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Transcript from a portion of the conference, Communicating the Future: Best Practices for Communication of Science to the Public, March 7-8, 2002. The
Future of Broadcast Journalism Rick Borchelt: Thank you all for coming back after lunch. I know it was a very difficult decision to make, whether to go wandering around and take a look at the deer herd and the goose herd here on the reservation and go outside in the beautiful weather. I'm going to reprise my Radar O'Riley role, and give a couple of announcements here, of general interest to the attendees. The first general announcement is that there are some things in your packet that you may or may not have gotten. One is the Research Roadmap Task Force Report, which is a little blue thing which has my name on it, and about 50 of the packets that were handed out may not have had this copy in it. So, just check your packet, and if you don't have one of these, there are additional copies on the registration table out front. Again, it's the Communicating the Future, it's a reprint from Carol Rogers' excellent Journal of Science and Communication, and those are free for the taking. One thing that was
not free for the taking but that inadvertently, I'm sure, wandered away
from the display, is the Science and Technology: Transforming Pubic Health
notebook from the poster display outside. That was not meant to be a give-away,
so if it happens to make it's way back, we won't ask, we won't tell. And anyone from Eureka Alert? Catherine, are you here? I'm looking. Gail needs to see you about setting up your computer for your exhibit, so take care of that. The last piece of business I have here is all of you have a little green sheet in your packets. The green sheet is the "NIST Conference Workshop Feedback Form," we are, of course, expecting that all of you will stay until the very last minute of the conference tomorrow, but if for some reason you don't, make sure you fill this out and leave it with the conference desk on your way out. This will be very important for us if we ever decide to be able to find money to be able to do another one of these conferences, and we are expecting to try to do that, so we would like to be able to make sure that we have all your feedback. It is, after all, a form of evaluative research that we would like to adhere to. Again, thanks very much. I found the morning session, aside for the good-natured ribbing, the only thing I think that didn't get expressed there was Jim Grunig calling me his "failed student," which he usually does. "Gail's the good student. Rick is my failed student. Rick didn't finish his graduate degree with me, while Gail did, so, you know, Gail's my good student." But it's nice for Jim to see us all here, and - in this kind of an environment, actually putting - we may be the only two students of his that are putting, actually, his work to good use. So, I continue. When I saw him [laughter] - yes - when I saw him at the task force that he and I both work on at Brookhaven, he introduced me as his failed student. I said, " Now is that the failure of the student or the teacher, Jim?" So, we - he forbore to go down that line this morning. I'd like to recognize another one of our R2 committee members who's been active in all of this - we're trying to get all of them up here so you get to see them a little bit - it's Deborah Blum, and Deborah's going to introduce our next speaker. Deborah Blum: Well, it's my pleasure to introduce to you a friend and colleague, Peggy Girshman. Peggy is the assistant managing editor of NPR. She has 27 years experience in broadcast, from commercial to public television, from national to local. Most of that has been communicating science, technology and health news. She's won a national Emmy, but she's most proud of producing a 26-episode series for PBS on statistics, which is something I think most of us could not pull off. Peggy? Peggy Girshman: Hi. It's great to be here, and yes, it really was 26 parts, and yes, I can actually just talk about that if you want. [laughter] No, okay. Musical urine will not make it today. [The term musical urine refers to a project featured in the NPR statistics series in which musical tones were used to indicate if specific data from urine samples was one or two standard deviations from "normal."] When I first graduated from college in 1975, I considered myself extremely unfortunate that I had missed the "Golden Age" of broadcast journalism. I had missed Edward R. Murrow, I had missed World War II, I had missed Watergate, I had missed the downing of a president, I had missed everything. And all I ever thought about is how terrible it was, and how bad the local news was, and how everything had deteriorated so much. Now, of course, I feel the same way; that the early part of my career was just golden, and now, if you look at local news, you see nothing but dreck, and if you look at even network news, you see nothing but dreck inter-cut with commercials, which now there are even more commercials than there were before cutting into material that you sometimes can't distinguish from a commercial. But, I think both perceptions are wrong. But if you want to keep with the one that we're in a toilet right now, you could look at this past week. It's