Science journalists have had some factual quibbles with the new Cosmos, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. See this Tracker post, for an example. For a while it seemed Tyson might be planning to fire some complaints back. On Sunday night, the teaser for his radio show, StarTalk, was headlined What’s Wrong with Science Journalism? The segment was to feature former CNN science correspondent Miles O’Brien.
The good news: They didn’t find any fault with those of us who practice science journalism through the written word or radio. The bad news: It’s isn’t clear they know we exist.
The show was good-humored and fun, if not particularly informative. The only “journalist” who got criticized was Larry King. But journalism and TV journalism were treated synonymously. It was as if the world of print/web journalists and the world of TV personalities had drifted to oppose sides of some event horizon and were out of causal contact. (And it’s not hard to guess which side is headed into a black hole).
Tyson’s main complaint was that he saw too much focus on the personalities of the journalists at the expense of the subject matter – again, a problem associated with TV. He wanted to know why he should care about journalists’ opinions.
O’Brien had a good answer, explaining that when he’d covered something long enough, he felt he was in a position to offer analysis as well as “Joe Friday’s just the facts,” as he put it. Listeners learned why CNN discontinued its science desk. O’Brien has moved to the PBS News Hour but has been back on CNN to add to the missing plane coverage.
The discussion ended with the observation that the most popular news stories involve bad news, death and destruction. And even in astrophysics, people like stories about explosions, collisions, or how you would get stretched into spaghetti if you fell into a black hole. I wonder how much time we have left.
Listen to the 43 minute segment here.
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