Science vs. Sensationalism: How the Media Distorts Discoveries for Profit 

We’ve all heard them. The grandiose scientific research or discovery plastered across the media. You know, the ones distorted and presented at the next species-saving miracle.  

 

Most frequently, these claims in the press tend to be false, and while they do stem from some amount of truth, they are generally not the world-changing discoveries that they claim to be. If that’s the case, how can we know when a scientific article in the news is telling the truth? Or, alarmingly, telling lies? How can we find truth amongst a sea of misinformation? 

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To understand why journalists deliberately print misinformation, we must first understand their motives. The human brain is not wired to truly grasp the implications of probability. For example, if a coin toss lands heads five times in a row, surely the next result must be tails. The fact we don’t intuitively comprehend probability leaves us vulnerable when listening to statistical data.  

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This can lead to a plethora of poor decisions. The poor decision concerning this article is the one in choosing to believe something based on superstition or personal desires over evidence. People choose to believe what their aunt Matilda or the conspiracy theorists have to say about the world instead of what they are being told by established institutions because they would rather believe what they want to hear. The concept of confirmation bias in psychology states that if you truly want something to be right, you will always find evidence for it that you believe to be valid, even if it isn't.  

 

Believing the more sensational account may be more exciting than the version told in their school classroom. As Boyo Ockinga put it when writing about forged Egyptian hieroglyphs found in Australia: "People just don't want to believe they are fake; they want this connection with ancient Egypt to be true, but unfortunately it's not".  The press today is inclined to publish content that will actually sell, not always content which is true. It is always sensationalized information that spreads much faster than the facts. This reflects our confirmation bias, we would rather believe the ‘froth’, the sensation, over the facts. 

The result of this sensationalization of information makes it so that the average person is constantly hearing misinformation over and over again, and in this way, people actually begin to believe the scientific "facts" that the press and social media promote. This is a form of scientific propaganda which actively tries to make people believe in the misinformation these organizations spread in exchange for a subscription to the magazine, newsletter, YouTube channel, etc. that these organizations own so they can make a profit. In essence, they attempt to brainwash you to increase their ever-expanding hoard of people which allows them to make a profit. The information being spread in such a way, while clearly not an objective truth, can still be treated as a kind of truth.  

 

Neil DeGrasse Tyson in his book Starry Messenger broke down the concept of truth into three categories, the first of which is objective truths. Objective truths are what most people understand to be true: That which remains the same and in accordance to our reality, the observed laws of the universe, not matter what. Objective truths are the kind which science exists to discover. It is the objective truths that govern our place in and relationship to, everything else in the universe.  

 

The second type of truth he describes is personal truths, these are something which remains true to you no matter what. Things such as religion or personal beliefs can fit into this category. So long as you believe something that you never doubt and which does not stem from an objective truth, you have yourself a personal truth.  

 

The last type mentioned are political truths, these are truths which are imposed by the government, if the government says something is a certain way, then that becomes a political truth. This type of truth became prevalent during pretty much every dictatorship, ranging from Nazi Germany under Hitler to the Soviet Union under Stalin. A very vivid illustration of this concept can also be found in the state presented in 1984 by George Orwell. 

 

One of the final reasons as to why the media reports scientific studies whose results end up being false, is the tendency to shortcut their way to sensational headlines by presenting findings as facts. Anyone familiar with the scientific method would know that initial results are not considered gospel.  

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Indeed, once we have a complete study which suggests something is the way that it is, with a series of results to back it up, the study must now be repeated to check if the same results persist. This is how we find the truth, objective truths. Most of the time, these studies are repeated in labs all over the world, if we then still get the same results across all the labs despite them being all over the world, then we can be fairly certain that the scientific theory which predicted those results has some degree of truth to it. Once you have results that agree with each other, then you can say you have an objective truth.  

 

For something to become certain in this way, however, it might take years before anything can be proven, hardly a time span the media is willing to wait for. Almost always, by the time anything is proven for certain, all of the excitement it carried with it as a new thing is gone in the eyes of the general public. If the press were to write about it, years later, then few people would buy their content. The incentive the press has to write about things which will engage with the public ensures they can't afford to write about an actual scientific discovery. That is, a discover set in stone and not on the unstable, bleeding edge of science. 

 

   Science is about finding the objective truths in our universe, but to do this, it must follow a rigorous process. This is, after all, the only way we can make sure that we are not making mistakes. Science has been wrong before, and as such, we must make everything in our power to find truth as best we can. This does not sit well with general audiences who are looking for ever more exiting content to consume, hence, organizations which provide information to the masses are generally not interested in the slow passed process of the scientific way of doing things. The price for a working framework of reality is high, it always has been. We must, therefore, make sacrifices as a species to obtain it - sacrifices which the press doesn't seem very keen on doing.