A HISTORY OF SCIENCE NEWS

Sketches by Bill Kovarik

(Drawn from The Ethyl Controversy, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1993).

( Also see E.W. Scripps and Walter Lippmann)

Introduction

The early origins of popular news about discovery and science might be traced back to Christopher Columbus' printed newsletter of 1493, announcing the results of his first expedition to the Indies. Or perhaps "science journalism" could be traced to the occasional report in newsletters from the houses of Taxi and Fugger that circulated around Europe in the early 16th century and discussed such topics as witch burnings and the effect of weather on crops.[1] The expansion of printing and publishing, and the availability of books such as De Re Metallica (1556) and De Re Navali (1536), broke down the "secrecy and mystery" of many crafts traditions in the 16th century that would lead to an expansion of technology and, in turn, an expansion of scientific knowledge.[2] However, the tradition of truly popular science writing can be said to have emerged by the late 17th century, when Bernier le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657 - 1757) lectured and wrote for the Paris magazine Mercure Galant about astronomy and physics "in the least philosophical manner possible." Science writing should be, he said, "neither too dry for the gentry nor too superficial for the scientist." Fontenelle's idea of public involvement in science was to encourage people to spend evenings peering through telescopes trying to see the people living on the moon.[3]

Publik Occurences, America's first newspaper, contained reports of smallpox “raging in Boston” and other “epidemical fevers.” It was suppressed in 1690 by the governor of Massachusetts.[4] Another early media controversy involved an argument around 1720 between New England Courant publishers James and Benjamin Franklin and the Rev. Cotton Mather over smallpox inoculation in Boston. The Franklins opposed it in the Courant, while Mather printed pamphlets, gave sermons, provided physicians with information and demonstrations and conducted a study to prove his point. [5]

Social reform was a concern of the British press in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and reform efforts were linked to medical and scientific arguments. In 1699, the London Spy, provided an "alehouse view of English society" with articles such as "Hell in an Uproar," (about the Bedlam lunatic asylum) that set the stage for more scientifically-oriented reform movements in years to come.[6] Campaigns for sanitation, prison improvement, child welfare, worker safety and temperance were a reaction to the steaming slums of 18th and 19th century London. One of the first public health campaigns was directed against cheap gin and was sparked by William Hogarth’s 1750 book Gin Lane, which described shocking depravity and brutality caused by alcoholism. The campaign used newspaper editorials, petition drives, public events and organized lobbying of magistrates and other officials. In response, Parliament quickly regulated gin sales. The campaign “was a prototype of public health agitation that was to assume crucial significance in the 19th century,” said historian George Rosen in his classic History of Public Health.[7] John Howard, High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, published State of the Prisons in 1777 that described the evils of prison in terms of their impact on the health of the surrounding community. “He thus showed that people are galvanized into action when the facts about social disease are forced upon them and that an aroused public opinion could be employed as a lever to compel reform,” said Rosen.[8]

An unprecedented increase in popular education about science and medicine emerged in the 18th century through books, magazines and newspapers. [9] Physicians such as Benjamin Rush published regular articles on medicine in a variety of American and British magazines, varying vastly in tone, accuracy and content. They contained advice about hygiene and herbal remedies, epidemics, medical curiosities, and theories of disease. [10] Reform and the spread of scientific knowledge was occasionally suppressed. For example, the discovery of the origins of the Devonshire Colic (lead sheets in the presses of cider mills) was hotly controversial, as we have seen in Chapter Two.[11] Also, a school for mechanics at Royal Institution was dismantled in 1802. "I was asked rudely what I meant by instructing the lower classes in science," wrote Thomas Webster of the school. "It was thought to have a dangerous tendency."[12]

Yet popularization of science continued with lectures by notable scientists, through articles by scientific and medical professionals and, increasingly, in articles by laymen attempting to understand science. A prominent early American journalist concerned with science was Baltimore editor Hezekiah Niles, whose Niles Weekly Register (published 1811 - 1849) was concerned with a broad spectrum of human activity beyond politics and foreign affairs. He regularly wrote about developments in medicine, technology, exploration, economics, chemistry, physics and astronomy. In an 1816 article about sunspots, Niles neatly summed up the old and new views of the world: "One class of philosophy calls every extraordinary appearance a judgment or a sign; another class views everything as the working of matter and motion. These two sets are at war with each other. The one denounces the other as superstitious or aesthetical..."[13]

