Tag: science journalism

What makes ‘good science journalism’?

From ‘Your Doppelgänger Is Out There and You Probably Share DNA With Them’, The New York Times, August 23, 2022:

Dr. Esteller also suggested that there could be links between facial features and behavioral patterns, and that the study’s findings might one day aid forensic science by providing a glimpse of the faces of criminal suspects known only from DNA samples. However, Daphne Martschenko, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics who was not involved with the study, urged caution in applying its findings to forensics.

There are two big problems here: 1) Esteller’s comment is at the doorstep of eugenics, and 2) the reporter creates a false balance by reporting both Esteller’s comment and Martschenko’s rebuttal to that comment, when in fact the right course of action would’ve been to drop this portion entirely, as well as take a closer look at why Esteller et al. conducted the study in the first place and whether the study paper and other work at the Esteller lab is suspect.

This said, it’s a bit gratifying (in a bad way) when a high-stature foreign news publication like The New York Times makes a dangerous mistake in a science-related story. Millions of people are misinformed, which sucks, but when independent scientists and other readers publicly address these mistakes, their call-outs create an opportunity for people (though not as many as are misinformed) to understand exactly what is wrong and, more importantly from the PoV of readers in India, that The New York Times also makes mistakes, that it isn’t a standard-bearer of good science journalism and that being good is a constant and diverse process.

1) “NYT also makes mistakes” is important to know if only to dispel the popular and frustrating perception that “all American news outlets are individually better than all Indian news outlets”. I had to wade through a considerable amount of this when I started at The Hindu a decade ago – at the hands of most readers as well as some colleagues. I still face this in a persistent way in the form of people who believe some article in The Atlantic is much better than an article on the same topic in, say, The Wire Science, for few, if any, reasons beyond the quality of the language. But of course this will always set The Atlantic and The Wire Science and its peers in India apart: English isn’t the first language for many of us – yet it seldom gets in the way of good storytelling. In fact, I’ve often noticed American publications in particular to be prone to oversimplification more often than their counterparts in Europe or, for that matter, in India. In my considered (but also limited) view, the appreciation of science stories is also a skill, and the population that aspires to harbour it in my country is often prone to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

2) “NYT isn’t a standard-bearer of good science journalism” is useful to know because of the less-than-straightforward manner in which publications acquire a reputation for “good science journalism”. Specifically, publications aren’t equally good at covering all branches of scientific study; some are better in some fields and others are at some others. Getting your facts right, speaking to all the relevant stakeholders and using sensitive language will get you 90% of the way, but you can tell the differences between publications by how well they cover the remaining 10%, which comes from beat knowledge, expertise and having the right editors.

3) “Being good is a constant and diverse process” – ‘diverse’ because of the previous point and ‘constant’ because, well, that’s how it is. It’s not that our previous work doesn’t keep us in good standing but that we shouldn’t overestimate how much that standing counts for. This is especially so in this age of short attention spans, short-lived memories and the subtle but pervasive encouragement to be hurtful towards others on the internet. “Good science journalism” is a tag we need to get by getting every single story right – and in this sense, you, the reader, are better off not doling out lifetime awards to outlets. Instead, understand that no outlet is going to be uniformly excellent at all times and evaluate each story on its own merits. This way, you’ll also create an opportunity for Indian news outlets to be free of the tyranny of unrealistic expectations and even surprise you now and then with excellence of our own.

Finally, none of this is to say that these mistakes happen. They shouldn’t and they’re entirely preventable. Instead, it’s a reminder to keep your eyes peeled at all times and not just when you’re reading an article produced by an Indian outlet.

The Higgs boson and I

My first byline as a professional journalist (a.k.a. my first byline ever) was oddly for a tech story – about the advent of IPv6 internet addresses. I started writing it after 7 pm, had to wrap it up by 9 pm and it was published in the paper the next day (I was at The Hindu).

The first byline that I actually wanted to take credit for appeared around a month later, on July 4, 2012 – ten years ago – on the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe. I published a live blog as Fabiola Gianotti, Joe Incandela and Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the spokespersons of the ATLAS and CMS detector collaborations and the director-general of CERN, respectively, announced and discussed the results. I also distinctly remember taking a pee break after telling readers “I have to leave my desk for a minute” and receiving mildly annoyed, but also amused, comments complaining of TMI.

After the results had been announced, the science editor, R. Prasad, told me that R. Ramachandran (a.k.a. Bajji) was filing the main copy and that I should work around that. So I wrote a ‘what next’ piece describing the work that remained for physicists to do, including open problems in particle physics that stayed open and the alternative theories, like supersymmetry, required to explain them. (Some jingoism surrounding the lack of acknowledgment for S.N. Bose – wholly justifiable, in my view – also forced me to write this.)

I also remember placing a bet with someone that the Nobel Prize for physics in 2012 wouldn’t be awarded for the discovery (because I knew, but the other person didn’t, that the nominations for that year’s prizes had closed by then).

To write about the feats and mysteries of particle physics is why I became a science journalist, so the Higgs boson’s discovery being announced a month after I started working was special – not least because it considerably eased the amount of effort I had to put in to pitches and have them accepted (specifically, I didn’t have to spend too much time or effort spelling out why a story was important). It was also a great opportunity for me to learn about how breaking news is reported as well as accelerated my induction into the newsroom and its ways.

But my interest in particle physics has since waned, especially from around 2017, as I began to focus in my role as science editor of The Wire (which I cofounded/joined in May 2015) on other areas of science as well. My heart is still with physics, and I have greatly enjoyed writing the occasional article about topological phases, neutrino astronomy, laser cooling and, recently, the AdS/CFT correspondence.

A couple years ago, I realised during a spell of daydreaming that even though I have stuck with physics, my act of ‘dropping’ particle physics as a specialty had left me without an edge as a writer. Just physics was and is too broad – even if there are very few others in India writing on it in the press, giving me lots of room to display my skills (such as they are). I briefly considered and rejected quantum computing and BECCS technologies – the former because its stories were often bursting with hype, especially in my neck of the woods, and the latter because, while it seemed important, it didn’t sit well morally. I was indifferent towards them because they were centered on technologies whereas I wanted to write about pure, supposedly boring science.

In all, penning an article commemorating the tenth anniversary of the announcement of the Higgs boson’s discovery brought back pleasant memories of my early days at The Hindu but also reminded me of this choice that I still need to make, for my sake. I don’t know if there is a clear winner yet, although quantum physics more broadly and condensed-matter physics more specifically are appealing. This said, I’m also looking forward to returning to writing more about physics in general, paralleling the evolution of The Wire Science itself (some announcements coming soon).

I should also note that I started blogging in 2008, when I was still an undergraduate student of mechanical engineering, in order to clarify my own knowledge of and thoughts on particle physics.

So in all, today is a special day.

