Speakers and topics for Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Here are the presenters for the second day of the 2016 Lorne Trottier public science symposium series, Science and the Media: The challenge of reporting science responsibly.

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JOEL ACHENBACH: How to Survive the Age of Bad Information

The Information Age has a nagging problem: Much of the information is simply not true. Society has always been plagued by “Bad Information,” but it moves faster now, accelerated by social media, the Internet more generally, and professional disinformation agents and partisans who cherry-pick their data and skew their narratives on behalf of an agenda. Journalists need to be trustworthy, and trusted, arbiters of information in a contentious era, and citizens have to learn how to pick up signs that a story is bogus or misleading. The stakes are high, because science and technology will increasingly shape the world in which we live. Getting it right is more important than ever.

Joel Achenbach has been a staff writer for The Washington Post since 1990 where he has reported for the Style section, the Magazine, Outlook, and, since 2007, the national desk, focusing on science and politics. For seven years he wrote the syndicated column “Why Things Are.” In 1999 he started the newsroom’s first online-only column, "Rough Draft," and in 2005 began writing washingtonpost.com’s first blog, Achenblog, the longest-running blog of any major newspaper in America. He has taught journalism at Princeton and Georgetown University. His “Why” and “Rough Draft” columns have been collected in four books, and he has authored three books touching on science, history and technology: A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea, The Grand Idea: George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West, and Captured By Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe.

 

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TREVOR BUTTERWORTH: Facts, fiction, and science: where the lines become blurred

Never in the field of human knowledge have two groups so committed to seeking the truth so often misunderstood each other as scientists and journalists. Historically, journalism has taken the blame for screwing things up. “Some of the things the press has done to science are horrible to contemplate,” wrote The St Louis Post Dispatch’s editorial page editor Ralph Coghlan in 1946. But—as the comedian John Oliver recently pointed out on his HBO show “Last Week Tonight”—scientists can't be let off the hook either. How do we preserve the public’s faith in the scientific method amid increasing skepticism that both science and journalism are getting science wrong?

Trevor Butterworth is Executive Director of the non-profit Sense About Science USA. He has written for the New Yorker Online, the Harvard Business Review, Newsweek, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Trevor was educated at Trinity College Dublin, Georgetown University, and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, and is currently a visiting fellow at Cornell University.

 

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