The Sciences, when the goal of science journalism
was to report real discoveries

When I started my career as a science journalist in the early 1990s, Peter Brown, the editor of award-winning magazine The Sciences (now sadly discountinued), assigned me the job of writing short news pieces. He pointed at a three-foot-high pile of press releases, and suggested I go through them to find some scientific discovery worth reporting.

As I went through this pile each month, I found that 90% described results that while interesting certainly did not merit any news coverage. Many described theories that “might” or “could” be true, hardly examples of solid new knowledge. I would find a handful of releases worth a news report, while the remaining 90% would get thrown in the dumpster.

Unfortunately, limited space in the magazine often meant that only one of the stories I thought worthwhile would be reported, but it also meant the story we picked was of real significance. The reader was guaranteed to read about important research results, because the technology then forced us to be discriminating.

That was then. Today, things are very different. The web allows modern news outlets to report about practically every press release they get. Nothing gets thrown away. If anything, new outlets today relish reporting on the least significant science results, merely because the scientists speculate about some amazing final events that “might,” “could,” or “may” happen, if their theories are right. The press eats this junk science up, because it produces great clickbait that, while as vapid as cotton candy, sounds really cool or exciting. That these speculations have no basis in reality is irrelevant.

To give you an idea of what I mean, here are a few examples from our modern propaganda press that I have gathered in just the past week:

• New York Times: Onionlike Space Explosion May Be a New Type of Supernova
• MSN: Cheese before bed might actually be giving you nightmares
• New Atlas: Our nearest stellar neighbor may have a habitable world
• Cosmos: Missing space sulphur: have chemists solved the mystery?
• Sky & Telescope: Saturn’s Moon Enceladus Might Have Weird “Space Rainbows”
• SciTechDaily: Why the Next Solar Superstorm Could Hit Satellites Even Harder
• New Scientist: There might be a ‘Planet Y’ hiding in the outer solar system
• Physics World: Exoplanets suffering from a plague of dark matter could turn into black holes
• Space.com: Is water really a necessary ingredient for life? Aliens may swim in truly exotic pools
• Space.com: Discovery of 250 ‘mini galaxies’ could help scientists pin down the nature of dark matter
• Space.com: Hidden fault beneath Canada could trigger massive earthquake after 12,000 years of silence
• Space.com: The Milky Way’s faintest satellite may not be what astronomers thought

In every one of these cases a close read of the story, as well as the original press release that prompted it, reveals that there really is nothing there. The scientists are proposing something that “might” or “could” be true, but they haven’t actually observed such things happening. Instead, they have used computer models or concocted a theory (based on limited data) to propose a wild future event, such as giant earthquakes, new solar superstorms, new types of supernovae, a new explanation for nightmares, and so on. Our propaganda press then latches onto these proposed (but unproven) cool events like a dog grabbing a treat, to write empty stories about nothing real.

As you can see, Space.com is an especially bad actor in this game. Even today I could have added two more stories (here and here) from that outlet. It appears its science reporters have relatively little depth in their knowledge, and there are no experienced editors there helping them distinguish between the wheat and the chaff. Everything gets published, even if the research is nothing more than a fantasy dressed up as research.

Worse, this focus on what “may” happen means the reporting focuses less on what was actually learned, The science reporting ends up teaching the reader nothing.

Space.com of course is not alone in this. It is now the routine at every major news outlet. The goal isn’t to report new discoveries, but to shape those discoveries around a narrative that might be true, but just as easily could be junk.

For example, let’s take the New York Times story. I had read the original press release, and found the conclusions of these scientists wanting. They might have seen evidence of a new type of supernova, but the data was sparse, there were too many assumptions involved, and the conclusions were simple one of many that could be possible. It was interesting work, of some significance to astronomers, but if I had read this in that pile of press releases in the 1990s, it would have ended up in the dumpster.

In fact, I did put it in the dumpster, now, as I did not post this story on Behind the Black. And had I decided to post it, I would have couched the results in much more uncertain terms than the New York Times, noting the flimsy basis for those final conclusions.

The NY Times however focused on the theories of the scientists — because they sounded cool — so that its reporting of the actual results was confusing and unclear. What mattered was that “a new type of supernova” might have been discovered, “very, very different to anything we’ve observed before.”

A short (and very incomplete) list of false political narratives
pushed in recent years by the propaganda press

This pattern is repeated in all the stories above. It is also repeated in almost all the non-science news stories from these mainstream outlets, which is why I now refer to them as the “propaganda press.” The term is very apt, as “propaganda” is defined as “information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause.” Their interest isn’t in reporting news, scoops of real discoveries, but of pushing narratives. In the case of the stories above, the narrative is almost always to harp on some exciting or awful future outcome, whether or not there is any real chance it may happen.

In the case of politics and general reporting, the narrative now with all the above outlets focuses almost entirely on one simple idea; How can we write our story to support the Democratic Party while condemning Donald Trump and the Republicans? This game has become so obvious it is now laughable, which is why an entire new cadre of conservative news sources have sprung up. The public has recognized the game, and has looked for alternative news sources to get better information.

Sadly, when it comes to science reporting, I don’t think the public has yet made the same realization. Maybe this short essay by me here will help wake everyone up.