Press releases and public duty

From ‘Science vs Marketing’, published on In The Dark, on May 20, 2022:

… there is an increasing tendency for university press offices to see themselves entirely as marketing agencies instead of informing and/or educating the public. Press releases about scientific research nowadays rarely make any attempt at accuracy – they are just designed to get the institution concerned into the headlines. In other words, research is just a marketing tool.

What astrophysicist and blogger Peter Coles writes here is very true. It is not a recent phenomenon but it hasn’t been widely acknowledged either, especially in the community of journalists. I had reported in 2016 on a study by researchers at the Universities of Cardiff and Wollongong that concluded that university press releases bloated with hype don’t necessarily result in reports in the media that are also bloated with hype. The study was mooted in part by an attempt to find if there was a relationship between the two locations of hype: in press releases and news reports. The study’s finding was a happy one because it indicated that science journalists at large were doing their jobs right, and were not being carried away by the rubbish that universe press offices often printed.

But this said, the study also highlighted the presence of hype in science news reports and which I have also blogged about on many occasions. It typically exists in two contexts: when journalists turn into stenographers and print press releases either as is or with superficial rephrasing, and when journalists themselves uncritically buy into the hype. I find the former to be more forgivable in the Indian context in particular because there are many hapless science journalists here: journalists who are actually generalists, not bound to any particular beat, and whose editors (or their editors’ bosses) have forced them to write on topics with which they are not at all familiar (I strongly suspected this bizarre article in Indian Express – while not being based on a press release of any sort – to be a good example of some sort of editorial pressure). Such a failure reflects to my mind the state of Indian mainstream journalism more than Indian science journalism, the best versions of which are still highly localised to a single handful of outlets.

The latter – of science journalists willfully buying into the hype – is a cardinal sin, more so when it manifests among journalists who should self-evidently know better, as with Pallab Ghosh of the BBC. University press releases affect the former group more, and not the likes of Pallab Ghosh, although there are exceptional cases. Journalists of the former group are more populous and are also employed by larger, wealthier newsrooms with audiences orders of magnitude larger than those that have adopted a more critical view of science. As a result, bad claims in bad press releases crafted by university press offices often reach more people than articles that properly interrogate those claims. So in addition to Coles’s charge that universities are increasingly concerned with “income”, “profit” and “marketing” over “education and research”, I’d add that universities that publish such press releases have also lost sight of their duty to the publics, and would rather be part of the problem.

Sci-Hub isn’t just for scientists

Quite a few reporters from other countries have reached out to me, directly or indirectly, to ask about scientists to whom they can speak about how important Sci-Hub is to their work.

This attention to Sci-Hub is commendable, against the backdrop of the case in Delhi high court, filed by a consortium of three ‘legacy’ publishers of scientific papers, to have access to the website cutoff in India. There has been a groundswell of support for Sci-Hub in India, to no one’s surprise, considering the exorbitant paywalls that legacy publishers have erected in front of the papers they published. As a result, before Sci-Hub, it was impossible to access these papers outside of university libraries, and universities libraries themselves paid through the nose to keep up these journal subscription. But as in drug development, the development of scientific knowledge also happens on government money for the most part, so legacy publishers effectively often charge people twice: first when they publish papers written by scientists funded by the government and second when they need to lift the paywalls. The prices are also somewhat arbitrary, and often far removed from the costs publishers incur to publish each paper and/or to maintain their websites.

All this said, I think one more demographic is often missing in this conversation about the importance of Sci-Hub, as a result of which the latter is also limited, unfairly, to scientists. This is the community of science writers, reporters, editors, etc. I have used Sci-Hub regularly since 2013, either to identify papers that I can report on, write about cool scientific work on my blog or to select papers that are data-heavy and attempt to replicate their findings by writing code of my own. We must also highlight Sci-Hub’s benefits for journalists if only to remember that science can empower in more ways than one – including providing the means by which to test the validity of knowledge and reduce uncertainty, letting people learn the nature of facts and expertise based on what is considered valid or legitimate, and broadening access to the tools of science and the methods of proofs beyond those whose careers depend on it.

Anonymity in journalism and a conflict of ethics

I wrote the following essay at the invitation of a journal in December 2020. (This was the first draft. There were additional drafts that incorporated feedback from a few editors.) It couldn’t be published because I had to back out of the commission owing to limitations of time and health. I formally withdrew my submission on April 11, 2022, and am publishing it in full below.

Anonymity in journalism and a conflict of ethics

Tiger’s dilemma

I once knew a person, whom I will call Tiger, who worked with the Government of India. Tiger was in a privileged position within the government, not very removed from the upper echelons in fact, and had substantial influence on policies and programmes lying in their domain. (Tiger himself was not a member of any political parties.) Tiger’s work was also commendable: their leadership from within the state had improved the working conditions of and opportunities for people in the corresponding fields, so much so that Tiger was generally well-regarded by their peers and colleagues around the country. Tiger had also produced high-quality work in their domain, which I say here to indicate Tiger’s all-round excellence.

But while Tiger ascended through government ranks, the Government of India itself was becoming more detestable – feeding communal discontentment, promoting pseudoscience, advancing crony capitalism and arresting/harassing dissidents. At various points in time, the actions and words of ministers and senior party leaders outright conflicted with the work and the spirit that Tiger and their department stood for – yet Tiger never spoke a word against the state or the party. As the government’s actions grew more objectionable, the more Tiger’s refusal to object became conspicuous.

I used to have trouble judging Tiger’s inaction because I had trouble settling a contest between two ethical loci: values versus outcomes. The question here was that, in the face of a dire threat, such as a vengeful government, how much could I ask of my compatriots? It is undeniably crucial to join protests on the streets and demonstrate the strength of numbers – but if the government almost always responds by having police tear-gas protesters or jail a few and keep them there on trumped-up charges under draconian laws for months on end, it becomes morally painful to insist that people join protests. I might wither under the demand of condemning anyone, but especially the less privileged, to such fates. (The more-privileged of course can and should be expected to do more, and fear the consequences of state viciousness less.)

If Tiger had spoken up against the prime minister or any of the other offending ministers, Tiger would have lost their position within the government, could in fact have become persona non grata in the state’s eyes, and become earmarked for further disparagement. As symbols go, speaking up against an errant government is a powerful one – especially when it originates from a person like Tiger. However, speaking up will still only be a symbol, and not an outcome. If Tiger had stayed silent to continue to retain their influential place within the government, there is a chance that Tiger’s department may have continued its good work. The implication here is that outcomes trump values.

Then again, I presume here that the power of symbols is predictable or even finite in any way, or that they are always inferior to action on the ground, so to speak. This need not be true. For example, if Tiger had spoken up, their peers could have been motivated to speak up as well, avalanching over time into a coordinated, collectivised refusal to cooperate with government initiatives that required their support. It is a remote possibility but it exists; more importantly, it is not for me to dismiss. And it is at least just as tempting to believe values trump outcomes, or certainly complement them.

