On the Media on ID

NPR's "On the Media" had a segment about the difficulty of fairly portraying science-vs.-pseudoscience debates -- how to not legitimize the non-science position while still covering the story. I think they got the science right in this piece at least, and showed and understanding of the problems of reporting about pseudo-science:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So months ago on this show we had on the editor of Scientific American, John Rennie.

DAVID KESTENBAUM: Mmm-hmm.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And he said that journalists make a fetish out of balance. In other words, if a source says X, reporters will inevitably get somebody else to say Y. And Rennie believes that this is very often inappropriate when applied to stories about science.

DAVID KESTENBAUM: Well, I think we agree with that. I mean, if you take something like climate change, I think in stories what you'll hear is that the vast majority of scientists believe that humans are changing the climate and causing the planet to get warmer. And then the story might say something like there are some people who do disagree with that, and here's one of them. But you're trying to set the scale of both sides. One of the things I really like about covering science is that, you know, there is an answer. It's not like politics where anybody's opinion may have some merit. Any question that can be posed scientifically is something that can be tested and can be proven right or wrong.

Kestenbaum's makes good points, I think, throughout the segment, especially as he discusses evolution:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I feel humbled argu ing this with you, David, but the fact is there are things that are theories before they become fact.

DAVID KESTENBAUM: For sure. And, you know, it's your job as a journalist to say where each theory is. But, you know, evolution is as much of a fact as you [LAUGHS], as you get in the scientific world. That's an assumption in a lot of stories we do. Any story which discusses whether the Avian flu virus could evolve, jump into humans and maybe kill a lot of people, you don't say, you know, "If evolution is right." When you do a story about genetics and mentioning that humans and chimps share some 99 percent of a DNA, the line that'll come after that is "Because they branched off from the evolutionary tree relatively recently."

Later in the segment was the following discussion about the recent NYT articles on ID:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The New York Times has recently run a multi-part series under the heading, "A Debate over Darwin." Do you think reporters run the risk of legitimizing what most consider to be pseudo science by giving it too much attention?

DAVID KESTENBAUM: Yeah. I do think that's a danger. And that's why we decided to handle the story the way we did. It's interesting, I've been reading some blogs by scientists who are unhappy with parts of the New York Times story. And then Kenneth Chang, who wrote one of them for the New York Times, has then been entering into a debate on the blogs with the [LAUGHTER], with the scientists saying, but look what I said in these thousand words of my story here. It's true the first paragraph says what you say, [BROOKE LAUGHS] but look at the rest of my story. And that's the hard part for journalists, is that people hear what they want to hear [LAUGHS] a lot of times, or people hear what they don't want to hear.

This is a probably a reference, at least in part, to these pieces over at Pharyngula. My problem with the NYT pieces is that no matter how well they counter non-science in the 'meat' of an article, they lead with the idea that the controversy is real, and the idea you lead with is the idea that will be remembered (since most won't read the whole article anyway).