On Monday, a massive tornado plowed a near 20-mile path through suburbs of Oklahoma City, killing dozens of people and destroying entire neighborhoods. My purpose in writing about it here at the Tracker is to take a look at the ways that...
Deborah Blum's Tracker
21May 2013
On Monday, a massive tornado plowed a near 20-mile path through suburbs of Oklahoma City, killing dozens of people and destroying entire neighborhoods. My purpose in writing about it here at the Tracker is to take a look at the ways that science writers helped illuminate the power of that storm. But stories of big storms are always first stories of devastated lives and I'd like to start by extending the sympathy and best wishes of all of us here to people in those damaged communities.
The tornado that struck in the region of Moore, Oklahoma yesterday was reportedly as much as a mile wide at points and reached peak wind speeds that topped 200 miles an hour. According to the National Weather Service, that classifies it as an EF-4 tornado on the widely accepted...
When researchers first proposed that athletes suffering repeated head blows might face a real risk of long-term brain damage, both players and athletic associations dismissed the idea. But over the last few years, an ongoing wave of deaths, injuries, and evidence (such as...
When researchers first proposed that athletes suffering repeated head blows might face a real risk of long-term brain damage, both players and athletic associations dismissed the idea. But over the last few years, an ongoing wave of deaths, injuries, and evidence (such as this 2009 report revealing a consistent pattern of damage in the brains of dead athletes) has begun to erode such resistance.
It's in the context of the attitude shift that I want to call attention to an outstandingly good set of stories on the subject in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, home paper to a city that is home of a football team famed for its aggressive style of play. The series, by the paper's senior science writer, Mark Roth, is called The Tragedy of CTE (which stands for chronic traumatic...
In a terrific recent piece, Columbia Journalism Review's Curtis Brainard takes apart the history of media coverage of false claims linking vaccination to development disorders such as autism. Brainard doesn't mince words about the...
In a terrific recent piece, Columbia Journalism Review's Curtis Brainard takes apart the history of media coverage of false claims linking vaccination to development disorders such as autism. Brainard doesn't mince words about the frequently shoddy coverage of the issue: "The consequences of this coverage go beyond squandering journalistic coverage on a bogus story. There is an evidence that a fear of a link between vaccines and autism, stoked by press coverage, caused some parents to either delay vaccinations for their children or deny them altogether."
In his four-page piece, Brainard acknowledges the central role of researchers, such as the now debunked work of Andrew Wakefield, whose (now retracted) 1998 Lancet paper is often considered the starting point for the recent wave of anti-vaccination fervor. But he doesn't let Wakefield's own behavior excuse that of...
On Saturday, The New York Times published an obituary for Yvonne Brill, 88, a scientist famed as a pioneering woman in the United States' rocket system programs and as the inventor, in the 1970s, of a critical propulsion system to keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.
...On Saturday, The New York Times published an obituary for Yvonne Brill, 88, a scientist famed as a pioneering woman in the United States' rocket system programs and as the inventor, in the 1970s, of a critical propulsion system to keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.
The lead, however, didn't mention any of that. It read: "She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise children. 'The world's best mom,' her son Matthew said.' And in case you - like so many of us - found that wrong-headed in the extreme, that's also a lead that's disappeared. If you call up that obit today, you won't find that opening paragraph. The stroganoff bit has been replaced by a different description, that of 'brilliant...
Last week, I wrote post about a collaboration between the PBS NewsHour and Center for Public Integrity, a look at the story of California environmentalist Erin Brockovich and twenty years of efforts to clean up industrial contamination in a small desert town....
Last week, I wrote post about a collaboration between the PBS NewsHour and Center for Public Integrity, a look at the story of California environmentalist Erin Brockovich and twenty years of efforts to clean up industrial contamination in a small desert town. As I noted, the strength of the story was in a detailed look at the way that the chemical industry tries to infiltrate the regulatory system.
But as science writer George Johnson also wrote in a piece on Slate, the story seemed too accepting of the Brockovich perspective that the industrial contamination in question - hexavalent chromium - was extremely dangerous in the trace amounts found in the area. Johnson's piece, as...