Now, depending on which relationship is true – values over outcomes or vice versa – we still have to contend with the same defining question before we can draw a line between whom to forgive and whom to punish. Put another way, when confronted with deadly force, how much can you ask of your compatriots? There can’t be shame in bending like grasses against a punishing wind, but at the same time someone somewhere must grow a spine. Then again, not everyone may draw the line between these two sides at the same place. This is useful context to consider issues surrounding anonymity and pseudonymity in journalism today.

Anonymity in journalism

Every now and then, The Wire and The Wire Science receive requests from authors to not have their names attached to their articles. In 2020, The Wire Science, which I edit, published at least three articles without a name or under a pseudonym. Anonymity as such has been commonly around for much longer vis-à-vis government officials and experts being quoted saying sensitive things, and individuals whose stories are worth sharing but whose identities are not. It is nearly impossible to regulate journalism, without ‘breaking’ it, from anywhere but the inside. As evasive as this sounds, what is in the public interest is often too fragile to survive the same accountability and transparency we demand of government, or even what the law offers to protect. So the channels to compose and transport such information should be able to be as private as individual liberties and ethical obligations can allow.

Anonymity is as a matter of principle possible, and journalists (should) have the liberty, and also the integrity, to determine who deserves it. It may help to view anonymity as a duty instead of as a right. For example, we have all come across many stories this year in which reporters quoted unnamed healthcare workers and government officials to uncover important details of the Government of India’s response to the country’s COVID-19 epidemic. Without presuming to know the nature of relationships between these ‘sources’ and the respective reporters, we can say they all likely share Tiger’s (erstwhile) dilemma: they are on the frontline and they are needed there, but if they speak up and have their identities known, they may lose their ability to stay there.

The state of defence reporting in India could offer an important contrast. Unlike health (although this could be changing), India’s defence has always been shrouded in secrecy, especially on matters of nuclear weapons, terrorist plots, military installations, etc. Not too long ago, one defence reporter began citing unnamed sources to write up a series of articles about a new chapter of terrorist activities in India’s north. A mutual colleague at the time told me he was unsettled by the series: while unnamed sources are not new, the colleague explained, this reporter almost never named anyone – except perhaps those making banal statements.

Many health-related institutions and activities in India need to abide by the requirements of the Right to Information Act, but defence has few such obligations. In such cases, there is no way for the consumers of journalism – the people at large – to ascertain the legitimacy of such reports and in fact have no option but to trust the reporter. But this doesn’t mean the reporter can do what they wish; there are some simple safeguards to prevent mistakes. One as ubiquitous as it is effective is to allow an offended party in the story to defend itself, with some caveats.

A notable example of such an incident from the last decade was the 2014 Rolling Stone investigation about an alleged incident of rape on the University of Virginia campus. The reporter had trusted her source and hid her identity in the article, using only the mononym ‘Jackie’. Jackie had alleged that she had been raped by a group of men during a fraternity party. However, other reporters subsequently noticed a series of inconsistencies that quickly snowballed into the alarming revelation that Jackie had probably fabricated the incident, and Rolling Stone had missed it. In this case, Rolling Stone itself claimed to have been duped, but managing editor Will Dana’s note to readers published after a formal investigation had wound up contains a telling passage:

“In trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault, we made a judgment – the kind of judgment reporters and editors make every day. We should have not made this agreement with Jackie and we should have worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story.”

Another ‘defence’ is rooted in news literacy: as a reader, try when you can to consider multiple accounts of a common story, as reported by multiple outlets, and look for at least one independently verifiable detail. There must be something, but if there isn’t, consider it a signal that the story is at best located halfway between truth and fiction, awaiting judgment. Fortunately (in a way), science, environment and health stories frequently pass this test – or at least they used to. While an intrepid Business Standard reporter might have tracked down a crucial detail by speaking to an expert who wished to remain unnamed, someone at The Wire or The Hindu, or an enterprising freelance journalist, will soon have been able to get someone else on the record, or find a document in the public domain attesting to the truth of the claim.

Identity as privilege

I use the past-tense because, since 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – which formed the national government then – has been vilifying any part of science that threatens the mythical history the party has sought to construct for itself and for the nation. The BJP is the ideological disciple of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and soon after the BJP’s ascent, members of groups affiliated with these organisations have murdered at least three anti-superstition activists and others have disrupted many a gathering of scholars, even as senior ministers in government have embarked on a campaign to erode scientific temper, appropriate R&D activities into the party’s communal programme and degrade or destabilise the scope for research that is guided by researchers’ interests, in favour of that of bureaucrats.

Under the party-friendly vice-chancellorship of M. Jagadesh Kumar, the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi has slid from being a national jewel to being blanketed in misplaced suspicions of secessionist activity. In January, students affiliated with the BJP’s student-politics wing went on a violent spree within the JNU campus, assaulting students and damaging university property, while Kumar did nothing to stop them. In November, well-known professors of the university’s school of physical sciences alleged that Kumar was intervening in unlawful ways with the school’s administration. Moushumi Basu, secretary of the teachers’ association, called the incident a first, since many faculty members had assumed Kumar wouldn’t interfere with the school of physical sciences, being a physical-sciences teacher himself.

(Edit, April 11, 2022: Kumar was succeeded in February 2022 by Santishree Pandit, and at the end of the first week of April, members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad assaulted JNU students on campus with stones over cooking non-vegetarian food on the occasion of Ram Navami.)

Shortly before India’s COVID-19 epidemic really bloomed, the Union government revoked the licence of the Manipal Institute of Virology to use foreign money to support its stellar, but in India insufficiently supported, research on viruses, on charges that remain unclear. The party’s government has confronted many other institutes with similar fates – triggering a chilling effect among scientists and pushing them further into their ivory towers.

In January 2020, I wrote about the unsettling case of a BJP functionary who had shot off an email asking university and institution heads to find out which of their students and faculty members had signed a letter condemning the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019. I discovered in the course of my reporting two details useful to understand the reasonable place of anonymous authorship in journalism. First, a researcher at one of the IISERs told me that the board of governors of their institute seemed to be amenable to the argument that since the institute receives funds via the education ministry (formerly the human resource development ministry), it does not enjoy complete autonomy. Second, while the Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules 1964 do prevent employees of centrally funded institutions, including universities and research facilities, from commenting negatively on the government, they are vague at best about whether employees can protest on issues concerning their rights as citizens of the country.

These two conditions together imply that state-funded practitioners of scientific activities – from government hospital coroners to spokespersons of billion-dollar research facilities, from PhD scholars to chaired professors – can be arbitrarily denied opportunities to engage as civilians on important issues concerning all people, even as their rights on paper seem straightforward.

