There's a great article in the Columbia Journalism Review about the way journalists deal with competing scientific claims. The problem is that journalists, trained to be objective, feel they have to represent both/all sides of an argument. But what gets lost is the relative validity of competing claims: in an effort to be fair, journalists often present near-consensus views side-by-side with fringe elements. This may have an influence on popular perception, which may affect public funding and political discourse, etc.
The article focuses on the physical sciences, but the situation seems far worse with social science. On these questions, everyone has an opinion. But in the public discourse (mediated, appropriately enough, by the media), the views of social scientists don't carry any more weight than those of opinionated ideologues. This has given rise to some backwards but widespread views -- for instance about the inefficiency of government and the benefits of privatization -- that have tremendous political traction but no scientific basis.
Part of the problem is just lazy and ignorant reporting. But it also goes beyond that: the postmodern focus on perspective has been stretched to the furthest possible extreme, so that now all opinions are equally valid. This is the ideology at the heart of journalists' search for balance, and its ultimate direction is literally governed by chaos theory. Science is seen as having no more authority than any other view, because authority itself is a meaningless construct. While this kind of thinking may be seductive in certain contexts, it makes no sense at all in the world of public policy, where there are measurable consequences of the policies that are implemented. It's simply incompatible with any idea of social progress.
Naturally American anti-intellectualism also feeds this spiral away from science. Like any other industry, the media is responsive to the tastes of its market, and a big part of journalistic balance is responding to the median audience view. But the American audience doesn't seem all that receptive to science (unless there's a commercial application), and there's probably even a synergy between that anti-intellectualism and the way the media frames scientific issues.
There's no obvious solution to this problem. The article urges journalists to treat "fringe scientific claims with considerable skepticism," but this is just a symptom of a much larger problem. It would help if the media were more tightly regulated -- ie not exposed to the same market pressures that act on other industries. The media has a unique position as the keeper of information in a democracy, and its operating incentives should be structured with that responsibility in mind. It's probably harder to fight the underlying pseudoliberal ideology that all opinions are created equal, but philosophical trends are leading away from the postmodern thinking that spawned that view, so maybe there's hope.
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