been a very interesting week. If you've followed the Nightline debate, at all, is it okay to replace probably the finest program on television, news-wise that is, with David Letterman, when David Letterman's already somewhere else? And should you take the seasoned-veteran journalists, Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson, off the air and put in people who have mostly done stand-up or political consulting, and that would be George Stephanopoulos and Claire Shipman. Um, on the other hand I look - I'm a glass half-full person. I see what's happening now and I say, "It's been a really interesting six months." We had the biggest story ever, of what I think will be my long career, and I thought at the time, "We will have this story every day for years. Years," and so far, it's been months and it's still there, and you'll hear a lot about it next week because next week is the six-month anniversary. That, like many other big stories, like the Gulf War, like the impeachment, has had a positive effect on people getting their news, getting any kind of news, whether it's newspaper reading or whether it's radio listening or TV watching or - so I would say that that's good. People are - I'm a journalist - I think people paying attention to what journalists say is a good thing. You might not. This was the first time in our history where, truly, things weren't being filtered through a reporter's eyes, except for things like hearings. We all saw the same thing at the same time. Many people saw it with other people next to them; they could share it, they could talk about it. Nothing filtered it, nothing explained it, it was inexplicable, and that, to me, was a real interesting marker in television journalism, because it set a new standard for how you wanted to get - this is a huge thing. You can't imagine something this big happening, so now, all of a sudden, without a picture on anything, it suddenly doesn't work as well. I mean, it's more exciting to see a live picture on CNN from Afghanistan than to read a great analysis of what's going on there, even though that live picture of what's going on in Afghanistan is a mile away, a plume of smoke. What does that tell you? I don't know. But people have kept watching. At NPR, some of our stations went up 25%, and they've stayed there. It's been a boon for us, and so I think that when we're reviewing the past and the present day, before we go into the future, we need to see that as sort of a watershed event. Not that it's changed our country, necessarily for forever, but I think it's changed a little bit about journalism for forever. I wanted to tell you a little bit about, also, what's going on today. Continuing a trend that's been going on for more than 15 or 20 years, most people get their news from television. In a recent survey, 80 percent watched local TV news in the last week, 68 percent read a daily newspaper in the last week, 64% watched network news or national news of some sort, that includes cable; 62 percent got their news from radio, that could include public or commercial radio, and 34 percent got news from the Internet. That's probably - this is data that are like a year-and-a-half old, so that's probably low now. There's a local-national TV complement that a lot of people who watch local news watch their national news, as well, because local news is on around the same time. In many cities, there's now all-news cable locally. As a matter of fact, here is Washington, the ABC affiliate that does local news is just merging its newsroom with their - with Channel 8, which is an all-news local station - cable station. And that's very interesting, because they were viewed as competition before. So, actually journalists will lose their jobs out of this probably, and they will also loose two independent views of the news. It will combine to one newsroom that collecting all the news. But across the board, regular use of regular media has gone down. Newspaper, television news viewing, has gone down across the board, even though there are many more options now than there used to be. It's not just the per-unit share. It's fewer people are paying attention to broadcast news than they used to. Fewer people are reading newspapers and magazines than they used to. Why is that? Well, we added a new option, which is the Internet. And you can look at the Internet as sort of a - is it a new medium, or are they using the old media to make news? Sure they are. They're writing words. They're putting up pictures like you'd see in a newspaper. Frequently, they ARE the newspaper pictures. They're putting up audio. In the case of our Web site, we put up audio directly from our newscast. As a matter of fact, you can click on NPR.org (please note the plug) and get the hour's latest - the latest newscast within the hour. MSNBC lives and dies by video and audio from its channel and from NBC News. So, MSNBC.com, which is always in the top two or three news sites on the Web, uses pictures and audio from its broadcast partner; same thing with CNN, another very popular news site. So, do I include them when I think about the future of broadcast journalism? I do. How else did they get it? Another trend that's continuing fairly strongly, it's gone down a little, is watching a TV news magazine sometime in the last