On December 9 I beefed that the New York Times‘s science section, perhaps the only stand-alone science section left in a major newspaper, appeared to be going light on pure science and heavy on human health and welfare (global warming, etc.). Carl Zimmer, one of their crack reporters, made a comment to the effect that a single week’s survey might not be a statistically meaningful sample. He’s right, of course: I dissected just one week’s reportage and just gave my general impression on the way the paper seemed to be headed from reading it online.
Now we have a second data point, as I picked up the paper copy of yesterday’s Times (science day). And the results are still pretty dire, though of course still not statistically meaningful. (To get any idea about trends, you’d have to do this over weeks and years, and I don’t have the energy).
Here are the totals for the section, which includes two pages of the “Well” (health) section.
Total articles (big and small, and letters): 20
Articles related to human health and welfare: 14 (including one about Lucy Kalanithi, the widow of neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, who wrote a best-seller before dying at 37 from lung cancer).
Articles (big and small) unrelated to human health and welfare: 6 (includes one on fossil humans and two small letters to the editor).
Substantial articles (more than a few paragraphs): 11
Substantial articles unrelated to human health and welfare: 2.5 (two articles on conservation [one on turtles, the other on restoring ecosystems], and one line-column on the new chemical elements).
I still see this as a pretty lean section for pure science. 70% of all the pieces are on stuff relating to human welfare, and of the remaining 30% on “pure science”, one piece was on fossil humans and two were letters to the editor. Among substantial articles, 23% were on pure science.
Again, this is not a systematic survey, just a random assessment looking at the Tuesday science section when I manage to get one on paper. But really, just 30% of all pieces on pure science, and 23% of “big” pieces on pure science?
Maybe I just got unlucky, and Carl is right that I’m not characterizing the section accurately over time. Still, in the two weeks I’ve looked, pure science has been thin on the ground. I just can’t believe that both of those weeks were slow ones for nonhuman science! My working hypothesis is that the public is more interesting in things related to Homo sapiens than to other species, especially when it involves your health. And the NYT is following that interest rather than leading by publishing stuff on non-human pieces.
It’s been this way for a lot longer than just a couple of weeks. NIH was heavily (over) funded for a decade with respect to NSF and NASA, almost exclusively on the motivation that no science is better than the science that supports humans.
The semiconductor industry does great science but so much of it is proprietary you can hold it in your hand without knowing what it does.
For real science junkies, there are many other sources (not all without their misgivings):
http://phys.org
http://www.sciencemag.org/news
http://www.nature.com/news/
http://physics.aps.org
http://www.sciencedaily.com
and blogs
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy.html
and tons of videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/minuteearth
https://www.youtube.com/user/destinws2
https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey
If NYT science section cannot compete…it will be supplanted.
Not sure I agree with your comment about NIH. It did get a big boost in 2000-2008 while NSF and NASA did not, but (a) DOD R&D got an even bigger boost during the same time, which was not predominately human health-related science but more physics and engineering-related, (b) both bumps seem to correlate more with the Bush II presidency’s spending increases than anything else, and (c) NASA’s budget was flat during the Bush years but then dropped around 2008, another bit of evidence suggesting that these budgets had more to do with who was in the WH than with social valuation of physics vs. chemistry vs. biology. I’ll also point out that the NSF budget has been very slowly but steadily growing in terms of real dollars for the past 30+ years, though since it stands at 1/10 the combined budget of NIH and HHS, I would take it to be a fair criticism if you pointed out that this growth is negligible compared to what we spend on health science.
I’m citing the AAAS’ analysis of the federal R&D budget. See the link, pull up the data for “Total R&D by Agency, 1976-2016” about midway down the page, and graph it.
P.S., the “by function” data is also fairly interesting. It tells a similar story: a large rise in human health science spending during the Bush years, a lower but more steady increase across a longer time period for the other sciences. In this cut of the data, however, the Apollo and shuttle programs are blatantly obvious. Its also pretty clear from the numbers why the US is no longer the preeminent country in terms of human space exploration that it used to be. 🙁
It would be very interesting if a communications scholar took the time to tally up stories by these categories in the Science Times over its entire history to see if there has indeed been a significant shift (and perhaps also compare the data with data from Scientific American or other science publications). I honestly don’t know what that graph would look like.
It’s unquestionably true that people love to read about people, and every reporter has, at some point in their career, dealt with an editor who says, “This would be really interesting if there was a human angle to it.” I don’t know if that’s become more intense in recent years.
But I do want to reiterate that I’ve never had a story idea turned down by the Times for anthropocentric reasons. And with other reporters like Kenneth Chang reporting on exciting non-human stories like Planet 9, those of us who don’t think Homo sapiens is the be all and end all of the universe can still enjoy the Science Times.
I’ve never for a moment implied that the reporters themselves slanted the section that way. But I, for one, would enjoy the Times more if there was a higher proportion of non-human stories. Did somebody write about the zebra stripes yet?
How is this skewed ratio of funding different from the funding ratio for medical as opposed to other sciences?
I admit that some big hardware projects could be under-reported relative to the amount of dollars they command, but, especially in the chemical and biological sciences, “follow the money” would be a good strategy.
The human angle seems a natural for science reporters. I’m not sure the bias towards those articles is a policy at NYT. But I would appreciate more pure science. I do not need everything put in terms of how it related to me or humans in general.