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CJR : The Observatory

  • Saving Corwin’s Creatures

    While filming his new documentary, 100 Heartbeats, Jeff Corwin cut off the horn of a black rhino to protect it from poachers, broke four ribs transporting Sumatran orangutans to a wildlife sanctuary, and helped raid a Cambodian restaurant serving endangered species like pangolin and soft-shelled turtle. “I wanted to [...]
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    Posted: November 20, 2009, 10:31am EST
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Trains, Planes, and Carbon Offsets

    This week, The New York Times published two much-needed articles questioning the value of programs that let consumers pay a small fee to ostensibly reduce their carbon footprints. The first, by Kate Galbraith, focused on renewable energy certificates, which allow utilities to offer their customers the choice of paying [...]
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    Posted: November 18, 2009, 1:31pm EST
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Newsweek, API, and Ethics

    Last week, news reports revealed that, since 2007, Newsweek has sold advertising packages to the American Petroleum Industry--the oil and gas industry’s largest trade group--“that included the right to co-host forums on energy issues, including two where members of Congress sat side-by-side on panels with the association’s president.” “Newsweek [...]
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    Posted: November 17, 2009, 1:48pm EST
    by The Editors

  • Criticism of Gladwell Reaches Tipping Point

    Criticism of Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling New Yorker writer, seems to be reaching – yes! – a tipping point. The critiques have come from a variety of angles – literary critics lambast his glibness; The Daily Beast doesn’t like his dating habits; The Nation doesn’t like, well, anything about [...]
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    Posted: November 17, 2009, 12:03pm EST
    by Terry McDermott

  • Plimer, “Balance as Bias” Back in Climate Coverage

    That old nuisance, “balance as bias,” cropped up in the press again on Thursday in an article in the Telegraph about the theories of climate skeptic Ian Plimer, an Australian geologist. There isn’t even the pretense of a news peg. For some reason, the paper’s environment correspondent, Louise Gray, [...]
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    Posted: November 13, 2009, 4:49pm EST
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Government Programs Don't Always Increase the Deficit

    The federal budget deficit, it seems, is back on the White House’s agenda. David Brooks, in his column today, asserted in passing that once (if?) health care reform passes, President Obama will "pick some fights with his own party over spending." At Politico, meanwhile, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei [...]
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    Posted: November 13, 2009, 11:50am EST
    by Greg Marx

  • The Fate of Former P-I Employees

    Ruth Teichroeb, who worked as an investigative reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer from 1997 until its demise in March, is not done investigating. On Wednesday she published a survey on her ironically titled blog, Safety Net, of what has become of her former colleagues in the last nine months. [...]
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    Posted: November 12, 2009, 4:31pm EST
    by Curtis Brainard

  • AMNH Hosts 33rd Annual Margaret Mead Film Festival

    Science news aficionados that are passing through New York City this week should check out the thirty-third Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, which kicks off at the American Museum of Natural History Thursday night and runs through Sunday. Named after the famed cultural anthropologist, a former assistant curator [...]
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    Posted: November 11, 2009, 4:36pm EST
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Univ. of Montana Launches Environmental Journalism Program

    At least somebody gets it. The University of Montana in Missoula announced on Monday that it is accepting applications for a new, two-year graduate program in environmental science and natural resource journalism. The news comes less than a month after Columbia University, in New York, decided to suspend a [...]
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    Posted: November 11, 2009, 2:39pm EST
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Trash Compactor

    Today’s New York Times features an article about a patch of garbage, estimated to be two times the area of Texas, swirling in the middle of the Pacific ocean. The piece was written by freelance journalist Lindsey Hoshaw, and the travel expenses for her reporting trip were covered by [...]
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    Posted: November 10, 2009, 5:45pm EST
    by Megan Garber

  • AAAS Announces 2009 Kavli Science Journalism Awards

    Recipients of the 2009 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards were announced this morning. “A radio broadcast on probability told through a tale about a drifting balloon, a newspaper series on the impact of a devastating genetic disease on a family in rural Montana, and a group of gracefully written [...]
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    Posted: November 10, 2009, 12:55pm EST
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Unscientific America Meets Denialism

    Michael Specter and Chris Mooney agree that the United States is full of people who just don’t get science, and that this is a dangerous situation. In fact, they agree about a lot of things. They are the respective authors of the similarly titled Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders [...]
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    Posted: November 06, 2009, 6:36pm EST
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Reservations about Resveratrol

    There is in the science press a kind of gene-of-the-month club for disease cures in which scientists discover that promoting or quieting a particular gene cures this condition or that. One prominent example in recent years has been the claim of remarkable potential for a compound named resveratrol. Specifically, [...]
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    Posted: November 05, 2009, 4:03pm EST
    by Terry McDermott

  • “Will Work in Copenhagen”

    The United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen this December will undoubtedly be an international media circus of the highest order. Many of the journalists there will be wandering bards, however, reciting tales on the spot for anyone willing to listen or, God willing, pay them. In an effort [...]
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    Posted: November 03, 2009, 3:48pm EST
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Halloween Hype?

