence is enormous but they seem to deal poorly with science. They are, however, the source for most people's knowledge of the world. The pseudoscience, antiscience and plain lack of common sense that we see on television, read in books, magazines and tabloids, hear on the radio, or view on the Internet distort, confuse, and simply misinform about science, how science is done, and who actually practices science. Many of the media, especially television, the tabloids and the Internet, prey on the ignorance, superstitions and fears of unknowledgeable people who live in a civilization acutely dependent on science and on scientific reasoning. People deserve much, much better! And the media can do much better!

The mass media provide very little help, however. Schools, teachers, good books, some excellent Internet sites, and a few informative television programs are overwhelmed by the effluent of pseudoscience and its like. Why do the mass media work against scientific literacy? For money, of course. For example, Tony Tavares, President of Disney's Anaheim Sports, said (Time Magazine, August 4, 1997): "Our main goal is to get people to spend their disposable income with properties associated with the company, whether they're our theme parks, videos, movies or our sports teams. If you've got a dollar, we want it." (Italics mine). How pathetic! Responsibility and innovation simply take a back seat to yet another dollar.

The good and bad information the media present is often selected by the media themselves or their advertisers (Bagdikian 1997). In general, those in the media responsible for material they use are as uninformed about science and its processes as the general public (Hartz and Chappell 1997). Newspaper editors in general, for example, are woefully ignorant of science, hence are reluctant to include it in their stories (Hartz and Chappell 1997). Screenwriters, although they would like to do intelligent and funny stories about science, simply do not have the basic knowledge to do so (Steve Allen, personal communication, 1997). As a result, the mass media serve science very poorly.

The mass media can be separated into two intergrading categories: Active and Passive (Lipps 1999). People engage the Active Mass Media with some effort to get the message, whatever it is. The Passive Mass Media require little decision-making, and the information is received passively. Generally, media that require reading are active, whereas those that are viewed or heard are passive.

Active Mass Media. Americans, for example, read a great deal. More than 50,000 books are published in the USA each year, including many excellent, beautiful and interesting science ones. Pseudoscientific books, however, seem to far outnumber science books, suggesting a much larger audience for these topics. They are so popular that some bookstores are dedicated solely to the paranormal. Science books seldom attain "best seller" status, yet anti- or pseudoscience books do rather frequently. Carl Sagan's Cosmos (Sagan 1980) may well have been a bestseller, largely thanks to its association with his popular television program of the same name. Books in paleontology, like T. rex and the Crater of Doom (Alvarez 1997), The Dinosaur Heresies (Bakker 1986), or Digging Dinosaurs (Horner and Gorman 1988) perhaps sell tens of thousands of copies, but many others, like The Hominid Gang (Willis 1989), appear suddenly and are gone and forgotten. Even Bakker's dinosaur novel Raptor Red (Bakker 1995) did not make the bestseller list, in spite of anticipation that it would. On the other hand, Jurassic Park (Crichton 1993) did very well, thanks in large part to the movie version of the book. Although the book and the movie had scientific errors (DeSalle and Lindley 1997), together they surely did a wonderful job of promoting paleontology and science in general. The movie thrilled a billion people or more and created an unprecedented interest in paleontology and molecular biology. Museums opened new exhibits, magazines explained the details, Internet sites created special pages to deal with it, and a lot of organizations made good money on good entertainment that challenged people to think a bit about science. Even TV experimented a little with paleontology in the fantastically successful situation comedy Friends. One of the principal characters was a professor of paleontology whose science was used occasionally to enhance the program, but never with any understanding of how science works, even though it would have added a great deal to both the humor and the story.

Authors who promote antiscientific or pseudoscientific views have considerably larger readerships than those promoting science. Many more books, magazines, and articles are devoted to such views than to science. The radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh's best selling books sold well over 7 million copies (Limbaugh 1993a, 1993b). He promoted an abundance of anti-scientific and pseudo-scientific errors and incorrect logic (Perkins 1995) to make his points. These books and his radio program regularly reach around 20 million people. Such numbers are significant.

