Astronomy and the Media: a love story?
aa r X i v : . [ a s t r o - ph . I M ] J un The Rˆole of Astronomy in Society and CultureProceedings IAU Symposium No. 260, 2009D. Valls-Gabaud & A. Boksenberg, eds. c (cid:13) Astronomy and the Media: a love story?
Henri M.J. Boffin
ESOKarl-Schwarzschild-str. 2, 85748 Garching, Germanyemail: [email protected]
Abstract.
With the availability of nice images and amazing, dramatic stories, the fundamentalquestions it addresses, and the attraction is exerces on many, it is often assumed that astronomyis an obvious topic for the media. Looking more carefully, however, one realises that the truthis perhaps not as glamorous as one would hope, and that, although well present in the media,astronomy’s coverage is rather tiny, and often, limited to the specialised pages or magazines.
Keywords. science communication, media, astronomical topics, press releases
1. Introduction
In astronomy as in other scientific or societal fields, communication is an importantaspect that no single organisation can overlook. Especially public research organisationsshould be accountable to the public for the tax money they use. This is only possible ifthe public is well informed. But this is even more crucial in order to secure additionalfunding for new projects. As one scientist said, perhaps a little bit too provocatively, “ theone percent spent on outreach allows one to get the 99 percent to have the project done ”.This is most likely too strong a statement but the general idea is there. Communication isalso important to entertain the necessary excellent relations with the local communities– some of the large astronomical observatories know a lot about this. Communicationis also essential for astronomy to fulfil a fundamental role in modern society: attractingbright youngsters to scientific careers. Although girls and boys are more and more movingaway from science, there is a great need for future scientists. And even if the young peoplewon’t become scientists, it is important that they are sensitive to science as a whole: asgrown-ups, they won’t be able to avoid relying on science in their daily life, and they willhave to take decisions with a scientific dimension.For all these reasons, the communication of research organisation will address varioustarget groups: general public, scientists, policy-makers, educators, and the industry. Butwith limited resources, one needs amplifying outlets to reach a significant fraction ofthe targeted audience. It is indeed impossible to prepare all types of communicationmaterial, with different emphasis, at all levels of complexity, and in all languages. Oneneeds to rely on specific amplifiers. Media outlets are one of these. Indeed, not only arejournalists trained to adapt the material to their public, which they know very well, butthe public get informed about science through these channels. The 2007 Eurobarometeron “Scientific research in the media” (Eurobarometer, 2007) shows for example that61% of respondents in the European Union get informed about science watching TVprogrammes, 49% reading science articles in general newspapers and magazines, 28%through the internet, 26% listening to radio, and 22% buying specialised press. Similarnumbers are observed in the US. Obviously, the media are an important channel tocommunicate science. However, there are caveats. The first one is that science on TVrepresents at most 2% of all news shown. The other is that studies have revealed that10 stronomy and the Media
The New York Times online science section has twospecific subsections, one on environment and the other on space & cosmos! Similarly, theBritish magazine
New Scientist has a rather successful specific Space section, and oneshould not forget that the
BBC Sky at Night programme is the longest running televi-sion series, existing since 1957, although to be fair, one should admit that it is no moreshown during prime time but very late in the evening. Here again there is an importantcaveat, which is that often space and astronomical news are put together, but their shareis far from equal. The NSF 2008 study of S&T attitudes and understanding reveal thatthe NASA Space Shuttle Programme has taken a very large share of all science relatednews in 2005 and 2006, but this is of course not astronomy as such. Another importantunfortunate aspect is the general tendency for media to cut down on science coverage.As a journalist of the french newspaper “Le Monde” told me, from the 10 journalistsworking for the science section in 1998, only 4 are still in place ten years later. All otherswhere moved to other sections.