    As trick-or-treaters ready themselves for the annual ritual that is Halloween, health and headline writers around the world have found it hard to resist a rip-and-tear story involving pumpkins: • “Pumpkins May Scare Away Some Germs” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Eco Speak blog • “Jack-O-Lanterns May Say ‘Boo’ to [...]
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    Posted: October 30, 2009, 2:57pm EDT
    by Cristine Russell

  • More On Super Freaks and Troubling Temps

    As I noted in a Wednesday column, a number of reporters have recently had to revisit the most fundamental question about climate change: Is the Earth actually warming up. The book SuperFreakonomics and an article by the BBC have received widespread criticism for arguing that there is evidence we [...]
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    Posted: October 30, 2009, 2:39pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • The Trouble with Temperature

    Articles about climate change legislation quickly piled up on Tuesday morning as the Senate began debating a proposal to cap greenhouse-gas emissions. The bill may be imperfect, and it may fail, but the deliberations are nonetheless the culmination of years of effort to convince to the government to address [...]
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    Posted: October 28, 2009, 1:26pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • “Fix the Climate, or the Kid Gets It”

    A Friday morning headline in Politico noted that it’s “crunch time” for the climate bill currently underway in the Senate. By Friday afternoon, stories were rolling in about a speech that President Obama delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in support of the legislation. Crunch time for hashing [...]
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    Posted: October 23, 2009, 5:52pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Limbaugh Suggests NYT’s Revkin Should “Kill Himself”

    There’s commentary and then there’s hateful insanity, and nobody is blurring the line between the two better than Rush Limbaugh. On his Tuesday radio program, the shock jock compared environmentalists to jihadists willing to dispatch child suicide bombers in support of their cause. Limbaugh then accused New York Times [...]
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    Posted: October 20, 2009, 6:28pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Notebooks Aside...

    When American science writers donned their cowboy boots to travel to the University of Texas in Austin for their annual meeting, they—like much of the world—found themselves Skyping, tweeting, live video streaming and using other digital technologies that made the reporter's notebooks in their registration packets seem like quaint [...]
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    Posted: October 20, 2009, 11:24am EDT
    by Robin Lloyd and Cristine Russell

  • Columbia Suspends Environmental Journalism Program

    For the first time since it was created fourteen years ago, Columbia University’s highly regarded dual-degree graduate program in environmental journalism will not be accepting applications for next academic year. In a letter to faculty at the Graduate School of Journalism, the Department of Environmental Sciences, and the Lamont-Doherty [...]
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    Posted: October 19, 2009, 3:36pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Sanjay Gupta on Cheating Death

    We’ve poked a bit of fun at CNN’s Sanjay Gupta in the past. See this Blair Witch like visit to a Mexican swine flu ward he did in the epidemic’s earliest days. And, yes, we’ve also had more substantive quibbles with his reporting. But after having heard him speak [...]
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    Posted: October 16, 2009, 2:45pm EDT
    by Clint Hendler

  • An (Oil) Peak Too High

    DENVER—Protestors in giant chicken suits lingered outside the 2009 International Peak Oil Conference here on Monday. Their personas were meant to taunt the “Chicken Littles” inside—men and women who had gathered to discuss the theory that oil production has or soon will reach its zenith and then enter into [...]
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    Posted: October 14, 2009, 1:50pm EDT
    by Tiffany Plate

  • SEJ Accused of Protecting Gore

    An independent filmmaker accused the Society of Environmental Journalists of “protecting” Al Gore on Friday after the filmmaker’s mic was cut while challenging the former vice president to acknowledge alleged errors in the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Phelim McAleer, the co-director/producer of an independent film entitled Not Evil, [...]
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    Posted: October 12, 2009, 12:39pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Synthetic Biology Still Not a Story

    According to a recent poll, Americans know very little about synthetic biology, which seeks to genetically engineer new forms of life or endow existing ones with novel powers. Part of that may be the press’s fault. While the field has drawn increased media attention over the last seven years [...]
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    Posted: October 06, 2009, 3:15pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Grantham Prize Seminar To Honor Air Pollution Series

