The panel discussion, titled "Separating Science from Hype: The Challenge of Reporting on Science and Technology in the 21st Century," sought to highlight how the media deals with the fields of science and technology in order to allow individuals in academia to enhance the communication of their enterprises and discoveries.
"Exposure to scientific and specific technological information does not come from the archival literature, it comes from mainstream literature," Helble said. "Who decides what is exciting? Who decides what is newsworthy? Who decides what is hype?"
Many of the answers to those questions, the panelists asserted, come out of the relationship among researchers, reporters and the government.
"I have been able to watch first-hand how science interacts with politics," Andrew Lawler, a senior writer for Science magazine, said. "You hear the grand statements that science is becoming politicized. What I began to see is that the funding system in this country is what drives scientific enterprise."
As a result, the scientific community is inextricably linked to the government and the nature of politics, Lawler said. Funding for research in stem cells, global warming and other traditionally contentious areas is contingent on the nature of the political climate.
"Science could not exist without the political system and yet that is ignored by many science journalists," Lawler said. "Some say scientists are about finding truth while politicians are not."
The extent to which the scientific community is dependent on the government for financial support also impacts the level of bias in science reporting, several of the panelists said.
They identified a convention of not approaching stories with the proper level of skepticism as introducing error within their field.
Many mainstream articles are based on press releases or previous articles written in the more science-oriented publications Nature or Science.
"I think no area of journalism is subject to the temptation of hyperbole as science journalism," Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief of MIT's Technology Review, said.
There is some parallelism, as a result, between reporting on science and reporting on politics.
"Science journalism is comparable to political journalism in the 1950s," Lawler said. "It is struggling to question and people are just writing up press releases. We [at the more prominent publications] are controlling the way the media gets access to scientific information."
Bias is also introduced because of the advent of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle.
"The news cycle has shortened so much," Ivan Oransky, deputy editor of The Scientist, said.
Reporters are pushed to write or broadcast one to two minute reports rather than the long in-depth pieces they would prefer, David Berlind, executive editor at ZDNet, a business information technology news site, said. This does not necessary benefit the readers, although it is necessary because of the internet.
"You are really in competition with the entire internet," Berlind said. "You have to beat everyone to the punch -- you have to be the first person to out the story with the most credibility."
Other panelists included Jason Margolis, a reporter for BBC's The World and Jim Rapoza, Chief Technical Analyst for eWeek. The event was co-sponsored by the Thayer School of Engineering and the Office of Public Affairs.
