One thing not touched on in this article is how much distrust in science is generated by bad journalism. Journalists routinely overstate and misinterpret results willfully to sell more copy, and all too often they just get things plain wrong. Even if their error is so egregious that they feel compelled to print a retraction a week later, the damage is done. A lot of people will remember the original article as "Truth" for decades.
The current decline of paid jobs in journalism suggests that insisting on more qualified journalists to report on science may not be an achievable goal. What we should be doing instead is encouraging scientists to make greater efforts in explaining their work directly to the public.
Universities routinely employ publicists to write "plain English" articles about the accomplishments of their researchers to promote their University's brand. These articles, despite being created in collaboration with the scientists, are frequently full of all the journalistic excesses I've described above. If you show errors in such articles to the scientists the article is about, they'll just laugh nervously and shrug, because the final copy was out of their hands.
If you speak both French and English, there's no need to communicate to another English speaker using French put through a bad translator. Most scientists are capable of writing well enough to communicate with other humans. It's time to cut the translators out and have scientists communicate directly with the public. Yes, give them editorial feedback to weed out jargon and simplify things adequately, but leave them with full control of what is actually published. The results may be less impressively bombastic and poetic, but they should at least not be hopelessly wrong or outright dishonest.
The article goes into the area of ideologies but perhaps in not enough detail. The Internet accelerates the existing situation where any broadly popular position, whether religion or New Age Healing or whatever, can create self-contained, self-reinforcing network of self-defined experts.
And even more, even if journalists correctly report scientific results, the real challenge is correctly conveying the "skeptical and imaginative (but not too imaginative)" quality described in the article.
The current decline of paid jobs in journalism suggests that insisting on more qualified journalists to report on science may not be an achievable goal. What we should be doing instead is encouraging scientists to make greater efforts in explaining their work directly to the public.
Universities routinely employ publicists to write "plain English" articles about the accomplishments of their researchers to promote their University's brand. These articles, despite being created in collaboration with the scientists, are frequently full of all the journalistic excesses I've described above. If you show errors in such articles to the scientists the article is about, they'll just laugh nervously and shrug, because the final copy was out of their hands.
If you speak both French and English, there's no need to communicate to another English speaker using French put through a bad translator. Most scientists are capable of writing well enough to communicate with other humans. It's time to cut the translators out and have scientists communicate directly with the public. Yes, give them editorial feedback to weed out jargon and simplify things adequately, but leave them with full control of what is actually published. The results may be less impressively bombastic and poetic, but they should at least not be hopelessly wrong or outright dishonest.