    Anybody in or around Washington, D.C. on Monday should check out the fourth annual Grantham Prize Seminar on the State of Environmental Journalism. The event, which is free and open to the public, features an impressive list of speakers from Robert Semple, who writes about environmental issues for The [...]
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    Posted: October 02, 2009, 1:28pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Green Rankings a Means, Not an End For Journalists

    Are you invested in a dirty company? If you work for the state of New York and plan to draw benefits from one of its pension funds, you might be. “One aspect of Newsweek's just-released rankings of 500 leading companies' environmental policies and performance is to view the list' [...]
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    Posted: September 28, 2009, 5:24pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Are Americans Wild Enough?

    On Sunday evening PBS will air Ken Burns’s much anticipated documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. News outlets and blogs were filled with reviews on Friday, a fitting end to a summer awash in news of our nation’s parks. In early June, the National Parks Service announced that [...]
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    Posted: September 25, 2009, 7:20pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Sidebar: The New Energy Beat

    Energy Journalism All Green To Me: An eclectic energy and environment Web site from The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware. Bloomberg: This financial and numbers-based energy section tends to focus on energy markets and the big firms. Chicago Tribune: The paper’s renewable energy topic page. Coal... [...]
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    Posted: September 24, 2009, 1:00am EDT
    by Curtis Brainard and Cristine Russell

  • The New Energy Beat

    On a Monday morning in January, less than a week after his inauguration, President Barack Obama signed two memoranda designed to improve automobile fuel efficiency. “These are extraordinary times,” Obama told an audience gathered in the White House’s East Room, that call “for swift and extraordinary action. At a [...]
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    Posted: September 24, 2009, 1:00am EDT
    by Curtis Brainard and Cristine Russell

  • Newsweek Ranks 500 Greenest Companies…

    The press’s latest attempt to quantify and categorize the environmental track records of myriad businesses attempting burnish their eco-credentials is the most ambitious to date. But the emerald paint is still wet in a couple places. On Monday, Newsweek released its “inaugural” Green Rankings for the 500 largest companies [...]
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    Posted: September 22, 2009, 7:45pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • MinnPost.com Launches “Science Agenda”

    On Thursday, I wrote about a group of thirty-five research universities that have launched a “newswire” called Futurity.org to showcase their best research. The impetus for the project was the decline of science coverage in the press. Elsewhere, however, the day also brought hope that all is not lost [...]
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    Posted: September 18, 2009, 5:43pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Is Futurity the Future?

    Citing the decline of science coverage in the mainstream news media, thirty-five of the country’s top universities have banded together to launch their own “news channel” for publicizing their best research. In March, the consortium created a Web site, Futurity.org, to showcase edited press releases and stories written by [...]
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    Posted: September 17, 2009, 5:52pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Science Needs a Storyline

    Journalists choose an angle for every story they write. Should scientists do the same when explaining the import of their research to reporters and the public? In a column at The Observatory last week, Earle Holland argued it would be better if they left that to the pros. Holland [...]
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    Posted: September 16, 2009, 12:22pm EDT
    by Matt Nisbet, Dominique Brossard, Dietram Scheufele

  • From Hudson to 9/11

    Remember remember the month of September. So says a smart tribute in today’s New York Times, pairing the eighth anniversary of 9/11 and the four-hundredth anniversary of Dutch explorer Henry Hudson’s first voyage, on 9/12, into what would become New York Harbor. The op-ed, by Eric Sanderson, author of [...]
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    Posted: September 11, 2009, 5:26pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Research, Not Relations…

    A piece in The Observatory last week lamented the fact that Rajenda Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was recently obliged to speak as a “human being” rather than as a scientist when recommending a specific target for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The column suggested [...]
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    Posted: September 09, 2009, 5:58pm EDT
    by Earle Holland

  • EPA Targets Major Emitters

    The Environmental Protection Agency sent a “tailoring rule” to the White House for consideration on Saturday that would limit regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions under the Clean Air Act to large, industrial sources. It’s easy to view the rule as the agency doing what it as said it would do [...]
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    Posted: September 04, 2009, 12:41pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • When Kennedy Didn’t Compromise

    I join the chorus of those who have long admired Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s remarkable Senate career and his persistence in pushing for health care reform throughout his forty-six years on Capitol Hill. Indeed, his negotiating skills and ability to wrest compromise from his diverse colleagues will be sorely [...]
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    Posted: September 01, 2009, 11:17am EDT
    by Cristine Russell

  • Can Science Be “Humanized?”

