Some TIPS subscribers might be interested in a recent post "Mooney &
Kirshenbaum on Unpopular Science" [Hake (2009)]. The abstract reads:
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ABSTRACT: Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum in their "Nation" article
"Unpopular Science" write: ". . . .the newspaper industry is
hemorrhaging staff writers and slashing coverage. . . this trend is
killing off a breed of journalistic specialists that we need now more
than ever . . . . .who are uniquely trained for the most difficult
stories, those with a complex technical component that are
nevertheless critical to politics and society. We live in a time of
pathbreaking advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology, of private
spaceflight and personalized medicine, amid a climate and energy
crisis, in a world made more dangerous by biological and nuclear
terror threats and global pandemics. . . . . .The media ought to be
bursting with this stuff. Yet precisely the opposite is happening:
even in places where you'd expect it to hold out the longest, science
journalism is declining.. . . . . . for a disturbing glimpse of what
to expect from a media world with vastly fewer trained science
journalists, we need only recount how much of the press managed to
bungle the most important science-related story of our time: global
warming. . . . . Can science blogs and science-infused websites fill
the gap?. . . the 2008 Weblog Awards, a popularity contest that
featured a tight race for Best Science Blog . . . . came down to the
religion-basher versus the misinformation-machine, and the
misinformation-machine won. That speaks volumes about the form
science commentary takes on the internet. . . . . We must stop
assuming today's media will dutifully carry the best and most
reliable knowledge to policy-makers and the American public. Rather,
it falls to us to shift gears and carry that knowledge to the
entirety of the remaining media, and well beyond. In the latter
endeavor, we may have to create media of our own.
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To access the complete 17 kB post please click on <http://tinyurl.com/n66db8>.
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
24245 Hatteras Street, Woodland Hills, CA 91367
Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands.
<rrh...@earthlink.net>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake/>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi/>
<http://HakesEdStuff.blogspot.com/>
REFERENCES
Hake, R.R. 2009. "Mooney & Kirshenbaum on Unpopular Science," online
on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at <http://tinyurl.com/n66db8>. Post of
14 Aug 2009 15:33:21 -0700 to AERA-L, Net-Gold, and Physoc.
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