HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Deborah Blum.

She's co-author of a Tactical Guide to Science Journalism: Lessons from the Front Lines, an anthology of important essays on the past, present, and future of science journalism.

Deborah, a pleasure to see you today.

BLUM: Thank you.

I'm just so pleased to be here.

HEFFNER: Deborah, what was most incisive to your mind about this reassessment or reevaluation of science journalism here in 2023 no.

I know these essays were compiled within the last year or two but what was the most fundamental takeaway for you on either the past, the present, or future of science journalism?

BLUM: Let me just do a little bit of context about, I want to say more than 10 years ago, I was co-editor of a book called A Field Guide for Science Writers, which was an assessment and sort of guide to the field at that point.

And when we've decided we wanted to update that into essentially the 2020s, one of the things was, if you go back and you look at that edition of Field Guide, it has a few references to this thing called the internet, right?

So it doesn't really situate you and what is obviously the digital age.

So one of the big shifts is not just that, but that journalism itself has become more digital.

I'm the publisher of a digital science magazine.

Almost everyone who does publish in print has a digital version and many publications are digital only.

So we wanted to acknowledge this sort of evolution of science journalism and journalism itself in that sense.

And there's other things in it that we didn't have before that are important to me.

There is more about science and social justice, right?

I would say earlier in the century, I don't think science writers thought so much as we do now about the way that science policies and science can affect all kinds of issues in environmental, scientific, and social justice.

So we wanted to address that.

We wanted to make people think about ethics.

We wanted to make them think about how we tell stories today.

So we wanted to talk about promotion, right?

I would say 20 years ago or so, journalists were less encouraged to be talking about themselves constantly or being public presences.

Today, that's not true.

So you'll see that addressed.

And I think the final thing is we added in a section on international science journalism in the sense that, and maybe this is a sort of personal thing for me.

I've been involved with trying to raise the bar for science journalism around the world and try to get us science journalists to think out of the U.S. bubble for a long time.

Right?

I've been involved with the World Federation of Science Journalists.

I've been involved in training program in a lot of countries in the global south, for instance.

I wanted to put something in there that said, guess what?

This is not, as the previous edition said, this is not just a U.S. thing.

We're connected around the world.

And I think more than that, long answer, sorry.

But a lot of science stories are global.

When we say global climate change, it, it actually means global, right?

And so I wanted to make sure that people thought about that.

All of those, I think, are important changes in the way we're doing it.

HEFFNER: Deborah, of course, is a tenured science journalist herself, award-winning author, a Pulitzer Prize winning, winning beat reporter on scientific matters, and has served as director of the Knight Science Journalism Program @MIT.

You make reference to what Americans can learn from the rest of the world.

It seems like Americans in the rest of the world now are unified in understanding the present threats of extreme weather.

2023 is the hottest year on record since humans started recording it.

And it also has been one filled with environmental disaster.

BLUM: Yes, it has.

I think one the things that we need to recognize, it's not just a facile thing to say, well, climate change is a global thing, right?

I think it's more important to recognize that the climate is changing in patterns around the planet that we don't fully understand.

There are places where we see extreme drought.

There are places where we see extreme water.

If you look at what just happened with the flooding in Libya, right?

I think it's important for us as journalists in every country to be able to connect those dots in a way that people who follow us, be it broadcast like you do so well here, but you, I'm a print reporter, so print for me or wordsmith.

It's important for readers and viewers and listeners to be given the information that allows them to connect those dots.

And I say that in part, I'm just thinking climate change right now, but the public has tended to have a simplistic view of it in which they think it's all global warming.

When in fact, what it really is, is a global shift in the patterns of climate.

And because the atmosphere, there's so much more heat in the atmosphere and in the oceans, we see these more extreme events around the planet.

So it's our job, I argue, sort of public communicators of science to take those different events, you know, extreme flooding, extreme drought, extreme heat in cases, extreme cold, and say, yes, this all fits into the same pattern.

This is a global event.

But climate change is just one example of that.

You could take COVID-19 was obviously a global event experienced differently for both political, environmental, and medical reasons in many different countries.

We need to be able to connect those dots.

Or, one more example, one of my fellows this year, so the Knight Science Journalism program that I direct, part of it is a fellowship program for working science journalists.

