Sam Poppe
This is a translation of an opinion that I wrote for the July 2022 issue 3/430 of SKEPP's Flemish magazine "Wonder en is gheen wonder" as a result of my participation in a panel discussion after the screening of the docu "Science Friction" at the Leuven documentary film festival DOCVILLE in March 2022. See www.skepp.be for more information about the magazine and the organisation.
Why do journalists talk to scientists? Why do scientists feel the need to talk to journalists? By bringing in scientific experts, a news item can be given meaning based on the knowledge that scientists have gathered about their specific field of expertise. A journalist, even a self-proclaimed science journalist, can never be aware of all the latest publications in every scientific subject. By tapping into a directory of experts at the right time, the journalist can therefore gain direct and efficient access to their accumulated knowledge. The journalist's ultimate goal is to put complex events in our world into perspective and to give the reader, viewer or listener more insight into the world and society. In return, the scientist theirself gets visibility for their research and a chance to put the social relevance of the newly acquired knowledge, sometimes abstract and far removed from our thoughts, into a framework. It is ultimately "with our tax money" that this same scientist was allowed to make their passion their job. Together against "fake news". The public is correctly informed from the start.
It all seems logical, self-explanatory, this synergy, but it often goes wrong, this relationship between expert and journalist. We often enough hear from experts who, the day after publication in the press, complain about incomplete or even downright incorrect quotes, short clips from interviews taken out of context, etc. Just ask Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst. Of course, this phenomenon is not limited to scientists. Politicians certainly have pithy anecdotes to tell, not to mention the relationship between private individuals and certain magazines, such as Dag Allemaal in Belgium or tabloids such as The Sun in the UK.
"We often hear from experts who, the day after publication in the press, complain about incomplete or even downright incorrect quotes, images of interviews taken out of context, etc. Just ask Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst."
What happens in our compact, national media ecosystem in Belgium happens in a much more spectacular and disturbing way in the sensationalised, purely profit-driven media in the United Kingdom, or in the superlative, in the United States. Earlier this year, the documentary film festival DOCVILLE in Leuven, Belgium, screened the production "Science Friction" by the Los Angeles-based independent production company Skeptoid Media (https://sciencefriction.tv/). The documentary, meanwhile available in several countries on all kinds of streaming services, lets scientists testify about negative experiences with journalists and media productions, which vary from innocent misquotes to complete destruction of promising scientific careers. As a biologist specialising in sharks, imagine to find yourself presented as a 'Voodoo shark' believer, or as a climatologist, imagine to find yourself presented as a born climate crisis sceptic through more than creative cut-and-paste work. This contribution highlights how I myself ended up in the above-mentioned docu and offers my personal experiences as a budding expert volcanologist to highlight the shortcomings in the scicom (science communication) ecosystem in Belgium.
Informing people correctly
In 2012, I graduated as Master of Geology at Ghent University and started as a young researcher at the department of Geography at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. My research focused (in 2022 still) on how magma and gravity deform the surface in volcanic areas and generate earthquakes, and how we can best interpret those deformations and seismicity to make ultimately more accurate volcanic eruption forecasts. I focused on my research work, fieldwork in Central Africa, and presenting at scientific conferences. Whenever a volcanic eruption happened somewhere, I could get irritated by word choices in the Flemish media to describe the phenomena (no, a volcano does not 'smoke', but more on that later), or by the fact that the opinion of fellow earth scientists whose field of expertise has nothing to do with active volcanism was asked. A frustration shared by many a degree-awarded volcano scientist globally.
