Note: This is a slightly updated version of an old post. I think it is especially relevant at this time of year.
October brings the Nobel Prize announcements and the World Series. No one will mistake media coverage of one for the other. Each Nobel Prize will get one article and 10 seconds on the evening news. A soft feature will quote the new Nobel recipient’s complete surprise at the 4 AM phone call.
By contrast, baseball, like all major sports, is covered in great depth, by legions of sports reporters. Coverage is continuous during the long baseball season, reaches a near-hysterical peak in October, and continues generously even during the off-season.
Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that newspapers covered baseball the way they cover science. What would happen? What kind of articles would we see and what kind of stories would we miss?
The World Series Article— Every paper would run one article on the World Series. Most papers would run the article after the contest had ended, and would dutifully report the final scores. Of course, few readers would actually read the articles, since the papers would have never explained why the world series was important; in fact it would not have been mentioned in any of the paper’s sports coverage all year.
Some papers would run the World Series article before the Series was over. Having polled a number of experts the paper’s sports reporter — there would only be one, of course, and he or she would much prefer to write about Hollywood — would announce the name of the team that was almost certain to win the Series. If that prediction turned out to be wrong an easy to miss correction might be buried in the back pages sometime in the weeks after the series was over.
The Profile— Each paper would run one profile each season of one player, chosen because of some colorful trait or scandal. The fact that this player would be an average fielder with a batting average of .198 would be glossed over in the article. This one profile would lead to dozens of similar articles in other newspapers, but, the next season, no newspaper would cover the story when the player is quietly dropped from the roster and no other team picks him up. More importantly, no newspaper would write about his teammate, the quiet, decent fellow who lacks the gift for colorful talk, is free of scandal, and who, with his .350 batting average and his outstanding defensive abilities, is a future hall of famer.
The Game— One game each season would be covered in great detail. Usually this game would take place early in the season, between two teams never in serious contention for the playoffs. It would be reported, however, as the most important game of the season.
The Economic Story– There would be no stories about the changing economics of professional baseball or players’ salaries, or steroids. However, when a third base coach from the home team is caught using team money for hookers, this will become a front page story.
If baseball was covered like this, the way science is actually covered, no one would care about the sport. Facts in isolation, without context or meaning, are dull. Science, like sports, is not a dry collection of facts. Science is interesting because it is an ongoing, constantly unfolding process. Like a baseball season it too has a narrative, but it is infinitely more complex and varied.
Most Americans find astrology more interesting than astronomy, and care more about psychics than about physicists. This is largely because, in the presentation of science to the public, the science itself has been stripped from the story, and what we’re left with is the bare announcement of a new fact, a fact that exists without context or significance. Most readers would not look skeptically at a story reporting that scientists, like the alchemists of old, had discovered the formula for turning lead into gold.
Is it any wonder that vast numbers of people are afraid of vaccines, or believe that GMOs are harmful, or that they put their faith in homeopathic remedies? The long-term assault on science budgets has caused little concern. Many cities spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build new sports stadiums while their education budgets languish. For all most people know or care, they respond as if they had learned that the budget for research into phrenology — the 19th century science of reading head bumps — was being cut.
The chief postwar motivation for US investment in science was to beat the Russians. Now that we’ve been to the moon, and the Russians no longer pose the same sort of threat, we need a new motivation to continue to support science. This time, however, that motivation must spring from the inside, and not from an outside threat. This will only be possible if more people can gain a better understanding of what science is and what scientists do.
Now imagine for a moment that newspapers covered science the way they now cover sports. Imagine that newspapers poured battalions of reporters and researchers into investigating important science stories, just as they now do for the Kardashians. Just imagine.
You’d have to have a world in which every kid in every town played science and was reasonably good at it, just as every kid in America until recently at least has played stickball in the street and baseball and football in PE class in school – and for fun, and the same thing happened elsewhere with soccer.
How do you make kids do science for fun? (Buzzer goes off as the time limit elapses) – you can’t. Best you can do is what we’ve always done, leave the tools out and hope the brightest kids play with them and learn how to use them. Schools aren’t great at that (or, at least, as a parent I haven;t heard that “making” – the art of what we used to call “tinkering” or “hardware hacking” – has caught on in the schools).
If science isn’t part of the “fun imperative” for kids, those kids won’t grow up to buy stuff advertised in commercials around science reporting, which is why sports reporting is a billion-dollar market. We, as a human race, know a lot about how our sports heroes played their way up into the bigs. Schools even play to that, trying to (in medical parlance) attach knowledge to a “sports carrier species”.
Who knows how Steven Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Elon Musk got their fame, fortune and money? It’s slightly important, as the major cases of science applied to culture becoming economically and medically important.
Try making a new protein without a pretty fast computer. You can’t even send a proposal to NIH for the grant money without one… but who knows how the stuff under the computer’s hood works, these days?