You
may have glanced at the newspaper this morning, or a news app on your smart
phone, and found that a new study discovered a shocking innovation that guarantees
weight loss or that the food on your plate could potentially be deadly. Media’s reports of scientific research often
distort the reality of research conclusions, stirring vicious and ultimately
meaningless debates. Often, scientific
research is jargon heavy and complicated, with many elements of what rhetoric
scholar Richard A. Lanham refers to as “the official style” of prose language.
In contrast, the field of journalism attempts to remove this official style
from the explanation of research. The
problem is that the language used in the varying sources of this information
leads to different interpretations of the same arguments. In experimental research, the official style is
a necessary component in establishing credibility by ensuring the accuracy of
the description and explanation of the results of the studies. The official style’s necessity in the field
of experimental research has created a gap between society’s questions and the
researchers’ ability to answer those questions; a gap that is weakly bridged by
journalist media’s reporting on the research findings. By analyzing articles from various sources
involving the current understanding of “organic foods,” the parasitic
relationship between experimental research articles and corresponding news
columns plainly emerges and unveils a larger societal need for critical
thinking.
Experimental research plays a large
role in directing the patterns and progress of human behavior, but this role is
often shadowed by the need for research evidence to be presented credibly and
accurately to the professionals within the field. When the public asks questions such as, “Is organic
food better for me than real food?” researchers set out to find answers and
have them published in dozens of scholarly and scientific journals. However, the sources of the findings are so
drenched in “the official style” that they become inaccessible to the average
consumer. For example, researchers at
Stanford University conducted a meta-analysis of hundreds of organic food
studies in 2012, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The study, titled “Are Organic Foods Safer or
Healthier than Conventional Alternatives? A Systematic Review” comes to no conclusive
solution for the public’s undying curiosity.
The official style is used throughout the article to maintain accuracy
and convey credibility, but its abundance makes deciphering the researchers’
conclusions essentially impossible. As such,
this sentence from the article riddles, “All
estimates of differences in nutrient and contaminant levels in foods were
highly heterogeneous except for the estimate for phosphorus; phosphorus levels
were significantly higher than in conventional produce, although this
difference is not clinically significant.”
The semicolon, multiple prepositional phrases and technical jargon are
highly indicative of the official style.
Using the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease calculator, a tool designed to
rate the ease with which one can read a piece, the reading ease level of this
segment is measured at an 8. Further,
the “grade-level” assigned to this piece is an 18.5. In 1993, The National Center for Educational
Statistics found that the average U.S. adult reads at the 7th grade
level. Comparing these grade levels
shows that the average American could not successfully comprehend and interpret
the findings of the study. Still, it was
important that the findings of the study be presented with the official style
in order to uphold the self-correcting nature of scientific research. This idea
outlines the necessity for research to be replicable by other researchers to
create reliable consistency of the results.
Because of this motive, the technical jargon used in the explanation of
the conclusions is intended for peers in the field and motivated by the need to
be precisely accurate, down to the word choice.
We saw in the above quote from the article that the results could be
perceived as apparently contradicting to the average reader: “phosphorus levels
were significantly higher than in conventional produce, although this
difference is not clinically significant.”
If one does not know the difference between significance and clinical
significance, something that is established through statistical data analysis,
the results could be deemed incomprehensible.
While the official style is inherently necessary in maintaining the
scientific expectations of publishing research, its resulting inaccessibility
to the public leads to a reliance on the more abundant and reachable
information provided by news articles.
Relying on a media source to direct
our behavior may not be the best decision, however it is the purpose of such
mediums to make scientific discoveries and their societal implications available
to the public. The public has more physical
access to news articles because their various sources eliminate the need for a
subscription to a journal, such as is needed for experimental research. Readers are more likely to understand the
language of journalists, which may lead them to trust the information that is
more clearly stated. In response to the
published findings by Stanford University on the status of perceptions of
organic foods, journalist Michelle Brandt published a column in the Stanford
Medicine News Center titled, “Little Evidence of Health Benefits from Organic
Foods, Study Finds.” While the article provided a detailed summary of the
research study, it received a reading ease score of 35, which is much higher
than the research article and several ‘grade levels’ lower. The following sentence received a high school-aged
grade level, much closer to the reading abilities of the average American: “You
figure you’ve just made the healthier decision by choosing the organic product
— but new findings from Stanford University cast some doubt on your thinking.” This inviting narrative, featuring a more
direct voice than the passive voice that is characteristic of the official
style, elicits more publicity by framing the results of the study in this way
as opposed to detailing the more comprehensive results of a “systematic
review.” By removing the official style
and attempting to explain and describe the results of research without the
technical jargon, journalists often lose the accuracy provided by scientific
journals.
Another
article from The Huffington Post provides
further evidence that the public holds distorted views of the article as a
result of multiple interpretations from multiple different news sources. The article’s author, Jonny Bowden argues, “The
media reporting of a new Stanford study purporting to show that organic food
has no substantial benefit over conventionally grown food is a wonderful
example of how to reduce a complex issue into a moronic sound bite. Google the study and you'll find at least a dozen entries
beginning with ‘Organic Food No Better for You.’ The study -- or rather, the media reporting
on it -- has generated quite a bit of buzz.”
By reducing the official style language used in the original article to
a static claim, not only do the true results of the study become distorted and
misreported, they also spread like wildfire due to their increased
accessibility. The first thing a reader
sees when viewing any sort of article is the headline. The gap in representations of the same
information is salient in the two sources’ differing headlines. The Stanford researchers’ article is titled,
“Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier than Conventional Alternatives? A
Systematic Review” while Brandt’s article reworded and summarized her
interpretation of the results as “Little Evidence of Health Benefits from
Organic Foods, Study Finds.” The systematic, experimental review, which
addresses both sides of the controversy over organic foods, will never be
explored by the crowds of readers exposed only to the news article that
successfully and clearly answered their original question, though not entirely
accurately.
The
sphere of journalism relies on the gap between the presentation of experimental
research results and the public’s understanding of those results to insert less
objective opinions and understandings of the data into the published literature,
fueling debates such as the one revolving around organic foods. This is achieved by reducing the official
style that is abundant in experimental research articles. Unfortunately, the issue that arises from
this relationship is the public’s acceptance of inaccurate information. In this case, the official style becomes a
hurdle to understanding and even receiving the true results of scientific
research. The question then becomes,
should we compromise the accuracy and credibility of experimental research to
increase the accessibility of real results?
Is it possible to encourage American readers, consumers and scholars to
think critically about the information they are exposed to and create resources
to facilitate understanding of difficult literature? This proposition could lead us down a path of
educational and societal improvement not limited to scholarly spheres of human
activity.
-Alayna Stein
No comments:
Post a Comment