by Ben Goldacre
Oh God. Everybody’s bad. How did things get so awful?
12 How the Media Promote the Public Misunderstanding of Science
We need to make some sense of all this, and appreciate just how deep into our culture the misunderstandings and misrepresentations of science go. If I am known at all, it is for dismantling foolish media stories about science: it is the bulk of my work, my oeuvre, and I am slightly ashamed to say that I have over five hundred stories to choose from, in illustrating the points I intend to make here. You may well count this as obsessional.
We have covered many of the themes elsewhere: the seductive march to medicalise everyday life; the fantasies about pills, mainstream and quack; and the ludicrous health claims about food, where journalists are every bit as guilty as nutritionists. But here I want to focus on the stories that can tell us about the way science is perceived, and the repetitive, structural patterns in how we have been misled.
My basic hypothesis is this: the people who run the media are humanities graduates with little understanding of science, who wear their ignorance as a badge of honour. Secretly, deep down, perhaps they resent the fact that they have denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of Western thought from the past two hundred years; but there is an attack implicit in all media coverage of science: in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science. On this template, science is portrayed as groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality; they do work that is either wacky or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory, probably going to change soon and, most ridiculously, ‘hard to understand’. Having created this parody, the commentariat then attack it, as if they were genuinely critiquing what science is all about.
Science stories generally fall into one of three categories: the wacky stories, the ‘breakthrough’ stories, and the ‘scare’ stories. Each undermines and distorts science in its own idiosyncratic way. We’ll do them in order.
Wacky stories—money for nothing
If you want to get your research in the media, throw away the autoclave, abandon the pipette, delete your copy of Stata, and sell your soul to a PR company.
At Reading University there is a man called Dr Kevin Warwick, and he has been a fountain of eye-catching stories for some time. He puts a chip from a wireless ID card in his arm, then shows journalists how he can open doors in his department using it. ‘I am a cyborg,’ he announces, ‘a melding of man and machine,’* and the media are duly impressed.
≡ This is a paraphrase, but it’s not entirely inaccurate.
A favourite research story from his lab—although it’s never been published in any kind of academic journal, of course—purported to show that watching Richard and Judy improves children’s IQ test performance much more effectively than all kinds of other things you might expect to do so, like, say, some exercise, or drinking some coffee.
This was not a peripheral funny: it was a news story, and unlike most genuine science stories, it produced an editorial leader in the Independent. I don’t have to scratch around to find more examples: there are five hundred to choose from, as I’ve said. ‘Infidelity is genetic,’ say scientists. ‘Electricity allergy real,’ says researcher. ‘In the future, all men will have big willies,’ says an evolutionary biologist from LSE.
These stories are empty, wacky filler, masquerading as science, and they reach their purest form in stories where scientists have ‘found’ the formula for something. How wacky those boffins are. Recently you may have enjoyed the perfect way to eat ice cream (AxTpxTm⁄FtxAt+VxLTxSpxW⁄Tt=3d20), the perfect TV sitcom (C=3d[(RxD)+V]xF⁄A+S, according to the Telegraph), the perfect boiled egg (Daily Mail), the perfect joke (the Telegraph again), and the most depressing day of the year ([W+(D-d)] XTQ MxNA, in almost every newspaper in the world). I could go on.
These stories are invariably written up by science correspondents, and hotly followed—to universal approbation—by comment pieces from humanities graduates on how bonkers and irrelevant scientists are, because from the bunker-like mentality of my ‘parody’ hypothesis, that is the appeal of these stories: they play on the public’s view of science as irrelevant, peripheral boffinry.
They are also there to make money, to promote products, and to fill pages cheaply, with a minimum of journalistic effort. Let’s take some of the most prominent examples. Dr Cliff Arnall is the king of the equation story, and his recent output includes the formulae for the most miserable day of the year, the happiest day of the year, the perfect long weekend and many, many more. According to the BBC he is ‘Professor Arnall’; usually he is ‘Dr Cliff Arnall of Cardiff University’. In reality he’s a private entrepreneur running confidence-building and stress-management courses, who has done a bit of part-time instructing at Cardiff University. The university’s press office, however, are keen to put him in their monthly media-monitoring success reports. This is how low we have sunk.
Perhaps you nurture fond hopes for these formulae—perhaps you think they make science ‘relevant’ and ‘fun’, a bit like Christian rock. But you should know that they come from PR companies, often fully formed and ready to have a scientist’s name attached to them. In fact PR companies are very open to their customers about this practice: it is referred to as ‘advertising equivalent exposure’, whereby a ‘news’ story is put out which can be attached to a client’s name.
