Media Bias Towards Science

The natural sciences is a world the general public will either dive into head first to exploit research out of fear and ignorance or to coexist with and celebrate recent advancements and discoveries. Whether or not the public stands and cheers or sulks and cries is entirely dependent on the accessibility of information and data that is available for public discretion and evaluation. People remain ignorant about many scientific advances that have paved the path for potential scientific solutions in major areas including cancer research, prenatal health, pediatric medicine, and genetics. However, sometimes the disregard for the aforementioned scientific triumphs is not entirely the fault of the public. The media has an incredible influence on what the community sees and hears, as well as swaying public sentiment and opinion by including or excluding fragments of information or by how the media presents their acquired information.

Every type of media is intended for a particular audience with the purpose of informing, enlightening, and persuading. When it comes to the hard sciences, the popular media, like newspaper and magazine articles, television news, and internet reports are faced with the challenge as secondary resources to interpret scientific exploration and intelligence into an accessible form of medium from which the public can then assemble an opinion. The more true to primary resources the popular media is, the more honestly informed the public could become and thus make opinions that are more educated. A recent scientific success that has remained discreetly out of the spotlight is the advancement scientists have made in harnessing stem cells from amniotic fluid as opposed to extracting the cells from embryos. After an...

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...rch. The variations in language, structure, and content of a popular article, the Washington Post, and an informative scholarly journal article from the Medical University of Vienna reveal the important differences in article intent in accordance with audience demands. There is an apparent distorted public perspective in understanding the significance behind the momentous advancement in stem cell research that is not expressed in the scholarly article. The media responds to the public’s pattern of interest in conflict and delivers more engaging rather than descriptive articles. In the end, science needs popular media to draw the attention and concern of the public even if the attraction is only to the conflictive area of scientific research. Without popular media, amniotic stem cell research will remain a “silent explosion in the medical field” (Washington Post 3).