Oil and gas industry professionals constantly frustrated by the portrayal of their industry and issues such as peak oil in the mass media were given a fascinating insight into its workings at the AAPG conference in Perth.

Media consultant and former journalist, Leonard McDonnell, told the conference there were two kinds of dialogue used in the broader community; rational or scientific and emotional.

“Scientific information is enormously complex and the community and even politicians and the media’s capacity to absorb this type of information is very limited”, McDonnell said. “So what all human beings do is they use emotions to decide what they are going to read and what they are going to show an interest in.”

McDonnell, who has been a journalist for over 25 years and now works as a speech writer and media consultant, said one of the most recent examples of the disconnect between scientific information and mass media coverage were warnings given about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

“It was known in the geoscience community that there was a strong potential this was going to happen but that information never got to the sort of people that would be necessary to set up a tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean like we’ve got in the Pacific Ocean”, he said.

McDonnell displayed a copy of Geoscience Australia’s September 2004 edition of AUSGEO News which had a cover story warning about the dangers of a tsunami and called for the establishment of a warning system. At the time, the article didn’t register on the mass media’s radar. But that changed on 26 December, 2004.

“The tsunami was an international event, more than 230,000 people lost their lives and millions of people were impacted by this, it was just an enormous event”, McDonnell said.

The media’s short attention span and interest in scientific issues and discoveries is not a new phenomenon, McDonnell said. He decided to research the media coverage of one of the most important scientific discoveries of recent times, the molecular structure of DNA, first reported in a series of three articles in Nature magazine’s 25 April, 1953 edition. “So I went to arguably one of the best newspapers of record, The New York Times, to see how it covered this discovery.”

It took three months for the paper to publish a single column story on page 17. “I found that really astonishing because this was a great news story for the general news reporter, it just wasn’t understood”, he said. “This says an awful lot about our values and why we do this.”

McDonnell said scientific dialogues is used in publications like journals, annual reports and even communicating simple, but factual messages like road signs. “It could be anything that imparts information where the emphasis is on correct versus incorrect”, he said.

“The factual language is how you talk at work, but at home and everywhere else we use emotional conversation and here the emphasis is not so much on correct versus incorrect but right versus wrong”, he said. “It’s very judgemental; the focus is often more on who’s talking. Emotions determine what we say and also what we choose to hear. So most people will switch off what they hear and today you see that operating most clearly in the climate change debate.”

“There are two clear dialogues, there is the scientific one which is the factual and then there is the emotional one which is all encompassing and you’ll see finger pointing and name calling. It’s an emotional chaos which is not really promoting or building on the knowledge that we actually have in a very constructive way.”

McDonnell said scientific knowledge is also quarantined within different sectors of the scientific community and there isn’t much communication between them either. He calls it the silo effect. “The same lack of sharing between the scientific and general community also exists between the silos themselves so scientists don’t necessarily have a great deal of understanding of another discipline and what’s going on in that silo and you can even get silos within silos”, he said.

“The tsunami failed to get from the knowledge base into the community arena where something could be done about it, where our leaders could work. The leaders are beholden to the community because they are answerable to them for their jobs and leaders want to do what they believe their general community perceptions of what they should do.”

He said the mass media had a pivotal role to play in a democracy because that is where the community gets its information from. “But the problems with conceptions about the media is that its role is to pass on information”, McDonnell said. “But they are not all that focused on information, the media is selling pure emotion. Stories are prioritised not by the level of information they’ve got in them or the importance, but by the emotional level. Even some of the more serious newspapers, emotion determines what is on the front page.”

He said the mass media is a business and faces the same pressures every other corporation has. “Editors sit in the distribution circulation meetings once a week where their circulation numbers are analysed”, he said. “They look back at last week and the same time last year and they sweat in these meetings on whether these numbers go up or down and they know exactly what it’s going to take to make circulation go up. If they started running informative articles their circulation would go south rapidly and they would be out of a job.”

“If an editor sends a reporter on a story during higher petrol prices it’s about how the oil companies are ripping us off. For a reporter, that’s an easy story to do, get out the files the last time prices were up, dial a quote, get the same people and he can have that story filed by 2 pm and be in the pub before closing. But if the editor had said go and do a story and see if the corporations do rip us off, that’s not a story. The reporter would have to do a thesis on that. He or she would have to spend weeks researching a story like that and at the end of the day come back and probably say no they’re not, or I’m not sure and that’s not a story.”

While bad news is a staple of mass media products, so is emotional good news, like the Beaconsfield rescue in May, one of the biggest stories in the Australian media this year. “Stories were running for weeks, there was blanket coverage. The information about how the rescue was carried actually out was kept to a minimum. But the emotional coverage makes us feel great and that sells paper.”

Other guaranteed media fodder is sport, gossip and celebrities. “Celebrities are people we all know so they are the junk food of the media, they are dead easy stories to do”, he said. “They cost nothing to produce, in fact the publicists are pumping out celebrity stories, and they sell papers. So celebrity is big.” He said Time magazine’s coverage of the 100 people who most shape our lives are dominated by celebrities, artists and sports stars. Scientists and thinkers comprise a small minority of the list.

McDonnell said celebrities are also signed up to speak up on popular issues, citing the role of people like Pierce Brosnan, Tom Hanks, Charlize Theron, Barbra Streisand, Cher and even our Olivia Newton-John opposing BHP Billiton’s plant for a LNG facility off Malibu Beach. “Scientists are being marginalised and there is a sense that we don’t need scientists any more, we can get celebrities to talk about anything that we want to talk about”, he said.

What are the messages the mass media is sending out about the role models that our kids should become? “If you want to make a difference in the world we tell them don’t be a scientist, be a celebrity”, he said. “The answer is awareness, once you are aware of an issue, particularly scientists, they can overcome it. It’s not that the scientists, the media and the community don’t understand each other; it’s that they don’t understand that they don’t understand each other. And it’s the same anywhere there’s conflict; misunderstanding is the oxygen of any conflict.”