week. There are lots them on, still. Some of them have gone - Dateline, a show I worked on, went from five nights a week to three, to two, and during the Olympics to zero. About half the country, at least, watches a news magazine every week. And you can quibble about whether that's news or not. It's certainly information. It's non-fiction. If it's a court case that you never would have heard of, is that news? I don't know. It depends on your perspective. It's not about, "Here's what happed today in Afghanistan," but it certainly is communicating information news-wise. The most interesting thing, or the most sad thing to people like me is another important - it's not even a trend, f act Old people like news; young people don't. And that's been true for forever, but as the population ages, our demographics go down. Demographics a very important thing. So, for example, most recent survey 18-34 year olds, 28 percent of them read a newspaper every day, 66 percent are over 65. So, it's more than double and - do you see that pattern? Across the board, local TV news, same thing. The thing that young people do the least is newspapers. And "young" I'm talking 34. That's not that young. And the worry at the network and local levels is when your demographic gets too old. "Sixty Minutes," which routinely ranks in the top 10 or 20 programs of the week, when you look at the demographics, if you look at the most popular age for advertisers, 18 to 49, that's a huge range. 60 Minutes ranks in the 60s or 70s, you know, so it's like #68 for the week for those people, but #9 if you count everybody else. Well, I mean I'm close to that 49, so I don't want to be counted out in two years. But it sort of freaks people out, and this explains why Nightline is being dropped, or probably being dropped because while they have enough people watching the show, they're too old, and they can charge as much for an advertisement. You can charge $50,000 maybe or $35,000 maybe for a "Nightline" 30-second advertisement. They can get $500,000 for that during Friends. Friends is younger demographically. And it sounds ridiculous for a journalist who's done nothing but worry about, like, okay, what are the chances of getting breast cancer if you're 49 and how do I write this right, to think about ratings and news and ratings and numbers and ratings and demographics, but we all are forced, all of us are forced to do that because it's affected our lives. I know I'm supposed to be talking about broadcast journalism, but look at the front page of you newspaper. They started putting in "Life Features" on the front page. That was to try to appeal to other people. The Washington Post has a kids page on the back of the comics section - which is great, I'm not complaining about it at all - I'm just saying they're preparing for - they're trying to get younger and younger audiences, and they're falling further and further behind. Now, when you think about broadcast journalism, you might be thinking cable, even though, technically, cable isn't broadcasting, but for this purpose we're going to talk about it a little. I mean, 20 years ago we had one cable outlet. I thought it would tank. I had an opportunity to go work there and I said, "They'll never make it." I'm laughing now, as I took the job at the other one, and it failed in six months. Um, so - but there was a huge jump when FOX when on the air with people watching FOX. MSNBC has a smaller audience, so we have three, 24-hour-a-day cable news operations. You can get news any time. But beyond the jump of initial new watchers, cable news has remained relatively flat. When people come in, they come in during crises, and then they go away. They stuck around for us. They stuck around for newspapers more, and they're sticking around for some regular news, but they haven't stuck around as much for cable. The main draw of cable seems to be yacking; that's what they put on, lots of people yacking, and if you watch one channel you might think it has more opinion than another channel, but 30 percent of the day - 30 percent of people watch cable news sometime during the day. That includes CNBC, so even if you're tuning in to watch your stock for floating by, that's considered watching news. That's growing slightly, because of financial - although people actually watch less CNBC now that everything's printed in red instead of in green. It's one thing to watch you stock keep going up up up, and then you want to check it three times a day or ten times a day, even, but guess what: you tend to check it less when it's going down. So, the main goal in programming, whether you're making the show 'Friends' or whether you're making 'Nightline,' even, no matter who you are is, "How do you get the maximum number of people to watch and the youngest people to watch it, and how do you keep it moving all the time so that - because everybody's got a remote." Everybody's got a remote. The second they're bored with television, they flip the channel. The second. Can you imagine? On anything you're writing having that standard? I'm sorry, this sentence is dull, I'm stopping is half-way through. I don't think so, you know, and they can't pick it up and put it down, and once you lose them, they tend to be gone. So, there's tremendous pressure, less so in public broadcasting