Five days of harmony, presentations, and finger food. Hardly Woodstock 40 years on, but one of the most exciting and important conferences in years — the 5th World Conference of Science Journalists held in Melbourne recently. And the noise of the interaction, between Arabs and Americans, Africans and Chinese, Finns and Canadians, was deafening.
More than 600 delegates from over 50 countries — including the premier of South Australia, Mike Rann, the chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Ziggy Switkowski, noted immunologist, Sir Gustav Nossal, and one of the editors of Eureka Street — met on the verge of a momentous decade for science and the world.
While they discussed how to report climate change, emerging diseases, nuclear expansion, economic development, water restrictions, bushfires, the development and policing of the Web, drugs, war… only a few hundred metres away, the Victorian Parliament was debating stem cell legislation. It was also the week when Australia’s new research reactor was launched in Sydney and the nation’s first synchrotron was opened in Melbourne.
Most big stories these days have science and technology buried in them. Understanding science is often critical to understanding a story and to separating fact from spin.
Yet science traditionally has been treated like a poor cousin in Australian journalism. It loses out to 'real' stories of politics and economics in the serious broadsheets, magazines and current affairs programs, and to crime and celebrities in the tabloids and to infotainment on TV. At the conference itself several of the country’s most important news executives bluntly said as much. And delegates from emerging nations complained bitterly of the same attitudes in their countries. All this, despite the fact that market research continually shows that readers, listeners and viewers consistently rank science and medicine as two of the topics in which they are most interested.
There are two major reasons for the poor status of science in the media, and they are related. With some notable exceptions, Australia has lacked editors of sufficient background and knowledge of science to see its potential as a source of news stories. Most people at the top of our media organisations never studied science, and don’t really understand it.
That means traditional stereotypes persist — boffins and nerds in lab coats, researchers who communicate in impenetrable language, and technocrats who talk endlessly about things which seem boring to the average punter. And these