More than 100 Nobel Prize-winners have signed onto a campaign demanding activist groups and their seemingly willing accomplices in the press refrain from spreading misinformation about the science behind genetically modified foods.
“The media very often likes to present a supposedly balanced argument,” Sir Richard Roberts, who is spearheading the campaign along with fellow Nobel Prize-winner Philip Sharp, told the Washington Examiner’s media desk Thursday.
“They present it as though it’s a 50/50 deal, rather than the fact that it’s a 99-to-1 percent. The media have to do a better job. They just have to do a better job of estimating where is the consensus and if you want to bring another view in, you have to point out it’s a minority view,” he added.
Roberts’ remarks came shortly after an event Thursday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., wherein he explained the purpose of the campaign is to demand activists and media report accurately and fairly on GMOs.
His media criticism is a common refrain in a field whose members say they have long fought to combat media misinformation on stories ranging from healthcare scares to not-so-groundbreaking technological breakthroughs.
One of the main reasons why it’s so easy for junk science to become the leading narrative, Roberts said, is that few reporters understand the issues they’re covering.
All it takes for a junk story to take hold is for one highly trafficked journalist at a decently sized publication to spread a report that is based on 100 percent false premises. From there, copycat news groups, blogs and social media will repeat the claim 100 times before the truth of the matter sees the light of day.
“The people doing the reporting often are not scientists themselves,” Roberts, who currently serves as the chief scientific officer to New England Biolabs, told the Examiner.
“And so they’re not in a position to judge when someone tells them, you know, you’ll get some high-level scientists will tell them something and you say, ‘Oh! High-level professor here, professor there,’ you tend to believe him without actually doing the fact-checking,” he added.
The former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science echoed these sentiments.
Junk science in media is “a huge problem,” Nina Fedoroff told the Examiner Thursday, adding that reporters often chase after, “stuff that’ll attract readers’ attention, and that’s usually something that’s a little scary.”
“People don’t necessarily want to hear bad stuff, but it catches their attention: ‘Oh, this might be dangerous to me,'” she said. “Consider the anti-vaccination campaign, which is based on one paper that was ultimately found to be phony. Ginned up. And yet, it has become a worldwide movement to the detriment to children.”
She continued, explaining the best counteroffensive against dubious science reporting is to keep putting out accurate information. But it’s a difficult and long slog, she said.
“There’s a battle of expertise. The folks who do the junk science assert that they’ve got all of the answers. So how you combat that is basically keep putting out the good science, but that’s not enough. Because once people’s belief systems are formed, they filter what comes in through that belief system. How do you change that?” she added
Luckily, she said, there are websites that provide “expertise and analysis” on scientific research, including Academics Review and Genetic Literacy Project. So those may prove useful to reporters who want to find the facts of the matter.
Criticism that junk science is easily spread by unscrupulous and oftentimes clueless reporters is not new, and has been a complaint long-held by members of the scientific community.
“I was kind of shocked at how bad the reporting is,” Dr. Johannes Bohannon, who holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology, told the Examiner’ in 2015 when he explained his personal experiences dealing with the media’s handling of scientific data. “I didn’t realize how bad people who call themselves proper journalists are at covering this beat.”
“Right now, there’s absolutely no accountability,” he added. “The bullshit is just flooding. And it’s flooding out of these media venues and no one gets any push back.”
Junkscience.com founder Steve Milloy added at the same time that, “The digital age has made it easier to spread junk science. The bad news is that it’s really easy to get it out there.”
“It’s a real battle out there. It’s always hard to turn the ship around,” he said, adding that reporters “will take media releases from journals and institutions and basically regurgitate them.”
This week, Roberts and Fedoroff aired similar concerns about media’s science reporting.
“One of the things that we’re hoping is that this will begin a much larger campaign to really get people talking about this. To get people knowledgeable about this,” Roberts said.
–
This story has been updated.