But even under unimaginable pressure to conform, I have found that many of India’s young scientists are still willing to – even insistent on – speaking up, joining public protests, writing and circulating forthright letters, championing democratic and socialist programmes, and tipping off journalists like myself to stories that need to be told. This makes my job as a journalist much easier, but I can’t treat their courage as permission to take advantage. They are still faced with threats whose full magnitude they may comprehend only later, or may be unaware of methods that don’t require them to endanger their lives or careers.

Earlier, postdoctoral scholars and young scientists may have been more wary than anything else of rubbing senior scientists the wrong way by, say, voicing concerns about a department or institute in the latter’s charge. Today, the biggest danger facing them is indefinite jail time, police brutality and avoidance by institutes that may wish to stay on the party’s good side. (And this is speaking only of the more privileged male scientists; others have only had it increasingly worse.)

Once again: how much can we ask of our compatriots? How much in particular can we ask of those who have reason to complain even as they stand to lose the most – the Dalits, the women, transgender people, the poor, the Adivasi, the non-English non-Hindi speakers, environmentalists, healthcare workers, migrant labourers, graveyard and crematorium operators, manual scavengers, the Muslims, Christians and members of other minority denominations, farmers and agricultural traders, cattle-rearers, and indeed just about anyone who is not male, rich, Brahmin? All of these people have stories worth sharing, but whose identities have been increasingly isolated, stigmatised and undermined. All of these people, including the young scientists as well, thus deserve to be quoted or published anonymously or pseudonymously – or their views may never be heard.

Paying the price of fiction

There are limitations, of course, and this is where ethical and responsible journalism can help. It is hard to trust an anonymous Twitter user issuing scandalous statements about a celebrity, and even harder to trust an anonymous writer laying claim to the credibility that comes with identifying as a scientist yet making unsubstantiated claims about other scientists – as necessary as such a tactic may seem to be. The safest and most responsible way forward is for a ‘source’ to work with a journalist such that the journalist tells the story, with the source supplying one set of quotes. This way, the source’s account will enjoy the benefit of being located in a journalistic narrative, in the company of other viewpoints, before it is broadcast. The journalist’s fundamental role here is to rescue doubts about one’s rights from the grey areas it occupies in the overlap between India’s laws and the wider political context.

However, it is often also necessary to let scientists, researchers, professors, doctors, etc. to say what they need to themselves, so that they may bring to bear the full weight of their authority as well as the attitudes they don as topical experts. There is certainly a difference between writing about Pushpa Mittra Bhargava’s statements on one hand and allowing Pushpa Mittra Bhargava to express himself directly on the other. Another example, but which doesn’t appeal to celebrity culture (such as it is in the halls of science!), is to let a relatively unknown but surely qualified epidemiologist write a thousand words in the style and voice of their choice about, say, the BJP’s attempts to communalise the epidemic. The message here is contained within the article’s arguments as well as in the writer’s credentials – but again, not necessarily in the writer’s religious or ethnic identity. Or, as the case may be, in their identity as powerless young scientists.

Ultimately, the most defensible request for anonymity is the one backed by evidence of reasonable risk of injury – physical or otherwise – and the BJP government has been steadily increasing this risk since 2014. Then again, none of this means those who have already received licence to write anonymously or pseudonymously also have license to shoot their mouths. Journalists have a responsibility to be as selective as they reasonably can to identify those who deserve to have their names hidden – with at least two editors signing off on the request instead of the commissioning editor alone, for example – and those who are selected to be reminded that the protection they have received is only for the performance of a necessary duty. Anonymity or even pseudonymity introduces one fiction into the narrative, and all fictions, now matter how trivial, are antithetical to narratives that offer important knowledge but also a demonstration of what good journalism is capable of. So it is important to not see this device as a reason for the journalist to invent more excuses to leave out or obfuscate yet other details in the name of fear or privacy. In fact, the inclusion of one fiction should force every other detail in the narrative to be that much more self-evidently true.

Though some authors may not like it, the decision to grant anonymity must also be balanced with the importance and uniqueness of the article in question. While anonymity may grant a writer the freedom to not pull their punches, the privilege also foists more responsibility on the editor to ensure the privilege is being granted for something that is in the public interest as well as can’t be obtained through any other means. One particular nuance is important here: the author should convince the editor that they are compelled to speak up. Anonymity shouldn’t be the only reason the article is being written. Otherwise, anonymity or pseudonymity will easily be excuses to fire from behind the publication’s shoulders. This may seem like a crude calculus but it also lies firmly in the realm of due diligence.

We may not be able to ask too much of our compatriots, but it is necessary to make sure the threats that face them are real and that they will not attempt to gain unfair advantages. In addition, the language must at all points be civil and devoid of polemic; every claim and hypothesis must be substantiated to the extent possible; if the author has had email or telephone conversations with other people, the call records and reporting notes must be preserved; and the author can’t say anything substantial that does not require their identity to be hidden. The reporter or the editor should include in the article the specific reason as to why anonymity has been granted. Finally, the commissioning editor reserves the right to back out of the arrangement anytime they become unsure. This condition simply reflects the author’s responsibility to convince the editor of the need for anonymity, even if specific details may never make it to the copy.

At the same time, in times as fraught as ours, it may be unreasonable to expect reporters and editors to never make a mistake, even of the Rolling Stone’s proportions (although I admit the Columbia University report on Rolling Stone’s mistakes is unequivocal in its assessment that the magazine made no mistakes it couldn’t have avoided). The straightforward checks that journalists employ to weed out as many mistakes as possible can never be 100% perfect, particularly during a pandemic of a new virus. Some mistakes can be found out only in hindsight, such as when one needs to prove the negative, or when a journalist is caught between the views of two accomplished scientists and one realises a mistake only later.

Instead, we should expect those who make mistakes to be prompt, honest and reflexive, especially smaller organisations that can’t yet afford independent fact-checkers. A period in which anonymous authorship is becoming more necessary, irrespective of its ad hoc moral validity, ought also to be a period in which newsroom managers and editors treat mistakes not as cardinal sins but as opportunities to strengthen the compact with their readers. One simple first step is to acknowledge post-publication corrections and modifications with a note plus a timestamp. Because let’s face it – journalists are duty-bound to walk the same doubts, ambiguities and fears that also punctuate their stories.

News coverage in India of open access papers

In a study published in November 2021, Teresa Schultz, of the University of Nevada, Reno, reported that gold, green and hybrid open-access (OA) modes of publishing of scientific papers were correlated with more mentions in the news.

Gold OA refers to scientists publishing their paper in an OA journal, and green is when scientists publish their paper in a journal and then self-archives a copy on an openly accessible website or in a repository. A hybrid OA journal is one that allows for some papers to be published OA (or gold) and for the others to stay behind a paywall.

Schultz didn’t check if there was a causative relationship between a paper’s OA status and the likelihood of it being covered in the press, but found a significant correlation. It’s a heartening result – but I think it might be useful to qualify this finding with a perspective from India, a country whose scientific-publishing literacy is likely to be lower than the global average, and certainly lower than that in the richest nations, which also have some of the world’s more mature science-journalism enterprises. (To be sure, and lest we forget, science journalism is more than just coverage of the pandemic.)

