Whenever I read about science in any of the main stream media outlets I have to look to find the research article or original interview that the piece is based on. Newspapers, magazines and television shows have always been terrible about translating scientific information to the press for the public. Maybe the New York Times used to do it well as I recall but even then there were many necessary grains of salt to get through some reporting. The reason science is a language free of emotion in most cases. It often states facts with evidence that when dug through we find the story is less about the headlines that they generate. Headlines are to bring you in. In today's electronic media it is about clicks that generate ad revenue. So a story for example about a near earth object might have a headline that screams: "Scientists Find Asteroid Will Pass Close By Our Planet This Fall", when in fact the close part is defined in terms related to the entire universe and could mean 100,000 miles. Close is a relative term and this case it is easy to see the sensationalism of the headline while the real story can be easily obtained. There will always be people who read the headline and maybe the lead and start digging a fallout shelter. However, during a pandemic the science reporting is not so cut and dried.
If you follow the reports in many media and social media outlets you will find that reporters and thus the general public are often under informed because of ignorance of how the scientific process works. Much like those who say things like evolution is just a theory because they don't know what the word theory means in a science context, we find people throwing around words like "peer-reviewed" as if that means it is factual. We also see reporters talking about how the information coming from public health agencies changes over time and some how we should trust them. Again, when the science changes the results and recommendations based on science changes. During the development of nuclear weapons the belief was that certain distances from a blast site would be perfectly safe, based on the results of earlier blasts. However, the materials and how the blasts were performed created different variables not fully understood. In the end nuclear blasts, that people held parties to watch and soldiers were stationed to observe ended up making people ill and killing some. From that new guidelines were created as more knowledge was obtained. That is science.
So today we are struggling to get a handle of the spreading of Covid-19 and for some it has become a political issue. This contributes to the nonsense reporting on the science even more. The Center for Disease Control, a government public health agency, released information about Covid deaths in US. They concluded the upwards of 94% of the deaths were people who had other co-morbidity factors, or conditions that were that made the results of the infection worse. While the study clearly says it was Covid that killed these people as they would likely still be alive today without the infection, many people are reporting that only 6% of the people in the figure of deaths (183,000) were deaths from Covid. In part this is due to the politicization of the this whole crisis, some thinking Covid isn't even real. Now they wave a piece of paper from an agency and say "see we don't need masks if we are healthy, we don't need to shut down". This is dangerous and I see no way to undo the long standing damage done to our collective knowledge by the lack of a voice out there to help understand what is happening, not only with Covid, but with all science. People who don't like facts, ignore them and claim to have a different opinion. Facts are not set aside because of opinion. A guy named Greg could find a frog whose call sounds like Greg, but that doesn't mean the frog called his name, even if he believes it. We cannot let opinion replace facts.
Climate Change, Disease, Pollutants, and Food processing have all fallen prey to opinion over science. We will always be able to find someone with an advanced degree to make statements against the prevailing science because people are people. That too is the problem. Reporters will report on a the person who is contrary to everything the scientific community says about a particular subject without researching further into why that person might be saying. Currently, the new doctor with ear to the President on Covid is talking about herd immunity and letting Covid run its course. He has no background in epidemiology or virology, he is a radiologist. We recently saw Dr. Ben Carson, a brain surgeon, touting a dangerous supplement that is untested to cure Covid. The CDC has fired people over a recent treatment suggestion by the director that the media ate up, only to find a few hours after a briefing that the numbers were inflated.
Some media outlets are trying. They bring in doctors who have studied the spread of viruses and other diseases and understand the papers being written. But often even they sound agenda ridden, looking more for gotcha moments that providing true explanations. It is a growing concern that we will have a country who can be easily manipulated by someone with letters after their name on an opinion show pretending to be news and cause us to make bad decisions. That is one reason that presidents need science advisors who will challenge their beliefs with facts and have the self-awareness to listen to the scientists. Most of Congress doesn't seem to even care about the science. The media, that is suppose to be an arbiter of facts, seems to spend time trying to look balanced and the people are lost. I keep seeing on social media platforms that the quote "If one person says it is raining and the other that it is sunny, the media's job is not to report what they said, it is to look out the window and describe what is going on". That is not happening.
This is by no means new. The media and politicians have fumbled over science for my entire life time. Think of the number of times in movies where the science advisor is seen as being hysterical until the catastrophe hits and they beg him or her for a solution. This is based on real interactions between science, politics and the media. We see this play out in many ways.
It isn't just the right that does it. In recent years we have seen massive media campaigns related to Alar on apples which turned out not to be a big problem and meat glue being used in processing of food, which is not only safe but something that makes sense. Both driven by organizations and thinkers on the left.
The problem with all this is because we don't have good information flow about scientific things every thing is valid and facts are just reduced to someone's opinion. When people stop listening to those actually working in a particular field in favor of an opinion that confirms their bias we can't set good policy or act in the best interest of ourselves or others. We are simply lost. We must get back to a time when we value solid information, education, and expertise in matters of science and beyond. We must be willing to allow that same science to learn and grow with more and new information moving forward. We must not let political or religious ideology stand in the way of science progressing. We must do it as if our lives depend on it. Because for 184,000 Americans and growing it did and we as a nation failed.
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