We have a journalist from Nigeria who's been really interested in plastic pollution in Africa, right?

I think, again, this is me saying U.S. bubble.

We think about plastic pollution, you see stories about plastics on beaches or plastics at the North Pole.

I think it's really important to look at that globally, right?

What does it really mean in every country, in every continent, and start sort of illustrating those global pictures in a way that reminds everyone that we are connected in this.

This is not a U.S. situation.

This is not a British situation.

This is not a Nigerian situation, a Chinese situation.

We are connected in dealing with these things.

I think not just science journalists, but all journalists need to address that.

HEFFNER: We're connected, and yet three years plus into COVID-19, there's still pandemonium, there's still incoherence, there's still disunity in perceptions of mask wearing and vax taking, making.

BLUM: Yes.

HEFFNER: And I think of it in the, in the context of World War II and the Marshall Plan and the beginning, if small semblance of a unified understanding of world order and civil society.

And is it the job of science journalists to get us there?

Because we're not there yet.

BLUM: I do not want to overstate the power and influence of journalism in my, as I look at something, if I'm going to take the anti-vax movement, if, if it was within my power in the journalism to correct the mixed misinformation about the public health importance of vaccines, if I as a journalist could pull that off, I mean, I'd be on it in a nanosecond and also probably in the running for a Nobel Prize.

I don't want to say that we can fix these misunderstandings, these politically-driven narratives that are not always flush with truth.

Right?

I do think that it' still a responsibility of someone who is a professional science communicator to try not just once, but many times to get the correct information out there.

And when I go out and I give lectures to science journalists, I gave a lecture for years on what did we learn from the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the things was a very basic, we learned the importance of repetition.

The people who were going to put out misinformation are going to put it out repeatedly.

And there has been a kind of ethic in journalism, well, I already did that.

I told that story, right?

That we have to get past, in this day and age, we have to be able to say, yes, I already have said that vaccines are really helpful.

Or I just had a conversation with someone sadly, that I'm related to, in which she said could vaccines, you know, drive COVID symptoms?

I'm like, you're talking about an mRNA vaccine, that is not the virus, right?

That is a replication of a spike protein.

There is nothing about that vaccine that would give you COVID, right?

Because there's no whole virus involved with it.

So that kind of misinformation is out there, even among educated people, I would like to fix it and, and I recognize that I need to say, no, that's wrong in as many ways as I can over and over again.

And to do it in a way, and I think this is really important in which I'm not waving my finger or waving my hands as I tend to do.

And, and just said, oh, you're wrong.

Right?

I, it's important for journalists to say, yes, you said that before, but how could you say it again in a different way?

How could you create a different story, a different perspective, a different way of illuminating that issue so that you're at least attempting to get that information out there in new and fresh ways?

And that whether it fixes anything or not, I think is absolutely a responsibility of science journalists like myself.

HEFFNER: My question to you, is there a feeling at all that we are overexposed in investigations?

The, the plight of citizen journalism in the new tech age that you referenced from the outset is that any citizen journalist can be capable of sharing something that will go viral, even if it has no integrity or substantiation.

And to my further point about the multiplicity of investigations, it's often said there's a local news shortage, which I believe.

It's also often said that there's an investigative news shortage, which I don't believe.

I think we struggle with our capacity to deal with the myriad multiplicity of investigations that are exposed each and every second, each and every day, many of which are fact-based.

So I wonder where you come out on both of those things, the question of the future of investigative science journalism and the capacity of the public to deal with the onslaught around them.

BLUM: Yeah, those are great questions.

You probably saw, I think all of us are concerned about the erosion of local news.

We give an award, specifically in my program, give an award that is only for science reporting at the local and regional level because I came up in regional newspapers.

I think that's so important.

And you probably saw that MacArthur and a number of other foundations, including Knight, are collaborating on $500 million to support local news and to try to keep it alive.

And I think we're seeing a recognition that if we don't have local news, we don't have the watchdogs that support democracy at the state, local, and regional level.

And that's absolutely critical.

And if we don't have local news, then we have news deserts in which there are people in vast swats.

Now I'm just going to stick in the U.S., vast west of the country, mostly rural, who are not really getting vetted scientific information.

The toolkit they need to navigate is usually how I think of what we do.

So are we inundated with bad news investigations, some of which are citizen journalism?

I'm going to "air quote" this exposes of wrongdoing by government or local officials.

Yeah, there's a lot of it.

And the internet is like the world's greatest amplifier of information.

So you can sometimes feel that you're drowning in this sea of missteps and bad actors and mistakes, right?

Because we're humans, we make mistakes, we're imperfect.

Not all of us are good, right?

All of the above, right?

I think it's really important in a situation like that to be very careful about who you listen to and the sources that you consider.

This gets thrown around a lot like a trusted source, a trustworthy source.

But I think it's really important to allow yourself to limit the number of sources that you consider really well vetted information, right?

Just, there's no way to listen to this cacophony.

You have to deliberately pick the ones that you think have some credibility.

And I'm going to add a corollary to that, which is that you have to deliberately pick more than one.

In the same way that I never believe a single study, I'm a science journalist.

One study is a data point.

It's not an endpoint, right?

So when I see science reporting that is only one study in a declarative sense, I either want to throw something or hide.

But the fact of the matter is, you should never say, I'm only picking this single news source either, or I'm only picking news sources from this end of the political spectrum.

We're all better served if we pick, I have no idea what the magic number is no more than 10 sources, right?

And make sure you include a couple in them that are not necessarily the ones that you're politically-friendly group tends to agree with you or that reinforces you.

It's good to step out of, like I said, the U.S. bubble, your bubble.

And finally investigative reporting and science journalism.

So I should tell you that one of the reasons that Katherine [Eban] is in Tactical Guide is not only because I'm a huge admirer of her work.

We met years ago at an American Society of journalists and authors meeting, and we've stayed friends since, but we're friends.

And so I really leaned on that together.

You'll see people that I leaned on because I have personal relationships with them and thought that I could get them to come into the book.

And Katherine is one of them.

And she, I moderated a panel going back to COVID on COVID origins for the National Association of Science Writers.

And she was one of the people that was on that panel along with people for other publications who don't agree with her origin work.

And I want to say two things about that.

Katherine says, and I happen to agree with her that we're sometimes thin in investigative reporting and science journalism, right?

A lot of people go into science journalism because they really love science.

They were scientists.

There are a lot of science journalists who started out as science majors and machinery of science didn't work for them, but they wanted to stay in it.

And they became science journalists or science communicators.

So you have a kind of tendency in the field to want to support science, and that can get in the way sometimes of good investigative reporting.

And I'm opposed to that.

I think that science journalism should be just as investigative as any other form of journalism, right?

I think that in part because as I said I came up through newspapers.

I was a police reporter, I was a court reporter, I was a city hall reporter.

So my background is to really say, okay, the official version is only one version of the truth, right?

HEFFNER: That's the scientific method, Deborah.

BLUM: Yes.

Thank you.

HEFFNER: That's the journalistic method.

BLUM: We should not be cheerleaders for science.

So do I think we need more investigative science journalists?

Yes.

Are people like Catherine who investigates science to me, valuable additions to the story of science?

Yes.

Does she some this important issues not only in the questions of the origin of COVID, but how we've reported on the coverage of COVID origins.

Absolutely.

She's dead on on some of those issues in terms of saying, can we cast a more critical eye on this?

I think in that particular sense, she and I totally agree on that point.

HEFFNER: Right.

And if she's stimulating the curiosity of people about an knowable answer, then that is part of the journalistic method as much as the scientific method.

And it's a difficult conundrum because we don't know if it is knowable or unknowable.

But I will tell you something, Deborah, that is knowable in the digital ecosystem.

So since we first started dialoguing online, Deborah, Twitter has been taken over by Elon Musk, and it's now called X.

And the most prevalent content over these past weeks and months has been 9/11 Truthers' conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers, and anti-maskers.

That seems to be most prevalent, most trending.

I don't know if he tapped a button or changed the algorithm to shift it.

And that was true of YouTube at some points.

It's certainly not feeding the Google algorithm when you search most terms.

But what are science journalists or newsroom editors to do about this, understanding that the ecosystem is often parasitic.

BLUM: That's a good description.

HEFFNER: It's corruptible and subject to manipulation.

And we, we are in a shifting paradigm now where you might've said in 2016 or 2017 focus on Twitter.

Now folks are going back to Instagram or Facebook, possibly, or to Threads, the new property within the Alphabet system.

But when you think of measuring success, if success is literacy and even some stimulation of curiosity and persuasion and civil discourse, don't know that we're at a different juncture than 2016.

We might even be worse off than we were in 2016.

BLUM: That's a depressing thought.

Well, social media is definitely a swamp right now and a complicated one.

I've been on Twitter for years.

It was never necessarily the most civil of discourses on Twitter, right?

Ever.

Right?

And I think it's gotten, that's become worse under Elon Musk, and I think, X or Twitter or whatever we're going call it at the moment.

I wonder about the algorithms too.

And it's been interesting to me.

I will say this to, to be on Twitter.

I'm still on Twitter.

I'm on Threads.

I'm on Blue Sky.

I'm starting to like, although it's still in beta, Blue Sky a little more, I, I mean, it's just interesting to me because when I'm on Blue Sky there's a lot of scientists that are moving away from Twitter and that's who I follow for the most part, scientists and science journalists.

So I'm seeing more interesting conversations on Blue Sky than when it first started.

You probably saw the story about Meta limiting searches on vaccines on Threads, right?

I went, okay, that's not going to work for me.

Right?

I don't need whoever the social media guy- HEFFNER: Self-censorship of controversial topics to keep it free of that controversy.

BLUM: I think we have to allow some controversy in some discussion acknowledging that sometimes that goes south, right?

I mean, there's lots of name calling threats, right?

You can't be a woman on social media, for instance, and not have to occasionally block with enthusiasm, right?

HEFFNER: We only have a few minutes left, if I may, I don't want to interrupt, but I have one more question.

BLUM: Sure.

HEFFNER: In 2016, James Hansen appeared on The Open Mind, and of course, he is considered the scientific godfather or whatever you might call him, of climate science who was a NASA whistleblower and said basically to the Bush administration, this is happening, and got the ax, and has been active at Columbia and elsewhere, with that message.

The question is this is climate and the extreme weather circumstances, symptoms of climate, the most important area we ought to focus on relating the journalism to the people experiencing the threat.

Because I specifically asked James Hansen in 2016, are you resonating with your need of Iowans?

He's from Iowa?

Is climate science, does it matter to them?

And are they experiencing it?

And so, do you think that how the American population is thinking about climate science has changed since 2016?

BLUM: I do.

I mean, I think more people are experiencing climate-related events.

And I see the news media doing something that used to be used as the model of people started wearing seat belts because in every news story, the reporter would say, so and so died, they weren't wearing a seatbelt, so and so survived.

They were more and more in just basic news stories.

You see people saying, dah, dah, dah, dah, flawed wildfire, drought, this heat, climate change.

Right?

Those dots are being connected all the time.

And I think you see that what I don't know that we've accomplished, is enough of a political force from the American public to actually come up with reasonable, productive regulations that will actually turn this around.

And beyond that, I don't know how we shift the approach of industry and government toward fossil fuels.

Biden has done some, but other states have not.

So I feel like we both are getting smarter.

We're getting more aware, but we haven't figured out yet the effective means to shift the way we address these issues.

And we need to.

HEFFNER: In the one minute we have left, the most important we think a science journalist can do when a, when a native population, when a local constituency says, we've always had extreme hurricanes, we've always had extreme drought, we've always had extreme wildfire, we've always had extreme mudslides.

BLUM: Is to provide the evidence for why this isn't an always right.

Why this doesn't fit into the historical pattern, which it does not.

The most important thing we can do at this point with what I think of as resistant populations is provide the evidence in a compelling and engaging and non-condescending that we are at a different place.

And that the future of the planet not to be over alarmist or catastrophist about it, but the future of the planet is really at stake.

HEFFNER: Deborah Blum, co-author of this most important volume of science essays, A Tactical Guide to Science Journalism, Lessons from the Front Lines.

Read Deborah's essay, read Katherine's essay, read them all by Oxford University Press, and continued best wishes for all the important work you're doing at the MIT Science Project.

Deborah, an honor to be with you today.

Thank you for your time.

BLUM: Thank you.

It's been an absolute pleasure.

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