Neil deGrasse Tyson: Science journalism has a problem | Big Think

I remember, some years ago, 20 years ago, any time I was interviewed by a journalist—a print journalist—the print journalism is taking what I said and turning it into an article. So, it has to pass through the journalist's get processed, and then it becomes some written content on a page. 100% of those experiences, the journalist got something fundamentally wrong with the subject matter.

An interesting point about the power of journalists: I had people read the article and say, “Neal, you must know better than that. That's not how this works.” They assumed the journalist was correct about reporting what I said, not that I was correct and that the journalist was wrong. Okay, this is an interesting power journalists have over whether you think what they're writing is true or not.

I even had a case—rather, I have one brother and a sister. I had a case where they misreported that I had two brothers, and I had a friend of mine who had been a friend for five or ten years read it. He said to me, “I didn't know you had two brothers,” and I said, “I don't!” Well, it says it right here. This is the power of journalism: a mistake becomes truth.

That was decades ago. In recent years, what I think has happened is there are more journalists who are science-fluent that are writing about science than was the case 20 years ago. So, now I don't have to worry about the journalists missing something fundamental about what I'm trying to describe, and reporting has been much more accurate in recent years. I'm happy to report.

However, there's something that has not been fixed in journalism yet: it's their urge to get the story first—the science story, the breaking news about a discovery. The urge to get it first means they're reporting on something that's not yet verified by other scientific experiments. If it's not yet verified, it's not there yet. You're more likely to write about a story that is most extraordinary. The more extraordinary a single scientific result is, the less likely it is that it's going to be true.

So then, you need some restraint there or some way to buffer the account. I don't want you to not talk about it, but say, “This is not yet verified; it's not yet this; it's not yet that.” It's been criticized by these other people anyway. So, be more open about how long this thing you're reporting on could be, because otherwise, you're doing a disservice to the public.

That disservice is they'll say, “Well, some people out there say scientists don't know anything.” Well, what gives you that idea? One week cholesterol is good for you, and the next week it's bad for you. They don’t know what they're doing—that’s on the frontier! On the frontier, science is flip-flopping all the time.

Yes, if you're gonna report from the frontier, it looks like scientists are clueless about everything. You take a few steps behind the line where experiments have verified and re-verified results. That's the stuff for the textbooks; that's the stuff that is objectively true. That's the stuff you should be paying attention to.

That's the stuff you should be thinking about—laws and legislation related to that. Speak to journalists: say, “We need a fair and balanced article.” So, if you say this, we will go to someone else with the opposite view, and that way it's fair and balanced.

Where do you draw the line? You realize the Earth goes around the Sun, right? Oh yeah, of course! If someone says the Sun goes around the Earth, are you going to give them equal time? Well, of course not, because that's just ridiculous. Fine. Now how about how much column space you're giving to climate change?

Well, there are scientists who say it's real; this scientist or not, so we give them equal time, equal space. Are they equal in the literature? No. Are they equal in impact? No. Are they equal in any way? No, except in your journalistic philosophy.

You want to give more column space to something that is shown to be false by the consensus of observation and experiment that's out there, and you think you're honoring your journalistic credo, but you're not. Not on that level. It's like saying the Sun goes around the Earth as far as I'm concerned.