HOW NEWSPAPERS COVER

 

SCIENCE, HEALTH, TECHNOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Catherine Cowan

 

School of Journalism and Mass Communication

 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

 

 

 

May 12, 1999

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The pioneer spirit is still vigorous within this nation. Science offers
a largely unexplored hinterland for the pioneer who has the tools for
his task. The rewards of such exploration both for the Nation and the individual are great. Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.”

 

Vannevar Bush,

Director, Office of Scientific Research,

In a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, July 5, 1945

 

 

 


TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

I. Introduction                                                                                                                 4

 

II. Methodology                                                                                                             8

 

III. Quantitative Results                                                                                     11

 

IV. Qualitative Results                                                                                      26

 

            A. General science news                                                                                   26

                 Recommendations for Lexington                                                                  28

 

            B. Health and medical news                                                                              35

                 Recommendations for Lexington                                                                  43

 

            C. Technology  news                                                                                       45

                 Recommendations for Lexington                                                                  51

 

            D. Environmental news                                                                         55

                 Recommendations for Lexington                                                                  61

 

V. Conclusion                                                                                                               62

 

 

Appendix I: Guidelines for running science and medical stories                           71

 

Appendix II: Newspaper survey methodology                                                   75

 

Appendix III: Professional Contacts                                                                              78

 

Appendix IV: Science sections and pages by newspaper                                               80

 

Appendix V: Most popular national science stories of the week                         83

 

Appendix VI: Further reading                                                                                        84

 

Appendix VII: Copies of science, health and technology pages                          86

 


I. Introduction

At the end of World War II, Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was highly optimistic about the role of science in American public life. In his 1945 report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt entitled Science: The Endless Frontier, Bush saw scientific progress as the key to curing disease, providing jobs, defending the nation and educating the populace. For the good of the nation, Bush argued, the federal government must fund basic scientific research. Bush’s report laid the foundation for federal science policy during the Cold War, a policy that was only reinforced when the Russians launched Sputnik, beginning the two-decade space race that culminated with the United States putting astronauts on the moon.

Since then, however, federal funding for science has been steadily declining. In 1965, the federal government spent 1.85 percent of its gross domestic product on scientific research and development; by 1995, that figure was cut in half to .9 percent.[1] As federal funding for science has fallen, private sources of funding have stepped in to fill some of the gap. In 1997, the entire annual research and development budget was $180 billion; of that, the federal government provided $73 billion, with private industry paying for the rest.[2]

Yet private funding often comes with strings attached. This trend means that scientists, who during the Cold War were often given money with no questions asked, are now having to justify the need for their research. Increasingly these explanations have involved an immediate use or practical application. Rather than allowing scientists to explore basic research, private industry wants them to concentrate on new products and technologies that can be quickly brought to the marketplace and sold for a profit.

This emphasis works very well in some areas of science but not so well in others. For example, the number of personal technology devices such as personal computers, cellular telephones and digital pagers is exploding, and many experts do not see an end to this trend or to the technological research that has produced it. Likewise, it is easy to argue for the importance of funding medical research, which can lead to treatments and cures for many human injuries or diseases.[3] But private companies are highly unlikely to tackle environmental issues such as deforestation, extinction of species or global warming, and basic scientific research in areas such as astronomy, geology and archaeology is often simply lost.

The role of journalists

Journalists have not stood idly by while science policy has changed. In 1939 Science Service, an organization founded in the 1920s by newspaperman E.W. Scripps and biologist W.E. Ritter, had 34 members who wrote for newspapers. By 1960, three years after the launch of Sputnik, 25 percent of 1500 daily and Sunday newspapers employed one or more reporters who covered science, medicine or technology, a ten-fold increase over a period of two decades.[4] Early Science Service members saw their roles as “missionaries” who brought science to the public, a philosophy that set the tone for science writing throughout the Cold War. During this time, journalists covered scientists as stars, a trend readily apparent in stories about Nobel Prize winners. In one example, Time magazine ran a picture of a large gold medal with a caption about Nobel winners going to Mt. Olympus; later Family Health magazine ran a profile of medical researcher Rosalyn Yalow headlined “She Cooks. She Cleans. She wins the Nobel Prize.”[5]

