It Ain't Necessarily So: How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality.

David Murray, Joel Schwartz and S Robert Lichter. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001, pp.249, US$24.95. ISBN: 0-742-51095-6.

Jay S Kaufman

The growing importance of secondary dissemination of epidemiological research has attracted much attention lately. Primary dissemination of research findings remains the province of peer-reviewed scientific journals, but secondary dissemination in the popular press has rapidly become a matter of great consequence, whether viewed as an opportunity or a dilemma. Journals, universities and government agencies regularly process the findings of epidemiological studies for mass consumption in the form of press releases which then compete for the attention of media outlets and wire services. The scientists responsible for the work rarely have a hand in the way their findings are ultimately portrayed, except perhaps through participating in an interview (which they often read with astonishment and dismay in the next morning's newspaper). This has led to many a seminar on ‘how to handle the media', but to precious little real scholarship on the inevitable distortions achieved when scientific results are made both more accessible and more exciting for a general readership. For example, on what basis does a university or journal press office select or ignore various aspects of the study? On what criteria are press releases selected for publication, and in what ways are they typically modified further? And how does the collective body of published reports in the popular press for a given research programme, say the genetic epidemiology of breast cancer for example, compare to the current state of knowledge represented in the peer-reviewed literature?

Many contemporary epidemiologists are intensely interested in the answers to such questions, which is why one might naturally become excited by the arrival of a new book entitled ‘It Ain't Necessarily So: How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality', especially one written by three PhDs (two political scientists and a social anthropologist). From such a title, one might reasonably expect a systematic study of how scientific research is typically rendered, tenderized and seasoned for mass consumption. Sadly, this book provides little in the way of useful insight on these questions. In fact, it is dangerously close to being a parody of the very processes it seeks to describe. That is, while decrying the selective oversimplification and pro forma manipulations of the popular press, the authors of this book behave in much the same way, pursuing their study largely through the use of highly selected anecdotes and dubiously supported assertions. And while repeatedly declaring that much distortion arises because of a ‘left-of-center-tilt' (p.28) in the media (for which the supporting ‘evidence' consists of nothing more than a citation to a 1984 book by The American Enterprise Institute's Ben Wattenberg in which the same assertion is made), it is not difficult to discern among the authors' choice of anecdotes and alternative ex-planations a certain ‘tilt' of their own. For example, in a section on poverty, low birthweight and infant mortality (pp.170–74), the authors dismiss the link between economic conditions and adverse birth outcomes, asserting instead that these events result simply from deficient ‘parental attitudes and behavior' (p.171), especially those related to ‘illegitimacy'. The reference for these assertions is once again a book from the American Enterprise Institute, this one by demographer Nicholas Eberstadt (The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule, 1995).

The authors opt to focus on the print media, and specifically on the major American newspapers ‘of record' such as the New York Times and The Washington Post. Much of the secondary dissemination of epidemiological research in newspapers and magazines occurs through wire service reports, but these entities remain outside the scope of this book. While somewhat narrow in their choice of media, the authors are much more broad with respect to the variety of scientific material discussed. Examples are derived from general social science research, public health and epidemiology, as well as other disciplines. Case studies that are used anecdotally include issues as diverse as global warming (not as bad as the media would have you believe, the reader is assured) and Texas secondary school education under Governor Bush (likewise, asserted to be not as bad as the media would have you believe).

In ten chapters, the authors sketch out a variety of deficiencies in newspaper reporting of scientific findings, each illustrated by a few selected studies. For instance, the first chapter describes stories that (according to the authors) should have been granted extensive coverage but were not, with examples including declines in American AIDS mortality rates and increases in ‘illegitimate' births. The next chapter, on the other hand, addresses stories that were indeed covered extensively, but (according to the authors) should not have been, including reports of falling sperm counts. Subsequent chapters decry false impressions arising from collapsing heterogeneous events into broad categories, reliance on proxy measures for quantities difficult to ascertain directly (e.g. wire codes in EMF studies), failure to provide diverse interpretations of statistical summaries, leading or misleading questions in surveys and polls, and results exaggerated by ‘activists' with the intent to cause alarm (e.g. the oft-quoted one-in-eight chance of breast cancer for American women).

Some of these issues are legitimate general concerns for study conduct, interpretation, or reporting, but most are simply weaknesses in the original study that the authors feel are glossed over in the newspaper account. It is overly simplistic, however, to criticize popular descriptions of research simply because they fail to articulate every typical and often inevitable study weakness. While many beginning graduate students delight in the journal club experience of discovering countless ‘fatal' flaws in articles from even our most prestigious journals, the problem of media ‘making and unmaking scientific reality' cannot simply be attributed to poor quality of the original journal publications. And to the extent that this is true—that media reports are flawed because the peer-reviewed articles on which they are based were flawed to begin with—this is hardly a useful or novel insight for a supposedly scholarly work on the role of the media in reporting science to the public. Whatever legitimate points are made about research conduct, however, are undermined by the authors' somewhat remarkable capacity for self-contradiction. In Chapter 10, for example, the reader is admonished to ‘be suspicious of monocausal explanations' (p.174). Yet in Chapter 7, in dismissing assertions of a causal link between environmental contaminants and breast cancer, the authors provide exactly this sort of grand dismissal, asserting that breast cancer incidence results simply as an inevitable by-product of ‘social and material progress' for women (p.122). In Chapter 9, the authors are appalled that research by Joel Brind asserting a link between elective abortion and breast cancer should be viewed with suspicion simply because he has declared on Christian talk-radio programmes his determination to show the procedure to be harmful (p.152). Yet previously in Chapter 7, the reader was warned that one should never trust scientists with ideological commitments to their research, as these are not scholars, aiming to understanding the world, but ‘activists', aiming to change it (p.117). Such disparaging epithets recur throughout the book: whereas favoured researchers are described with monikers such as ‘professor' or ‘epidemiologist', Stanton Glantz, for example, is referred to only by the descriptor ‘anti-smoking advocate' (p.225).

Even when not self-contradictory, the arguments tend to stay shallow and smug. Citations to counter-explanations, revealing the fallacies in respected medical and epidemiological journals, arise more often than not from The Weekly Standard, The Washington Times, or from various publications of the American Enterprise Institute. The inimitable Gary Taubes accounts for several of the citations, as do some rather unexpected sources, such as the heavy reliance in Chapter 1 on the journal Forbes Media Critic. The book therefore fails to live up to its implicit promise as the study of important contemporary processes of creating and disseminating scientific knowledge. Rather, the authors seem to be content with the role of seeking to set the record straight and with aiming to instil a healthy scepticism in the reader. Indeed, the book ends with the words ‘caveat lector—let the reader beware' (p.195). For those who would sit down with this particular book, there could be no more valuable advice.





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