Changing times for science and the public: Science journalists' roles for the responsible communication of science.

Abstract

EMBO Reports (2019)e47906 “Across time, public understanding about how science works is affected by journalism”, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “A journalist, with very little extra effort, can increase the accuracy of public understanding and minimize public vulnerability to distortions of science” [1]. The responsible communication of science has always been an important issue for scientists and journalists, but it has gained more attention during the past few years, owing to growing public interest in the scientific enterprise and demands for accountability. In response to this larger public attention, Jamieson argues that we need to reconsider media narratives about science and research, suggesting that the time is ripe to reexamine the ways and means by which science is communicated to the public [2]. This has gained particular importance in light of the contemporary debate about a “reproducibility crisis”, which has stimulated a tale of a science in trouble based largely on a string of retractions and failures to reproduce experiments in the biomedical and the social sciences. A recent analysis reassessed 21 experimental social science studies published between 2010 and 2015 in Nature and Science, and found that 8 lack crucial evidence to support the authors’ conclusions [3]. Brian Nosek, one of the co‐authors, reasoned that “someone observing these failures to replicate might conclude that science is going in the wrong direction”. He added though that “science's greatest strength is its constant self‐scrutiny to identify and correct problems and increase the pace of discovery” [4]. Increasingly, the narrative that science “is going in the wrong direction” and is undergoing a crisis has been revisited. Daniele Fanelli [5] commented that the narrative of a science in crisis is …