    There is a hauntingly dystopian headline in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine: “Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school.” According to the article itself, the dehumanizing element of the school system (especially universities) is actually its focus on producing businesspeople and “ensuring that the United States does [...]
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    Posted: August 31, 2009, 10:38am EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Media Hype Swine Flu Report

    On Monday, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology released a report (pdf) about the possible impact of swine flu this coming fall. The report presented a “plausible scenario” wherein 20 to 40 percent of the U.S. population becomes infected; as many as 1.8 million are hospitalized; [...]
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    Posted: August 26, 2009, 1:58pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Forbes on ExxonMobil: “Green Company of the Year”

    What an eye-grabber! “ExxonMobil: Green Company of Year.” I mean, who woulda thunk it? Too bad the provocative headline of Forbes’s current cover story is little more than cheap window dressing. Worse still, its unnecessary hyperbole detracts from what could have been an interesting piece about the oil giant’s [...]
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    Posted: August 24, 2009, 1:57pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • March of the Politicians

    On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal fronted an article about a trip that ten members of Congress took last year to the South Pacific and Antarctica, ostensibly to study climate change. The eleven-day trip, which occurred over New Year’s 2008, included six of the representatives’ spouses and featured diving [...]
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    Posted: August 12, 2009, 5:35pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Writing Wrongs

    For journalists, some scientific flops are just too good to pass up. Think of the Large Hadron Collider’s failure to launch last year. Efforts to get the inglorious atom smasher up and running are still drawing headlines, and if the heralded machine fails to locate the Higgs boson or [...]
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    Posted: August 11, 2009, 12:49pm EDT
    by Sanhita Reddy

  • It’s Tanking; I’m Teaching…

    Following the fiftieth fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing two weeks ago, The Observatory ran a short round-up of the coverage, arguing that the uncertain and controversial future of human spaceflight makes NASA “fertile ground” for space reporters right now. While that is undoubtedly true, we forgot to [...]
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    Posted: August 07, 2009, 5:27pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Clunkers, the Economy, and the Environment

    Since the Department of Transportation announced last Thursday that new-car buyers had bankrupted the “cash for clunkers” rebate initiative in its first week, the media have devoted countless articles to analyzing the federal program’s value. The deal--which offers consumers up to $4,500 for exchanging older vehicles for new, more [...]
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    Posted: August 05, 2009, 3:12pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Fuel for Thought

    Fuel from corn. Fuel from coffee grounds. Fuel from chicken feathers. Whatever the recipe, the search for a replacement for gasoline is one of the hottest topics in energy reporting—so it’s no surprise that, earlier this week, journalists reported on Joule Biotechnologies, a new company that claims it can [...]
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    Posted: July 31, 2009, 1:24pm EDT
    by Sanhita Reddy

  • (E)mission Impossible?

    After the recent Group 8 meeting in Italy, news outlets released a flood of reports about certain developing countries—led by China and India—that refuse to accept specific, binding targets for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. Negotiators from those nations argue that doing so would curb their economic growth and [...]
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    Posted: July 29, 2009, 12:15pm EDT
    by Sanhita Reddy

  • The DEA, Michael Jackson, and Me

    Scoops are won through hard work, luck and even, in the case of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot, mistaken identity. They should never be lost by the bungling of a government press office. But that’s what occurred to my publication in our attempt to cover the death of Michael Jackson. [...]
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    Posted: July 23, 2009, 5:22pm EDT
    by Adam Marcus

  • Media on the Moon

    The media loves to commemorate space-age milestones. In 2007, it was Sputnik’s fiftieth birthday. In 2008, it was NASA’s. This year--Monday, to be precise--marked four decades since the first moon landing. Nearly every media outlet had comprehensive coverage of the anniversary: The New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, and [...]
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    Posted: July 23, 2009, 4:35pm EDT
    by Sanhita Reddy

  • George Will and Climate Change: Have We Seen This Movie Before?

