The translator versus the critic: A flawed dichotomy in the age of misinformation

False balance

One well-established issue is that of false balance on issues such as climate change or health (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004; Dixon and Clarke, 2013). Prizing objectivity and seeking to avoid cheerleading science, the journalist/editor may instead mistakenly give undue weight to minority opinions in the name of balance and impartiality (Hansen, 2016).

As Dunwoody (2016) writes,

In a world where the science journalist cannot declare what is most likely to be true, objectivity demands that the reporter go into neutral transmitter mode and focus not on validity but on accuracy. That is, rather than judging the veracity of a truth claim, the journalist concentrates instead on representing the claim accurately in her story. The issue is no longer whether the claim is supported by evidence but, rather, the goodness of fit between what a source says and what a journalist presents. (p. 33)

On the issue of climate change, it’s now more widely accepted that reporting the science need not require non-scientific views for balance. The BBC, where I now work, was once criticised for giving too much airtime to climate change scepticism in the name of impartiality (BBC Trust, 2011), and as a result, we journalists have received specific training on how to avoid such false balance and correctly apply due impartiality. The emphasis, the training advises, should be on the word ‘due’. As the internal guidance advises, ‘To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage, in the same way you would not have someone denying that Manchester United won 2–0 last Saturday. The referee has spoken’ (CarbonBrief, 2018).

However, other issues remain less clear-cut, such as the policy decisions that arise as a consequence of climate change. For example, how much, if at all, should nuclear power be a solution? How quickly should carbon-reduction policies be introduced? What industries should be targeted with carbon-reduction policies, and how? The answers here are not ones that science alone can answer.

In navigating these kinds of questions, the modern science journalist faces something of a meta-problem regarding public perceptions of their work: not only is there disagreement over the answers, but also over whether impartiality should even be applied.

This can be illustrated by using a framework originally proposed by Hallin (1986) to describe how a journalist approaches news reporting: the sphere of consensus (e.g. democracy is valuable, climate change is happening), the sphere of legitimate controversy (e.g. Brexit is good/bad) and the sphere of deviance (e.g. far-right racism, Holocaust-denial). Echoing Dunwoody (2016), journalists in neutral transmitter mode often approach their subject matter by staying firmly in the sphere of legitimate controversy, seeking to represent a diversity of views.

However, on many issues, there is disagreement between journalists, scientists, politicians, campaigners and the public over which sphere is the appropriate lens: for instance, do questions over nuclear power’s role in solving climate change sit in the spheres of consensus, deviance or legitimate controversy? If a politician has set carbon-reduction targets for 2050 rather than, say, 2030, how should that story be reported? Some environmental campaigners, for instance, feel strongly that, given the scientific evidence that the climate is changing dangerously fast, applying the tone of cautious impartiality to climate change’s solutions is inappropriate. This view holds that, if the science sits in the sphere of consensus, then so should most of the political and economic decisions.

For example, in 2019, the group Extinction Rebellion protested against the BBC’s coverage of climate change in London with banners saying ‘tell the truth’ and ‘your silence is deadly’ (The Guardian, 2019), and in 2020 staged blockades that disrupted the deliveries of various UK newspapers (Press Gazette, 2020). Their argument was, essentially, that journalists were being too cautious in their coverage of an issue they believed should sit squarely in the sphere of consensus. (It should be noted that campaigners from across the political spectrum have attempted to reframe controversial political issues as ones of consensus or deviance.)

The danger for science journalism in this context is that angered segments of society may end up losing trust in its practitioners. As Jay Rosen once warned, if journalists themselves cling too much to a ‘view from nowhere’, they risk losing the trust of everyone (Maras, 2013). Also, now that the notion of ‘false balance’ is better-known, it can also be weaponised as a tool to undermine the audience’s faith in the accuracy of mainstream media by the purveyors of misinformation. Well-meaning communicators who call out the false balance of journalists to score points may find themselves unwittingly aligned with bad actors who wish to undermine trust in legitimate outlets. That’s not to say that false balance should not be called out when it is problematic, but all practitioners should be aware of the broader dangers of undermining the public’s faith in what they read, watch and hear.

Context collapse

Another peril for the modern science journalist and communicator in the digital media environment is that of ‘context collapse’ (Marwick and boyd, 2011). Information can now spread far beyond its original context and intended audience. One thing that this enables is for bad actors to reframe and repackage information on their own platforms to achieve their political goals. They can cherry-pick stories from a variety of outlets to give the appearance of consensus. Of course, attempts to maliciously reframe information have always existed, but in the age of the Internet, when everyone can be a publisher and therefore bypass traditional gatekeepers, these efforts are far more accessible and can reach greater numbers of people around the world.

It was once the case that both communicators and journalists only had to consider a specific target audience. For example, in the Darwin Was Wrong controversy, the editors’ decision-making was arguably focused predominantly on the buyers of New Scientist on the UK newsstand. The print magazine, at the time, had a very small footprint on the newsstand in the United States and its subscribers. But context collapse online meant that this particular feature could reach far further, to many more contexts than it would previously have done: including US-based intelligent design activists.

Another example from the world of politics: content-farms in North Macedonia with malicious intent have been found to be curating political stories from the United States, rewriting and embellishing them, and then feeding them back to conservative audiences in Texas on apparently legitimate news websites, with the goal of provoking and enraging (BBC Future, 2019). Such low-cost, high-reach activities would be difficult, if not impossible, in the age of printed media, unless conducted by well-funded state actors engaged in propaganda campaigns.

The peer-review problem

One of the challenges for communicating and reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic was that all the science was happening under a spotlight. Journalists, audiences, politicians and all other stakeholders experienced science at its frontiers. At this border, research is messy, confusing and sometimes contradictory. The politicians’ favoured phrase ‘we’ll be led by the science’ suggested that there was a single, absolute point-of-view to be led by. The reality was anything but.

