Press Releases and the Framing of Science Journalism Opinion Reproduced, with minor editorial changes, from Ars Technica, courtesy of Ars Technica, LLC

John Timmer Ars Technica, LLC E-mail: [email protected]

The chances of this happening are probably press releases and counting on interviews with Key Words proportional to the press officer’s expertise the scientists in order to fill out the report. This in the relevant field of research. And that, of again leaves the journalists highly dependent course, is going to vary wildly. As a result, on the quality of the press release; if it’s bad, Science press releases vary in quality from something the writer may reduced to squeezing a scien- as good as an experienced science writer tist’s words into a story that’s scientifically un- Journalism might produce to borderline incoherence. sound. The interviews may give the scientists Press Releases the opportunity to correct any misinterpreta- Embargo Scientists themselves, however, share part of tions by the journalist ,but it depends in part on the blame for this wide range of quality. Part of the time and effort that they expend in talking this stems from our willingness to write in jar- to the press. Any miscommunications between gon that limits our audience to fellow experts in the two may result in the kind of horror stories In a recent summary of a significant publica- our fields. One article I covered spent much of that started the recent discussions of science/ tion, I devoted a few paragraphs to slamming its introduction discussing the differences be- press relations. the press release that accompanied the results, tween the ‘cognition-based perceptual fluency/ since I viewed it as presenting assumptions as misattribution theory‘ and the ‘affect-based he- The whole process becomes a bit like the established fact with no underlying data to sup- donic fluency model’ but didn’t define either of game of Chinese whispers, where an original port them. This seems to have happened at a these until much later in the paper. The press message gets badly distorted as it’s passed time where a general debate has erupted over release announcing the results was (surprise!) around the room by word of mouth. To make the ways science gets presented to the public difficult to fathom, and the results received al- matters worse, there’s a lot of mistrust at both and the role of journalists in the communica- most no coverage beyond Ars: good for Ars, ends of the chain: scientists may view the press tion process. I’ve now viewed the internals of bad for nearly everyone else involved. as prone to misreporting and sensationalism, pretty much every step of the pipeline that runs while the press probably views scientists as from results to public press, and I’ve given Some of the confusion could be avoided if sci- being uncooperative and possessing limited some thought to what goes wrong along the entists and press offices worked more closely communications skills. I pity the press officers way to produce press coverage that’s mislead- together, but my experience is that their interac- that have to act as a bridge between the two. ing and/or inaccurate. So what follows is both a tions are somewhat limited. A lot of the blame description of the process for the curious, and for this falls on the shoulders of the scientists, To fix this, the scientific community is going my take on what the problems are. as they tend to view the press office as a dis- to have to do two things. The first is to recog- traction from their work rather than as the first nize that press coverage is neither a distrac- In general, most science stories start with a step towards an informed public. My experi- tion nor an unseemly display of ego; rather, it publication. There are exceptions to this — ma- ence has been that researchers are generally is an essential part of maintaining an informed jor astronomical sightings and large scientific cooperative with the press, but they interact and scientifically literate public. The second is meetings produce their share of press cover- very little with their own institution’s press office, to recognize the central role that the press re- age — but for the most part, scientists like to perhaps because they recognize that there is lease now occupies in this process. Scientists keep the profile of their results low until they an unpleasantly high ratio of press releases to can start to improve the situation by making have passed peer review. Mostly, the press is press coverage. their publications accessible to a broader au- made aware of publications through the em- dience, but they will have to go beyond that. bargo system run by the journals or through So the press releases that reach the hands of They need to know when a press release about press releases from the institutions where the journalists can vary widely in quality. Assuming their research is being made, they need to work researchers work. the story gets covered, one of two things tends with the press officer involved to make sure it’s to happen. Most news outlets no longer have right, and they need to recognize that the press There’s a number of ways for things to go sour dedicated science journalists (this is especially officer probably has better communication here. The clearest problem is that press offic- true of the web-based press), and they hand skills than they do. ers are dedicated to creating positive coverage the story to someone who rearranges the press of whatever institution they are a part of, be it a release and publishes. This is depressingly Scientists are the first step in the process and, university or a journal. Part of that job involves common and sends any flaws in the release accordingly, they need to be the first to get their making scientific results as broadly interesting straight on to the public. act together. Once the scientific community and significant — as newsworthy — as they does a better job of ensuring that the press has possibly can. That can often lead them to spin Even dedicated science journalists, however, good material to work with, it’ll be in a far bet- the results in a way that the people who ac- don’t always have the time or ability to read ter position to recognize when the journalists tually produced them may view as inaccurate, and digest the underlying publication. They of- get things wrong and to work on ensuring that over-hyped or oversimplified. ten end up structuring their reports around the those mistakes don’t get repeated. Page 35