The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [181]
There’s a great deal of pseudoscience for the gullible on TV, a fair amount of medicine and technology, but hardly any science, especially on the big commercial networks, whose executives tend to think that science programming means ratings declines and lost profits, and nothing else matters. There are network employees with the title ‘Science Correspondent’, and an occasional news feature said to be devoted to science. But we almost never hear any science from them, just medicine and technology. In all the networks, I doubt if there’s a single employee whose job it is to read each week’s issue of Nature or Science to see if anything newsworthy has been discovered. When the Nobel Prizes in science are announced each fall, there’s a superb news ‘hook’ for science: a chance to explain what the prizes were given for. But, almost always, all we hear is something like ‘... may one day lead to a cure for cancer. Today in Belgrade...’
How much science is there on the radio or television talk shows, or on those dreary Sunday morning programmes in which middle-aged white people sit around agreeing with each other? When is the last time you heard an intelligent comment on science by a President of the United States? Why in all America is there no TV drama that has as its hero someone devoted to figuring out how the Universe works? When a highly publicized murder trial has everyone casually mentioning DNA testing, where are the prime-time network specials devoted to nucleic acids and heredity? I can’t even recall seeing an accurate and comprehensible description on television of how television works.
By far the most effective means of raising interest in science is television. But this enormously powerful medium is doing close to nothing to convey the joys and methods of science, while its ‘mad scientist’ engine continues to huff and puff away.
In American polls in the early 1990s, two-thirds of all adults had no idea what the ‘information superhighway’ was; 42 per cent didn’t know where Japan is; and 38 per cent were ignorant of the term ‘holocaust’. But the proportion was in the high 90s who had heard of the Menendez, Bobbit and O.J. Simpson criminal cases; 99 per cent had heard that the singer Michael Jackson had allegedly sexually molested a boy. The United States may be the best-entertained nation on Earth, but a steep price is being paid.
Surveys in Canada and the United States in the same period show that television viewers wish there were more science programming. In North America, often there’s a good science programme in the ‘Nova’ series of the Public Broadcasting System, and occasionally on the Discovery or Learning Channels, or the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Bill Nye’s ‘The Science Guy’ programmes for young children on PBS are fast-paced, feature arresting graphics, range over many realms of science, and sometimes even illuminate the process of discovery. But the depth of public interest in science engrossingly and accurately presented - to say nothing of the immense good that would result from better public understanding of science - is not yet reflected in network programming.
How could we put more science on television? Here are some possibilities:
• The wonders and methods of science routinely presented on news and talk programmes. There’s real human drama in the process of discovery.
• A series called ‘Solved Mysteries’, in which tremulous speculations have rational resolutions, including puzzling cases in forensic medicine and epidemiology.
• ‘Ring My Bells Again’ - a series in which we relive the media and the public falling hook, line and sinker for a coordinated government lie. The first two episodes might be the Bay of Tonkin ‘incident’ and the systematic irradiation of unsuspecting