This created problems for the traditional science communicator seeking to translate science’s ‘fixed’ wisdom and insights. Outside a pandemic, the currency of the translator/explainer are findings that have gone through peer-reviewed journals, knowing that the science itself was done at a laboratory bench, in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine or on a planetary surface long before that, possibly even years prior.

During the pandemic, the journalist questioner/critic/observer model also showed its shortcomings. With a strong appetite for news, first drafts of papers that lacked peer review were often given disproportionate prominence.

Meanwhile, the problems of false balance returned in new forms, with sceptics and minority views lined up alongside mainstream science. For example, early in the pandemic, a few scientists expressed doubt that all reported deaths were due to Covid-19, and some argued that the disease is no worse than seasonal flu (both were wrong). In the absence of peer review and amid the fog of the pandemic, it was sometimes difficult for journalists to distinguish which voices to listen to and which to ignore.

The oxygen of amplification

Disinformation was a particularly pernicious problem during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the modern media environment, the production of ignorance can be strategic. The so-called manufacture of doubt allows powerful actors to spread confusion in the name of their agenda (Oreskes and Conway, 2010). Historically, the doubt-manufacturers have been easily identifiable: behemoths such as the cigarette or fossil fuel industries. But in the social media era, a number of smaller, less obvious actors have become adept at sowing ignorance, using new techniques to capitalise on the norms of journalism to spread their goals and ideas. They have murkier agendas so are more difficult to identify as bad actors in the fog of online misinformation wars.

One example came from peddlers of Covid-19 ‘cures’. In 2020, a series of fake cures for coronavirus began circulating on social media. For example, a conspiracist QAnon YouTuber called Jordan Sather tweeted about a ‘miracle mineral solution’ that essentially involved drinking bleach. Traditional news journalists duly reported that these rumours were appearing on social media, often even embedding the tweets on their pages. As one headline read, ‘QAnon-ers’ Magic Cure for Coronavirus: Just Drink Bleach!’ (Daily Beast, 2020). While responsible outlets identified that the assertions were false and harmful to anyone who followed them, the journalists also amplified these claims to whole new audiences. The headline above was clearly intended to be sarcastic, but crucially, it did not explicitly spell out that the claim was false until the body of the story – and even then, deployed elements of false balance to do so, placing QAnon claims alongside the advice of the Food and Drug Administration not to drink bleach.

The likelihood of harmful amplification in the modern media environment raises difficult ethical choices for the science journalist (and commercial ones, too). Bad actors sowing ignorance now know they can use the traditional practices of journalism to amplify their agenda, and the science journalist can be just as susceptible as their colleagues covering politics elsewhere in the newsroom.

The practice of manipulating journalistic norms in this way is known as ‘trading up the chain’ (Freelon and Wells, 2020). It goes like this: a bad actor begins by planting a story in a small, obscure news site, on their own social media or on private channels like WhatsApp. They encourage followers to share it too, so it reaches platforms like Reddit or YouTube, or an influencer on Twitter or Facebook.

At this point, a journalist at a small- to medium-sized publisher or TV network notices the fuss and decides to run a story about it. Her competitors then follow suit, driven by their editors who are fearful of missing out on a rival’s scoop. Then, all it takes is for a major outlet to pick it up, and the idea has reached millions of people. Eventually, it’s being discussed by the US president in the press room at the White House.

In the context of a different journalistic field – the coverage of far-right politics – this problem has been labelled ‘the oxygen of amplification’ (Phillips, 2018). By sticking to twentieth-century journalistic norms of objectivity and uncritically providing platforms to the claims of a new strain of political activism, the US media arguably helped to bring extreme political views to new audiences that might not otherwise have encountered them. As Phillips (2018) writes,

The takeaway for establishment journalists is stark, and starkly distressing: just by showing up for work and doing their jobs as assigned, journalists covering the far-right fringe – which subsumed everything from professional conspiracy theorists to pro-Trump social media shitposters to actual Nazis – played directly into these groups’ public relations interests. In the process, this coverage added not just oxygen, but rocket fuel to an already-smoldering fire.

Crucially, even if a principled journalist’s only goal is to bust unscientific myths within a false claim, the bad actor’s goal can still be achieved. For many campaigners, a debunk still provides oxygen. After all, if millions of new people are encountering the bad actor’s ideas, it means they will discover new narratives or beliefs that would have otherwise remained obscure. A minority may then choose to leave the relative epistemological safety of the mainstream news site to find out more, via a Google search or by following the conspiracy theorist behind the embedded tweet. And so begins a journey into a rabbit-hole of misinformation and so-called ‘algorithmic radicalisation’ becomes a danger.

Individual science journalists might not always be able to see these wider consequences of their work, because the chain of decision-making is too diffuse. But while no one story can be individually blamed for spreading misinformation, the media as a whole can nonetheless be collectively held responsible for negative amplification by moving as a pack, reproducing and following-up on each others’ work.

Importantly, there comes a point where coverage of false claims is unavoidable, necessary and important – say, when the US President starts to tout bleach as a Covid-19 cure – but when an obscure, fringe view on social media is touted, the journalist and her editors ought to ask if their platform’s amplification could cause additional harm.

There are no easy answers for journalists and communicators navigating this new environment. As Hansen (2016) points out,

Research needs to go significantly further to uncover and to understand how balances/biases in media coverage of science result not only from journalistic practices and values, but that these practices/values are also skilfully manipulated/exploited by sources keen to promote their particular views. (p. 766)

But what’s clear is that neither of the traditional models of science communication and science journalism is equipped to handle these broad-scale changes without making adaptations to their norms and approaches.