In spite of a gap between science and journalism (Hartz and Chappell 1997) magazines and newspapers can do very well with science. Time, U.S. News and World Report, and Newsweek regularly include science stories (paleontology, too), although pseudo-science appears regularly in them as well without much critical comment. Millions of people read these magazines, but their influence seems small compared to other media. Newspapers, in some circumstances, do a reasonable job of science reporting, especially when the writers are trained in science or are dedicated only to science writing (Hartz and Chappell 1997). General reporters do not seem to be any better with science than the general public. They ask the wrong questions, probe for preconceived significance, and may well distort science. Some of you may have been disappointed with the news coverage of your own work. Sometimes reporters fail to understand, even if allowances are made for "writing for their audiences", an excuse for poor science coverage.

Among several such disappointments I experienced, one shed light on how the process sometimes works. Some time ago, the National Science Foundation decided to drill a hole through the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica to see what was under it. No one knew what might live there. But the drill froze 3/4 of the way through the ice and no sampling could be done. In spite of that, I was able to get some dive gear to Antarctica in time to divert my team to do some diving under the ice pack near McMurdo Sound. We found a new kind of foraminifera (Figure 1) that looked like a little tree, 5 or 6 cm tall with roots, trunk and branches (DeLaca et al. 1980). In spite of the fact that nothing could be found below the ice shelf, a symposium about the results of the Ross Ice Shelf Project was held. Investigator after investigator stood up and said they had no results because the engineers got the drill stuck. When my turn came, I told them about how we diverted and found a new species of protozoan. Big deal, but it was all I had! Two weeks later, the NSF Public Relations person called me up and said, "I hear you discovered a new species of animal in Antarctica". I said: "Well, it wasn't an animal, it was a single-celled protozoan, and besides, scientists find new species of animals every day. It is not newsworthy." He then asked: "Is it good to eat?" I said, "It's a single cell--no one in their right mind would even think of eating one!" He continued: "Well, if you did eat it, what would it taste like?" Wearily, I said I had no idea but since it had a shell made of sand, I supposed it would taste like sand. But I warned, "No one would ever want to eat one!" In a few days his report went out over Reuters International, and I received one reprint request and a clip from a newspaper in Rhode Island sent to me by a colleague. He pasted it to the back of a post card and wrote, "Did you really say this, Jere?" It said: "Professor Jere Lipps of the University of California found a new species of animal in Antarctica that is not good to eat because it tastes like sand!"

Be very careful with the press! Don't let them ask the questions that make no sense or that are irrelevant or wrong. Instead, just tell them about your work. Help them to formulate correct questions if they must ask them. If they insist on asking wrong questions and you don't think they are appropriate, don't answer them. Give them instead the answers to the right questions. Most reporters want their stories to be correct, but they do want to write them themselves. They seldom, for reasons beyond me, allow their stories to be read for correctness by the scientists they interview. Surely a way can be found to have the facts of the story checked by someone knowledgeable besides the writer and his or her editor. It would be in everyone's best interests. Less significant errors or marginal statements may be present, but hopefully none will be as memorable as my bad-tasting foram.

Tabloids hardly need discussion. Their aim is to make a lot of money, so what little science gets presented may be either bad or good depending on what might sell best. Some of their stories have substance when particularly sensational events take place, because they do assign special writers to those stories. While the events rarely involve science or scientists, these successes increase the apparent veracity of their other stories enormously.

The Internet has turned into a vast pit of sites that must be navigated and used cautiously. Anyone can have a site where they can post nearly anything they like. Just sorting through the results of an on-line search now takes considerable sophistication, because of the need to determine which sites are reliable and which are not. Scientific literacy may help here. Tens of millions of sites now exist on the WWW and purvey a wide range of material. Our own Museum of Paleontology site, one of the first on the Web and now containing 4000+ pages of paleontology, geology and evolution, is accessed over 2.5 million times a week (but many of these are multiple hits by the same user). Even so, it is a paltry number compared to some sites on the Web. The Internet can help considerably by providing students with good information, but this usually requires guidance from teachers and the development of appropriate content.