An Indian perspective might also help to understand that a paper’s coverage in the news media is as much about whether it’s OA as about whether journalists know what OA is.

Schultz has found that the contents of a green/gold/hybrid OA paper are more likely to be covered in the news than those of a non-OA paper – but didn’t check for a causative relationship. One way to interpret the latter is that she didn’t check if a journalist determined to report on a paper because it was OA. Now, a journalist making this decision requires automatically that she be aware of what OA publishing is, its merits (and demerits if possible) and the ins/outs of displaying a preference – as a journalist – for OA versus non-OA papers.

Such awareness exists among Indian media-persons but it is sharply confined to some small pockets. And when awareness of OA, at least in opposition to non-OA, is so limited, the question of whether to cover a paper based on whether it has been published in an OA journal is relegated to the bottom of the priority list – if it finds mention at all.

In India, it is likelier for the average journalist who has been tasked with covering a scientific finding – rather than a science journalist per se, because the former are at least one order of magnitude more common – to consider whether the paper was published in a journal at all; whether, in keeping with the dominant view in the Indian scientific community, that paper was peer-reviewed; and whether it was published in a prestigious journal. Otherwise, the journalist may not even discover that paper.

When I was at The Hindu, I received a lot of emails from scientists requesting coverage of their paper, and 90% of the time, they would add with pride that the papers had been published in the peer-reviewed [insert name of legacy journal here] journal; I receive fewer such emails at The Wire Science but still around half-dozen a day.

This is just to say that the way the average journalist in India discovers papers is skewed in favour of non-OA, paywalled journals, typically one of Nature, Science, The Lancet, etc. (In a roundabout way, the popular support for Sci-Hub in India might attest to this reality: we need Sci-Hub because we need to access papers behind paywalls.)

Another factor in India that skews the discoverability of papers, albeit to a lesser extent, is journal outreach. The Nature Publishing Group, PLOS and Science are all prolific outreachers (the last through the EurekAlert! service) and the papers that are covered most often by Indian mainstream media outlets have likelier than not been published in one of these journals. In fact, this together with scientists flagging their own papers to journalists would cover almost all papers published in the mainstream Indian press.

So as such, a shift in favour of OA papers isn’t likely to arise from the quarter of journalists covering science in India – at least not without significant efforts to improve their awareness of the principles of OA. Note that this post is based on my personal experiences in the Indian news media space since 2012; if you have evidence to the contrary, please share. I’d be happy to be wrong on this front.

The problem with rooting for science

The idea that trusting in science involves a lot of faith, instead of reason, is lost on most people. More often than not, as a science journalist, I encounter faith through extreme examples – such as the Bloch sphere (used to represent the state of a qubit) or wave functions (‘mathematical objects’ used to understand the evolution of certain simple quantum systems). These and other similar concepts require years of training in physics and mathematics to understand. At the same time, science writers are often confronted with the challenge of making these concepts sensible to an audience that seldom has this training.

More importantly, how are science writers to understand them? They don’t. Instead, they implicitly trust scientists they’re talking to to make sense. If I know that a black hole curves spacetime to such an extent that pairs of virtual particles created near its surface are torn apart – one particle entering the black hole never to exit and the other sent off into space – it’s not because I’m familiar with the work of Stephen Hawking. It’s because I read his books, read some blogs and scientific papers, spoke to physicists, and decided to trust them all. Every science journalist, in fact, has a set of sources they’re likely to trust over others. I even place my faith in some people over others, based on factors like personal character, past record, transparency, reflexivity, etc., so that what they produce I take only with the smallest pinch of salt, and build on their findings to develop my own. And this way, I’m already creating an interface between science and society – by matching scientific knowledge with the socially developed markers of reliability.

I choose to trust those people, processes and institutions that display these markers. I call this an act of faith for two reasons: 1) it’s an empirical method, so to speak; there is no proof in theory that such ‘matching’ will always work; and 2) I believe it’s instructive to think of this relationship as being mediated by faith if only to amplify its anti-polarity with reason. Most of us understand science through faith, not reason. Even scientists who are experts on one thing take the word of scientists on completely different things, instead of trying to study those things themselves (see ad verecundiam fallacy).

Sometimes, such faith is (mostly) harmless, such as in the ‘extreme’ cases of the Bloch sphere and the wave function. It is both inexact and incomplete to think that quantum superposition means an object is in two states at once. The human brain hasn’t evolved to cognate superposition exactly; this is why physicists use the language of mathematics to make sense of this strange existential phenomenon. The problem – i.e. the inexactitude and the incompleteness – arises when a communicator translates the mathematics to a metaphor. Equally importantly, physicists are describing whereas the rest of us are thinking. There is a crucial difference between these activities that illustrates, among other things, the fundamental incompatibility between scientific research and science communication that communicators must first surmount.

As physicists over the past three or four centuries have relied increasingly on mathematics rather than the word to describe the world, physics, like mathematics itself, has made a “retreat from the word,” as literary scholar George Steiner put it. In a 1961 Kenyon Review article, Steiner wrote, “It is, on the whole, true to say that until the seventeenth century the predominant bias and content of the natural sciences were descriptive.” Mathematics used to be “anchored to the material conditions of experience,” and so was largely susceptible to being expressed in ordinary language. But this changed with the advances of modern mathematicians such as Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz, whose work in geometry, algebra, and calculus helped to distance mathematical notation from ordinary language, such that the history of how mathematics is expressed has become “one of progressive untranslatability.” It is easier to translate between Chinese and English — both express human experience, the vast majority of which is shared — than it is to translate advanced mathematics into a spoken language, because the world that mathematics expresses is theoretical and for the most part not available to our lived experience.

Samuel Matlack, ‘Quantum Poetics’, The New Atlantic, 2017

However, the faith becomes more harmful the further we move away from the ‘extreme’ examples – of things we’re unlikely to stumble on in our daily lives – and towards more commonplace ideas, such as ‘how vaccines work’ or ‘why GM foods are not inherently bad’. The harm emerges from the assumption that we think we know something when in fact we’re in denial about how it is that we know that thing. Many of us think it’s reason; most of the time it’s faith. Remember when, in Friends, Monica Geller and Chandler Bing ask David the Scientist Guy how airplanes fly, and David says it has to do with Bernoulli’s principle and Newton’s third law? Monica then turns to Chandler with a knowing look and says, “See?!” To which Chandler says, “Yeah, that’s the same as ‘it has something to do with wind’!”

The harm is to root for science, to endorse the scientific enterprise and vest our faith in its fruits, without really understanding how these fruits are produced. Such understanding is important for two reasons.