By the late 1960s, however, the tone of science journalism was changing. On a political level, the Vietnam War and Watergate fostered a mistrust of authority figures in general, while several events in science such as Three Mile Island, the Challenger explosion and the Bhopal, India, gas leak fostered a mistrust of the scientific establishment in particular. The dominant journalistic approach changed from regarding science with awe to putting science in its social, historical and economic context, and exposing the very human flaws and failings of scientists. It was during this time that reporting about medical and environmental controversies began to fill news pages; issues such as the effect of fluorocarbons on the ozone layer, the likelihood of saccharin to cause cancer and the discovery of a toxic waste dump in Love Canal all surfaced in the late 1970s.[6] In the 1980s this perspective continued. One of the best examples of science journalism designed to show the flaws of a scientist was Chicago Tribune reporter John Crewdson’s investigation of AIDS researcher Robert Gallo, in which Crewdson alleged that Gallo had not isolated a new AIDS virus but found the same virus as French researchers.[7]

If the Cold War era heralded the benefits of science and the Vietnam era warned about its pitfalls, the 1990s have brought on a third type of science journalism, one that very few journalists or scholars have written about. This third era of science journalism, which I will call the 21st Century era, takes no moralistic stance toward science at all; rather, it simply asks, “How does this apply to me?” Science is seen not as good or as evil but simply as the place where new medical treatments and new tools and technologies that can affect the lives of everyday people are invented. The more information we can get out about these treatments and technologies, many professional journalists argue, the better people will be able to decide how to use them.

It is my contention that just as the Cold War philosophy of science journalism followed governmental emphasis on science’s good and the Vietnam philosophy of science journalism followed many conspicuous science disasters, the 21st Century era of science journalism is following the trend away from government funding of science and toward private research. As a result, science coverage in newspapers has not disappeared, but has changed to emphasize the parts of science that have immediate practical application. While many daily newspapers once had a weekly science page or section which contained stories about basic scientific research, only a handful do now; yet most newspapers have health and medicine sections that emphasize “consumer health,” or news about how to eat right, stay in shape and treat various illnesses or injuries. Meanwhile, newspapers across the country are currently launching “personal technology” sections to help keep consumers up to date on the dizzying pace of change in the computer industry, as well as on other technologies such as cell phones, pagers and flat TV.

This trend toward consumer news is both positive and negative for science journalism. On the positive side, science has made its way out of its assigned place in the science section and into the substance of every part of the newspaper. For example, a business story about the merger of two computer companies has to explain how the deal will bring about new technologies for using the Internet. Likewise, a story about stem cell research must explain what stem cells are and why they are important, while story about a city council vote on whether to approve a proposed shopping center has to show how development is affecting the underlying water table and explain how this might damage the water supply. Pick up almost any issue of practically any U.S. newspaper and you will find that science is embedded on just about every page.

Yet the negative side of these changes is that journalism is losing sight of basic science. Areas such as astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, geology and archaeology are covered only if there is a major breakthrough and often not even then. When they are covered, it is often by journalists who have no background in the field, and so have no idea what is important or even what questions to ask. The result is stories that do not put the event at hand in any type of context, and so either overhype or underplay its significance. Finally, these science stories tend to run not on any special section or page, but inside the general nation and world news pages, where they are forced to compete for space with all the other news of the day. In this way, newspapers of the 1990s are depriving their readers of the full breadth of developments in the world of science.

 

II. Methodology

In this study, I set out simply to discover the state of science journalism in American newspapers today. To do this, I divided the topic of science journalism into four areas -- general science, health and medicine, technology and the environment – and looked at them in both quantitative and qualitative ways. General science news included stories on topics such as astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology and archaeology. Health and medical news included stories on topics such as research that might one day affect human health, new discoveries in medicine such as new drugs or other treatments, or new diet and fitness trends. Technology news included stories about technological devices such as personal computers, cell phones and high definition television. Environmental news included stories about the planet Earth, whether local or global, and explored topics such as pollution, deforestation and the ozone hole.

In the first part of the project, I examined thirty newspapers, ten of circulation 100,000 to 200,000, ten of circulation 200,000 to 300,000, and ten of circulation 300,000 to 500,000.[8] I surveyed one week’s worth of each paper, noting every science, health, technology or environment story, as well as how many column inches it was, whether it was staff or wire-written, whether it had photos or graphics, and several other variables. To be chosen for this study, a story had to include some type of scientific information somewhere in its content. For example, in medical news a story about falling profits at an HMO would not count, but one about why the HMO was paying for one treatment but not another would; in technology news a story about Internet stocks driving the rise of the Dow would not count, but one about a new type of computer search engine would; and in environment news a story about the city council approving a new development would not count, but one that explained the new development’s effect on the city water supply would. I then compiled a database of these findings and used the statistical program SPSS to analyze them.[9] In the second part of this study, I traveled to twelve newspapers to talk with editors and reporters who covered science, health, technology and the environment. In this way, I was able to put the statistics I found into context and to identify several trends.

