Are science journalists scientists?

Science journalists produce a different kind of knowledge – in the same way that magnetite mined from the earth is different from a crowbar

Updated - July 07, 2023 01:06 am IST

“A scientist is taken to mean someone whose profession is research. In this sense, science journalists are not scientists” File

“A scientist is taken to mean someone whose profession is research. In this sense, science journalists are not scientists” File | Photo Credit: The Hindu

Some of my colleagues call me a “scientist”. They jest, but not entirely. I’ve been approached with questions about technical issues for which my answers have been a mix of Wikipedia entries, some scientific papers, and vague recollections from a textbook. I’m a scientist insofar as I don’t panic when I read “2-bromo-2-chloro-1,1,1,-trifluoroethane” — but at the same time, no matter what I know, I can’t comment on the technical merits of a paper.

A friend once said journalists are “X-adjacent”, X being different fields in which specially trained people first produce knowledge. The suggestion has always rankled because it seemed to cast journalism as a parasitic enterprise. But it also made me wonder: as journalists accrue more expertise, we become less parasitic and more participants, so are science journalists also scientists? It’s easy to know who we are when we’re writing about people and people-centric problems. But when we’re dealing with, say, organometallic chemistry, identity becomes harder to define.

Many years ago, science blogger Bora Zivkovic wrote that science journalists are “temporary experts”, but it seemed an inchoate answer. I now believe a proper answer must begin with what it means to be a scientist, crescendo at an important distinction between two ways of knowing, and acknowledge the unique knowledge that journalists produce.

What distinguishes a scientist? A scientist is taken to mean someone whose profession is research. In this sense, science journalists are not scientists.

Next, what is scientific knowledge? Is it knowledge that a scientist produces or knowledge produced as a result of exercising the scientific method? The latter is romantic but hard to realise because there needs to be a way to validate such a claim, and people need to have incentives to conduct validation tests.

So far so good, but now the tricky bit begins. A crucial difference between licensed and unlicensed practitioners of medicine is that if the former makes a mistake, they’re likely to be punished, so in order to avoid being punished, they operate in good faith. This is why people can trust licensed practitioners.

Similarly, even if I know enough to explain, say, the Higgs boson, what do I tell people that will make them trust me to be speaking the truth? Nothing. Of course, people don’t care when the stakes are low, such as when human lives aren’t involved, but the distinction matters. This brings us to a widely underestimated difference between knowledge and faith.

You can understand many things about the Higgs boson by reading many science journalists’ articles, but this is still knowing through faith — the faith we have in the physicists quoted in the articles. We don’t really know it because we’re not familiar with any of the mathematical physics required to truly understand the particle. Science journalists should become comfortable with this fact, especially when explaining things: that often, they’re purveyors of faith-based knowing.

This conclusion raises two implications: a) asking whether science journalists are scientists could erect a (false) hierarchy between the kinds of knowledge produced by professional scientists and others; and b) science journalists produce a kind of knowledge whose essence and importance we could lose sight of by comparing it to the knowledge that scientists produce.

I believe that science journalists produce a different kind of knowledge – in the same way that magnetite mined from the earth is different from a crowbar. A physicist might explain to a journalist how she found an elusive particle that could revolutionise quantum computing, yet the journalistic article and not the scientific paper will be able to make it socially relevant, determine its place and flavour in public opinion and, hopefully, make it the subject of a question in the civil services examination.

This transformation is something new, and defies the view that science journalism is adjacent to science.

mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in

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