    He’s ba-ack. After igniting a firestorm in the blogosphere (and attracting some attention from mainstream media) with a February 15 column in which he misrepresented scientific data in order to discount concerns about global warming—and then penning another column about the ensuing controversy--Washington Post columnist George Will <a href=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/22/AR2009072202415.html?hpid=opinionsbox1... [...]
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    Posted: July 23, 2009, 3:46pm EDT
    by Greg Marx

  • Science Clichés: Steer Clear

    Cheers to the Knight Science Journalism Tracker for picking up a snarky post at Wired titled, “5 Atrocious Science Clichés to Throw Down a Black Hole.” Here’s what the author, Betsy Mason, says about using the term, “missing link”: Don’t even tell me you aren’t sick of all the [...]
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    Posted: July 21, 2009, 2:02pm EDT
    by Sanhita Reddy

  • The New Pioneers of the West

    When Robert McClure picked up the phone to talk to about the new journalism startup he’s working for, Investigate West, he was at an airport in Dallas, getting ready to fly back to Seattle after doing some reporting in Texas. McClure and his photographer had a three-hour layover in [...]
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    Posted: July 17, 2009, 4:50pm EDT
    by Sanhita Reddy

  • BPA, Health and Nuance

    The FDA is supposed to reach a final decision on the safety of Bisphenol A (BPA)—a plastics additive found in many food and drink containers—by the end of this summer. Last month, STATS, a “statistical assessment service” affiliated with George Mason University, released an in-depth critique of the media’s [...]
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    Posted: July 16, 2009, 3:53pm EDT
    by Sanhita Reddy

  • Science Journalism in a Can

    Last week, the The Washington Post’s Health section carried a lead story about AIDS immunology research being spearheaded by a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, Bruce Walker, whom it introduced in the third paragraph. At the end of the piece, an editor’s note disclosed that “A longer version of [...]
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    Posted: July 14, 2009, 11:39am EDT
    by The Editors

  • Grace-ful Coverage

    The name Libby doesn’t conjure the same images of corporate and environmental malfeasance as Love Canal or Three Mile Island. But it should. This 2,600-person town in Montana was recently the focus of what a former prosecutor for the Justice Department called “the most significant environmental criminal prosecution that's' [...]
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    Posted: July 10, 2009, 11:54am EDT
    by Russ Juskalian

  • Science Journalism Around the World

    LONDON — During the meeting here last week, I began referring to the World Conference of Science Journalists as my “Super Bowl.” With around 900 participants, it was surely one of, if not the, largest gathering ever of science media from all over the globe. But that wasn’t the [...]
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    Posted: July 08, 2009, 11:23am EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Press Eyes Copenhagen

    LONDON — Unsurprisingly, climate change was one of the most popular topics at the World Conference of Science Journalists, held here last week. As I’ve argued many times, ups and downs in the coverage thereof have been a big part of the story itself, not unlike the coverage of [...]
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    Posted: July 06, 2009, 6:28pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Some Optimism for the Future of Science Journalism

    LONDON — Amidst the gloomy climate in American science journalism, leading British editors have a decidedly upbeat view about coverage. “I have an enormously sunny outlook for the future of science journalism,” said James Harding, editor of London’s The Times. “Science is absolutely essential to what we do.” Harding [...]
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    Posted: July 02, 2009, 5:43pm EDT
    by Cristine Russell

  • NSF “Underwriting” Coverage…

    LONDON — The sixth World Conference of Science Journalists got off to an enjoyably controversial start here on Tuesday afternoon. The event takes place against the backdrop of concurrent editorials in the world’s leading scientific journals, Science and Nature (the former by CJR contributing editor Cristine Russell), exploring the [...]
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    Posted: July 01, 2009, 11:23am EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Health Wealth

    Earlier this month, the Lancet published two studies clarifying some long-standing questions about global health financing and the effectiveness of health programs. One of the studies, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, provided a comprehensive list of sources of public health funding, including—for the first time—non-governmental organizations [...]
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    Posted: June 30, 2009, 2:16pm EDT
    by Sanhita Reddy

  • Reprimanded Psychiatrist? Bad Advice?

    Last May, a Peabody was awarded to the film Depression: Out of the Shadows, a documentary which aired in 2008 on PBS, was produced by Twin Cities Public Television and WGBH Boston, and was written and directed by Minneapolis-based filmmaker Larkin McPhee. The documentary profiled a wide variety of [...]
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    Posted: June 24, 2009, 2:10pm EDT
    by Paul Scott

  • Climate Change, Crop Catastrophe

    California’s awful fiscal and economic crises—$24 billion budget shortfall, fifth highest level of unemployment in the nation—have been much in the press lately. A common theme of the coverage is California’s economic resiliency—things may be nasty now, but the state still has plenty going for it: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, [...]
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    Posted: June 22, 2009, 12:41pm EDT
    by Sam Kornell

  • Gene Randall “Reporting,” Inc.