First, if we trust scientists, instead of presuming to know or actually knowing that we can vouch for their work. It would be vacuous to claim science is superior in any way to another enterprise that demands our faith when science itself also receives our faith. Perhaps more fundamentally, we like to believe that science is trustworthy because it is evidence-based and it is tested – but the COVID-19 pandemic should have clarified, if it hasn’t already, the continuous (as opposed to discrete) nature of scientific evidence, especially if we also acknowledge that scientific progress is almost always incremental. Evidence can be singular and thus clear – like a new avian species, graphene layers superconducting electrons or tuned lasers cooling down atoms – or it can be necessary but insufficient, and therefore on a slippery slope – such as repeated genetic components in viral RNA, a cigar-shaped asteroid or water shortage in the time of climate change.

Physicists working with giant machines to spot new particles and reactions – all of which are detected indirectly, through their imprints on other well-understood phenomena – have two important thresholds for the reliability of their findings: if the chance of X (say, “spotting a particle of energy 100 GeV”) being false is 0.27%, it’s good enough to be evidence; if the chance of X being false is 0.00006%, then it’s a discovery (i.e., “we have found the particle”). But at what point can we be sure that we’ve indeed found the particle we were looking for if the chance of being false will never reach 0%? One way, for physicists specifically, is to combine the experiment’s results with what they expect to happen according to theory; if the two match, it’s okay to think that even a less reliable result will likely be borne out. Another possibility (in the line of Karl Popper’s philosophy) is that a result expected to be true, and is subsequently found to be true, is true until we have evidence to the contrary. But as suitable as this answer may be, it still doesn’t neatly fit the binary ‘yes’/’no’ we’re used to, and which we often expect from scientific endeavours as well (see experience v. reality).

(Minor detour: While rational solutions are ideally refutable, faith-based solutions are not. Instead, the simplest way to reject their validity is to use extra-scientific methods, and more broadly deny them power. For example, if two people were offering me drugs to suppress the pain of a headache, I would trust the one who has a state-sanctioned license to practice medicine and is likely to lose that license, even temporarily, if his prescription is found to have been mistaken – that is, by asserting the doctor as the subject of democratic power. Axiomatically, if I know that Crocin helps manage headaches, it’s because, first, I trusted the doctor who prescribed it and, second, Crocin has helped me multiple times before, so empirical experience is on my side.)

Second, if we don’t know how science works, we become vulnerable to believing pseudoscience to be science as long as the two share some superficial characteristics, like, say, the presence and frequency of jargon or a claim’s originator being affiliated with a ‘top’ institute. The authors of a scientific paper to be published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology write:

We identify two critical determinants of vulnerability to pseudoscience. First, participants who trust science are more likely to believe and disseminate false claims that contain scientific references than false claims that do not. Second, reminding participants of the value of critical evaluation reduces belief in false claims, whereas reminders of the value of trusting science do not.

(Caveats: 1. We could apply the point of this post to this study itself; 2. I haven’t checked the study’s methods and results with an independent expert, and I’m also mindful that this is psychology research and that its conclusions should be taken with salt until independent scientists have successfully replicated them.)

Later from the same paper:

Our four experiments and meta-analysis demonstrated that people, and in particular people with higher trust in science (Experiments 1-3), are vulnerable to misinformation that contains pseudoscientific content. Among participants who reported high trust in science, the mere presence of scientific labels in the article facilitated belief in the misinformation and increased the probability of dissemination. Thus, this research highlights that trust in science ironically increases vulnerability to pseudoscience, a finding that conflicts with campaigns that promote broad trust in science as an antidote to misinformation but does not conflict with efforts to install trust in conclusions about the specific science about COVID-19 or climate change.

In terms of the process, the findings of Experiments 1-3 may reflect a form of heuristic processing. Complex topics such as the origins of a virus or potential harms of GMOs to human health include information that is difficult for a lay audience to comprehend, and requires acquiring background knowledge when reading news. For most participants, seeing scientists as the source of the information may act as an expertise cue in some conditions, although source cues are well known to also be processed systematically. However, when participants have higher levels of methodological literacy, they may be more able to bring relevant knowledge to bear and scrutinise the misinformation. The consistent negative association between methodological literacy and both belief and dissemination across Experiments 1-3 suggests that one antidote to the influence of pseudoscience is methodological literacy. The meta-analysis supports this.

So rooting for science per se is not just not enough, it could be harmful vis-à-vis the public support for science itself. For example (and without taking names), in response to right-wing propaganda related to India’s COVID-19 epidemic, quite a few videos produced by YouTube ‘stars’ have advanced dubious claims. They’re not dubious at first glance, if also because they purport to counter pseudoscientific claims with scientific knowledge, but they are – either for insisting a measure of certainty in the results that neither exist nor are achievable, or for making pseudoscientific claims of their own, just wrapped up in technical lingo so they’re more palatable to those supporting science over critical thinking. Some of these YouTubers, and in fact writers, podcasters, etc., are even blissfully unaware of how wrong they often are. (At least one of them was also reluctant to edit a ‘finished’ video to make it less sensational despite repeated requests.)

Now, where do these ideas leave (other) science communicators? In attempting to bridge a nearly unbridgeable gap, are we doomed to swing only between most and least unsuccessful? I personally think that this problem, such as it is, is comparable to Zeno’s arrow paradox. To use Wikipedia’s words:

He states that in any one (duration-less) instant of time, the arrow is neither moving to where it is, nor to where it is not. It cannot move to where it is not, because no time elapses for it to move there; it cannot move to where it is, because it is already there. In other words, at every instant of time there is no motion occurring. If everything is motionless at every instant, and time is entirely composed of instants, then motion is impossible.

To ‘break’ the paradox, we need to identify and discard one or more primitive assumptions. In the arrow paradox, for example, one could argue that time is not composed of a stream of “duration-less” instants, that each instant – no matter how small – encompasses a vanishingly short but not nonexistent passage of time. With popular science communication (in the limited context of translating something that is untranslatable sans inexactitude and/or incompleteness), I’d contend the following:

  • Awareness: ‘Knowing’ and ‘knowing of’ are significantly different and, I hope, self-explanatory also. Example: I’m not fluent with the physics of cryogenic engines but I’m aware that they’re desirable because liquefied hydrogen has the highest specific impulse of all rocket fuels.
  • Context: As I’ve written before, a unit of scientific knowledge that exists in relation to other units of scientific knowledge is a different object from the same unit of scientific knowledge existing in relation to society.
  • Abstraction: 1. perfect can be the enemy of the good, and imperfect knowledge of an object – especially a complicated compound one – can still be useful; 2. when multiple components come together to form a larger entity, the entity can exhibit some emergent properties that one can’t derive entirely from the properties of the individual components. Example: one doesn’t have to understand semiconductor physics to understand what a computer does.