21Mar 2013
Yesterday, I wrote a post in praise of a collaboration between PBS News Hour and the Center for Public Integrity which took a twenty-years-after look at story of Erin Brockovich. As you may recall, Brockovich was the crusading law clerk (made...
Yesterday, I wrote a post in praise of a collaboration between PBS News Hour and the Center for Public Integrity which took a twenty-years-after look at story of Erin Brockovich. As you may recall, Brockovich was the crusading law clerk (made famous in a movie starring Julia Roberts) whose work led to multimillion settlement from the California utility company, PG&E, to a residents of a small town in California.
That settlement was based on years of chemical dumping that led to hexavalent chromium contamination of the ground water in that area - and years of a company coverup. As these latest stories pointed out, the ground water is still contaminated (although PG&E is working on a clean up plan) and the town of Hinkley is now pretty a ghost town. The part of the reporting that I found most fascinating was the evidence of the way the company manipulated the state regulatory system following the...
20Mar 2013
[Ed. note: For more on health claims such as those related to the contamination at Hinkley, see Deborah Blum's "An update to the Erin Brockovich update."]
Some twenty years ago, young law...
[Ed. note: For more on health claims such as those related to the contamination at Hinkley, see Deborah Blum's "An update to the Erin Brockovich update."]
Some twenty years ago, young law clerk named Erin Brockovich took on an apparently impossible cause - bringing utility giant PG&E to justice for poisoning ground water in a small California community (and covering up the danger). Her work on behalf of the residents of Hinkley, California, who were being sickened by a toxic metallic element in the water, led to a $333 million judgement against the company and a court order to clean up the water.
Both her unlikely crusade and her triumph were told in the Oscar-winning eponymously titled movie, released in 2000, in which actress Julia Roberts played Brockovich. This year, though, science...
This week, the journal BioScience made available an upcoming paper with the rather unassuming title "Journalism and Social Media as Means of Observing the Contexts of Science". On first glance, you might...
This week, the journal BioScience made available an upcoming paper with the rather unassuming title "Journalism and Social Media as Means of Observing the Contexts of Science". On first glance, you might think this an unlikely study to generate an angry response.
You have to read a little farther to get to the explosive potential. The paper, published by communications researchers in Germany and the United States, results from a survey of neuroscientists in both countries who were asked to weight the relative value and influence of traditional news outlets versus blogs. Or as the researchers put it in the abstract, to assess "the influence of various types of 'old' and 'new" media on public opinion and political decision making.
Based on the response of some 250 scientists (fairly evenly divided between the countries), the researchers found...
On Sunday, a story published in USA Today flagged this problem: "The EPA has not revised key hazard standards that protect children from lead poisoning since 2001,...
On Sunday, a story published in USA Today flagged this problem: "The EPA has not revised key hazard standards that protect children from lead poisoning since 2001, despite science showing harm at far lower levels of exposure than previously believed."
The story, by Alison Young, cites an array of evidence that EPA's standards are some five times higher than what many scientists believe is a safe level; experts also note that "no blood threshold level" has been identified as safe in children. Yet, as the story also notes, realtor associations have fought hard against stiffening the standards, putting political pressure on the agency. Perhaps, not surprisingly, the EPA refused to grant Young an interview for the story...
23Feb 2013
My first job as a dedicated newspaper science writer was at The Sacramento Bee. I took that job in 1984, newly minted out of graduate school, and not at all sure what I was actually supposed to do. The Bee wasn't sure either - the paper had never had a designated science writer before and many of...
My first job as a dedicated newspaper science writer was at The Sacramento Bee. I took that job in 1984, newly minted out of graduate school, and not at all sure what I was actually supposed to do. The Bee wasn't sure either - the paper had never had a designated science writer before and many of the editors were, at first, dubious about the idea. And me.
Fortunately, I had a great model just down the road. The San Francisco Chronicle had two of the best science writers in the country, Charlie Petit (now at the Tracker) and David Perlman, who, as Los Angeles Times' columnist Maria L. LaGanga wrote this week in a lovely tribute is still hard at work: "The San Francisco Chronicle's David Perlman churned out 111 stories last year and is still going strong. Not bad for someone born before the discovery of penicillin and Pluto."
