The Independent Sucks at Science Journalism

It’s often said that the way to really know if you understand something is to try and explain it to someone else. You’ll soon realise the gaps in your knowledge and the areas you thought you understood but really don’t. 

Journalism is an area of expertise where this becomes all to apparent. Journalists are supposed to write about areas where they have expertise and take often technical stories and translate them into language that can be understood by pretty much anyone while explaining why their article is of interest and importance to their readers. Stories on politics, economics, business and sport are all written by journalists with expertise in their fields and often write for an audience who are assumed to have been following the stories as they develop.

Yet for some reason science writing does not seem to have the same requirements as these other fields. Journalists who appear to have not studied any science since school are regularly being asked to report on science stories and their inexperience shows. This is particularly prevalent (or at least I’m noticing it more) in The Independent.

The first time I noticed was back in late 2013. An article was published on a deep sea amphipod. If you read the article you may wonder what my complaints were as it all looks perfectly fine. However, this is because I took the time to contact the journalist and he was willing to amend the article to improve it. Prior to my recommendations it implied the animals were shrimp rather than amphipods, mis-formatted species and family names and gave no information about where the article that formed the basis of the story had been published.

A few months later I found myself reading an article on a potential beaver cull. I again emailed the journalist responsible but while he promised edits would be made they haven’t been so I can show the problems. My main problem focused on this sentence: 

Derek Gow, an independent ecologist who studies beavers, said he feared Defra was using the threat of a rare parasite tapeworm found in the European beaver, called Echinococcus Multilocularis (EM), as a “smokescreen” to remove the three animals found in Devon. 

There are three problems there. Can you spot them?

The first is that in the context of the sentence the journalist should have used the word ‘parasitic’ not ‘parasite’. The second is that all tapeworms are parasitic so the word ‘parasite’ is redundant and finally the species name of the tapeworm should be Echinococcus multilocularis. I appreciate that these may appear to be nitpicks but they show a lack of care, either from the journalist or their editor. 

There have been other articles over the months that have had me rolling my eyes but I have failed to make a note of them, and I have to admit I’m not actively searching out examples of bad reporting, they just catch my eye every now and again. However, the fact that pretty much every science article I read in The Independent has basic science problems suggests that there is a systematic problem. And as a final example, and arguably the most egregious, is an article I saw this morning.

The article was headlined “Rain in Spain unearths fossilised trees that predate dinosaurs”. The article reports that a petrified forest dating from around 300 mya (million years ago) has been found on a beach in Spain.

Before I tear this to shreds I should point out it isn’t clear whether the problems come from the journalist or from a press release but whoever is responsible, there is clearly no editorial oversight catching the problems before they go to press.

The first problem is the infuriatingly ubiquitous and unnecessary use of dinosaurs in any story about fossils, completely ignoring that fossils span an incredibly long time. The oldest fossils we have are 3.5 billion years old.  Dinosaurs lived between 230 mya and 65 mya, an impressive span of 165 million years but still less than 5% of the total length of time that fossilisable life has existed. It’s a bit like reading any story about ancient history and having it put in the context of WW2.

The article then goes on to discuss plate tectonics. The way they are described suggests the author has a vague memory of how they worked from school but has forgotten much in the intervening years and couldn’t be bothered to check before writing, 

What is now the northern coast of Spain would once have been found in the southern hemisphere before tectonic plates gradually moved it north. 

This is so muddled it’s hard to know where to begin. ‘Spain’ did not exist 300mya. The continents had coalesced into Pangaea, predominantly located in the Southern hemisphere. Consequently ‘Spain’ was not 'moved north' on tectonic plates. Additionally, this wrongly implies that ‘Spain’ and the ‘tectonic plates’ are two separate entities. Tectonic plates are just the ‘crust’ on the planet, where the rock of the asthenosphere has cooled sufficiently to become solid. Drill far enough down (approximately 150-200km on the continents, less in the oceans) and you will reach molten magma. If you don’t want to go to all that trouble you could go to Hawaii, or Etna, or anywhere on the edge of the Pacific Ocean and you can see this magma erupting from volcanoes.

Having butchered geology the author then moves on to biology. We are given these gems: 

It would have been rich in exotic plant and embryonic animal life. . . [Professor Arbizu] said that the area was typical of where animal life originated. It is the sort of place where early animals “were making their first steps out of the water on to the soil”, he said. 

What is this supposed to mean? True, the area would have been ‘rich in exotic plant [life]' such as horse-tails, tree ferns, cycads and other now-extinct groups of plants as angiosperms (flowering plants) had not yet evolved. But what does he mean by ‘embryonic animal life’? Was it a nursery? Or does he mean that animal life had only just begun evolving at this point in history? The former is complete speculation and the latter is completely wrong. If we take these two sentences together four interpretations present themselves:

The first is that this area is similar to the areas that animal life first originated back in the pre-Cambrian/Cambrian. However, given that there were no terrestrial plants at that time this is untrue. 

The second option is that he is referring to vertebrates (animals with backbones). Unfortunately, this doesn’t help. Jawed fish first evolved during the Silurian (~445-420mya) and massively diversified during the Devonian (~420-360mya), a period often referred to as ‘the age of fishes’ because they became so abundant and varied.

The third option is also the one offering the greatest benefit of the doubt. Even if we assume that he is solely referring to this being a period where terrestrial vertebrates were first evolving, well, even that’s not correct as they evolved in the early Carboniferous, a full 40 my before these trees lived and died. 

The forth and final option is that the author knows nothing about animal evolution and incorrectly thought that animals only evolved around 300mya. Given the scientific illiteracy shown in the rest of the article I am inclined to go with this option.

My final complaint about the article is from its final paragraph: 

For tourists, the beach may be lost as a place to sunbathe and swim, but it has become an open-air museum. It also raises the possibility that further impressive archeological discoveries could be made in the area. 

Yeah, because archaeologists are really interested in sites that were active millions of years prior to the time that humans evolved (that was sarcasm, by the way). For those who are confused, archaeologists deal with human history. He means palaeontologists, who study fossil life.

I really should cut the author some slack. He is, according to his bio, The Independent’s Jerusalem correspondent after all. He’s out of his comfort zone. Unfortunately, it shows. My ire should be direct towards The Independent's editors who allowed a Jerulsalem correspondent and former foreign editor to write a science article in the first place. Would they let a science journalist report on Israeli politics? A sports writer cover the latest political scandal? Why is it assumed that anyone can write about science, or that no-one will care if the articles are bad? Above all, where are the editors in all this? It wouldn’t have taken more than a cursory look over the article (or any of the articles I’ve mentioned) to notice the problems with them and correct them. So why are they allowed to be published? I appreciate that papers are struggling to adapt to an online medium and are having to cut staff which puts pressure on fewer journalists to produce more articles. But allowing non-experts to write rubbish and pass it off as news is really not the way to turn things around.