As long as I'm mentioning good science journalism, let me toss out another name: William Souder. He's a Minnesota journalist who has talked at my university, and is the author of A Plague of Frogs: Unraveling an Environmental Mystery ^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, a book about the malformed frogs that have been popping up in lakes and streams all over our state (a subject my colleague, David Hoppe, studies). We assigned a paper by Souder on the problems of science journalism in the deformed frog case, and I thought this section was very perceptive.

…journalists do not cover science in the same way that they cover politis or government or business or sports. Science coverage is discontinuous, and as a result, misleading as often as it is informative. There are, I believe, three broad shortcomings in the way science is communicated to the lay public by the media.

First, reporters—and more importantly their editors—tend not to see science as a developing story, but rather as a perlexing and boring process that produces "news" only intermittently, usually in the form of a readily digestible "discovery." This, for the most part, eliminates from science reporting what is elsewhere the gold standard in journalism—enterprise. A reporter trying to cover an ongoing story in science is likely to find room for only fragments of it in the paper or on the evening news. Very small fragments. Image that newspaper and TV journalists reported the results of elections, but said not a word about the campaigns leading up to voting day, and you begin to get an idea of the disparity.

Second, journalists are overly reliant on findings published in the scientific literature. In most forms of journalism getting "scooped" is a disaster. In science reporting, it's almost a requirement. The surest way to convince an editor to go with a science story is to show him or her that it has already been published in a scientific journal—or, preferably, that it will appear in one on the very same day you are proposing you run with your version. Here, I think, journalism and science must shoulder the blame equally. Journalists, in choosing only to cover periodic developments, give a false picture of the nature of scientific progress. A paper in a journal reporting a set of findings rarely represents a comprehensive view of the whole field of knowledge about a particular issue; rather it is a snapshot of one facet of our knowledge, incomplete and lacking context. No wonder the public often sees scientific discoveries as contradictory of one another. The public—that is to say, you and I—may feel a little like it's listening to a radio broadcast of a football game in which the plays aren't reported, but only a score is given every few minutes. In a seesaw game (and science is very much a seesaw game) you would never know when one reality might supplant another. At the same time, the scientific community makes better, more continuing coverage of science difficult when most journals require researchers to embargo their findings asa condition of publication. Why don't reporters do a better job of keeping track of what scientists are up to? Much of the time it is because scientists keep it a secret. Embargoing scientific findings that are in press enhances the status and confirms the supreme power of scientific journals—but it inhibits a full public understanding of what science does or does not know about many subjects of vital importance.

Finally, journalists, and (to a lesser but still substantial degree) scientists as well, place an inordinate significance on human health concerns with respect to ecological problems. Human health, of course, is a paramount consideration, but you should not have to have evidence of people keeling over or growing extra legs to sell an editor on a story about deformed frogs (or ozone depletion, global warming, endocrine disruption, water scarcity, shrinking biodiversity, etc., etc., unto oblivion). From the beginning of the frog story, there were worries over whether frogs are "sentinel species" for human environmental welfare. There is one thing I'm sure of. As we enter a century when environmental problems are likely to surpass traditional sources of human misery such as war, racism, and fanatical nationalism, if we continue to see wildlife ecology as separate from human ecology, we are going to be (however well intentioned) dead meat. If we get to the point where the only sentinels left are a handful of opportunistic species—rodents, white-tailed deer, cockroaches, or the weeds in your lawn—it's time to turn out the lights. If you are in the water with a great white shark, you can think of your feet as "sentinel organs" if you want to, but if you get a message from them, it is going to be too little, too late. Deformed frogs are nothing if not proof that environmental degradation is circling us with its fin up, coming in ever and ever closer.

On that note of impending despair, I see some similarities to Chris Clarke. I complain a lot about the bad coverage of science issues by the press, but one reason is that science journalism is important, and is dealing with issues of growing significance.

When my class discussed this paper last week, one thing I mentioned to them was that they should consider journalism as one direction they could take with their biology degrees once they leave UMM. I was surprised at how quick they were to say there was no way they'd do that—I swear, they were making signs to ward off the evil eye and pulling out the prayer beads (well, maybe I exaggerate slightly). That's worrisome. When sloppy work throws the whole career track into disrepute, it's hard to encourage the good students, the ones they need to rescue journalism, to consider it.

Souder, W. (2005) Of men and deformed frogs: a journalist's lament. In: Lannoo, M. 2005. Amphibian Declines: The Conservation Status of United States Species. U. Calif. Press, Berkeley, pp. 344-347.