...22Feb 2013
In a policy move, long awaited by open-access advocates, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced today that it is directing federal agencies - notably those with more than $100 million in annual research and development funding - to make the published results of federally-funded research...
In a policy move, long awaited by open-access advocates, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced today that it is directing federal agencies - notably those with more than $100 million in annual research and development funding - to make the published results of federally-funded research far more freely available to the public.
The move, announced by John Holdren, is aimed at a broad swath of citizens who might be interested in such research results: "The Obama Administration is committed to the proposition that citizens deserve easy access to the results of scientific research their tax dollars have paid for," began the OSTP announcement. The announcement noted that more than 65,000 citizens had recently signed a We the People petition asking that such research be more open to the public.
A Washington Post ...
7Feb 2013
In general, science writers must learn to navigate the complicated terrain of two different professions - their own writerly world and the world of scientific research. Understanding the former helps the writer stay solvent. Understanding the latter helps the writer stay smart - figure out what research is...
In general, science writers must learn to navigate the complicated terrain of two different professions - their own writerly world and the world of scientific research. Understanding the former helps the writer stay solvent. Understanding the latter helps the writer stay smart - figure out what research is worth reporting, which scientists are credible, and how to put a given study into the context it deserves.
Among my favorite tools in this regard, is Retraction Watch, the blog created by Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, which details and investigates scientific retractions and the reasons for the withdrawal of certain papers. If you follow the blog, you end up with a surprising wealth of insight into the high demand way that science works, the standards set by research journals, the evolving rules meant to insure integrity. And you also get sense of repeat offenders in this process - for instance, as in ...
23Jan 2013
Earlier this month, my Tracker colleague Paul Raeburn posted a detailed and substantive critique of Columbia Journalism Review's big cover story in this year's first issue, which he described as a...
Earlier this month, my Tracker colleague Paul Raeburn posted a detailed and substantive critique of Columbia Journalism Review's big cover story in this year's first issue, which he described as a deeply flawed take-down of diet and health reporting by The Atlantic's David Freedman. I'm not planning to pile onto those story criticisms though.
I'm here to criticize the cover illustration that went with it.
I've posted an image of that cover, which features the jokey teaser headline for Freeman's piece "Why is Diet Research So Thin?" But really the headline is only secondary to the main focus of this cover which appears to be a swimsuit model. In fact, a thin yet nicely endowed model wearing a two piece suit with a, um, slightly...
18Jan 2013
Some years ago, Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker, of Science Online fame, decided to create a place where the best science blogging could be featured. That project, called the Open Laboratory, became so successful that it eventually grew into an admired annual anthology. ...
Some years ago, Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker, of Science Online fame, decided to create a place where the best science blogging could be featured. That project, called the Open Laboratory, became so successful that it eventually grew into an admired annual anthology. The Best Science Writing Online 2012 was published last year by Scientific America/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
But as Zivkovic thought about it, he realized that many excellent online science stories are also told not by written words but in sound, image, video and other multimedia formats. And it was this idea that led to a collaboration with other like-minded creative science communicators and the announcement yesterday of a new project, Science Studio. As one of the Science Studio founders, Rose Eveleth...
17Jan 2013
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In early January, Hamilton Nolan at Gawker published a piece titled "Journalism is Not Narcissism", in which he deplored the current fad for first-person in journalistic story telling. His argument is that this is often a lazy way to tell a...
In early January, Hamilton Nolan at Gawker published a piece titled "Journalism is Not Narcissism", in which he deplored the current fad for first-person in journalistic story telling. His argument is that this is often a lazy way to tell a story and one that often ends up being writer rather than subject focused: "At their very best, they offer some amount of insight learned through experience. Mostly, they offer run of the mill voyeurism tinged with the desperation of attention addiction."
This led Gary Schwitzer at Health News Review last week to ponder the same trajectory in health and medical reporting. "Why am I writing about this on a site that focuses on health care journalism?" he asked. "Because we see many stories by health care journalists reporting about themselves. They are often imbalanced, incomplete, non-evidence-based stories....
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