I'm happy to say, to keep it lively all the time. This explains what happened with local news going to 30 seconds, 40 seconds, 45 seconds, the longest story you'll see on local news, their in-depth series, is two and a half minutes. Two and a half minutes for NPR? That's like a joke, you know, if we can't say it in five, it's not, you know, more than five, it's not worth saying. And they have pictures, so they're actually transmitting more information. So, there's a tremendous pressure, especially now that there's hundreds of cable channels, and people who get cable TV in their home are watching broadcast TV that way, so your local NBC affiliate is competing with HBO, and sometimes if you have digital cable, competing with 15 channels of HBO, or 15 channels of the Discovery Channel, where they really care about who's holding the little flicker - clicker. For example, I don't know whether you'd call what Discovery Channel does, lots of science documentaries, "news." Is MTV, when MTV puts on news, do we call that "news?" Yeah, I think so. Is Discovery Channel news? Well, it sort of looks like news sometimes. It's topical stuff. They have a shelf life on their shows of three years. That's not news by my definition, but they're very worried about men at channels - the cable channels are more worried about men than the broadcast channels, because men hold the remote. Women stick - women are, you know, this sounds sexist, but women are more loyal. They turn on a channel and they're willing to sit there and watch through the commercial and watch for their favorite people. They bond with people. Men, if it's not blowing up, they might change. [laughter] This explains the high rate of crime news. Despite the dropping rate in crime, there is still the same amount of crime news on local television; body bags, car crashes, whatever. Because, the perception is, "I can do this in 30 seconds, then I'm moving on to the next really cool picture." And there's nothing wrong with that in one way, that is something that's going on in the world. Bill Skane, former CBS Producer, is laughing at me, because he knows. It's hard! How do you program - and women care about medical news more than men do, and women watch network television, so you want to have more medical news. If you watch a morning program, 'The Today Show' or 'Good Morning America,' you'll see lots of medical segments. You will not see a physics segment, ever, because it's the women who are home getting the kids ready and have the TV on in the kitchen. That's the perception and they - believe me, if that's the perception, they have 12 studies to back it up. They don't do anything by accident. They don't try anything by accident. Everything is researched, and you know exactly who's sitting out there, and you know exactly how old they are, what sex they are, what color they are, what they're going to buy, what they're likely to buy, what your advertisers might want from them. So, everything in between the commercials is designed to appeal to the people who we want to have watch the commercials. This sounds very cynical. I'm sorry. But, what do we get, what have we gotten over the years with this? We've gotten shorter and shorter segments, for the most part. We've gotten medical stuff, weather, just think about this: Weather's on every single night for three minutes. That's more than we spend on any story in the rest of the newscast. So, as a result, by the way, the public understands jet streams, the direction of weather, what fronts are, what barometric pressure is, I mean, this is our best way to teach science, actually. I did want to talk a little bit about what I see for the future, and also what I see for science news and science content in newscasts. What I see for the future is much, much, much more blending of these things, so that it won't matter whether you say you watch TV or listen to broadcasts or went on the Internet, because you're probably hearing or seeing the same thing. There's lots of co-branding arrangements right now, and NPR, for example, is pairing with the 'Bill Moyers Show,' which airs on Friday nights, called Now with Bill Moyers, so that's a PBS and NPR collaboration. But now, all of a sudden, you'll see one of our reporters their air doing the same story that he might be doing for us. So, people are sharing material more than every before. You'll see lots of co-collaborations. The reason you see all these pictures on CNN is they have television partners all over the world, including in every little local city. As a matter of fact, sometimes if the CBS affiliate - this happened in Columbine - the CBS affiliate had some pictures. The CBS affiliate in Denver had some exclusive pictures. They were a CNN partner. They fed it up to CNN, so the NBC affiliate could pull it down somewhere else. So, there's lots of sharing of material, and you're going to see much more of that because, as we splinter, how people get this as` there are billions of Web sites, arguably hundreds of news - big news Web sites, and hundreds of channels, and clear channel radios and satellite radio. When there's hundreds and hundreds of options of all forms of media, then all of the sudden the cost goes out of whack. The thing you used to be able to spend a million dollars on suddenly you can't, because