Choosing terms; it's something science writers do every day, sometimes with careful thought, sometimes in the last minutes before deadline. This panel at the 2007 NASW annual meeting challenged writers to use care when choosing terms and constructing analogies to describe contentious science, noting that if writers don't think through their choices, they may well be letting interest groups do it for them.
Erica Austin, the interim director of the Edward R. Murrow School of communication at Washington State University, studies advertising campaigns as well as news coverage. She noted that readers respond both logically and emotionally to every message we get.
"Patterns are learned early," she noted. "We don't have the time to think deeply about every message we receive so we use a lot of short cuts."
Austin described the messages her mother had learned in the fifties about the value of formula feeding infants. "She's still blaming any problems my children have on the fact that I breast fed them," she quipped.
Chris Mooney, the author of the Republican War on Science urged the audience not to be too literal. "Sometimes scientists want absolute accuracy and they can't have it," Mooney said, arguing that metaphors are often the best way explain complex science. However, he cautioned journalists to watch for language that's being planted for them, noting that interest groups use metaphors to their own end.
In his work, Mooney frequently runs into the terms "junk science" and "sound science," both of which were created by interest groups to try to influence what kinds of studies the government could use when making policy decisions. "Neither term accurately captures the truth of trying to use science, which is always imperfect, in regulatory action," he said.
He also described an experiment where college students were given news stories that were identical except one used the word "fetus" and the other the word "baby." Support for an abortion ban was higher after reading stories that used the word baby.
Leah Ceccarelli, a rhetorician at the University of Washington noted that despite the sophistication some interest groups show, many people use metaphors that hurt their causes. For example, warmth is generally considered a good thing and greenhouses are associated with lush foliage and abundance.
"It's taken quite a bit of time to get people to think about global warming and greenhouse gases as a negative thing," she said. "It's hard to overcome definitions that are deeply embedded in the public mind."
Ceccarelli disagreed with Mooney, urging the audience to use scientifically precise language the way scientists do, followed by an explanation of what the phrase actually means.
Charlie Petit then closed out the talk with a somewhat painful depiction of what happens when journalists abdicate their responsibility to make their own choices.
A veteran newspaperman, Petit now runs the Knight Science Journalism tracker. He explained how at the tracker, they post press releases alongside resulting stories so that readers can see how closely some news coverage follows an institutional line. He also highlighted reporters who clearly started with the same release but did their own reporting and found a different story.
"The point is, whose story is it?" Petit reminded the audience. "You've got to take possession of the story. Do sweat the small stuff. If we thought about it a little harder there might be fewer cases where this grand framing would take possession of us so easily."
Robin Mejia writes for magazines like Wired, Science and Popular Science, and she won the 2005 Livingston Award for Young Journalists for her first broadcast project, the CNN presents documentary Reasonable Doubt. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA with her husband.