Passive Mass Media. Television, movies and radio reach billions of people worldwide. They could provide very good understanding of science through informative programs, such as those on the Discovery Channel, and entertainment programs that use science themes. However, modern radio is mostly music and talk shows, movies are clearly entertainment, and TV seems unable to develop scientific topics in prime time.

Even though movies are recognized by most people as entertainment and fiction, they nevertheless may have influence. They indicate what scientists do (crazy stuff usually), who scientists are (flakes and bad guys), but provide little indication of the scientific process. They may promote pseudoscientific themes. Much of this is defended as simply entertainment (Crichton 1999), but it nevertheless has greater influence than might be supposed by screenwriters, producers and directors. Some of this may even be quite positive. On the other hand, movies may reinforce pseudoscience or antiscience learned in other media. For example, I took my son to see Independence Day, the fantasy film about a massive alien invasion of the world. When an alleged UFO crash and supposed capture of aliens was screened, a woman behind me excitedly told her three children, "That's true! I saw it on television!!"

Television has done very little with science. It reaches so many homes and is so easily absorbed passively, that it is very, very influential. As such it may serve science well, if it can develop the scripts and programs that people would likely be interested in. Because most children and adults uncritically watch many hours of television weekly, it is particularly unfortunate that science is so sparsely represented. People learn a good deal from television, and their views and behavior are commonly shaped by what they see (Postman 1985). Commercial television executives claim that their programs do not influence people, yet they sell billions of dollars worth of advertising based on just the opposite claim. It can't be both ways! The sales of advertising and changes in people's buying patterns demonstrate that TV is tremendously influential (Bagdikian 1997). It decides our cultural norms, our interests, our politics, and our learning habits, as well as what we want to buy. It could also positively influence scientific understanding around the world.

Television is particularly good at promoting visual images rather than serious discussion or information about the issues. Unfortunately, this usually results in the trivialization of the important things in our lives, our nation and our world. Besides the production of this kind of "junk", television distorts and misinforms by mixing programming. Entertainment programs look like news programs, and news programs look like entertainment. Documentaries are designed to be entertaining, not necessarily factual. People cannot easily distinguish between reality and fantasy on TV.

Furthermore, television companies have two major problems: they have to keep the viewers from quickly switching channels with their remote controllers and they have to fill 24 hours a day with programs. The first need forces stations and networks to switch topics within programs every 45 or so seconds and to show spectacular items and sensational programs in attempts to keep people from channel jumping. The second need forces them to uncritically accept and buy some programs that distort, lie and cheat about science (and other issues as well), and promote pseudoscience. Yet even in reruns, these programs reach millions of people, and many more than that in the first showing (Emery 1997). My favorite example is The Mysterious Origins of Man, a program purchased and twice shown in prime time by NBC. It showed mostly factual errors, a couple of self-proclaimed authorities claiming "scientific cover-ups", and presentations of distorted and erroneous theories. Curiously the Public Broadcasting System sold a video of it through their online store. This program was criticized by scientists, me included, on the basis of the errors and silly theories it presented. The program, derived in large part from a book titled Forbidden Archeology (Cremo and Thompson 1993), relied on statements that 55-million-year-old human remains were found under Table Mountain in California and that trackways preserved in Cretaceous mudstones in Texas proved that humans walked with dinosaurs. It also claimed that scientists "covered up" such facts in a gigantic conspiracy. Far from it--science long ago dismissed the alleged high age of the California remains because they came from a near-modern overhanging shelter (Blake 1899), and the so-called Cretaceous human footprints were made by other kinds of dinosaurs or were carved fakes (Hastings 1987). Demonstrably erroneous theories were presented, such as the crust of the earth slipping 2000 miles sometime in the last million years or less, from temperate places to new positions in the Arctic, so fast that mammoths could not swallow or spit out the buttercups they had been eating at the time. These things were dredged up, packaged in an entertaining fashion, and moderated by Charlton Heston who sounded very authoritative. Alternative hypotheses (such as: buttercups did live in the Arctic when the mammoths died) were never presented--a complete distortion of the process of science. Scientists did not cover anything up; they did their job and long ago disproved those very ideas. The cover-up is on the other side, as its proponents pushed errors and fraudulent ideas as real science by omitting whatever data and theory that countered their own viewpoints. The book sold several hundred thousand copies, and the authors make even more money on lecture tours. This looks more like a business scheme than science. The program should have been labeled fiction or entertainment instead of science, but the networks seem to have no way to evaluate the validity of its programs. When NBC was done with this program, it was shown on the "Learning Channel" a number of times. Is this really a Learning Channel?? A number of scientists sent messages to NBC, the sponsors of the program, and the Federal Communications Commission to point out the errors of fact and theory and to object to the promotion of the program as real science. The producers and authors of the program used this commentary as further evidence of a conspiracy of scientists, and even wrote more books that sold more copies.

