a short monthly column on media and politics that Tracy and I coauthored for In These Times:

Sound Byte Science

In July, Bush’s veto of a bill on stem-cell funding stirred up a flurry of high-profile science news stories. For the most part, however, science gets the shaft: on average, science stories make up only two percent of network news coverage. And, according to a recent book by Chronicle of Higher Education writer Vincent Kiernan, the sliver of information that does reach the larger public may be narrowed yet further by the entrenched practices of science journalism.

In Embargoed Science, Kiernan examines how a handful of elite journals generate both buzz and scientific consensus by enforcing an “embargo” on findings— providing journalists with advance access to journal articles under the condition that they not report on them until a specified date. Many journals also apply the “Ingelfinger Rule,” pioneered by New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) editor Franz Ingelfinger in 1969. This policy decrees that “a given journal will not publish a scientific paper that has already been disseminated, particularly through the popular press.”

While journal editors say that the rule helps to limit coverage of findings that aren’t appropriately peer-reviewed, Kiernan notes that such practices just reinforce the already-disproportionate influence of major publications like NEJM, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Science, and Nature. Embargoes are as much about marketing as about research integrity— the cozy relationship between beat journalists and journal editors means that those journals end up as the source for the bulk of popular science stories In practice, this means that important scientific breakthroughs may take longer to reach the public, and that scientists are left with “few options for cooperating with reporters who learn about research through independent channels.”

Critics of the system say that it restricts the free flow of information and influences which stories rise to the top. By providing “information subsidies,” and artificial time pegs, science journals bias the news in much the same way that the White House slants coverage by restricting access to political heavyweights.

While eliminating embargos might make journalists have to scramble, the end result would be more original, honest reporting. “The embargo,” he concludes, “should go.”