2. Does astronomy sell?
In order to try to be a little bit more quantitative, I looked at the US magazine
Time . Since this main street magazine exists, astronomy has been featured no less than12 times on its cover. About once every five years or so. This would be a nice result per se , especially when by comparison, biology had only 4 covers in the same period,and chemistry only 9 (in the latter case, most of them having appeared before 1965).However, when looking at other scientific fields, things start to be less exceptional. Historywas featured 24 times, and environment took the seat 90 times. The overall winner isdefinitively medicine which was featured on 248 covers. This is 20 times as much asastronomy! The same trend can be seen in the number of articles dealing with the varioustopics that appear in the magazine. With 598 articles published from 1923 till nowadays,astronomy comes well behind most other scientific topics. Archeology, biology, chemistry,physics, environment, all do better with, respectively, 1031, 1503, 2240, 2290, and 77642 Henri Boffinarticles. And again medicine is the great winner with no less than 11814 articles, 20 timesas many as the one devoted to astronomy.This first superficial quantitative study clearly illustrates that while the media donot hesitate to talk about the greatest discoveries in astronomy, it is far from beingthe most loved of journalists and editors. Is there any logic behind this? Given what Istated above, that journalists know their readers, I would assume so. Looking back atan Eurobarometer – from 2005 this time (Eurobarometer, 2005), it is interesting to seethat when asked “which science and technology developments are you most interestedin?”, astronomy takes only the 6 th place, with 23% of respondents choosing it. People aremore interested in economics and social sciences (24%), the internet (29%), humanities(30%), the environment (47%), and medicine (61%). There is clearly a logic, althoughone could invoke the ubiquitous chicken and egg problem as a reason for this situation.Are journalists providing stories on subjects that are most interesting to people or arepeople interested in the stories given by the journalists? As always, the truth must lie inthe middle, but it is perhaps no such surprise that what interests the majority of people istheir health. A cause for optimism can be found however in the fact that the comparisonbetween the 2001 and 2005 Eurobarometer surveys reveals an increase of 6% over 4 yearsin the percentage of people interested in astronomy. Let us hope that the InternationalYear of Astronomy, with its florilege of activities, will lead to a continuation of this trend.
3. Astronomy topics
The New York Times science writer John Noble Wilford (as cited by Maran et al., 2000)stated that the topics most likely to cause public impact are mysterious and catastrophicsubjects. Astronomy is not devoid of these and likely candidates would be subjects suchas dark matter, black holes, exoplanets, or Near-Earth Objects on collision course withour planets.It seems that press offices are not unaware of this and already make a pre-selectionalong these lines, although some subjects seem more difficult to deal with than others.Here is the distribution of subjects in the 144 press releases distributed on the AmericanAstronomical Society (AAS) mailing list, to which about 1300 science journalists aresubscribed worldwide, in September and in November 2008:Solar System 52New Facilities 15Exoplanets 12Awards, fellowships, contests 10Stars, supernovae 10Black holes 9Press photos 6Galaxies 4Dark matter 2Cosmology 2Among the press releases distribued by the AAS, one can note the large place taken bythe major players. Out of the 144 press releases mentioned above, 61 were issued by NASA(or related to NASA), 17 by ESA and 15 by ESO. The large presence of NASA and ESAcould also explain the predominance of solar system stories, as these organisations tendto also devote a large part of their communication to their solar system space missions.But again, things appear more tricky. Looking at the distribution of topics in all ESOpress releases issued between 2004 and 2008 (for a total of 228), one can see that the stronomy and the Media • Closest
Look Ever at the Edge of A Black Hole • Analysis Begins on Phoenix Lander’s
Deepest
Soil Sample • First
Picture of Likely Planet Around Sun-Like Star • Most
Dark Matter-Dominated Galaxy in Universe • The
Deepest
Ultraviolet Image of The Universe Yet • Gemini Releases Historic Discovery image of Planetary “
First
Family” • Gamma-Ray Burst was Aimed
Squarely at Earth.
4. The place of astronomy
The AAS mailing list is an important source of information for science journalists onastronomy and can clearly serve as a good representation of what science journalistsare exposed to. This is particularly relevant as Madsen (2001, 2003) has shown that theastronomy covered in the media finds most of the time its origin in press releases. Thefirst thing to remark is that journalists have a large choice of stories. The AAS distributestypically 80 press releases per month, or about 4 per working day. One should realise,however, that this is still only a very tiny fraction of all scientific press releases receivedby journalists. Looking at the European science agency Alphagalileo, astronomy coversonly about 10% of all scientific press releases they distribute. Journalism is really aboutmaking a choice and in such conditions, one can be happy if some astronomical news getcovered. This is of course not the only place where choices are made. Taking the exampleof ESO, the European Southern Observatory, one can note that in 2008 there were morethan 700 refereed scientific papers published, while there were only 50 press releases,of which only half were based on a scientific paper (the others being organisation news,instrumentation news or press photos). At the sourcce there is thus already a selection bya factor 30! All in all, the chances that an astronomical scientific paper will be reportedupon in the media is less than one in a few hundreds.Madsen (2001) in his study “Stars in the Media”, in which he looked at the coverageof astronomy and space science in broadsheet papers in the United Kingdom, France,4 Henri BoffinSpain, Sweden and Denmark, provided some useful conclusions: • The choice of topics is influenced by national (cultural, political) aspects, but thenarrative (story, rhetoric) is rather uniform; • Fundamental research is reported within a narrow scientific frame; • Articles on astrophysics/space currently occupy approximatively 0.1% of leadingEuropean newspapers; • There is much more emphasis on health/environment than on astronomy; • Science is mostly presented in special sections.Madsen also emphasised that more effort should be invested to show the role of fun-damental research for societal development and general culture, and that this may alsoattract more interest. I can’t agree more. Despite the fact that astronomy may be consid-ered humankind’s boldest attempt to understand the world in which we live, addressingfundamental questions such as “are we alone?”, “what is the Universe made of?”, and“how did it all begin?”, which have deep philosophical, religious, and societal impacts,astronomy is too often limited to the science sections that are accessed by a small audi-ence. We need to bring the message home to the editors that astronomy is not for ‘geeks’only, but deserves a more prominent place in the media.