Sadly, many other programs, some of which are regular features, continue to convey these distorted and false messages about science on television. Sometimes television produces a whole series of such pseudoscientific programs. For example, the week of March 24, 1997, was declared "Alien Invasion Week" on the Learning Channel. During this week, packaged pseudoscientific programs were shown each night concerning UFOs, alien abductions, alien autopsies, and similar topics. While most programs included a sprinkling of terms like "might have been", "could have been", "alleged", these terms were surrounded by images of flying saucers, big-eyed aliens, and impressive sounding pro-UFO people all accompanied by dramatic music. In a few cases, a skeptic or scientist noted why these things were unacceptable, but the music, images, and general tenor of the segment changed from the dramatic ones used when UFO phenomena were shown. These kinds of presentations significantly influence the viewers to believe the general message about UFOs and not the more rational one (Sparks et al. 1995, 1997). While alien space crafts may well exist somewhere in the Universe, lights in the sky, Biblical tales, fuzzy recollections, blurry photos, and outright fakes are hardly the kind of evidence that such claims require. This is not learning in any sense of the word, but indoctrination. Such programs have enormous influence because they reach millions of people, and many people believe, in the absence of other sources of information, that television tells the truth. These programs should carry a disclaimer that they are dramatizations based on unreliable evidence and beliefs, and that they do not meet acceptable scientific criteria for acceptance. Producing such programs is more than a prescription for disaster, it is a great waste of time, effort and money, and an opportunity for international and local charlatans to foist who-knows-what on people everywhere. It is truly "the dumbing of the world".

Yet television is also the solution, for it reaches everybody! TV could present entertaining and newsworthy programming and readings that properly convey science, so people gain rather than lose something of value in their daily lives. The sense of discovery, excitement and the checks and balances operating in science, especially a science like paleontology, make for interesting stories.

There are good science programs presented in the passive media once in a while. National Geographic Specials, Nova, and similar TV programs are good examples. The Jacques Cousteau programs showed how science was done, and they did it in an entertaining manner. Usually, a problem was identified, a hypothesis proposed, and then his divers went out to solve the problem. The programs were a bit dramatic and took poetic license at times, but they were widely viewed around the world and very influential in educating people about various scientific issues. Other programs, shown especially on PBS or other "educational channels", often thought to represent science fairly, fail to provide an antidote to the TV trash science. They are merely films of scientific subjects, most commonly animals and plants, with voice-overs describing the scenes. Rarely is the scientific process part of the program. The thrill of discovery, the sorting of hypotheses, evidential reasoning, critical thinking, and the joy of successful problem solving--few of these are seen on television even though they could be made dramatic, humorous or interesting.

This should not be acceptable today. Science should become as familiar on television to people as the sex, violence and pseudoscience that are learned in great detail from TV (Postman 1985; Sapolsky and Tabarlet 1991; Paik and Comstock 1994; Sege and Dietz 1994; Signorielli et al. 1995). If these things can be learned from television, the workings of science can be learned as well, if only television will take some initiative and show some real science in their programming.