Dan Fagin

From 1991 to 2005, Dan Fagin was the environment writer at Newsday in New York. His most recent awards include the 2003 AAAS Science Journalism Award and NASW Science-in-Society Award, for a series about cancer epidemiology. At Newsday, Fagin was a principal member of two reporting teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize: in 1994 for stories about pesticides and breast cancer risk and in 2004 for coverage of the causes of the Northeastern blackout. A 1985 graduate of Dartmouth, he is the co-author of the book Toxic Deception and a past president of the 1,400-member Society of Environmental Journalists. In fall 2005 he became associate professor of journalism at New York University and the associate director of the Science and Environmental Reporting Program at NYU.

Article
Nieman Reports
published November 1, 2005

Science and Journalism Fail to Connect

How can we expect Americans to know anything beyond what they happen to remember from science class? Journalists certainly don't tell them.

Evolution is “only a theory.” Global warming is “unproven.” And science itself is “just another opinion.”

Critics of mainstream science seem to be everywhere these days, and we, as journalists, just can’t seem to get enough of them. It’s just about impossible to pick up a newspaper or watch CNN for an hour without being confronted by someone attacking ideas that most scientists think are so settled that they aren’t even worth discussing any more. Meanwhile, the topics that many scientists are working on—the almost daily advances in nanotechnology and genetics, to pick just two—are largely absent from mass-market media coverage. What’s going on?

Nearly 50 years ago, the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow published his famous “two cultures” essay, which deplores the widening gulf between scientists and their intellectual counterparts in the arts. If Snow was alive today, I think he might have extended his argument to apply to the chasm that now exists between science and just about everyone else in society, including journalists.

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