5. Conclusion
When looking at the presence of astronomy and the media, it is also interesting to havethe opinion of the journalists themselves. I have therefore conducted a small survey viae-mail to all journalists subscribed to the ESO media mailing list. This is by no meanssupposed to be a scientifically accurate survey, but is useful to get a first glance at the‘other side’. I submitted to the journalists a series of 5 questions, which are indicatedbelow as well as their answers. Some interesting facts come out.Most journalists said that they run between 2 and 3 astronomical stories per month ,with some running a few more. Representatives of the online media were generally runningmore than 5 stories per month. This is due to the fact, as one journalist put it, that“online, space is infinite” and there is not so much struggle with other subjects. Thisillustrates that given time and space, journalists do find astronomy stories interesting.The majority of journalists said that they have no a priori about the possible topicsto be run, and that the most important when selecting the story is the subject andthe availability of a nice image or a video. Some journalists highlighted neverthelessexoplanets and the solar system as the topics they will most likely write about. It seemsalso that once journalists have made their mind into writing a story, it is not difficult toconvince their editor to run it. They also acknowledge, however, that “they don’t makeit to the front page” and are often confined in special sections. And, finally, it is perhapsrevealing that almost two-third of the journalists thought that astronomy has the placeit deserves in the media. It is also important to note that the journalists said that theywon’t necessarily increase their coverage of astronomy just because it is the InternationalYear of Astronomy. Good stories is what they want and need.It is therefore clear that journalists appear to be keen to cover astronomy in the mediaand that most major breakthroughs are covered. ESO estimates a yearly readershipin newspapers and magazines of tens of million people worldwide, while it appeared inhundreds of TV news reports or documentaries, potentially reaching hundreds of millionsof viewers. The impact is undeniable. This shouldn’t hide the fact that more efforts stronomy and the Media Small survey of science journalists
1. How often would you run a story related to astronomy per month?1 11%2-3 37%4-5 19%More than 5 33%2. What are the topics most likely to be run? (several answers possible)None in particular 55%Exoplanets 33%Solar system 29%Cosmology 15%Stars and nebulae 11%Galaxies 7%3. What is most important when selecting the story? (several answers possible)Subject 92%Availability of a nice image or video 74%Nationalities of the scientists involved 22%Names and host institutions of the scientists involved 9%Institution issuing the press release 0%4. Do you find it difficult to run an astronomical story past the chief editor?NO 80%YES 20%5. Do you think astronomy has the place it deserves in the media?YES 62%NO 38% should be done for astronomy to be dealt outside of the special science sections, takinginto account its important societal and cultural aspects.
References
Boffin, H., West, R. 2004,
The Messenger , 116, 39Boffin, H., West, R. 2005, in
IAU Commission 55: Communicating Astronomy with the Public2005 , I. Robson & L. L. Christensen (eds), p. 266Eurobarometer 2005,
Special Eurobarometer on Europeans, Science and Technology
Eurobarometer 2007,
Scientific research in the media
Maran, S.P., Cominsky, L.R., Marschall. L.A. 2000, in
Information Handling in Astronomy , A.Heck, ed., Kluwer, p. 13Madsen, C. 2001,
Stars in the Media , Open UniversityMadsen, C. 2003
Astronomy and Space Science in the European Print Media , in AstronomyCommunication, ed. Andr´e Heck & Claus Madsen, KluwerNSF Science and Engineering Indicators 2004, National Science Board,
Chapter 7, Science andTechnology: Public Attitudes and Understanding