It’s been almost a year now since the Canadian Science Writers Association posted an open letter to their national government citing “numerous examples of instances where Canadian journalists have been denied access to government scientists doing research in areas of public interest.”
Two examples from that letter:
1) After radiation releases from Japan’s crippled Fukishima power plant, journalists asked for information from the country’s sensitive radiation monitoring network. They were denied all reports and found out about levels in Canada only from a global sampling report released by Australia.
2) In April of last year, the American Geophysical Union announced publication of a global climate study (suggesting an inevitable rise in temperature) done by Canadian environmental scientists. All interview requests for those scientists were denied.
In fact, the issue of tight government control of science information – what Canadian science journalists have nicknamed “the big chill” – dates back even farther. A leaked internal government document produced stories noting that scientists themselves have been complaining about these policies since 2008, charting a resulting 80 percent decline in stories about global climate change.
If you wondered if any of these appeals and complaints had changed the policies of the conservative government of Canadian premier Stephen Harper the answer – a definite no – could be found at the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Vancouver.
The sending of another “open letter”, this time from both scientists and journalists, was announced in a government-critical session organized by Canadian freelance science journalist Binh An Vu Van. As she told BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh the policies have indeed had a chilling effect on Canadian science reporting in general: “It’s so hard to get hold of scientists that a lot of my colleagues have given up.”
Ghosh’s story was one of a host of stories that followed the presentation, almost entirely in Canadian newspapers. That coverage emphasized the real frustration of scientists as well as journalists (AAAS is a scientific meeting, after all). This nicely balanced piece by Pettie Fong in the Toronto Star also pointed out that the panel line up included an empty chair (set aside for a deputy minister who declined to come). And this very thorough job by Douglas Quan at The Gazette in Montreal sought a response from the Harper administration, resulting in an e-mailed assurance that the government was simply trying to make sure that information was well informed.
Aside from Ghosh’s story, however, very few journalists from outside Canada covered the issue; two exceptions were this piece by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing and an American Thinker blog post by Rick Moran. And I think that represents a badly missed opportunity.
We tend too often in the United States to act as if Canadian science and science policy is invisible or irrelevant. And yet there’s some outstandingly good research done there and some exceptional science journalists – André Picard of the Toronto Globe and Mail, Helen Branswell of The Canadian Press and Margaret Munro of PostMedia (former CanWest News Service) all come immediately to mind. And freely shared research information is important to all of us hoping for a science-literate world.
One of the things that AAAS does well is give under-reported stories a platform and a new life. So I would have liked to see more U.S. journalists take this opportunity to spread the word about the plight of science communication in a neighboring country. I would have hoped to see this story spread far and wide. And since that didn’t happen ( or at least, not enough to suit me) I’m passing it along here on the Tracker.
(ps – In case you wonder, the photo of snow blocking a door was taken by me and at my house last winter. I do live in Wisconsin after all.)
—Deborah Blum
Leave a Reply