A Scientist's Guide to Talking with the Media: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists , Richard Hayes and Daniel Grossman , Rutgers U. Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2006. $60.00, $18.95 paper (200 pp.). ISBN 978-0-8135-3857-0, ISBN 978-0-8135-3858-7 paper
Last May NASA administrator Michael Griffin, a brilliant engineer who holds seven degrees, made the elementary mistake of replying to a radio interviewer's question by sharing thoughts that apparently just popped into his head. In short order, Griffin's comment on global warming was disavowed by the White House. Soon after, NASA issued a “clarification.”
Griffin's faux pas is a classic example of what happens when an expert fails to heed the most important recommendation that authors Richard Hayes and Daniel Grossman offer in A Scientist's Guide to Talking with the Media: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists: Respond live to an interviewer's questions with previously prepared answers. If you don't have a rehearsed answer for a particular question, reply with the rehearsed answer to a question that wasn't actually posed. Watch television talk shows. That practice is the modus operandi of every experienced politician and advocacy-group representative. And it will serve equally well the scientist who is briefly in the limelight.
Hayes, the deputy director of communications at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC, and Grossman, a science journalist and educator, offer a fine introduction to the news media and give pointers on how scientists can interact effectively with them. The book is exceptional in its wide variety of comments, suggestions, and anecdotes from working scientists, not just from journalists and publicists. We scientists who have interacted with the media have our own favorite stories. Mine are from decades of media planning at NASA and at the American Astronomical Society. One involves a press conference rehearsal in Huntsville, Alabama. At the actual briefing, some reporters would be on hand while others would participate via satellite link. During rehearsal, a distinguished panelist faced the cameras when responding to questions from NASA staff impersonating reporters in the room. But he then turned and spoke over his shoulder toward a ceiling-mounted loudspeaker to respond to the simulated voice of a remotely located questioner. Further media training was in order.
On another occasion, a session chair prefaced the introduction of an invited speaker at an AAS meeting by revealing that the guest would be withdrawing his own discovery, which had just been published with great fanfare. He asked that reporters hear the expert out first before spreading the news. Almost immediately a man, crouching so as not to be too conspicuous, ran up the aisle and out of the hall. He was an ace reporter for the Associated Press, racing to the phone.
The authors have more in mind than explaining how to behave when the Washington Post calls. They encourage scientists to develop themselves as preferred media sources, and they give detailed instructions on how to attain that end and thereby influence public discourse on controversial topics with a science context. If you want to put in your two cents on nuclear power, stem-cell research, directed-energy weapons, or the creation of new life forms in the laboratory, and if you have the necessary expertise to do so, this book is for you.
But even if you prefer to remain safely cloistered in the peaceful halls of academia, you may nevertheless benefit from what Hayes and Grossman have to say. In my experience, much of the way the media operate is counterintuitive to physicists. When 95% of experts in a field agree on a topic, reporters will quote one or more of them, but may also include remarks by someone whose work is not taken seriously by fellow professionals but who is chosen because he or she disputes the majority position. To some journalists, that approach provides needed “balance.” Usually when a reporter calls a scientist to ask a question, the journalist actually wants to know the answer. Yet it's also common for a reporter to know what answer he or she wishes to quote and call a scientist who is likely to take that position.
The book also discusses the art of writing good press releases. A scientist who writes an article begins by introducing the subject of the research and may make the error of following that practice in drafting a press release about the results. A communications professional knows that a press release must begin with the bottom line: What was discovered? The context then follows. Hayes and Grossman even advise scientists to speak in clichés during certain media interactions. It's contrary to what we were taught in school, but the approach is sometimes appropriate, as the authors cogently explain. All of these “crazy” practices, as physicists might say, are in accord with the rules of journalism.
All kinds of journalists work in different ways, and it helps to know the differences, too. Talking “on background” implies various rules on how reporters use the information, depending on their affiliations. A local television news correspondent arrives at your office, records a quick stand-up interview, and is gone in 15 minutes. The resulting sound bite of your comments will last about 20 seconds on the nightly news. Another reporter may spend a day with you and write a feature article.
Hayes and Grossman note that many researchers are critical of the daily press: Scientists don't like the selection of science topics, the singling out of a few scientists for comment, the omission of prior research, and the loose way in which the carefully nuanced conclusions of a research paper are expanded to broad, new contexts. Many researchers think that scientific significance should be the prime criterion for featuring a research result in the mass media, and they don't understand why it emphatically is not. But such critics should realize that when it comes to newspapers, “if there were a paper written the way they would like it, nobody would read it,” according to a British scientist quoted in Hayes and Grossman's book. If researchers read A Scientist's Guide to Talking with the Media, it will help them to understand.