Friday 4 February

This week, Janne will introduce our discussion on “The role journalists, markets and researchers in science journalism”

1. We often encounter more or less serious mistakes when our own research or research in general is discussed in media. Is scientific journalism that bad? Are there differences between different media and countries?

(One example:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2009/08/markus-jokela-speaks-women-getting-more-beautiful/)

2. What are the mechanisms that result in bad (if that is the case) reporting practices? Does competitive pressure lead to too little preparation time per story? Is the demand for high quality journalism low? Are media markets in bad equilibrium?

(I am sure there are numerous economics papers on these subjects but I am also sure you won’t be reading them today)

3. Do legal and cultural institutions lead to bad journalism? Need to hear "both sides" (this is law is some countries) grants almost as much voice to proponents of things such as homeopathy or global warming scepticism, in which consensus among scientific community is much more clear than what media coverage implies. If you are against the flow and willing to talk, you always get media coverage. This also gives business opportunities, for example to “smoking is not the cause of cancer and even if it was the smokers knew it was” lobbyists. There is a trade-off between making things look more controversial than they are (therefore delaying the obvious policies) and risk of getting the wrong answer to be the only "truth". How to solve this dilemma?

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/26/scientists-open-letter-logging)

4. Should we as scientists make compromises to get our results into media? Given that part of our job is to make an impact beyond academy, and someone else will probably say something less useful about a given economic topic if we say nothing. Should we take stands outside our narrow fields of expertise? Should we go out with results that are mere correlations? Should we highlight the less important result is that will get us media coverage? What are the possible short run (e.g. better knowledge of the current topic in public) and long run (e.g. loss of credibility of the scientific community) effects of making such compromises and how should we weight these?

5. Are there differences in researchers that make the thresholds to go public differ from optimal, in a sense that research quality and importance should drive the decision (e.g. gender, field, seniority, political views)? Are there conventions in the profession of economics that cause suboptimal dissemination of information to the public? For example one attitude could be that junior researchers should concentrate on getting their tenures and senior researchers may participate in media activities. Should we design better practices and institutions on how knowledge is transmitted to media? For example, should one talk publicly only about work published in good enough journals.