you have such a narrow audience, it's all narrow, like little magazines. And so, people tend to share more thinking, "Okay. I can run this piece that I pulled off of our partner, the Discovery Channel, on 'Dateline.'" Dateline and Discovery have a partnership, because Discovery wants it because it's promoting to their show. NBC wants it because it's material that they can get for cheaper. So you'll more and more of that, so in a way, you could see more redundancy, but in a way, you have so many more choices. The future of this means that you have - that people who are creating the content have to worry about diminishing audiences, less money to gather news, and less money to produce it. Most of the networks have closed down their foreign bureaus, partly as a result of the "clicking" problem, because people don't like foreign news as much as they like domestic news. And most networks are still - are now still condensing what they're doing, even though as they've added news magazines, as they added cable affiliations, they're not growing. They're shrinking, and that's because of the demographics and the splintering of the audience. And so far, nobody, I don't think, has made money off the Internet; although, my friend at MSNBC says they're working hard at it. They're pretty - they were pretty close to breaking even until September 11th. I mean, we've all put a lot of burden on September 11th, which is probably unfair. I wanted to talk a little bit about science news. That, to me, is - so , in terms of general news, there's just going to me more and more of it out there. It'll be more similar, but there's more different sites to find it. In terms of science news, I have a fairly bleaker picture. As this has expanded and splintered, we have fewer and fewer science news specialists working for major news organizations. And that applies to newspapers, as well, that have lessened I think - Deborah ?- their science pages or their science staff, sometimes to zero or sometimes to one poor schmo who has to be able to answer the question about the new Alzheimer's vaccine at the same time answering the question about cold table fusion - I mean, table-top fusion, which was just the other day. And so, nobody knows all that, so we've lost some specialists, and even then, we never really had that many. We had a few at the broadcast networks, one, in many cases, one producer, one reporter. At NPR, we have a huge science staff that's probably the biggest science staff of any national news organization - of any news organization for the public - we have about 20 people between editors and reporters. But, and we've kept that going. The New York Times has stayed pretty stable, but I'd say everybody else has reduced science coverage. And if you think about how CNN has to operate or any of the cable operations operate - well first of all, they live by yacking, so, "Who do you yack to?" and if you don't have anybody inside, sort of giving you somebody good to talk to, then it's harder to book. And a lot of these people didn't like science growing up. They don't know much about it. The last science class they took was in the 7th grade, and - come to think of it, the lat science class I took was in the 10th grade. So the impetus, there's nobody there to help translate it even internally to editors or to producers, so I worry a little for this. I don't think that all the blossoming of cable channels that deal with science and technology and health, there's just been a huge boom. I mean, there's Discovery - Regular Discovery, there's The Learning Channel, which does a lot of this. There's Discovery Health, there's Discovery Science, there's Discovery Technology, I mean, not a lot of people get them yet, but they're there. But the question is is, "Are people watching them? Are these things accurate?" Most of the people who work at these channels don't have a science background. Most of the channels have one of two people there who have a science background. So even there where you think, "I'm getting specialized information," you're getting people who care a lot about television but also think that you can keep something on the shelf about medicine that lasts three to four years, which is not possible in our current climate of discovery and innovation. And there is certainly nobody on the local news level except for somebody who tends to get designated as the health reporter that week or that year. Somebody who comes in with nothing who does manage to try really hard, makes good relationships with the hospitals in the area, but can't independently evaluate the study, doesn't know what a "P value" is - I had to use my statistical terminology, thank you - and can't - doesn't have a clue who to call to get some sort of critical opinion. So, what you would tend to do - this is very typical for television news - is, there's a story in today's JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, you take a look at it, you call the local hospital, even though they didn't do the research, you never talk to the researcher. They explain it after they look at it, you do two sound bytes and a little bit of cover in between. You look for a patient who has this problem. Here's Fred with prostate cancer. Here's Fred eating breakfast with his wife. You always have to start