It occurs to me that I don't have a good list of these, so I invite you all to list and name your favourite science journalism narratives. You know, the sorts of things that journalists must squeeze every science story into, no matter what the actual content. Journalists in general have at best a few dozen of these pigeonholes into which to force every "news" story, and science is no exception. I'll start off with three of my favourites:
Frankenscience: scientists have done something that is going to cause the end of the world, major cancer, or they Meddled With Things Man Was Not Meant To Meddle With.
Imminent Breakthrough: scientists are about to cure cancer/Alzheimers/diabetes, or solve the Meaning Of The Universe. A friend once said in my hearing "Science magazines ought to have a mandatory sticker on the cover saying "Warning! Scientific Breakthroughs are Farther Away Than They Appear!"
Geewhizzery: Scientists have discovered something really cool. We can't tell you exactly why it is cool as that would entail explaining something, but we can amaze and astound you with cute graphics and art. [For video journalism, cute animations and stock footage.]
Add yours in the comments.
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How about This Changes Everything: scientists have made a breakthrough that completely changes everything we thought we knew about [insert field of science]!
"The Tin Men" by Michael Frayn is about this topic.
They said I was mad!
One lone genius, fighting against ridicule and contempt from plodding mainstream science, discovers a world-shaking breakthrough.
One of my favourite examples of this wasn't even from a journalist, but from a certain Nobel-Prize winner. He claimed that he had driven ahead on his prize-winning work despite the ridicule, hinderance and contempt from mainstream. The head of the NIH at the time pointed out that they had, in fact, generously funded his work from the beginning, and the prize-winner said that Oh, sure, but someone on a panel had said one something in a review that was a little bit negative about his proposal at one point, so he stood by his claim.
It's a total coincidence!
I've just been reading Chapter 11 of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, which is about precisely this. He has the same classification, but calls the categories the wacky stories, the breakthrough stories and the scare stories.
His central thesis is that it's all he fault of humanities graduates.
Ian, that's the Myth of the Oppressed Underdog.
Bob, it's also the fault of politics majors. And economists. And psychology students. And Hollywood...
How about: 1) there's no cause for alarm; 2) we're all gonna die screaming; 3) we'll have the answer for you any day now. . . . These are the three narratives of risk analysis. The first two narratives never correspond to reality (events are either worse than we believe, or nowhere near as hazardous). The third is ever so common - risk analyses typically are unable to produce usable results in a timely manner; the corresponding problem being that most decision makers and members of the public have so little understanding of risk that no amount of tinkering or massaging can make a risk analysis comprehensible to them.
The Smoking Gun "At long last, scientists have found the smoking gun proving ..." One of my favorite in this class is Black Holes, which have occasioned enough smoking guns since the first such article I read (in the early 1970s) to equip a small army.
The Missing Link "This newly discovered fossil finally supplies the missing link between ..."
I think the most pervasive is the 'this changes everything'. Smoking guns seem next most common.
Paradigm Shift as in this newly published report overthrows the existing paradigm (e.g., Central Dogma, Evolutionary Theory, definition of a gene etc. etc.)
A variant on Geewhiz and This changes everything! -- This is harsh, depressing and politically incorrect therefore it must be true (often seen in the penumbra of the intersection between the shallower sorts of evo-psych and politics).
The 'There must be a gene for X' story because identical twins are more likely to have X in common than other siblings.
The Alternative Explanation
For political correctness the journalist digs up some maverick scientist who has his/her own pet hypothesis. Especially favoured by denialists.
On rare occasions you'll also see the "This is so exciting! No, really!" Which means: There's something new about to happen in the world of science that's so big we can't ignore it, but neither can we explain what it's really about. However, we have several scientists on record, saying dutifully that this is really exciting, and so that will be our story.
The other day as the LHC was turned on I was very irritated by the BBC reporters who kept saying that this was the biggest scientific experiment of the 21st century. Given the fact that we still have more than 90 years of the 21st century to go I found this claim somewhat premature.
I will also second Larry on Paradigm Shift.
You will get cancer if you eat X / use gadget Y/
work with Z
Someone does studies, giving cells in vitro or animals a very large dose of something and finds a few cells are altered somehow. Journalists inevitably report this as "X will give you cancer".