Cliff Arnall’s formula to identify the most miserable day of the year has now become an annual media stalwart. It was sponsored by Sky Travel, and appeared in January, the perfect time to book a holiday. His ‘happiest day of the year’ formula appears in June—it received yet another outing in the Telegraph and the Mail in 2008—and was sponsored by Wall’s ice cream. Professor Cary Cooper’s formula to grade sporting triumphs was sponsored by Tesco. The equation for the beer-goggle effect, whereby ladies become more attractive after some ale, was produced by Dr Nathan Efron, Professor of Clinical Optometry at the University of Manchester, and sponsored by the optical products manufacturer Bausch & Lomb; the formula for the perfect penalty kick, by Dr David Lewis of Liverpool John Moores, was sponsored by Ladbrokes; the formula for the perfect way to pull a Christmas cracker, by Dr Paul Stevenson of the University of Surrey, was commissioned by Tesco; the formula for the perfect beach, by Dr Dimitrios Buhalis of the University of Surrey, sponsored by travel firm Opodo. These are people from proper universities, putting their names to advertising equivalent exposure for PR companies.
I know how Dr Arnall is paid, because when I wrote critically in the newspaper about his endless equations stories just before Christmas, he sent me this genuinely charming email:
Further to your mentioning my name in conjunction with ‘Walls’ I just received a cheque from them. Cheers and season’s greetings, Cliff Arnall.
It’s not a scandal: it’s just stupid. These stories are not informative. They are promotional activity masquerading as news. They play—rather cynically—on the fact that most news editors wouldn’t know a science story if it danced naked in front of them. They play on journalists being short of time but still needing to fill pages, as more words are written by fewer reporters. It is, in fact, a perfect example of what investigative journalist Nick Davies has described as Churnalism, the uncritical rehashing of press releases into content, and in some respects this is merely a microcosm of a much wider problem that generalises to all areas of journalism. Research conducted at Cardiff University in 2007 showed that 80 per cent of all broadsheet news stories were ‘wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry’.
It strikes me that you can read press releases on the internet, without paying for them in newsagents.
‘All men will have big willies’
For all that they are foolish PR slop
, these stories can have phenomenal penetrance. Those willies can be found in the Sun’s headline for a story on a radical new ‘Evolution Report’ by Dr Oliver Curry, ‘evolution theorist’ from the Darwin@LSE research centre. The story is a classic of the genre.
By the year 3000, the average human will be 6½ft tall, have coffee-coloured skin and live for 120 years, new research predicts. And the good news does not end there. Blokes will be chuffed to learn their willies will get bigger—and women’s boobs will become more pert.
This was presented as important ‘new research’ in almost every British newspaper. In fact it was just a fanciful essay from a political theorist at LSE. Did it hold water, even on its own terms?
No. Firstly, Dr Oliver Curry seems to think that geographical and social mobility are new things, and that they will produce uniformly coffee-coloured humans in 1,000 years. Oliver has perhaps not been to Brazil, where black Africans, white Europeans and Native Americans have been having children together for many centuries. The Brazilians have not gone coffee-coloured: in fact they still show a wide range of skin pigmentation, from black to tan. Studies of skin pigmentation (some specifically performed in Brazil) show that skin pigmentation seems not to be related to the extent of your African heritage, and suggest that colour may be coded for by a fairly small number of genes, and probably doesn’t blend and even out as Oliver suggests.
What about his other ideas? He theorised that ultimately, through extreme socio-economic divisions in society, humans will divide into two species: one tall, thin symmetrical, clean, healthy, intelligent and creative; the other short, stocky, asymmetrical, grubby, unhealthy and not as bright. Much like the peace-loving Eloi and the cannibalistic Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
Evolutionary theory is probably one of the top three most important ideas of our time, and it seems a shame to get it wrong. This ridiculous set of claims was covered in every British newspaper as a news story, but none of them thought to mention that dividing into species, as Curry thinks we will do, usually requires some fairly strong pressures, like, say, geographical divisions. The Tasmanian Aboriginals, for example, who had been isolated for 10,000 years, were still able to have children with other humans from outside. ‘Sympatric speciation’, a division into species where the two groups live in the same place, divided only by socioeconomic factors, as Curry is proposing, is even tougher. For a while, many scientists didn’t think it happened at all. It would require that these divides were absolute, although history shows that attractive impoverished females and wealthy ugly men can be remarkably resourceful in love.
I could go on—the full press release is at badscience.net for your amusement. But the trivial problems in this trivial essay are not the issue: what’s odd is how it became a ‘boffins today said’ science story all over the media, with the BBC, the Telegraph, the Sun, the Scotsman, Metro and many more lapping it up without criticism.
How does this happen? By now you don’t need me to tell you that the ‘research’—or ‘essay’—was paid for by Bravo, a bikini-and-fast-car ‘men’s TV channel’ which was celebrating its twenty-first year in operation. (In the week of Dr Curry’s important science essay, just to give you a flavour of the channel, you could catch the movie classic Temptations: ‘When a group of farm workers find that the bank intends to foreclose on their property, they console each other with a succession of steamy romps.’ This might go some way to explaining the ‘pert breasts’ angle of his ‘new research’.)