An introduction to physics that contains no equations is like an introduction to French that contains no French words, but tries instead to capture the essence of the language by discussing it in English. Of course, popular writers on physics must abide by that constraint because they are writing for mathematical illiterates, like me, who wouldn’t be able to understand the equations. (Sometimes I browse math articles in Wikipedia simply to immerse myself in their majestic incomprehensibility, like visiting a foreign planet.)

Such books don’t teach physical truths; what they teach is that physical truth is knowable in principle, because physicists know it. Ironically, this means that a layperson in science is in basically the same position as a layperson in religion.

Adam Kirsch, ‘The Ontology of Pop Physics’, Tablet Magazine, 2020

But by offering these reasons, I don’t intend to over-qualify science communication – i.e. claim that, given enough time and/or other resources, a suitably skilled science communicator will be able to produce a non-mathematical description of, say, quantum superposition that is comprehensible, exact and complete. Instead, it may be useful for communicators to acknowledge that there is an immutable gap between common English (the language of modern science) and mathematics, beyond which scientific expertise is unavoidable – in much the same way communicators must insist that the farther the expert strays into the realm of communication, the closer they’re bound to get to a boundary beyond which they must defer to the communicator.

Scicommers as knowledge producers

Reading the latest edition of Raghavendra Gadagkar’s column in The Wire Science, ‘More Fun Than Fun’, about how scientists should become communicators and communicators should be treated as knowledge-producers, I began wondering if the knowledge produced by the latter is in fact not the same knowledge but something entirely new. The idea that communicators simply make the scientists’ Promethean fire more palatable to a wider audience has led, among other things, to a belief widespread among scientists that science communicators are adjacent to science and aren’t part of the enterprise producing ‘scientific knowledge’ itself. And this perceived adjacency often belittles communicators by trivialising the work that they do and hiding the knowledge that only they produce.

Explanatory writing that “enters into the mental world of uninitiated readers and helps them understand complex scientific concepts”, to use Gadagkar’s words, takes copious and focused work. (And if it doesn’t result in papers, citations and h-indices, just as well: no one should become trapped in bibliometrics the way so many scientists have.) In fact, describing the work of communicators in this way dismisses a specific kind of proof of work that is present in the final product – in much the same way scientists’ proofs of work are implicit in new solutions to old problems, development of new technologies, etc. The knowledge that people writing about science for a wider audience produce is, in my view, entirely distinct, even if the nature of the task at hand is explanatory.

In his article, Gadagkar writes:

Science writers should do more than just reporting, more than translating the gibberish of scientists into English or whatever language they may choose to write in. … Science writers are in a much better position to make lateral comparisons, understand the process of science, and detect possible biases and conflicts of interest, something that scientists, being insiders, cannot do very well. So rather than just expect them to clean up our messy prose, we should elevate science writers to the role of knowledge producers.

My point is about knowledge arising from a more limited enterprise – i.e. explanation – but which I think can be generalised to all of journalism as well (and to other expository enterprises). And in making this point, I hope my two-pronged deviation from Gadagkar’s view is clear. First, science journalists should be treated as knowledge producers, but not in the limited confines of the scientific enterprise and certainly not just to expose biases; instead, communicators as knowledge producers exist in a wider arena – that of society, including its messy traditions and politics, itself. Here, knowledge is composed of much more than scientific facts. Second, science journalists are already knowledge producers, even when they’re ‘just’ “translating the gibberish of scientists”.

Specifically, the knowledge that science journalists produce differs from the knowledge that scientists produce in at least two ways: it is accessible and it makes knowledge socially relevant. What scientists find is not what people know. Society broadly synthesises knowledge from information that it weights together with extra-scientific considerations, including biases like “which university is the scientist affiliated with” and concerns like “will the finding affect my quality of life”. Journalists are influential synthesisers who work with or around these and other psychosocial stressors to contextualise scientific findings, and thus science itself. Even when they write drab stories about obscure phenomena, they make an important choice: “this is what the reader gets to read, instead of something else”.

These properties taken together encompass the journalist’s proof of work, which is knowledge accessible to a much larger audience. The scientific enterprise is not designed to produce this particular knowledge. Scientists may find that “leaves use chlorophyll to photosynthesise sunlight”; a skilled communicator will find that more people know this, know why it matters and know how they can put such knowledge to use, thus fostering a more empowered society. And the latter is entirely new knowledge – akin to an emergent object that is greater than the sum of its scientific bits.

Anti-softening science for the state

The group of ministers (GoM) report on “government communication” has recommended that the government promote “soft topics” in the media like “yoga” and “tigers”. We can only speculate what this means, and that shouldn’t be hard. The overall spirit of the document is insecurity and paranoia, manifested as fantasies of reining in the country’s independent media into doing the government’s bidding. The promotion of “soft” stories is in line with this aspiration – “soft” here can only mean stories that don’t criticise the government, its actions or policies, and be like ‘harmless entertainment’ for a politically inert audience. It’s also no coincidence that the two examples on offer of such stories skirt the edges of health and environmental journalism; other examples are sure to include reports of scientific discoveries.

Science is closely related to the Indian state in many ways. The current government in particular, in power since 2014, has been promoting application-oriented R&D (a bias especially visible in budgetary allocations); encouraging ill-prepared research facilities to self-finance; privileging certain private interests (esp. the Reliance and Adani groups) vis-à-vis natural resources like coal, coastal zones and spectrum allocations; pillaging India’s ecological commons for industrialisation; promoting pseudoscience (which further disempowers those closer to society’s margins); interfering at universities by appointing vice-chancellors friendly to the ruling party (and if that doesn’t work, jailing students on ridiculous charges that include dissent); curtailing academic freedom; and hounding after scientists and institutions that threaten its preferred narratives.

With this in mind, it’s important for science journalism outlets and science journalists to not become complicit – inadvertently or otherwise – in the state project to “soften” science, and start reporting, if they aren’t already, on issues with a closer eye on their repercussions on the wider society. The idea that science journalism can or should be objective the way science is is nonsensical because the idea that science is an objective enterprise is nonsensical. The scientific method is a technique to obtain information about the natural universe while steadily subtracting the influence of human biases and other limitations. However, what scientists choose to study, how they design their studies and what is ultimately construed to be knowledge are all deeply human enterprises.

On top of this, science journalism is driven by journalists’ sense of good and bad: We write favourably about the former and argue against the latter. We write about some telescope unravelling a long-standing cosmogonic problem and also publish an article calling out homeopathy’s bullshit. We write a scientific paper that uses ingenious methods to prove its point and also call out Indian academia as an unsafe space for queer-trans people.

Some have advanced a defence that simply focusing on “good science” can inculcate in the audience a sense of what is “worthy” and “desirable” while denying “bad science” the platform and publicity it seeks. This is objectionable on two counts.