    Former CNN correspondent-turned-PR consultant Gene Randall’s video “report” for oil giant Chevron might be unprecedented for how it blurred the line between public relations and journalism. But the Randall-Chevron production raises not only ethical questions, but also the question of whether a surge of newly pink-slipped reporters might go, [...]
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    Posted: June 16, 2009, 12:00pm EDT
    by Brad Jacobson

  • Talking Shop: Karen Ravn

    In “Body of Lies,” a recent article published in the Los Angeles Times, Karen Ravn reported on the widespread problem of dishonesty among patients when talking to their doctors. Here, Ravn answers a few questions via e-mail about the piece and her thoughts on the future of health journalism. [...]
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    Posted: June 15, 2009, 2:00pm EDT
    by Sanhita Reddy

  • Pregnancy Pounds

    Eating for two might not be such good advice for expectant mothers, according to new guidelines for how much weight women should gain during pregnancy, issued The National Institute of Medicine last week. Most reporters were adept at explaining the new guidelines, as well as relevant studies about pregnancy [...]
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    Posted: June 10, 2009, 6:29pm EDT
    by Sanhita Reddy

  • Earth 2100 Sizzles

    On Tuesday night, ABC News aired a two-hour special called Earth 2100, describing the potentially apocalyptic scene that could await us at the end of the century. The network abandoned cautious storytelling, opting instead to portray “the worst-case scenario for human civilization… if we fail to seriously address the [...]
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    Posted: June 05, 2009, 1:22pm EDT
    by Katherine Bagley

  • Foolish Fusion

    Coverage of the dedication ceremony for the National Ignition Facility, the world’s largest laser system, may have made it hard to discern how NIF’s work differs from Dr. Octopus’s fusion experiment in Spiderman II. Media outlets skirted around substantial explanations of NIF, providing cursory information that left readers confused [...]
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    Posted: June 04, 2009, 4:19pm EDT
    by Sanhita Reddy

  • Sotomayor’s “Sweet” Side

    Over the past week, members of the news media have talked a lot about SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s race and ethnic background. But they have also devoted a surprising amount of attention to her status as a Type 1 diabetic. As we learned from the coverage of John McCain’s [...]
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    Posted: June 02, 2009, 6:06pm EDT
    by Sanhita Reddy

  • Climate Bill Cacophony

    Last week, the House Energy and Commerce committee approved energy and climate legislation that could put the first national cap on greenhouse-gas emissions. Many news reports called the decision a “landmark” and “historic.” Indeed it was. But the best adjective for the legislative wrangling—as employed by The Washington Post [...]
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    Posted: May 27, 2009, 11:15am EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Probability Problems

    A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which found that end-of-the-century global warming could be twice as severe as previous estimates, drew a limited amount of press attention on Thursday. Few of the resulting articles, unfortunately, are totally [...]
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    Posted: May 22, 2009, 12:45pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • “The Mediacene Age”

    On Tuesday, The New York Times ran its second article about a 47-million-year-old skeleton that is being described as “the most complete fossil primate ever discovered.” The monkey-like creature, an entirely new genus and species, might be a "missing link" between modern primates—such as monkeys, apes and humans—and the [...]
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    Posted: May 19, 2009, 4:31pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Trek Tech

    I am not a Trekkie, despite my older brothers’ countless attempts to make me one. But the first time I saw a Bluetooth receiver, I just couldn’t help but think of Lieutenant Uhura and her iconic earpiece communicator. With the release of the newest Star Trek movie, articles are [...]
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    Posted: May 14, 2009, 6:13pm EDT
    by Katherine Bagley

  • The Science of Art…

    Last Thursday was the fiftieth anniversary of C.P. Snow’s famous lecture, “The Two Cultures,” which described a divide between scientists and “literary intellectuals” such as novelists, poets, and philosophers. The half-centennial provoked only a limited amount of media coverage. Nature, New Scientist, the Financial Times, and the Telegraph... [...]
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    Posted: May 13, 2009, 12:38pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • To Report or Repeat?