with an anecdote, and then we go to the doctor at the hospital, you know, what this new study means and maybe someday, Fred will be treated by this treatment, and we end with Fred saying, "I just hope they work it out." And that's the best it gets, right now. And I don't see that trend changing, reversing itself, because local news is collapsing its newsrooms. Network news is collapsing its newsrooms. We're not talking about more specialization here, we're talking about more need, but less specialization. So - I hate to sound so glum, because I want to say that I think that public radio is doing very well. We have interested, fascinated audience. We have - we can put on all kinds of intellectual ideas, and people will watch it and listen. Nightline just did five half-hours on the Congo and what's happening there, and so there's moments of brightness everywhere, and people seem to be interested. They're still watching. Whether these young people that I talk about with 28 percent now 18-34 reading a daily newspaper, are they going to grow up to be newspaper readers? Are they going to turn into the older generation, or is there a permanent change? I don't know. It's always been that way. People have always read more and paid more attention as they got older, except for a little blip during the 60s and early 70s, The Golden Age. And we'll see what happens, whether young people grow up to be news consumers or not. Ah, I think that - I think that they will, but not to the same numbers. So we'll see, maybe eventually, a gradual deterioration, but I hope not. So, I'm happy to take questions, and I'll try not to be depressing. Okay. Oh, I guess you have to wait for the mic. Question: The statistics that you're quoting, are they from the Pew study that was conducted? Girshman: Yes. I'm sorry, I should have attributed - that's a major flaw in my journalism. Pew does a study constantly on news habits. Question: Well, my curiosity was, have they updated that study, or has someone else done a more recent study comparing different - Girshman: I couldn't find a more recent one, but other - other, sort of trends, people who are journal - who are news watchers, watchers of the news industry would say that these trends are still going the same way. And any data would be pre and post 9/11, so you'd have to look at it that way. Question: Peggy, you alluded to the closing of foreign news bureaus, and you said perhaps, globally, it's because people click off - they're not interested in foreign news. Ten, fifteen years ago, we had a lot more foreign news. Were people more interested then, the viewers, or is it a management decision that in those days they said, "This is what people should be learning about. We'll have a bureau, we'll present the news," even though people might have preferred another crime story? Girshman: That's a great question, and the answer is it was the "good for you" approach - "It's good for you" approach. And a lot of the people who were managing the news back 15 years ago were people who were still in the World War II generation of foreign news is the most important news, and it's, you know, you should take a spoonful of it every day for your knowledge. It's - if you look at The New York Times versus any other paper, including The Washington Post, you'll see a higher quotient of foreign news. Do you read it more? Do you guys read it less? I, you know, I'm guilty of this, too. I read the foreign news less. I listen less on my own air - I shouldn't be admitting this - okay, never mind. I never said that. But it also - it was also a tribute to better research methodology about figuring out about what people exactly wanted to hear and see. The other things is that news used to be, and this is very important change, news used to be required by the FCC as a community requirement. You were doing something for the community. It wasn't seen as a profit center. But about 20 years ago, news, especially local news, started being THE moneymaker for stations. You know, they'd sort of do fine on the primetime, the little ads they could sell on the edges of primetime, but they - I was at Channel 9 here in town when they expanded to 2 ½ hours - 3 hours of local news. Why? Because every dime they raised went back into the company as opposed to paying a syndicator, as opposed to paying the network a fee. So, all of a sudden, news became attractive financially, and then you had all the guys who weren't journalists coming in and saying, "Well, then we have to make even more money at it, " so they started applying different standards to what things had to cost and come up with. Question: One of the speakers early today mentioned scientists as positive role models in a number of movies. For the demographics of the 18 to 34 year olds, could you comment on that with other - getting other science messages across, like, perhaps, ala Erin Brockovich. Girshman: Well,
I don't know. It's interesting. He said that Erin Brockovich was an example