Summary of findings

Though I will expand on each of these areas in the body of this report, here are the general results. 1) Health and medical news is by far the most common type of science news. It is the most common type of science news to make the front page, the inside pages, and to be put into its own section. Most newspapers have at least one health or medical reporter, often more than one, although their beats can vary from covering medical research to an emphasis on health and fitness to one on the health-care industry. The philosophy of most medical news is “consumer health,” namely, supplying information about new treatments or trends that can lead to the improved health of the individual reader. Newspaper staff writers generally shun stories about the latest research in scientific journals, leaving these stories to the wires; instead they concentrate on topics such as how lasers are being used in medical treatments or why more and more people are being diagnosed with sleep apnea. Many health sections include advertising from area hospitals, doctors’ offices and fitness clubs.

2) Technology is the second most common type of science news and the most likely to have its own special section or designated pages. Most newspapers have either recently started or are currently starting their own technology section or pages; these sections generate revenue for the paper by attracting advertising from many computer and other high-technology firms. Technology stories deal mainly with “personal technology,” or consumer purchase and use of computers and the Internet, though some include information about other technologies such as cell phones, digital pagers and flat TV. A few stories deal with what is called the “culture of technology,” looking at issues such as what it’s like to start your own computer company or how people manage to remember an ever-rising number of secret passwords for their accounts.

3) The third type of science news concerns the environment. Here stories are much more likely to be locally oriented than nationally or internationally oriented, and to be written by a staff member rather than retrieved from the wires. Environmental news is the most likely to run on the front page or the local section of the paper; it is the least likely to be included in a special section of the paper. Reporters for many papers, especially smaller ones in the 100,000 to 200,000 circulation range, see environmental news as a premiere beat. Many papers are willing to give environmental reporters large amounts of time to put together a major enterprise pieces. Some of these series have won Pulitzers; others have helped spur changes in state legislation.

4) News about general science lags far behind the other three types of science news. In the survey, the average length of a general science story was shorter than any other type, despite the fact that readers have less knowledge in areas such as physics or astronomy and so need more background information. While 14 of the 30 papers I surveyed had a special weekly section or page for science news, in practice most of those papers ran much more news about health than science. Three of the papers I visited had recently transferred their science writers to other beats; only one had actually hired a science writer but even there tension was present. As a result, most general science news comes from the wire services and is relegated into the already overstuffed space for nation and world news. In the conclusion of this report I will explore some reasons health, technology and environmental news is doing so well but general science news is suffering, and I will suggest what can be done to remedy this problem.

 

III. Quantitative Results

An SPSS statistical analysis of science stories in one week’s worth of 30 newspapers ranging in circulation from 100,000 to 500,000 supports the conclusion that medical, technology and environmental news are all flourishing while general science news is suffering. In short, medical news is flourishing simply because of sheer numbers; it is by far the most common type of science news in the paper. Technology news is abundant because it is the mostly likely to be put into a special section or page and to attract advertising. Environmental news is doing well because it is the most likely to be staff written and the most likely to go onto A1. But general science news is lagging because it is at or near the bottom of all these trends.

As Table 1 shows, a simple count of each type of science story in all 30 papers reveals that health stories were most numerous, followed by technology stories; many fewer articles were about general science or the environment. Meanwhile, Table 2 shows that of the total of 1352 stories, science stories accounted for 167, or 12.4 percent, health stories for 596 or 44.1 percent, technology for 451 or 33.4 percent, and environment for 138 or 10.2 percent.

 

Table 1: Simple bar graph: Type of science story

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table 2: Frequency: Type of science story

Story type
Frequency
Percent
Valid Percent
Cum. Percent

Science

 167

  12.4

  12.4

  12.4

Health

 596

  44.1

  44.1

  56.4

Technology

 451

  33.4

  33.4

  89.8

Environment

 138

  10.2

  10.2

100.0

Total

1352

100.0

100.0

 

 

 

Although environmental stories are less numerous than stories about general science, this statistic is somewhat misleading. As Tables 3 and 4 show, environmental news was the only one of the four types of science news in which a majority of the stories were staff written. In environmental news, 74 of 138 stories, or 54 percent, were staff written; by comparison, 47 of 167 general science stories (28 percent), 164 of 596 health stories (28 percent), and 167 of 451 technology stories (37 percent) were staff written.