I spoke to friends on various newspapers, proper science reporters who told me they had stand-up rows with their newsdesks, trying to explain that this was not a science news story. But if they refused to write it, some other journalist would—you will often find that the worst science stories are written by consumer correspondents, or news generalists—and if I can borrow a concept from evolutionary theory myself, the selection pressure on employees in national newspapers is for journalists who compliantly and swiftly write up commercial puff nonsense as ‘science news’.
One thing that fascinates me is this: Dr Curry is a proper academic (although a political theorist, not a scientist). I’m not seeking to rubbish his career. I’m sure he’s done lots of stimulating work, but in all likelihood nothing he will ever do in his profession as a relatively accomplished academic at a leading Russell Group university will ever generate as much media coverage—or have as much cultural penetrance—as this childish, lucrative, fanciful, wrong essay, which explains nothing to anybody. Isn’t life strange?
‘Jessica Alba has the perfect wiggle, study says’
That’s a headline from the Daily Telegraph, over a story that got picked up by Fox News, no less, and in both cases it was accompanied by compelling imagery of some very hot totty. This is the last wacky story we’ll do, and I’m only including this one because it features some very fearless undercover work.
‘Jessica Alba, the film actress, has the ultimate sexy strut, according to a team of Cambridge mathematicians.’ This important study was the work of a team—apparently—headed by Professor Richard Weber of Cambridge University. I was particularly delighted to see it finally appear in print since, in the name of research, I had discussed prostituting my own reputation for it with Clarion, the PR company responsible, six months earlier, and there’s nothing like watching flowers bloom.
Here is their opening email:
We are conducting a survey into the celebrity top ten sexiest walks for my client Veet (hair removal cream) and we would like to back up our survey with an equation from an expert to work out which celebrity has the sexiest walk, with theory behind it. We would like help from a doctor of psychology or someone similar who can come up with equations to back up our findings, as we feel that having an expert comment and an equation will give the story more weight.
It got them, as we have seen, onto the news pages of the Daily Telegraph.
I replied immediately. ‘Are there any factors you would particularly like to have in the equation?’ I asked. ‘Something sexual, perhaps?’ ‘Hi Dr Ben,’ replied Kiren. ‘We would really like the factors of the equation to include the thigh to calf ratio, the shape of the leg, the look of the skin and the wiggle (swing) of the hips…There is a fee of £500 which we would pay for your services.’
There was survey data too. ‘We haven’t conducted the survey yet,’ Kiren told me, ‘but we know what results we want to achieve.’ That’s the spirit! ‘We want Beyonce to come out on top followed by other celebrities with curvy legs such as J-Lo and Kylie and celebrities like Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse to be at the bottom e.g.—skinny and pale unshapely legs are not as sexy.’ The survey, it turned out, was an internal email sent around the company. I rejected their kind offer, and waited. Professor Richard Weber did not. He regrets it. When the story came out, I emailed him, and it turned out that things were even more absurd than was necessary. Even after rigging their survey, they had to re-rig it:
The Clarion press release was not approved by me and is factually incorrect and misleading in suggesting there has been any serious attempt to do serious mathematics here. No ‘team of Cambridge mathematicians’ has been involved. Clarion asked me to help by analysing survey data from eight hundred men in which they were asked to rank ten celebrities for ‘sexiness of walk’. And Jessica Alba did not come top. She came seventh.
Are these stories so bad? They are certainly pointless, and reflect a kind of contempt for science. They are merely PR promotional pieces for the companies which plant them, but it’s telling that they know exactly where newspapers’ weaknesses lie: as we shall see, bogus survey data is a hot ticket in the media.
And did Clarion Communications really get eight hundred respondents to an internal email survey for their research, where they knew the result they wanted beforehand, and where Jessica Alba came seventh, but was mysteriously promoted to first after the analysis? Yes, maybe: Clarion is part of WPP, one of the world’s largest ‘communications services’ groups. It does advertising,
PR and lobbying, has a turnover of around £6 billion, and employs 100,000 people in a hundred countries.
These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
Stats, miracle cures and hidden scares
How can we explain the hopelessness of media coverage of science? A lack of expertise is one part of the story, but there are other, more interesting elements. Over half of all the science coverage in a newspaper is concerned with health, because stories of what will kill or cure us are highly motivating, and in this field the pace of research has changed dramatically, as I have already briefly mentioned. This is important background. Before 1935 doctors were basically useless. We had morphine for pain relief- a drug with superficial charm, at least—and we could do operations fairly cleanly, although with huge doses of anaesthetics, because we hadn’t yet sorted out well-targeted muscle-relaxant drugs. Then suddenly, between about 1935 and 1975, science poured out an almost constant stream of miracle cures. If you got TB in the 1920s, you died, pale and emaciated, in the style of a romantic poet. If you got TB in the 1970s, then in all likelihood you would live to a ripe old age. You might have to take rifampicin and isoniazid for months on end, and they’re not nice drugs, and the side-effects will make your eyeballs and wee go pink, but if all goes well you will live to see inventions unimaginable in your childhood.