    It’s hard to agree with a study last week that claimed academic medical centers hype their research through their press releases, once you look closely at the process they used to reach that conclusion. The releases are, after all, fundamentally intended to attract reporters’ interest. But the study claims [...]
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    Posted: May 12, 2009, 5:31pm EDT
    by Earle Holland

  • Facebook and Procrastination

    From the start, we knew that the news release we were distributing had a chance for ample news coverage. After all, it involved the ubiquitous “social media” and student grades, either of which is all-but-guaranteed to garner attention. What we didn’t figure was how badly most of the conventional [...]
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    Posted: May 08, 2009, 11:00am EDT
    by Earle Holland

  • Science Journalism's Crystal Ball

    In covering a crisis, it is crucial to quickly separate reliable information from speculation and hype—or, in the case of the fast-moving swine flu story, an epidemic from a pandemic. It’s easier, of course, if you have strong science and medical reporters on board. From the first days of [...]
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    Posted: May 07, 2009, 11:58am EDT
    by Cristine Russell

  • The Flu Formerly Known As Swine

    Over the past week, media reports cycled through various names for the 2009 A(H1N1) influenza—swine flu, Mexico flu, North American flu, novel flu—as international health agencies struggled to better understand the global outbreak. The World Health Organization and the Obama administration eventually settled on “A(H1N1),” which stands for Influenza [...]
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    Posted: May 06, 2009, 12:30pm EDT
    by Katherine Bagley

  • Magazine Mayhem

    Last week was yet another turbulent one for science journalism. Scientific American, the United States’s oldest magazine, and the American Chemical Society, which publishes a magazine and a number of journals with news content, cut staff in an effort to reposition themselves for long-term stability. Portfolio (which closed just [...]
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    Posted: May 05, 2009, 3:40pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Swine Flu and CAFOs?

    In the search for the swine flu outbreak’s “ground zero,” blogs have called upon mainstream media to investigate the potential role of large factory farms in breeding and spreading the virus. Major news outlets have tentatively begun to do just that over the last two days. Reports have focused [...]
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    Posted: April 29, 2009, 5:45pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Learning from Perlman and Maddox

    Many of us in science journalism today know (or should know) that our careers are vastly different because of two men who helped to revolutionize the field: Sir John Maddox and David Perlman. Mentors to many of the best working journalists today, their efforts to clearly and succinctly explain [...]
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    Posted: April 28, 2009, 3:08pm EDT
    by Katherine Bagley

  • Toying with Climate Information

    The news media and blogs were rife with stories last week about politicians and journalists alike manipulating information related to climate change. The most significant was Friday’s New York Times front-page story by Andrew Revkin, “Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate.” The piece is about the Global Climate Coalition, [...]
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    Posted: April 27, 2009, 6:59pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Green Issues Fade

    Another year, another Earth Day, another wave of “Green Issues” on newsstands… or not. After three years, the springtime fad seems to have run its course, with a number of magazines cancelling and cutting back their special editions on the environment. Is this a symptom of a larger “green [...]
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    Posted: April 22, 2009, 8:21pm EDT
    by Katherine Bagley

  • Capturing Conversation

    On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency formally announced that heat-trapping greenhouse gases are a danger to human health and welfare, a move that could lead to the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles, power plants, and other industrial sources. The determination—which will undergo a sixty-day comment period before [...]
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    Posted: April 21, 2009, 11:38am EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Wish He Was a Baller

    As virtually all of America knows by now, Tom Friedman is a big environmentalist. He loves nature, green things, responsible business practices, stuff Europe does, and so on. That's how America knows the New York Times columnist is a good guy, despite the fact that he's otherwise pretty much [...]
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    Posted: April 16, 2009, 9:39am EDT
    by Daniel Luzer

  • The Man with the Van

    In early March, in a mountainous, quake-prone patch of central Italy, the readings on Gioacchino Giuliani’s patented radon detector suddenly spiked. He concluded the jump could only mean one thing: impending seismic activity. Giuliani immediately dispatched a fleet of vans equipped with loudspeakers throughout the Abruzzo region, blaring warnings [...]
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    Posted: April 13, 2009, 9:45am EDT
    by Katherine Bagley

  • Holdren’s First Interviews

    President Barack Obama’s new science advisor, physicist John Holdren, met the press this week, with mixed results for the ensuing journalism. Holdren gave his first media interviews since being confirmed at the end of March, starting with the Associated Press’s Seth Borenstein, to whom he expressed support for studying [...]
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    Posted: April 10, 2009, 6:20pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Post vs. Post

    On Tuesday, an article and a blog entry at The Washington Post both took the unusual step of rebutting one of the paper’s own columnists, George Will, who has drawn widespread criticism for misusing scientific data about global warming. Will has penned three columns on climate change in the [...]
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    Posted: April 09, 2009, 11:56am EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Class Dismissed

