Sometimes I choose the topic of this newsletter, and sometimes it chooses me. On at least three separate occasions in the past week, someone has asked me about science communications, aka, scicomm. (Maybe it’s because I keep talking about UFOs.) In any case, these questions have focused on two separate issues worth thinking about: what it would take to make scientists more effective partners in scicomm, and second, whether historians should look to scicomm as a model for communicating with the public.
These questions are coming from a place of good intentions. Clearly, something has gone off track in how both political leaders and members of the public, both in the United States and globally, make sense of this amorphous thing we call “science” or “scientific expertise.” In the United States, the recent manufactured controversies over the 1619 Project and critical race theory have fed a sense of panic that historians might share some of the scientists’ problems. But if the goal is to regain the public’s trust in scientific institutions, scicomm is not the right answer. And for historians, it’s not even the right question.
It’s useful to divide the people whose professional activities focus on communicating about science (as opposed to say, “doing” or “teaching” science) into three categories: science journalists, science writers, and science communicators. Science journalists are exactly that: Journalists. In theory, their loyalties are to the public. Journalists see themselves as responsible for providing factual information, “news,” about things that are happening in the world, to help their audiences make more informed decisions. Even as journalists’ critics question what “independence” means in a world of media conglomerates, the profession of journalism values the concept of holding public institutions accountable.
Science writers also inform, but they’re less invested in journalistic commitments to objectivity. Maybe they’re doing advocacy writing, or maybe it’s memoir that happens to include some science or nature writing. As nonfiction writers, they’re trying to create some sort of emotional connection to readers. Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk is consummate nature writing, blending as it does aspects of memoir, history of science, and facts about raptors.
Scicomm is a different kind of project. If science journalists are committed to informing the public, and science writers are committed to connecting with their readers, scicomm is committed to the institutions of science. Most scicomm professionals would undoubtedly describe their work more in terms of “translation” or “explanation,” but it’s an incontrovertible fact that the fortunes of the field have historically been tied to defending science. Its founding premise is that the public would be more inclined to support science if only it understood. Even as the newest generation of science communicators have pushed back against the idea that the purpose of scicomm should be to generate consent, it remains the case that most scicomm professionals draw their paychecks as public information officers. On a day-to-day basis, science communicators write press releases, do media trainings, and build websites.
For the record: There is nothing wrong with this! Someone has to explain what the AAAS or the NAS or a university’s department of genetics does! So long as Exxon has a comms team, scientific institutions need comms teams. It’s nevertheless worth remembering that Exxon’s comms team, focusing as they do on the potential of “innovation,” likely consider themselves scicomm professionals.
Americans’ lack of trust in scientific authority is not for lack of good PR. It’s about a much more fundamental collapse of institutional trust that’s not unrelated to the collapse in journalism, including science journalism. Would a better understanding of how vaccines work help address vaccine hesitancy? For some people, maybe? But given the close tracking between political affiliation and vaccinations, it seems like information isn’t really the problem here.
And this is why I die a little inside everytime I see someone float the concept of “histcomm.” What would “history communications” even mean? Presumably its advocates have in mind something closer to “public understanding of history” than “PIOs, but for history departments,” but the trajectory of scicomm shows the limitations of the deficit model. The people attacking the 1619 Project or the thing they’re calling “critical race theory” aren’t doing so because they lack facts. Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse has a history Ph.D. from Yale. H. R. McMaster, one of Trump’s National Security Council Advisors, has a history Ph.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill. Oklahoma Representative Tom Cole, the former chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, has a history Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma.
Fascinating, isn’t it, that all of the national policitians with Ph.D.s in history identify as or work with Republicans? It’s almost as if appeals to the past default conservative. I digress.
Like science, history has many uses, and simply providing more of it won’t solve our political woes. History isn’t a neutral thing, nor should it be. What we need is the right kind of history, an approach to understanding the past that acknowledges complexity, power differentials, and the potential for abuse as well as liberation. We need better history, not better comms.