Niles Weekly Register belonged to an elite group of publications that by the 1830s found itself competing with cheaper publications supported in part by advertising. In 1835, the New York Sun, one of the new "penny press" newspapers, managed to embarrass many of the more expensive publications by printing an extraordinary story that the Sun claimed had come from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The story involved Sir Percival Lowell's supposed discovery of winged inhabitants on the moon and contained elaborate descriptions of their cities. The expensive papers published the story as if they, too, had picked it up from the Journal of Science, and when the hoax was uncovered and no such Journal of Science was shown to exist, they "were reduced in stature" and the penny press got a boost.[14]

By the 1840s, the Sun, the Herald, the Tribune and other daily newspapers routinely sent reporters to courthouses, police stations and battlefields in search of news. Science, meanwhile, was beginning to find a voice in a new group of science magazines, including Scientific American, Science, and Popular Science Monthly. By the end of the 19th century, newspapers contained enough science material that they tended to introduce readers to areas better covered by specialized magazines. The specialized lay publications, in turn, served as introductions to medical journals and books, according to Terra Ziporyn, in Disease in the Popular American Press.[15] "American interest in scientific matters burgeoned in the 1860s and 70s" with the new publications and with regular science and medical columns in general interest magazines, Ziporyn said.

As the 19th century ended, muckraking magazines, such as McClure's and Munsey's, showered a generation with scandals about tainted meat and milk, patent medicines, worker safety and a host of other abuses of corporate and scientific power. Muckraking fervor accomplished some of the intended reforms by the first decade of the 20th century, but the public grew tired of it. There continued to be a preference for the sensational "yellow journalism" approach in among some levels of the culture.

....

Like most other professions, journalism was heavily influenced by the quest for scientific objectivity at the turn of the 20th century; and, like the others, it retreated in the face of confusion and complexity in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, noted muckraker Ray Stannard Baker said around 1906: "Facts, facts, piled up to the point of dry certitude, was what the American people really wanted."[78] By the mid-30s, Baker had not found certitude in mountains of fact, and admitted he could not understand (much less solve) many of the tremendous problems in the world: "The factors are too complex," he said.[79] This may sound like nothing less than a modern realistic outlook, but it is probably best interpreted as a lament about the demise of the scientific method not only in journalism but also in history, social sciences and other fields. That “objectivity” became a watchword in journalism around the same era, the mid-30s, has been seen by historians Michael Schudson and Peter Novick more as a longing for the ideal, a reflection of what had been lost, rather than the introduction of a new professional code of conduct.

If certitude could not be found in piles of dry objective facts (or what one historian called the “haystack” technique of reporting)[80] perhaps authorities could at least provide interpretations of facts that could be compared. This approach, advocated by Lippmann and embodied in the title of Curtis McDougall’s 1930s vintage journalism textbook Interpretive Reporting, is still the most significant model for reporting controversy.[81] The problem with this approach, as noted by Edward Jay Epstein, is that “journalists are rarely if ever in a position to establish the truth about an issue for themselves, and they are therefore almost entirely dependent on self-interested sources for the version of reality that they report.” [82]

Therefore, according to Leon Sigal:

In the absence of any foolproof criteria for choosing sources who are likely to provide valid information, journalists are uncertain about whom to believe. They cope with uncertainty by continuing to rely on authoritative sources. The presumption of hierarchy, that those at the top of any organization are the people in charge and that those in subordinate positions do what their superiors tell them to, underlies the journalists criterion for selected sources even though the journalists themselves recognize that this presumption is often of doubtful validity.[83]

Typically, if authorities differ in their interpretations, the reporter emphasizes two extremes for clarity and brevity. This reductionism is derisively known in the journalism profession as the “he said - she said” approach. Its lack of nuance, especially with regard to complex scientific and technological issues, has been frequently noted. In the 1950s debate over the link between cancer and cigarette smoking, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee was established as "an authoritative front organization." Whenever a researcher or doctor was quoted in the media as saying that smoking caused cancer, the committee and its public relations consultants made certain that someone with an authoritative voice was quoted as saying it did not or that there were problems with the research.[84]

Similarly, in a 1993 controversy over the role of natural volcanic processes in creating atmospheric chlorine responsible for ozone depletion, Alan S. Miller, director of the Center for Global Change, wrote: "When it comes to questions of scientific fact, printing 'both sides' of an issue can be seriously misleading. Unless the reader is an expert in the field being discussed, he or she has no basis to judge the qualifications or validity of the facts presented."[85] Similar dilemmas are typical in the climate change issue.

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[1] Louis L. Snyder and Richard B. Morris, eds., A Treasury of Great Reporting (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962), p.2.

[2] W.H.G. Armytage, A Social History of Engineering (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961), p. 67. One frequently cited example of the precedence of technology over science is the invention of steam engines before the understanding of thermodynamics.

