Scientists are apparently not as disenchanted with the media as anecdote suggests, according to a study in this week's Science1.

On the face of it, it sounds like good news. And certainly science journalists can draw encouragement from this evidence of general goodwill.

Tight newspaper deadlines can seriously damage your science Credit: Columbia Pictures

But the study raises more provocative questions than it answers. It undoubtedly matters how scientists perceive the way their work is reported, but in the end the crucial question is surely how well science is communicated, not whether scientists are happy with the results. Making scientists happy is not the aim of science journalism, any more than political reporters should worry whether politicians feel good about what they write.

The new study, conducted by a team based in Germany, France, the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom, asked scientists from all of those countries whether they felt that media contacts had had an overall positive or negative impact on them professionally, and whether their most recent contact with the media left them mostly pleased, dissatisfied or neutral.

Despite some national variations, the responses were surprisingly uniform — and generally positive. For example, an average of 46% felt that media contact had had a 'mostly positive' impact, only 3% feeling it was mostly negative. And 57% were mostly pleased by their most recent contact, with only 6% 'mostly dissatisfied'.

Does this mean that journalists have been doing a good job? That depends on what you mean by journalists, and what you mean by a good job.

Some scientists, especially those who work in biomedical and health sciences, are quite likely to find themselves speaking to reporters who have virtually no scientific training. This sometimes breeds exasperation, suspicion or frustration, but it needn't. The scientist who cannot explain what they are doing and why in terms a lay person can understand needs to question how well he or she understands the work themselves. On the other hand, the scope for mistranslation and misrepresentation here is huge, particularly because the biggest challenge for many scientists is not refraining from jargon, but remembering how little context the listener might have for framing what they are hearing.

How wrong is wrong?

Yet the test of a good journalist is not how much they know — they will be utter naifs on just about any technically complex subject, whether baroque music or quantum physics — but how aware they are of what they don't know. As media discussions of climate change have revealed, the biggest threat to a clear public understanding of the science comes not from junior reporters ignorant of the science, but from highly educated, politically motivated commentators whose ignorance does not inhibit them from pronouncing on the issues.

The kinds of inaccuracy that may result from those two cases have quite different causes, and probably very different effects. Scientists need to keep the distinction clear. This means, among other things, resisting the notion that journalists are somehow a homogeneous bunch. Many scientists do an excellent job of adjusting the level of their discussion according to whether they are talking to, for example, a reporter from Nature or a cable TV channel.

How good is good?

And what is 'good' coverage anyway? The real meat of the Science study is in the details of why scientists might feel unhappy about media contacts. An astonishing 42% feared this would bring 'critical reactions from peers' (although an almost equal proportion felt their reputation would be enhanced). Even if these fears are more imagined than real, such a widespread belief that popularization might attract derision reveals a serious problem for the community.

One very common fear, voiced by nine in ten respondents, was that of misquotation. This could mean several things. Although it's understandable that scientists will feel annoyed at being misquoted, often the strongest fear here again seems to be not so much that the public will be misinformed as that the scientist will lose status among his or her peers. That's understandable, but is nonetheless a parochial attitude. Either way, it would be tragic if such concerns were to mean that scientists' admirable directness and precision were to be replaced with the kind of empty platitudes used by politicians. Some signs of this can already be detected in the reliance of big science institutions on media-relations teams who spout corporate jargon explicitly designed to be content-free. That serves nobody's interests.

In the end, however, there would be something wrong if all scientists were happy with their contacts with the media. Compared with politicians, entertainers and artists, scientists get an extremely smooth ride: reporters may garble facts, but rarely do they afford them much serious critical scrutiny. But the media's job is to question as well as to inform, and that means raising awkward questions when scientists, scientific institutions and science-based businesses do and say irresponsible things.

So although it is great to find that scientists are generally sanguine about their media contacts, their occasional unhappiness means little until the reasons are examined. Let’s hope that the follow-up studies will zero in on the disgruntled minorities and ask: what went wrong? Who, if anyone, was to blame? What was miscommunicated: the general point of the work, or the detail? Was bias or ignorance at the root of it? How much did it matter, and to whom? Both scientists and journalists must be prepared to ask – and answer – such questions.