PressEthic

Not to be incredibly dorky, but one of the places where “bias,” or rather incomplete one-sided reporting, runs most rampant is in newspapers’ science sections. I try to stay away from them to avoid my inevitable cringe, but then I’ll see a cool headline, like this Carl Simmer New York Times article, ”Down For the Count.”

The danger is obvious. New research is news, hence the newspaper coverage, but new research never stands alone. It always builds on past research, past understandings -- and it always has critics.

Whatever subject you can think of, whatever theories you can imagine. . . there’s a scientist somewhere studying it, publishing a paper about it, and reporters get drawn in like moths to a flame. New theories are seductive, but just because they are new does not mean they are right. . . in fact, the opposite is more likely.

Here is one comment from the Zimmer article on sleep that bothered me:

"One of the reasons we don't understand sleep is that we haven't taken this evolutionary perspective on it," Dr. Lima said.

I’m pretty sure that previous researchers have looked at sleep from an evolutionary perspective. Maybe not from the same specific perspective that Dr. Lima is currently researching, maybe they didn’t conduct the same experiments or try to disprove the same hypothesis, but Dr. Lima is certainly not the first scientist to look at sleep as an evolutionary adaptation. I don’t know who’s to blame for this comment, a researcher with a big ego or a quote taken out of context. I tend to think the latter.

Then I came to this section:

Scientists have offered a number of ideas about the primordial function of sleep. Dr. Tononi believes that it originally evolved as a way to allow neurons to recover from a hard day of learning. "When you're awake you learn all the time, whether you know it or not," he said.

Learning strengthens some connections between neurons, known as synapses, and even forms new synapses. These synapses demand a lot of extra energy, though. "That means that at the end of the day, you have a brain that costs you more energy," Dr. Tononi said. "That's where sleep would kick in."

The key phrase in these paragraphs is “Dr. Tononi believes.” No one really knows. There are numerous other theories, but Zimmer just gives us this one. Why? Because this is new research, not necessarily because it's the best.

I’m not saying that newspapers should stop trying to tackle complex scientific research and issues, but I do think that they could be a lot more “fair and balanced” in their coverage. Every point deserves a counterpoint and every advocate should be challenged by a critic. Nothing in science is absolute, and until science reporters become more diligent, responsible and knowledgeable they are just going to continue unintentionally misleading and misinforming the public.