[3] Maurice Goldsmith, "The Popularization of Science," Nature 250 (August 1974), p. 751-53.

[4] Edwin and Michael Emery, The Press and America, 6th edition, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), p. 16.

[5] William J. Paisley, “Public Communication Campaigns: The American Experience,” Ronald E. Rice and William J. Paisley eds., Public Communication Campaigns (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1981), p. 17.

[6] Snyder, A Treasury of Great Reporting, p. 6.

[7] George Rosen, History of Public Health (New York: M.D. Publications, 1958), p. 139.

[8] Ibid, p. 143.

[9] Volkmer, Richard M., "Edward Livingston Youmans and the Popular Science Monthly: A Study in 19th Century American Science-Technology Journalism," Master's thesis, Iowa State University, 1969.; Gail R. Meadows, "Scientific American: A Mirror of Scientific Progress, 1845-1968," Master's thesis, University of Missouri, 1969.

[10] Nola Kay Gibson, "A History of Medical Journals in the United States," Master’s thesis, University of Missouri, 1983.

[11] Marjorie Smith, “Lead in History,” Richard Lansdown and William Yule, eds., Lead Toxicity: History and Environmental Impact, (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 20.

[12] Goldsmith, "The Popularization of Science," p. 752.

[13] Niles Register, Sept. 14, 1816, p. 42.

[14] Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).

[15] Terra Ziporyn, Disease in the Popular American Press (Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1988), p.20.

[16] Bill Kovarik, "Dr. North and the Kansas City Newspaper War" paper presented to the Association for Journalism and Mass Communications, Washington DC, 1989.

[17] Ziporyn, Disease in the Popular American Press, p. 36.

[18] Edwin Emery, The Press and America, 2nd edition (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972), p. 29.

[19] Barrett Fine, A Giant of the Press: Carr Van Anda (Oakland, Calif.: Acme Books, 1968), pp. 44, 89, 100.

[20] Michael Schudson Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 160.

[21] Joseph Pulitzer, first editorial in the World, May 10, 1883, reprinted by the World Sept. 19, 1924, p. 1.

[22] Michael Emery and Edwin Emery, The Press and America, 6th edition (New York: Prentice Hall, 1988), p. 339.

[23] "Cheap Gold Soon," World, Nov. 12, 1924; "Eat an Orange a Day, Keep Baldness Away," World, Sept. 21, 1924; "Miracle Man of Paris heals by Elementary Forces, He Says," World, June 14, 1925.

[24] "Chemist Control of Sex Predicted," World Nov. 18, 1924; 'Movies as Textbooks Forecast by Edison," World, Feb. 17, 1925; "Science has Actual Plan for Rocket to Sail around the Moon," World Feb. 8, 1925.

[25] Snyder, A Treasury of Great Reporting, p. xxii.

[26] Ronald Steele, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1980), p. 198.

[27] Ibid. Also, see Schudson, Discovering the News; also, Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); also Edward L. Schapsmeier, Frederick H. Schapsmeier, Walter Lippmann Philosopher-Journalist (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1969).

[28] Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, (New York: Harper & Row, 1931), p. 3.

[29] Marcel LaFollette, "Authority, Promise and Expectation: The Images of Science and Scientists in American Popular Magazines," 1910-1955, Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1979, p. xvii.

[30] Ibid, p. xvii.

[31] Ibid, p. xvii.

[32] "Martyrs to Science," New York World, Feb. 9, 1925, p. 1. Also see Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 17

[33] Joseph Pratt, "Letting the Grandchildren do it: Environmental Planning During the Ascent of Oil as a Major Energy Source," The Public Historian, 2, No. 4, (Summer, 1980), p. 29. .

[34] Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question and the Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 42.

[35] The distinction between “knowledge of” and “knowledge about” is attributed to John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1938).

[36] John Palen, “Science and Walter Lippmann,” M.A., University of Michigan, 1984.

[37] Fine, A Giant of the Press, p. 100.

[38] Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1914).

[39] Idem., “The Press and Public Opinion,” Political Science Quarterly 46 (June 1931) p. 161.

[40] Ibid., p. 162

[41] Steele, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, p. 184.

[42] Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, (New York: MacMillan, 1949) p. 370.

[43] Edward Layton, Revolt of Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); also David F. Noble, America By Design: Science Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 33.

[44] Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, (New York: MacMillan, 1929), p. 254.

[45] Steele, Walter Lippmann, p. 276, from a speech Mar. 25, 1931: “Journalism and the Liberal Spirit.”

[46] Edward L. and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, Walter Lippmann Philosopher-Journalist (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1969), p. 18.

[47] Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1937) p. 22.

[48] Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: MacMillan, 1949), p. 362.

