My friend Joe Culver and I both grew up in the swamplands of the Mississippi
River, in the “Little Egypt” area of Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky
that provides a migration stopover for millions of geese and ducks every winter.
Duck hunting isn’t so much a pastime there as it is a way of life, a religion
almost, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows either of us that duck
hunting becomes a metaphor for much of the work we do these days in science
communication.
Culver, a former newspaper science reporter and now editor at the National Energy
Technology Laboratory, likens scientists’ current fascination with influencing
science policy or funding — by sending out reams of press releases and
glossy brochures — to the desire to have duck for dinner. We might think
that there could be a couple of ducks in the pond up on the hill in back of
the cabin, and we might want one of those ducks for dinner.
To get the duck, we’d fill a gallon bucket with steel shot. Then we’d
sneak up the hill, yell “Boo!” and throw the shot up in the air, hoping
that (1) there were ducks in the pond in the first place, (2) that they fly
up in a panic, (3) that they collide with our shot with sufficient force to
knock them down, and (4) that we didn’t hit blue jays and robins instead
of ducks.
With apologies for the homespun metaphor (and to vegetarians), this is exactly
the approach most of the scientific community takes to reach the ears and minds
of the people who determine science policy in the United States. There’s
a prevailing notion that the best way to reach national leaders, particularly
those who influence policy and funding for science, is through the mass media
— daily newspapers, magazines, radio and television. The assumptions here
are either that sufficient numbers of interested people in America’s heartland
get jazzed enough to raise a groundswell about science among policy-makers and
decision leaders in Washington, or that these decision-makers themselves go
directly to mass media to meet their information needs in science and technology.
They “fly” directly into the “shot” we’ve thrown out
in great quantity via the media’s press releases, Web sites and newsletters.
For many reasons, those of us who do public science communication for a living
have had our reservations about this line of reasoning. If saturation coverage
in the mass media meant anything at all, public political literacy would be
astoundingly high. As it is, disgraceful numbers of Americans cannot name their
congressman, senator, governor or a Supreme Court justice. Moreover, many people
could not name a political race for which the decision hinged in large measure
on any scientific or technological issue.
Our suspicions were confirmed in some elegant research conducted recently by
Jon Miller at Northwestern University. With funding from the Department of Energy
under a research program in public communication that I was coordinating at
the time, Miller sought to determine exactly who these science policy leaders
and decision-makers are, and where they got their information about science
and technology.
Miller found that the pool of people who actually get in the game on most science
and technology policy issues is very small — usually a few hundred. The
entire universe of decision-makers and policy leaders for all of these kinds
of issues numbers only about 8,000 people.
Miller also found that these people consume information voraciously. They read
newspapers, books and magazines. They browse Web sites; most of them are very
Internet-savvy and have computers they use at both work and home. Given this
information, you’d think that throwing a lot of information about science
into mass media would have an impact.
What emerges from this research is that decision-makers and policy leaders are
not passive consumers of information. They don’t read just anything that
is dumped in front of them. They actively seek information about issues where
they think they need to know more. And they are very particular about where
that information comes from. They give very high marks on credibility to scientific
journals, national laboratory reports and scientific organizations. But they
rate commercial television news dead last and most print mass media rather poorly
as well.
In short, they’re not likely to run into the shot, and even if they do,
they aren’t likely to pay enough attention to even be stunned, much less
be brought to the dinner table.
If we are serious about getting information into the hands of science policy
leaders and decision-makers, we need to target them directly; 8,000 people is
the size of a hamlet in New England. We can find ways to interact with them
directly — through the Web, through professional organizations, through
the scientific literature — and not surrender our messages and our hopes
for disseminating them to reporters, editors and news anchors whose capacity
to accurately transmit the message in the first place requires a great leap
of faith.
Increasingly, we’re learning that affecting science policy and science
funding is a game of focusing messages, not increasing the bandwidth. We would
do well to think more strategically about how to bring these ducks to the table.
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