In 2014, a series of earthquakes and ground deformations around the Bárðarbunga volcano under the Vatnajökull icecap in Iceland led to the Holuhraun eruption, first with a small volume of lava flows. After the 2010 eruption of that volcano, which makes every eloquent TV journalist shiver, but to Icelanders and volcanologists is simply called Eyjafjallajökull (pronounce [ei-ja-fjat-la-jeu-kutl]), the interest of the Flemish press was understandable. Will an ash cloud drift towards continental Europe, just like in 2010, bringing air traffic to a standstill again? Because of the composition of the lava and the location of the eruption far from the icecap, volcanologists estimated the risk of explosive ash formation to be much smaller than in 2010. So we sent out a press release through the press service of the VUB, which was picked up and led to several phone calls from the written press and radio. Sometimes quotes were used, sometimes the journalist wanted to check with me whether their piece for the radio news about the confluence of tectonics and volcanism in Iceland was factually correct. Fact-checking before that word really came into vogue. My mobile number and e-mail address ended up in the address books of a few journalists, and I myself had acquired a taste for using my collected knowledge and fascination for volcanoes to inform others correctly. I began to immerse myself more in the world of science communication, reading a blog here and there. Because at that time I was the only purely Dutch mother-tongue volcanologist working at a Flemish university, journalists soon came to me whenever a volcano somewhere in the world was making life difficult for people.
However, not all experiences were equally positive and motivating. There was the time pressure. When a journalist calls you, it is here and now. Question: "When is your piece for?". Answer: "For this afternoon, around 15-16 hours we prefer to put it online." Or again: Question: "It's now 4pm, when do you need that interview for?". Answer: "It's for the 7pm news tonight, if we find a camera crew available we'll be in your office in 20-30 minutes." It takes some getting used to, you have to learn to deal with it, with the incredibly tight deadlines. As scientists, we are trained to think in terms of publication deadlines of months, and projects of years. The result is obvious. There is no time to call the journalist two hours after the interview to perhaps adjust something or omit something from the recording. By that time, your proud grandmother has long seen her grandson's full 30-second interview in full primetime news. Or, when reading the online article, you may not be too happy about the quotes used, or the incomplete background information that can distort your understanding of the mechanisms behind an eruption.
"Some exaggeration is allowed"
And this is how we end up with the passage I myself speak of in Science Friction. During the summer of 2016, an unusually large number of earthquakes took place under the Hekla volcano in Iceland, an unusually explosive specimen, we know from the thick ash packets surrounding the volcano. An Icelandic professor had given a rather alarmist interview to the Icelandic press (or was it an incomplete quote taken out of context?). A journalist from a Flemish newspaper called me up and asked the question, so loathed among volcanologists, "Come on, you have to be able to answer me, or guess, when will the eruption occur?". While the location and likelihood of an eruption can be forecasted with ever increasing accuracy, the exact timing remains difficult to forecast, let alone determine, especially for a PhD student in Belgium who is not involved in monitoring and data collection on the volcano in question. So, from my scientifically nuanced perspective, I strategically replied, "We don't know. This could be for tomorrow, next week, next month, next year." The headline the next day read, "We cannot rule out that the eruption is not for tomorrow."
Great. Any self-respecting fellow volcanologist, of course, would immediately reach their boiling point and wonder why it is necessary to create panic just to get some attention. For example, during the musical interruption of a radio interview in the studio, a producer advised me that I should make my words about fascinating volcanoes and their violent eruptions bigger, a bit more spectacular, to keep the listener's attention. "A little exaggeration is allowed."
This sensation-seeking goal is at odds with that of a passionate science communicator. We aim to nuance. Putting things into perspective. Trying to include the aspect of probability, of chance, in an answer. Ultimately, an important goal of scicom is to make sense of the earthly things in life, and to make the importance of advancing insight clear. Because that is what science is all about. What we accept today can and may be overturned tomorrow by new robust and empirical scientific evidence.
"This sensation-seeking goal is at odds with that of a passionate science communicator. We aim to nuance. To put things into perspective. To try to include the aspect of probabilities, of chance, in an answer."
Trial-and-error
These experiences taught me that it is necessary to pause after a question, to put myself in the journalist's shoes, and to formulate my answer in such a way that it becomes impossible to get me to say the opposite via quotes. Because, yes, there are also those penny-pinching journalists with bad intentions, just as there are scientists who enjoy blowing their findings out of proportion, or deliberately spreading panic, in order to be able to wave the many mentions in the media at their next project application. It comes from both sides, good and bad.