Table 3: Clustered bar graph: Story type vs. staff/wire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Table 4: Crosstabulation: Story type vs. staff/wire

 

Story Type

Staff

Wire

Other

Total

Science

  47

111

  9

  167

Health

164

416

16

  596

Technology

167

274

10

  451

Environment

  74

  61

  3

  138

Total

452

862

38

1352

Another key difference between general science and environment news is the number of times the stories appear on A1, shown in Tables 5 and 6. [10] Of the stories that made it to the front pages of the 30 newspapers, only seven were general science stories while 18 were environmental stories, almost three times as many; in other words, 4 percent of the total number of 167 general science stories made it onto A1, whereas 13 percent of all 138 environmental stories did. In this same count, 52 medical stories made it to the front, over seven times as many general science stories; however, because these newspapers ran such a large amount of medical news, that figure represents only 9 percent of the total number of 596 health-related stories. Technology news is in a similar situation; here 19 stories made it to the front, only 4 percent of the total of 451 stories.

 

Table 5: Simple bar graph: Types of science stories on A1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table 6: Frequency: Types of science stories on A1

 

Story Type

Frequency

Percent

Valid Percent

Cum. Percent

Science

  7

    7.3

    7.3

    7.3

Health

52

  54.2

  54.2

  61.5

Technology

19

  19.8

  19.8

  81.3

Environment

18

  18.8

  18.8

100.0

Total

96

100.0

100.0

 

 

 

Another indication that general science news is at a disadvantage is the average column-inch length of the stories. Table 7 shows that general science stories were shorter than the others, despite the fact that readers have little knowledge about science and so a certain number of column inches are required simply to explain the background. One reason general science stories are so short is that most run inside the paper’s A section, which is typically responsible for all national and international news of the day. These pages usually have the tightest space in the paper because a large number of stories must fit there and because many advertisers want to be located as close to the front as possible. Yet as Table 8 shows, 109 of 167 science stories, or 65 percent, ran inside the A section; this compares to 284 of 596 health stories (48 percent), 99 of 451 technology stories (22 percent), and 33 of 138 environment stories (48 percent).

 

Table 7: Means: Average column inches for each story type

 

Story Type

Mean Col. Inches

Number

Std. Deviation

Science

15.4

  167

  9.39

Health

18.8

  594

12.91

Technology

19.9

  450

11.88

Environment

19.0

  138

11.47

Total

18.8

1349

12.10

 

 

If health and technology stories are not running inside the A section, where are they going? As Table 8 indicates, the most popular place for medical stories is the features section while the most popular place for technology stories is the business section. This statistic points to the consumer basis of each type of story; medical news is oriented toward personal health and well-being, and so often falls under the province of the features department, while technology news is often oriented toward personal devices such as home computers and so often falls under the province of the business desk.

 

Table 8: Crosstabulation: Story type vs. location in paper

Story Type

A section

Local

Business

Features

Editorial

Total

Science

109

22

9

20

7

167

Health

284

37

15

240

20

596

Technology

99

11

199

136

6

451

Environment

66

41

2

13

16

138

Total

558

111

225

409

49

1352

 

Beyond running as a part of other sections, however, health and technology stories are increasingly running on their own stand-alone sections or pages. As Table 9 indicates, only 6.3 percent of stories in a stand-alone science, health, technology or environment section concerned general science, while 48.9 percent of such stories were health-related and 42.5 percent were technology related. General science stories fared only slightly better on special pages located within other sections, such as a weekly science page tucked inside the A section or a set of technology pages tucked inside the business section. As Table 10 indicates, general science accounted for 14.4 percent of all stories on special pages; yet here again twice as many health-related stories and almost four times as many technology stories ran on special pages.

 

 

Table 9: Types of stories in stand-alone sections

Story Type

Frequency

Percent

Valid Percent

Cum. Percent

Science

  14

    6.3

    6.3

    6.3

Health

108

  48.9

  48.9

  55.2

Technology

  94

  42.5

  42.5

  97.7

Environment

    5

    2.3

    2.3

100.0

Total

221

100.0

100.0

 

 

Table 10: Frequency: Types of stories on special pages inside other sections

Story Type

Frequency

Percent

Valid Percent

Cum. Percent

Science

  25

  14.4

  14.4

  14.4

Health

  50

  28.7

  28.7

  43.1

Technology

  92

  52.9

  52.9