First, who decides what is “worthy”? For example, some scientists, especially in the ‘senior’ cadre and the more influential and/or powerful for it, make this choice by deferring to the wisdom of scientific journals, chosen according to their impact factors, and what the journals have deemed worthy of publishing. But abiding by this heuristic only means we continue to participate in and extend the lifetime of the existing ways of knowledge production that privilege white scientists, male scientists and richer scientists – and sensational positive results on topics that the scientists staffing the journals’ editorial boards would like to focus on.

Second, being limited to goodness at a time when badness abounds is bad, at least severely tone-deaf (but I’m disinclined to be so charitable). Very broadly, that science is inherently amoral is a pithy factoid by this point. There have been far too many incidents in history for anyone to still be able to overlook, in good faith, the fact that science’s prescriptions unguided by human morals and values are quite likely to lead to humanitarian disasters. We may even be living through one such. Scientists’ rapid and successful development of new vaccines against a new pathogen was followed by a global rush to acquire enough doses. But the world’s industrial and economic powers have ensured that the strongest among them have enough to vaccine their entire populations more than once, have blocked petitions at global fora to loosen patents on these vaccines to expand manufacturing and distribution, have forced desperate countries to purchase doses at prices higher than those for developed blocs like the EU, and have allowed corporate behemoths to make monumental profits even as they force third-world nations to pledge sovereign assets to secure supplies. It’s fallacious to claim scientific labour makes the world a better place when the fruits of such labour must still be filtered, like so much else, through the capitalist sieve.

There are many questions for the science journalist to consider here: why have some communities in certain countries been affected more than others? Why is there so little data on the vaccines’ consequences for pregnant women? Do we know enough to discuss the pandemic’s effects on women? Why, at a time when so many scientists and engineers were working to design new ventilators, was there no unified standard to ensure usability? If the world has demonstrated that it’s possible to design, test, manufacture and administer vaccines against a new virus in such a short time, why have we been waiting so long for effective defences against neglected tropical diseases? How do the racial, gender and ethnic identifies of clinical trials affect trial outcomes? Is it ethical for countries that hosted vaccine clinical trials to get the first doses? Should we compulsorily prohibit patents on drugs, therapies and devices important to ending pandemics? If so, what might the consequences be for drug development? And what good is a vaccine if we can’t also ensure all the world’s 7.x billion people can be vaccinated simultaneously?

The pandemic isn’t a particularly ‘easy’ example either. For example, if the government promises to develop new supercomputers, who can use them and what problems will they be used to solve? How can we improve the quality and quantity of research conducted at institutes funded by state governments? Why do so many scientists at public universities plagiarise scientific papers? On what basis are the winners of the S.S. Bhatnagar Award chosen? Should we formally do away with subscription-funded scientific journals in favour of open-access publishing, overlay journals and post-publication peer-review? Is methane really a “clean fuel” even though its extraction and transportation will impose a considerable dirty cost? Why can’t we have more GM foods in the market even though the science is ‘good’? Is it worthwhile to invest Rs 10,000 crore in a human spaceflight programme that lacks long-term vision? And so forth.

Simply focusing on “good science” at our present time is not enough. I also reject the argument that it’s not for science journalists to protect or defend science simply because science, whatever it’s interpreted to mean, is not the preserve of scientists. As an enterprise rooted in its famous method, science is a tool of empowerment: it encourages discovery and deliberation; I’m not sure if it’s fair to say it encourages dissent as well but there is evidence that science can accommodate it without resorting to violence and subjugation.

It’s not for nothing that I’m more comfortable holding up an aspirin tablet for someone with a headache than a jar of leaves from the Patanjali Ayurved stable: being able to know how and why something works is power in the same way knowing how the pharmaceutical industry manipulates markets, how to file an RTI application, what makes an FIR valid or invalid, what the election commission’s model code of conduct stipulates or what kind of land a mall can be built on is power. All of it represents control, especially the ability to say ‘no’ and mean it.

This is ultimately what the GoM report fantasises about – and what the present government desires: the annulment of individual and institutional resistance, one subset of which is the neutralisation of science’s ability to provoke questions about atoms and black holes as much as about the circumstances in which scientists study them, about the nature, utility and purpose of knowledge, and the relationships between science, capital and the state.

Addendum

In January 2020, the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India organised a meeting with science journalists and communicators from around the country to discuss what the two parties could do for each other. Us journalists and communicators aired a lot of grievances during the meeting as well as suggestions on fixing long-standing and/or particularly thorny problems (some notes here).

In light of the government’s renewed attention on curbing press freedom and ludicrous suggestions in the report, such as one by S. Gurumurthy that the news should be a “mixture of truth and untruth”, I’m not sure where that leaves the PSA’s plans for future consultation nor – considering parts of the report seemingly manufactured consent – whether good-faith consultation will be possible going ahead. I can only hope that members of this community at least evoke and keep the faith.

The commentariot

The following post is an orange flag – a quieter alarm raised in anticipation of something worse that hasn’t transpired yet but is likely in the offing. Earlier today, at the end of a call with a scientist for a story, the scientist implied that my job – as science journalist – required nothing of me but to be a commentator, whereas his required him to be a ‘maker’ and that that was superior. At the outset, this is offensive because if you don’t think journalism requires both creative and non-creative work to conduct ethically, you either don’t know what journalism is or you’re taking its moving parts for granted.

But the scientist’s comment merited an orange flag, I thought, because it’s the fourth time I’ve heard something like that in the last three months – and is a point of view I can’t help but think is attached in some way to our present national government and the political climate it has engendered. (All four scientists worked for government-funded institutes but I say this only because of the slant of their own views.)

The Modi government is, among many other things, a cult of personality centred on the prime minister and his fabled habit of getting things done, even if they’re undemocratic or just unconstitutional. Many of the government’s reforms today are often cast as being in stark contrast to the Congress’s rule of the country – that “Modi did what no other prime minister had dared.” The illegitimacy of these boasts aside, the government and its supporters are obviously proud of their ability to act swiftly and have rendered inaction in any form a sin (to the point where this government has also been notorious for repackaging previous governments’ schemes as its own).

They have also consigned many activities as being sinful for the same reason because their practice is much too tempered, or whose outcomes they believe “don’t go far enough”, for their taste. Journalism is one of them. A conversation a few months ago with a person who was both scientist and government official alerted me as to how real this sentiment might be in government circles when they said, “I have real work unlike you and I will get back to you with a concrete answer in two or three days.” The other scientists also said something similar. The right-wing has often cast the mainstream Indian journalism establishment as elite, classist, corrupt and apologist, and the accusation that it doesn’t do any real work – “certainly not to the nation’s benefit” – simply extends this view.

But for scientists to denigrate the work of science journalists, especially since their training should have alerted them to different ways in which science is both good and hard, is more than dispiriting. It’s a sign that “journalists don’t do good work” is more than just an ideological spearpoint used to undermine adversarial journalism, that it is something at least parts of the establishment believe to be true. And it also suggests that the stories we publish are being read as nothing more than the babble of a lazy commentariot.