    Historian John Steele Gordon, writing on Barack Obama’s economic policies in the April issue of Commentary, says that the president's plan to raise taxes on high earners and increase regulations on business will curtail job creation and slow economic growth. This is nominally an article about cap and trade, [...]
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    Posted: April 09, 2009, 11:20am EDT
    by Daniel Luzer

  • Looking Past Red Flags

    In late January, clinical immunologist Richard Burt and his Northwestern University colleagues published the results of a study which found that stem cell transplantation could possibly halt disease progression and “reverse” neurological deficits in patients with multiple sclerosis. MS, which affects 2.5 million people worldwide, is a degenerative autoimmune [...]
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    Posted: April 07, 2009, 3:04pm EDT
    by Katherine Bagley

  • Making Space for Skeptics

    Washington Post columnist George Will was at it again on Thursday with his third column disparaging the scientific consensus behind man-made global warming in less than a month. As usual, the blogosphere delivered a quick and thorough retort. Carl Zimmer, Chris Mooney, Joe Romm, Adam Siegel, and <a href=http://mediamatters.org/items/200904020007?f=h_latest... [...]
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    Posted: April 03, 2009, 4:35pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • For the Birds?

    Earlier this month, the United States Department of the Interior released the results of a large-scale, collaborative report on the status of bird populations across the country. The study, which announced that approximately one-third of the nation’s 800 bird species are endangered, threatened, or in significant decline, flew over [...]
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    Posted: March 31, 2009, 12:18pm EDT
    by Katherine Bagley

  • Post-Intelligent

    When the last print issue of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer rolled off the presses last Tuesday, it was another blow to the floundering newspaper industry—and to specialized reporting in particular. The P-I had a long history of supporting top-flight science, environment, and public health coverage. Since at least the late [...]
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    Posted: March 25, 2009, 1:43pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Catastrophe in Context

    Climate scientists gathered for a major summit in Copenhagen a bit more than a week ago, but you might not have heard about it—or if you did, it might not have made much of an impression. It got little coverage in the U.S.—and the coverage it did get largely [...]
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    Posted: March 23, 2009, 2:40pm EDT
    by Mason Inman

  • Nature’s Artificial Divide

    The illustration is excellent. As Charlie Petit described it: “a crumbling monument topped by a stack of ossified newspapers, overwhelmed by USB and laptop cables.” Such is the introductory image to Nature’s superb package, published Wednesday, on the troubled state of science journalism. Its central point, described in an [...]
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    Posted: March 20, 2009, 8:28pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Obama on Stem Cells

    President Obama's decision to allow federally funded scientists to work with hundreds of new embryonic stem cell lines continued to fuel media debate this week about the proper relationship between science and politics. As U.S. News & World Report pointed out the day after last Monday's announcement, the change [...]
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    Posted: March 18, 2009, 10:00am EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Gallup: Many Americans Think Media Exaggerate Global Warming

    On Wednesday, the Gallup polling organization released its annual survey of environmental issues. Among the key findings: Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest [...]
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    Posted: March 13, 2009, 12:16pm EDT
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Ménage à Green Blogs

    News outlets across the country are cutting staff, sections, and print editions, but science and environment blogs continue to multiply, even among “old media.” Three that have sprung up in recent months are, in particular, worth pointing out for their efforts to expand the bounds of what a “Web [...]
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    Posted: March 11, 2009, 6:14pm EDT
    by Katherine Bagley

  • Columbia Presents 2008 Oakes Award

    Writing about environmental toxicology—the ambient chemical exposure of our daily lives—has it all: public health threats, a nascent body of science, tight-lipped officials, industrial interests, and consumer unawareness. Yesterday, at Columbia University, two news outlets were rewarded for doing it right. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, for the second time [...]
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    Posted: March 06, 2009, 1:09pm EST
    by Curtis Brainard

  • Washington Post Pools Its Resources

    In the latest of many recent changes at The Washington Post, the management has announced a new plan to coordinate all health, science and environmental coverage paper-wide—from national to lifestyle—under a single editor. “As one step towards a broader re-imagining of the newsroom, we will soon assemble under one [...]
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    Posted: March 06, 2009, 8:22am EST
    by Cristine Russell

  • Globe Kills Health/Science Section, Keeps Staff

    It is the end of an era that began more than twenty-five years ago, when test-tube babies and compact discs were new. This week, The Boston Globe stopped running its highly regarded Monday Health/Science section and began placing its content in the paper’s trendy new “g” lifestyle tabloid, as [...]
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    Posted: March 04, 2009, 4:06pm EST
    by Cristine Russell
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