Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Well, we’ll talk a lot about science journalism soon. A lot. It’s one of my passions. But I’ll hold off for another time. In the meantime, you in the USA should know that your belief (because you’re often being told this again and again by Brits) that the UK might have vastly superior serious daily newspaper journalism (as well as superior tabliod journalism) ought not to extend neccesarily to science coverage. For a long time, the Science Times -which appears in the New York Times on Tuesdays-, even with all of its flaws, was a model of enlightenment compared to what is regularly produced over here in the dailies.

Well, not long ago the Guardian tried to address this (bless them) with their Thursday regular tabloid-sized science pullout section called “Life”. I hope that by now several of the other newspapers have followed suit, but I do not know since I don’t live here anymore. Someone please let me know. So for all the incredible amount of news, sport and celebrity coverage that is going on in any number of national newspapers over here, this is the pinnacle of science coverage in a country that claims to be full of educated people (too many of whom look down on the US on the matter of education).

Anyway, this week’s Life is out today. Following in the tradition of doing big science stories by focusing on a personality, instead of the science, the front cover page has a giant closeup of the face of the loveable cuddly Craig Venter. There are three huge pages on the guy (with some science in there, I’ll grant you), but this cover story turns out to just be an extract from a book on him and other biotech folk. Oh dear, the big science cover story is a book extract. This is great journalism folks! (Anyway, it might be interesting actually, so here’s the info: “The Geneticist Who Played Hoops with My DNA : . . . And Other Masterminds from the Frontiers of Biotech”, by David Ewing Duncan.)

To be fair, there are a few other pages filled with science reporting, which have to fight for space with stuff about medicine (why not, I suppose) and technology (not all about gadgets either). It’s a pretty good effort, and on some days can hold its own against the Science Times, I’m pleased to note. You cannot easily tell this from the Guardian Life website, as far as I can see, which seems to have gone to some effort to hide many of the stories and so you see at first only a couple of the stories, one of them being the extract. But I did note that a regular feature called “Bad Science” by Ben Goldacre does show up on the site too. I note his nice comment (the third paragraph) on a misunderstanding a woman he met at a party has about the role of women in science.

If you’re in the uk and care about science, you should be getting this every Thursday, whether or not you’re a sandal-wearing, salad-eating, whiny left-wing Guardian reader.

-cvj

July 21st, 2005 by cjohnson in Science, Science and the Media, Women in Science | 6 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >