I have received private comments on a post I made the other day about an immaculate conception in Vietnam. When I normally make a post about atheism or the truth that if there is a God, he’s not worth worshipping, I get unreasonable numbers of comments. Even though, apparently, society is getting more and more secular, those who are religious are getting more and more intolerant of their religion being mocked. So I must assume that because it was in a “Gav’s Brief Thoughts” box it was mostly missed.

Joy of Curmudgeonry has an excellent Fewtril up today which is a succinct answer to the question: X is amazing, how can it not be created by God? The truth is there might be a God, and there may not. You, my loyal and in some cases new, readers will have your own beliefs and while that doesn’t affect me I’ll let it pass. I am not an evangelist for non-theism.

But you’ll also know I am a strong believer in freedom of speech. I should be allowed, were I so insensitive, to stand on a street corner and proclaim my beliefs. I should be allowed, through the new media and old, to tell people what I think without fear of state-sponsored censure. I should expect, if I were to say unpopular things, to lose an election and I should expect people not to like me; but I must be allowed to say them.

I think most people would agree with that. But where does that line end? If I were to call a friend a name (whether it is true or not) I may expect to lose that friend. And if I call a stranger a name, I should expect them to be unhappy with that too. But if I criticise an opposition politician (whether intelligently and accurately or not) should the media get involved? Should the media investigate the item or should the media stick only to facts?

The news is unable, due to time constraints and competing stories, to give much more than the headlines of a particular story. If a complicated scientific report is released in Nature, Science or any other journal and if the broadcasters consider it interesting, then the equivalent of a headline will be given to the public (see also yesterday’s post).

Headlines or truth?

But how often does the public get the wrong idea from that? How many times has a broadcast implied that some scientific breakthrough is around the corner or that the result of a particular study was D when it was actually somewhere between A and G? It has been said many times before, and it will be said, I suspect, forever, that the media has responsibilities and that it does not manage them well.

I have an alternate suggestion:

Rather than reporting the headlines or trying to explain complex discoveries etc. in a too-short period, the news should just advise its readers/listeners/viewers that a new scientific paper has been released and explain to people how to get a hold of it. Spin in politics has created the mess that the UK and EU are in right now, and it could be argued that spin in science has misled many thousands of others. But there is a difference: Spin in politics affects everyone only because there is no alternative — I know very few people who care enough about politics to know enough to be educated in their opinions.

But it is orders of magnitude worse when we are talking about science; whether we are discussing evolution, global warming or SARs. The media must not mislead or even, if their intentions are pure, try and extrapolate.