The ethics of journalism don’t work for science | comment | EducationGuardian.co.uk

Professor (of philosophy) Jonathan Wolff describes (in the article at the above link) hearing a lecture and reading a subsequent published article in a scientific journal (Science) by Professor Naomi Oreskes. Prof Oreskes surveyed hundreds of peer-reviewed articles on climate change, none of which “denied that the Earth was warming or that human action was at least partially responsible.” The sceptics, she argued, were largely members of independent think-tanks, publishing their own reports without external review.

Yet when Prof Oreskes published her article, writes Prof Wolff, she “was immediately shot down by bloggers, journalists and think-tankers, who mixed insults about her honesty with more plausible-sounding complaints about her methodology. Oreskes replied, with great restraint, that she would wait for the peer-reviewed criticisms.”

His observation led Prof Wolff to contrast journalistic and scientific ethics. In reporting political arguments, each claim must be countered so that a lively debate can take place and readers come to their own views, he writes. Journalists are mistaken in applying the same ethical code of ‘balance’ to scientific reporting. “Whenever a story on climate change is produced, a maverick nay-sayer is rolled out for the sake of balance. But this misleads the public into thinking that a few lone voices have equal weight to the scientific orthodoxy.” Prof Wolf also provides the example of the few people who deny a role for HIV in AIDS, yet make a disproportionate amount of noise.

Can non-scientists understand scientific discussions, asks Wolff? “We all study science for a few years, but learn – or at least remember – very little about methodology. Science is presented as a body of known truths. As adults, though, we need to know not the atomic number of chlorine, but how to assess evidence for or against a theory.”