COMMUNICATING MEDIA RESEARCH FINDINGS TO THE PUBLIC

COMMUNICATING MEDIA RESEARCH FINDINGS TO THE PUBLIC

In the reporting of science, the scientist’s truth and the reporter’s news are often quite different. For example, an editor may not consider a particular background feature story about pornography research as newsworthy because the paper has already carried two stories that week on that particular topic. The scientist looking at the same situation may not be convinced of the overlap, in that one was a story about citizens seeking a ban on sales of Playboy in convenience stores and the other was a story about a woman involved in acting in pornographic videos, neither of which at all overlaps with a report of behavioral research on the topic.

In their desire to fairly present all sides of an issue, journalists may emphasize controversy and thus (perhaps inadvertently) play up and legitimatize a fringe position given little credibility in the scientific community. As discussed in chapter 7, conflict and controversy are highly newsworthy. For example, subliminal advertising greatly intrigues and even alarms the general public, whereas the research community has long realized that its feared effects are vastly overrated or nonexistent (T.E.Moore, 1982; Pratkanis, 1992; Saegert, 1987). Such a topic may make good journalism, but it is bad science. The perceived reality of readers in response to such stories may be significantly at variance with the scientific reality.

Journalists and scientists use language in very different ways. As Tavris (1986) said:

To the academician, the language of the reporter is excessively casual, trivializing, and simple-minded, if not downright wrong or silly. To the journalist, the language of the academicians is excessively passive, technical, and complicated, if not downright wordy or pompous. Academic language strives to be informative and accurate. To the reporter, though, the result sounds like nit-picking; it encumbers the research with so many qualifications and exceptions that the results seem meaningless, (p. 25)

It is not unusual to encounter the feeling that social science is an inferior,

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journalists trained in science. More surprising, however, is that this view is also not unusual among social scientists themselves, some of whom see themselves as doing work that is inferior to that of their colleagues in physics or biology. If many social scientists do not see themselves as true scientists, is it surprising that others do not so perceive them? This collective feeling of inferiority may stem from the fact that social science is by its very nature probabilistic, not deterministic. One can never predict for sure the effect on a particular person of seeing a violent movie, in the sense that one can predict with absolute certainty that 2+2=4.

Researchers, including social science researchers, have not always been very successful at, or even interested in, communicating the results of their research to the public. Sometimes scientists who do so, such as Carl Sagan, are actually scorned by their professional colleagues (Ferris, 1997). They certainly are not rewarded by the academic profession, which primarily encourages obtaining research grants and publishing scholarly research papers. Even writing textbooks is held in relatively low esteem in terms of professional advancement (no professor ever writes a textbook before they have tenure!), and talking to the press and the public is often given no value at all, possibly even scorned. Professors and researchers receive no training at all in speaking with the press and often have no clue how to speak to reporters about their work in a way that gives the journalist something he or she can use in writing a story.

Still, social science stories hold much interest for many readers and even journalists. In a study by Dunwoody (1986), newspaper editors actually reported a preference for social science topics over those in physical science. However, the reverse preference was found in reporters. Thus, there may often be a situation of an editor selecting a social science topic but assigning it to a reporter who has less interest in it and thus may not treat it as science, thereby resulting in more sloppy treatment than would be given a “real science” story. A recent study showed that neither journalists nor scientists believed that media do a good job communicating scientific information to the public (Chappell & Hartz, 1998). Indeed, sometimes the impression conveyed in the popular press is entirely opposite to the state of the research, as seen in chapter 9 in the study of popular press coverage of conclusions from media violence research (Bushman & Anderson, 2001), For a fascinating series of papers examining how the media report scientific research about media violence, see J.H. Goldstein (1986).

Throughout most of this book, we have focused on the perceived reality of the receiver of media input. It is even more magical to appear in the media, especially on television. Because it is a very intrusive medium, being on television makes someone either very excited or very uncomfortable or perhaps both. The importance seems to be more in the act of merely being on TV than in what one does there. People are very eager to look perfectly

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foolish singing a song or even exposing personally embarrassing information on a daytime talk show. Over the years we have seen shows of people in the real world, often doing very strange things (e.g., Candid Camera, America’s Funniest Home Videos, Survivor, Temptation Island). It will be interesting to see if the use of camcorders and home videos removes some of the magic from being on TV, because children now grow up seeing themselves on the TV screen frequently. So far, however, the mystique still seems to be there.