[49] Idem, A Preface to Morals (New York: MacMillan, 1929), p. 242.

[50] James W. Carey, “The Communications Revolution and the Professional Communicator,” Sociological Review , Monograph 13, (January, 1969), p. 23-38.

[51] Richard B. Kielbowicz and Clifford Scherer, “The Role of the Press in the Dynamics of Social Movements,” in Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Vol. 9 (Greenwich, Ct.: JAI Press Inc., 1986), pp. 71-96.

[52] Barbara Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 95.

[53] Ibid, p. 2.

[54] Alice Hamilton to Florence Kelly, April 25, 1924, National Consumers League B-13, Microfilm Reel # 26, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

[55] Letter to Nelle Swartz from Florence Kelly, National Consumers League, Box C1, Microfilm Reel #48, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

[56] Alice Hamilton to Florence Kelly, April 6, 1925, National Consumers League B-13, Microfilm Reel # 26, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

[57] Alice Hamilton to Katy Hamilton, 17 May, 1925, File 655, HFC, cited in Angela Young, “Exploring the Dangerous Trades” Ph.D. Dissertation, Brown University, 1982.

[58] Hamilton to Lippmann, July 12, 1927, Box 12 Folder 496 Lippmann collection, Yale University Library, New Haven, Ct.

[59] Hamilton to Lippmann, June 21, 1928, Box 12 Folder 496 Lippmann collection, Yale University Library, New Haven, Ct.

[60] Lippmann to Hamilton, June 25, 1928, Box 12 Folder 496, Lippmann collection, Yale University Library, New Haven, Ct

[61] Alice Hamilton, “Nineteen Years in the Dangerous Trades,” Harper’s Magazine, 159, Oct. 1929, p. 587.

[62] Angela Nugent Young, “Exploring the Dangerous Trades: Workers Health in America and the Career of Alice Hamilton, 1910-1935,” Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1982, p. 158.

[63] James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt, Managing Public Relations (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984), p. 41.

[64] Hamilton to Katharine Bowditch Codman, May 17, 1925, cited in Sicherman, Alice Hamilton, A Life in Letters, p. 242.

[65] Ibid., p. 242.

[66] Lippmann, Public Opinion, p. 362.

[67] Hamilton to Lippmann, July 5, 1928, Box 12, Folder 496, Lippmann collection, Yale University Library, New Haven, Ct

[68] Hamilton to Florence Kelly, probably Jan. 1929, Raymond Berry Papers, National Consumers League, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

[69] Allen Nevins, Allen Nevins on History, ed. A.R. Billington, (NY: Scribners 1975) p. 39.

[70] Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters, p. 242 - 243.

[71] James E. Grunig, "World View, Ethics and the Two Way Symmetrical Model of Public Relations," Paper presented to the Herbert Quandt Communication Circle, Munich, March 1993.

[72] Charles Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and Social Thought (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

[73] New York Times, July 31, 1984.

[74] Schudson Discovering the News, p. 88.

[75] Ibid, p. 109.

[76] Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, “A Test of the News,” New Republic, August 4, 1920.

[77] "Odd Gas Kills One," New York Times, Oct. 27, 1924, p. 1.

[78] Schudson, Discovering the News, p. 80

[79] Ibid, p. 126

[80] Ziporyn, Disease in the Popular American Press, p. 20.

[81] Curtis D. MacDougall, Interpretative Reporting (New York: MacMillan Co., 1970), p. 9.

[82] Edward Jay Epstien, News from Nowhere (New York: Random House, 1973).

[83] Leon V. Sigal, “Sources Make the News,” in Robert Manhoff and Michael Schudson, eds., Reading the News (New York: Pantheon, 1986) p. 15, cited in Koch, p. 47.

[84] Karen Miller, "Smoking Up a Storm: Public Relations and Advertising in the Construction of the Cigarette Problem, 1953 - 54," Journalism Monographs No. 136, December 1992.

[85] Allan S. Miller, "Volcanic Hyperbole," Washington Post, July 29, 1993 p. A24.

[86] Clifford Daniel and Irving Kristol, "The Times: An Exchange," Public Interest, Vol. 7,1967, pp. 119 - 123, cited in Tom Koch, Journalism for the 21st century : Online Information, Electronic Databases, and the News, (New York : Greenwood Press, 1991), p. 49.

[87] Scott De Garmo, “An Editor Takes a Survey: Are Scientists Better Writers than Non-Scientists?” NASW Newsletter, Oct. 1981, p. 16.

[88] Lippmann, Public Opinion, p. 364.

[89] Tom Koch, Journalism for the 21st century : Online Information, Electronic Databases, and the News, (New York : Greenwood Press, 1991), p. 30.