Fortunately, in our Flemish media landscape, things are much more moderate than in the UK or the US, where, as Science Friction shows, scientists are under strong pressure from journalists to play a role where the outcome of a production is already determined in advance, and the words of the scientist are twisted, if necessary, to support that goal. The careers of otherwise respected scientists are being played with, often resulting in irreparable damage. As a scientist, it is best to be well prepared.
And that is precisely where the problem lies. Young scientists are not structurally trained to communicate in a scientifically responsible, yet captivating, concise, direct and unsubtle way to a broad public. We have to rely on trial and error and on sharing experiences with fellow communicators. Because, to be perfectly clear, because of all the known problems, many colleagues are all too happy to stay aloof from the public debate, leaving one of the roles that society expects of us unfulfilled. Besides attending some workshops here and there, I learned the most from speaking with fellow volcanologists active within a very international community known as #volcanotwitter on social media. And that's how I came into contact with the international role model in our field, Dr. Janine Krippner, who has been a pioneer in the field for more than a decade. She in turn introduced me to "Science Friction". When she was a New Zealand volcanologist in the US, translating some Indonesian tweets into English and providing interpretation during the 2017 eruption of the Agung volcano in Bali, she was catapulted overnight from obscure PhD student with a few hundred Twitter followers to an expert with a verified account with over thirty thousand (!) followers. She was suddenly in demand by international media as the number one volcanologist expert and has since conducted hundreds of interviews on volcanoes and their impact on people.
"Fortunately, in our Flemish media landscape things are much more moderate than in the UK or the US, where, as Science Friction shows, scientists are subject to strong pressure from journalists."
Structural fight against misinformation
The often incorrect use of jargon around volcanic eruptions really matters. During the Agung eruption, the term "cold lava flow" quickly replaced the volcanological term "lahar". Lahars, however, are often still hot mixtures of rainwater and volcanic ash that flow down volcanic slopes at high velocities, often when an eruption coincides with the tropical rainy season. As a result, tourists have felt a false sense of security, diving headlong into valleys and posting videos online of muddy streams around the volcano. The only life-saving advice is to go to higher ground because these mud streams can suddenly turn into a swirling wall of mud, dragging everything and everyone down with them, and locals knów that. But foreign tourists first consult their own national press. Belgians first turn to VRT.be, De Standaard Online and so on. The information on those sites is then best short, unambiguous and correct. This is why I co-authored an article that Dr Krippner submitted last month to Frontiers in Earth Science, which briefly explains the most common erroneously used volcanological terms. Our target audience is both young volcanologists venturing into science communication or being drawn into it against their will, and journalists looking for a reliable source.
"Instead of separate workshops here and there, universities would do better to provide fixed training courses for students and scientists, which train in clear science communication."
Achieving that goal and preventing misinformation requires smooth and direct cooperation between journalists and scientists. But with the current trial-and-error approach, that effort has to start all over again and again. It can also be done differently. Instead of separate workshops here and there, universities would do better to provide permanent courses and training for students and scientists in clear science communication. Initiatives in Belgium such as The Floor is Yours (https://thefloorisyours.be), the science academy of the vzw Scimingo (https://scimingo.eu), the Flemish PhD cup already go a long way, and talking sessions between scientists and journalists around socially relevant themes really help to build that mutual understanding further. Scientists also need to understand the starting point of the scientific journalist better and help to bridge the gap. We also need more structural scientific research to understand whether our current communication approach really has the impact that science journalism has in mind.
Science Friction only lets - often disgruntled - scientists do the talking in order to address the short-circuit. I am waiting for part 2, in which we hear the journalists speak, or better still, joins both perspectives. In the meantime, my phone and inbox remains open for any self-respecting journalist to join me in unfolding the wonders of our fascinating world for all who wish to listen, read and watch.
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