of a scientist being a good guy? Uh huh. Well, I think that charismatic figures are always great, and that's why when I'm making a story that's scientific in nature, you look for somebody who's the best talker, or who does the coolest thing. I mean, we do something at NPR called "radio expeditions," where we go out in the field with scientists who are doing various things. They could be - they're often biologists, but sometimes - this past trip we just, it won't be on the air until next month, but it was an interesting series that we'll do on elephant acoustics. So we had all these engineers setting up ways to, sort of, map how elephants communicate, while we were just hiding in the bush. But we had the adventure behind that, so we try to do that, and unfortunately, bench science, or - doesn't lend itself as much to that, especially when it comes to getting good video. So, that makes it much harder, and that's why you're reliant on anecdote, either the anecdote or the scientist doing something, or the anecdote of the patient or the person getting something. And the main problem with that is, is that you can only follow somebody around even on a one-hour Nova, which you'll hear about tomorrow from Paula Apsell - they have two or three weeks to shoot their whole hour. That doesn't mean that do it all in that time period, that means it's the total number of shooting days. So, you're not there for "eureka moments" that happen once every ten years. If you're lucky, you're there for those eureka moments, but it's very rare, so you have to plot everything out and plan it, which makes it inherently, I would argue, less interesting, because you're not actually seeing things happen, it's been, sort of, shot in certain way to make it look - it's not faked, ever, but what it is is, it's also not a real eureka moment, which it too bad. Also, there aren't that many of them. Borchelt: We'll take three more questions. Question: Thank you. There seems to me a certain tension here, and I'm - I struggle with that, between those things which are -and I'm thinking now aside from my own perspective - those things which are really complex issues but tremendously important in terms of being able to communicate that to the public, and those sound bytes which, essentially, strip that out into a very quick image which may or may not communicate very much and very often miscommunicates an idea. I mean, if you - you just mentioned the table-top fusion as an issue where, in fact, there are a lot of interesting issues around that including that we don't know whether it makes any sense yet or not, which is, in fact, an interesting story. And could be, if it were taken - on the other hand, you talked also about taking 26 segments to do a story on statistics. How do you - how do we find a way, I mean, do you have any suggestions and thoughts about how to take more complex issues and fine some medium in between those extremes, in a sense? Girshman: Well, this is where I'm actually quite optimistic. First of all, the addition of the Web to everybody, whether it's newspaper or print - whether it's print or radio or television or even, like, commercials - driving people to the Web you can really expand a lot more, and you can link to sites, and we do that on almost every story we have now, is we give people additional information that we couldn't fit in even our five or ten-minute radio piece. And newspapers even do it, even though they have the most space of anybody to do long features. So, it's - that's great, because you can really expand, and then people who are interested to know - and also, there is some other tiny reason, which I didn't mention before to be optimistic, which is that some people who have studied local news, local television news have found that the better stations are actually starting to do better in their markets. Their all losing, and so they're all freaking out, but in some markets, the stations that have opted to go a slightly higher road, less crime and longer pieces, have done better. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean, by the way, that they're hiring people who know how to interpret complex scientific data, because they're not. They still aren't, because every single reporter that they have does a piece every single day. So, when they do their special series on pollution - environmental news is big in local markets; big, and there's nothing more complicated than a cluster of anything. And it's very hard to say straight-forwardly, "That kid's cancer is not related to the fact that the stream down the street is brown, because we don't know, " and then you get a scientist on who says, "Well, you know, we really can't tell," because scientists, by their nature, can't make a 100 percent affirmative statement because you never are 100 percent. So, people take that kind of "wiggle" as a wiggle and a wobble as a lack of conviction, the way it is in a politician. And of course, we all know that that's not true in science, but it often gets interpreted that way by the people who report it. But my hope is that this Web-based component of news is going to help change that. Question: Peggy, here in the Washington area almost all the news stations, or the TV stations, have a - almost a daily Health Watch report, a little one-minute thing. And it's almost always - it is always medical research. It's a good report, but how much of a change would it be for them to call that segment, Science Watch, continue putting the medical research on, but also include some of the science and technology? And the second part of that question is, what about other areas of the