By the way, you may have heard Dorothy Sayers quip that "Everything good in life is either illegal, immoral or fattening". My father contends that had she written this today, she would have added "or gives cancer to laboratory rats".
Biggest, Smallest, Strongest, Fastest; whatever it is, is the X-est example ever discovered (plus or minus a confidence interval of n, which actually means its within the expected possible range of...)
'Woman does something in science' story (but only if said woman is young, cute, and willing to be photographed so her boobs look big in this...)
Reminds me of this Onion article.
@Thinker: Are you sure that was Dorothy Sayers? Sounds more like Parker to me. Not that Sayers didn't know her immorality; her essay on "The Other Six Deadly Sins" is still worth reading.
Anyway, this may not qualify as a full Narrative, but out of respect to the Annals of Improbable Research we should include the Holy Grail. Watch for it in the news. You'll see that every day scientists are finding The Holy Grail of Somethingorother. Truly grails can get tedious after a while.
I'm not quite sure how to categorize it, but many journalists have a penchant for using Edenic imagery in articles dealing with human evolution. Nowhere was this more marked than with the papers about "African Eve" from the 1990's.
How about the child prodigy. That is, the obsession with analyzing the childhood of successful scientists looking for signs of early brilliance.
The absent-minded professor concept is similar. Back your car through the garage door in front of your neighbour and you're an idiot. Do the same thing in front of a science journalist and it's proof that you are a brilliant scientist. At least if you are already a brilliant scientist to begin with.
"Scientists are baffled..."
It's always "baffled." Never intrigued or puzzled. Journalists are only allowed to use "baffled" when something is unexpected or unexplained.
The one that got me into blogging was "Discovery of X shows scientists were wrong about ." I wanted to correct the caricature.
Sorry, I used angle brackets to indicate a variable. Try again:
I saw one on MSNBC today:
It's definitely not as big an experiment as global warming.
You should/shouldn't eat this individual food item. The reason media reports dealing with nutritional science make it look like "scientists can't make up their mind" is that they try to force research results into answers to an essentially religious/philosophical question.
Scientists are astounded that some traditional healer's remedy (leeches anyone?) actually works.
I believe the most basic and common narrative is "This causes that". Every science article I can remember has been constructed around this narrative, no matter how vague the correlation or how complicated the issue. Sometimes you'll see a scientist quoted way down on the page, saying that it's far too early in the day to conclude about cause and effect. But the headline will still say Too much sleep causes premature death.
A subset of the wacky story: the equation for X story.
"Scientists have discovered an equation for love/depression/drinking tea/liking cake/wrestling/fashion/etc."
(Unpublished story + journalistic sensationalism)*inanity = FAIL
One that concerns mathematicians has to do with the fact that most people have no idea what pure mathematicians do and couldn't name an important living mathematician if their lives depended on it. The ignorance of the discipline and its propagators lead the press to automatically label any mathematician whose head appears above the ramparts for more than two minutes the "greatest", "most brilliant", ... mathematician in the world, of the century, living... For examples see Andrew Wiles (Fermat Last Theorem) or John Nash (Beautiful Mind). A personal pet peeve is that in every popular article about Nash they always write, "he invented game theory"! No he bloody didn't!
The Alternative Explanation
For political correctness the journalist digs up some maverick scientist who has his/her own pet hypothesis. Especially favoured by denialists.
Posted by: Lassi Hippel�inen
To elaborate on this one, it's important to note the unsupported alternative in which a tiny percentage of scientists are actually in the maverick opinion category, (Behe's "irreducible complexity", for example), must always be presented as if scientists were actually divided in roughly equal proportions. 'Controversy' is the classic news pigeonhole into which as many things as possible are jammed into regardless of fit.
to me one of the most amusing/irritating aspects of science journalism is the use of the words "precise" or "precisely" to imply that a particular discovery brings scientists within a whisker of totally understanding some huge phenomenon, when in fact the data presented only suggest that the discovery may possibly be relevant to that phenomenon. often used these days in relation to biochemical or genetic explanations for mental or neurological illnesses: "scientists today reported that adding a dopamine antagonist to a culture of neurons from the frog hippocampus caused them to fire much more slowly, although they still can't explain precisely how such chemicals might cause alzheimer's disease."