Scientific American Is Disappointed in the Media Coverage of Student Protests

On Monday, we did a piece on a former columnist for Scientific American who explained the magazine's "ideological capture." As we noted, SciAm broke a 175-year streak of not endorsing candidates for president in 2020 when it endorsed Joe Biden. because the 2020 election "was literally a matter of life and death." It's fitting that a magazine called Scientific American endorses a guy whose Supreme Court nominee couldn't tell what a woman was because she wasn't a biologist.

So we're not surprised that Scientific American has a new piece out on the pro-Hamas protests on university campuses across the country. If they really wanted to talk about science, they could have explained the physics of a protester with a trash-can shield bouncing off a police officer. Instead, they have a beef with the media and how they're covering the pro-Hamas protests.

Media coverage of university students speaking up against the war in Gaza, just like coverage of other protest movements, has fallen prey to some serious weaknesses https://t.co/BhXw8un6rZ
— Scientific American (@sciam) May 8, 2024

mmmm, science-y https://t.co/sZz4munCmf
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 8, 2024

stay subscribed to Scientific American for our hard-hitting scientific hot takes on the Drake-Kendrick Lamar conflict
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 8, 2024

A lot of people in the replies to Monday's post said they'd been subscribers for a long time but dropped it when they started doing "collectible" editions devoted to "science for social justice."

Let's see what their problem is. Danielle K. Brown, whose scientific credentials include being a professor of journalism at Michigan State University, writes:

… rather than focusing on the grievance of protesters — that is, concerns about the deaths, injuries and looming famine affecting Palestinians— in reports of the campus encampments it has been the confrontations between protesters and police that have become central to the news media coverage.
…
There are commercial reasons why some newsrooms focus on the spectacle and confrontation – the old journalism adage of “if it bleeds, it leads” still prevails in many newsroom decisions. For the initial weeks of the campus protests, this penchant for sensationalism has shown up in the focus on chaos, clashes and arrests.
But it is a decision that delegitimizes protest aims.
This delegitimization is aided by the sourcing routines journalists often fall back on to tell stories quickly and without legal consequence. In breaking news situations, journalists tend to gravitate toward – and directly quote – sources that hold status, like government and university officials. This is because reporters may already have an established relationship with such officials, who often have dedicated media relations teams. And in the case of campus protests, in particular, reporters have faced difficulty connecting with protest participants directly.
As a result, official narratives may dominate news coverage. So when officials like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott equate protesters to criminals with antisemitic intentions, that typically gets covered– certainly more than any rebuttal from protest participants.

So they find a piece written by a pro-Palestinian journalism professor and republish it in the science magazine. Cover something scientific, like Hamas firing rockets blindly into civilian areas in Israel. Maybe the terrorists could learn something about trajectory and stop blowing up their own hospitals.

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