country where there's concentrations of science of technology, like San Francisco or Boston or someplace like that. Do they have Science Watch segments, or is it Health Watch everywhere? Girshman: Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that there's a company in New York run by a woman named Eilene Augenbraun, who used to be - who's done like twelve things. She has a Ph.D., she's a Dr. of Osteopathy, plus she's been a science journalist, plus she worked for the National Academy - I don't know, but she started a company with this goal of putting science news, not medical news, on television stations, and she has succeeded. She operates on a complete shoestring, but she made a deal with ABC News to syndicate her two-minute features, and you can either take her narration - not her personally, but the narration the company puts on it, or you can put your own reporter on it and you - they read your script. So, they're not re-writing it in any way, and this has fed out to every single ABC station in the country, and more than 100 are using them on a regular basis - they use at least once a week, which is great. The reason that you see health news and not science news is because of research that shows that people rank, consistently, knowing about their health very high, and knowing about science very low. So, they don't think that that's a way to attract audience, and in fact, it isn't. And because women tend to watch, and because women are fascinated by health news more than men, they even go more that direction for that reason. Also, you're just more interested in your own body than you are in the body of science about fusion. Question: Um, I guess
this is more of a conversational question than an actual question. How
many people here last night saw The West Wing? I'm surprised nobody
has pointed out how well a science storyline was handled in that particular
show. I was highly impressed, and I don't know if others were here like
that. One of the things I sort of am paying attention to, now that I'm
in this area, is how well television fictional shows portray or don't
portray or discuss science. And I think that's an area that we often overlook,
and it's probably maybe not wise to overlook it, because so many millions
of people watch fictional shows and watch entertainment shows. And sometimes
it can be the conveying of information about science, as was done last
night, can be extremely well done in places where you'd least expect it,
such as a show like The West Wing, and even - even other primetime
shows. Even once in a while a show like Friends, where one of the
characters is a scientist, makes a good point about science, and the public
seem to - may learn more from just from watching that show than from any
other activity they do during the 24-hour day. Borchelt: Use the mic, please, when you speak. Question: Yeah, let me, while she's walking there I'll comment on that. I was going to bring up one of the worst examples of - Oh, just one? Question: What I was saying was, what happens when science is not well portrayed in a show? I mean, I watch The West Wing. The people I was talking to yesterday new I was rushing back to my hotel just so that I can make sure that I was there on time. But, and I think the writing is great on The West Wing, but I think not everybody watches The West Wing. A lot of people watch more of the comedies, and a lot of times there, one: is no science mentioned. For instance, Friends, you bring up Friends. Ross is an archeologist, or paleontologist? I forget. Comment: Paleontologist. Question: How often does he talk about his science? Every time he does, everybody rolls their eyes and, you know, it's a boring subject. Well, there you go. Paleontology must be boring. So, what happens when you have imagery like that, and when you have people who misquote or misuse science in those shows for the comedy effect or whatever? Girshman: I would say you also have to get in line. Politics is misrepresented in fictional stuff. Law enforcement; how many people don't get a lawyer, whereas on TV they never get a lawyer, and I think that that isn't really the case in real life. I mean, I don't think there's anything where they don't make giant leaps, even unknowing leaps, without- just for the purpose of the story. So, we're all in the same boat when we want something to be real; it ain't. Borchelt: Peggy, thank you so much for those inspiring and uplifting comments. [laughter] We're - Girshman: You guys know! You guys know you wanted another opportunity to dump on TV. You just know it! Borchelt: If I could just have your attention for a second, I'd like all presenters, please, if you could leave now and take a couple minutes to go set up your activity. The rest of you, let them out so that they can get up to their booths, and then I'll give a little bit of direction here. We will have buses beginning at 4:30. They'll run until everybody' gone, so don't feel like you have to rush through the programs. The dinner tonight is at 6:30. Before you leave the building today, please check your little badge holder and make sure you have a ticket for tonight's dinner, and if you don't, please see the registration desk to make sure you get one. Thanks a bunch. Created: 7/14/02
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