Carl Sagan meets Barbara Frum. Blood everywhere.

Speaking of the Onion, I think they've put a finger on why media literacy has been dropping for decades. Half the time when I tune in to the news to hear the experts, they come across like this:


In The Know: Situation In Nigeria Seems Pretty Complex

Harsh? Maybe. But when a media personality tries to talk about a subject they don't know much about, they don't always succeed in pulling it off. They're particularly bad with anything science related. A few months ago I almost drove off the road in a rage while hearing a show about the pine beetle epidemic on CKNW, where one guest was adopting a "take a lawnmower to the province" approach, while the other guest was saying that we should try to at least leave dead trees in place around river valleys and eroding slopes, lest we get sudden massive flooding. The host was hostile and acting as if this was the most lunatic hippy idea imaginable. "They have to cut everything and make their money now, before they have nothing left to cut!" Cue a few months later, and my hometown is pretty much under water.

No one's immune to this. I was really shocked when I recently saw this 1988 interview where Barbara Frum - who I had previously had nothing but respect for - seems to be trying to play gotcha! with Carl Sagan. Frum was a respected journalist with decades of experience in political analysis, but here she comes off really badly and almost ignorant.



I suppose it's natural for people who are experts in one field - like, say, politics - to think of everything else in terms of politics; from an interesting crooked timber post here comes the argument that many fields - engineering, science, management - tend to disregard anything outside their own field, complete with this great quote from CP Snow:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had...

It's a fantastic line of thought, and I now want to seek out the original source material; but it does drive the point home to me why we're having such problems now around global warming and the pushback against evolution; people who are not scientists, but philosophers, or religious figures, or politicians, see science as just another social construct, one in which the truths are relative and can be manipulated. But the fact is, you can be an expert in your own field and still be completely ignorant about another one. There is such a thing as reality, science is all about the real, and scientists are canaries in the global coal mine. Eppur si muove.

The facts that science studies are indifferent to economics, politics, or religion; it wouldn't take very much to cause (for instance) widespread global famine, and there are few belief systems that than outlast the starvation of every adherent. The media might want to interview a few Mayans about that. Ask any farmer: a few degrees' difference in temperature here or there at the wrong time of year, and localized disaster awaits. A bit of drought, and you have catastrophe. And if you have that going on in many places at once...

But the media have not been asking the farmers, now have they?