Neuroscience and popular culture: How much are journalists to blame for pop science culture?

Don't blame journalists, says Jonah Lehrer here on the reporting of science. He makes some excellent points:

Scientists are almost never subjected to critical coverage in the mainstream media. Quick: name the last newspaper or magazine article that dared to criticize or skeptically analyze a piece of published research. If you had trouble thinking of an article, it's because it almost never happens. And this isn't because science is perfect. As a JAMA study reported last year, almost a third of medical studies published in the most prestigious journals are wrong. Flat out false. These are the same studies that get that get faithfully recited in our daily newspapers day after day. This gullible reporting stands in sharp contrast to the way scientists actually perceive things. When I talk to scientists, I'm always impressed by the way they criticize the research of their peers. To take a recent example: a few weeks ago I spent over an hour listening to a neuroeconomist elegantly dissect a very influential fMRI study. (Other scientists subsequently echoed his criticisms.) And yet this same study has been covered extensively in the press, with nary a hint of skepticism. The fact is, science journalists suffer from an excess of politeness. We are intimidated by all the acronyms, and forget to ask difficult questions. But this is our duty. Most researchers, after all, are funded by tax dollars. They have an obligation to explain their research to the public.

He recommends that we stop letting science journals control the flow of news. I agree, except that in areas like "evolutionary psychology," public funding usually means a licence to propound whatever you want, and call it science. Anyway, assuming we all agree that this situation is a disgrace - in the phrase of the old folk tale - who will put the bell on the cat?

Look, I am a science journalist myself, and I say yes, blame science journalists. Too many of us just do not even think to ask enough of the right questions about too many stories.

In fairness, when we do ask, as Lehrer implies, we run into problems. Recently, I offered a piece to a peer reviewed science journal, on why most people do not believe atheistic materialism, as it is represented in popular culture. That's my specific beat.

I warned the editor that I write like a journalist, not like an academic. My offer was accepted, but when I got the peer review, I was dismayed.

It was full of pettifogging demands for definitions of stuff no one needs defining in the context.

Like, for example, when Dean Hamer says that we are a bunch of chemicals running around in a bag or Steve Pinker explains how infanticide "helps" evolution – what’s not to understand? Hundreds of millions of people read this stuff in the popular press - and they understand. It is a series of overlapping circles whose core is materialist atheism.

I withdrew the paper and found another home for it. From that experience, I realized two things:

1. I could never write anything they would want.

2. They would never want anything I could write. (Even though I know stuff they don't.)

Meanwhile, I wrote the lead editor, and said, “If a story rolled through the science press saying that “Sex with dogs helps evolution, study finds”, would anyone really be surprised?”

Would anyone question it? Would anyone ask, is this really science?

That would be nice. But be still, my heart! That train she be a long time comin'.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

Ignorant journalists and evangelical voters: Fast forward to US election year 2008

Marvin Olasky, journalism prof and World's chief editor complains once again on the endemic problem of journalists who do not seem to think that they need to know anything at all about religion - which would NOT be a problem if they also didn't report religion-related news. But they Do, you see, and so ...

As voters ask questions about religion, some journalists are challenging records for theological illiteracy. For example, on Nov. 29, Chris Matthews complained that a YouTube questioner asked GOP presidential candidates about their views of the Bible: "If there was a Jewish fellow up here, an Arab fellow up here, a nonbeliever, he'd have to say, 'I don't believe in the Bible.'"
Way to go, Chris: Three errors in one sentence. Jewish believers would not say that: They trust the Old Testament, which makes up three-fourths of the Bible. Some Arabs are Christians, believing in all of the Bible. Arab Muslims also believe in the Bible, when the Quran does not contradict it.

I've heard this story a few times now, and expect to hear it a few times more. One reason many journalists do not bother to inform themselves about religion is that for many decades pundits said it would, like, disappear. Nothing of the kind happened, of course.

As we note in The Spiritual Brain, the pundits who propounded that view were looking at the dwindling membership of mainstream Christian denominations. They assumed that the ex-members were becoming secularists. Many were, no doubt, but others were turning up at storefront churches in the inner city and megachurches in the burbs, as well as various New Age folds, Islam, or Zen.

The pundits and those journalists who heed them are just not keeping up with the story. The last pastor I had coffee with, Bruxy Cavey, dresses like a bicycle courier, not like a funeral director. And his innovative churches are thriving. He gave me a copy of his book, The End of Religion - but despite the title, he's no Richard Dawkins, let me tell you. He means the end of the kind of religion that has emptied pews all over town, not the end of Christianity. He is quite confident about the latter.

From the back cover of his book: "Sick of religion? So was Jesus."