Maybe there’s no such thing as science news

Sometimes it seems like science can’t make up its mind.

Coffee is good for you, or maybe it’s not, chocolate adds years to your life, or takes them away, and let’s not even get into red wine. The only takeaway from the science sections that accompany the news is that these scientists keep saying something different every day.

It’s no news, so to speak, that the twists and turns of science are often covered as if they were sporting events or some celebrity’s whim or misfortune. From the body of scientific work, whatever can be more or less turned into strong, clear statements is clipped out and shamelessly given the pretense of expanding our knowledge of the world — even if any actual interest in truth gets lost along the way.

Headlines announce a new “scientific discovery,” report that “science has revealed that…,” or conclude that “a group of scientists proved” this or that. This forces the concept of news — with its intrinsic urgency, its necessary brevity, its relentless pursuit of impact — onto the slow, meticulous effort that scientific knowledge demands, and it rests on a simplistic view of science as one big set of true, coherent, and consistent claims about how the world works.

Although scientific activity has its great moments, it doesn’t operate at the frantic pace of the news cycle. “Eureka moments” are usually after-the-fact fabrications that help summarize and popularize stories about science, but not only are they rare events — they also serve a particular interest in perpetuating the myth of genius in scientific work, as Steven Johnson explains.

In real life, innovation often emerges in completely unexpected ways, in response to seemingly unrelated circumstances, as the result of years of shared exploration across vast networks of creative minds. A scientific publication rarely offers definitive answers. On the contrary, it usually involves opening new questions, revising or tentatively confirming earlier hypotheses, refining a measurement, or acknowledging that we were looking in the wrong direction.

As archaeologist Gustavo Politis pointed out some years ago, there is an inevitable, structural tension: “The media demands certainties and science works with uncertainties.” Though not knowing can be uncomfortable, he explains, “it’s fine for those uncertainties to persist and be communicated, because otherwise we’re creating a false image — that we have absolute answers for everything.” This, it’s assumed, is what the audience wants, and it’s the way science tends to be talked about not just in the media but also in education. The uncomfortable place that remains is repeating, over and over, that things are rarely that clear.

Some studies even suggest that it’s precisely those pieces of research that manage to capture media attention — and lend themselves to irresistible headlines — that have a higher statistical probability of being refuted or significantly qualified by later work. In other words, what’s eye-catching tends to be flimsier than what’s solid but boring.

One possible explanation is that there’s a tendency to prioritize the dissemination of initial “positive” and novel results (which are inherently more uncertain), while ignoring the necessary (and less “newsworthy”) follow-up studies, failed replications, or null results, which are equally crucial for the advancement of knowledge. Coffee is going to kill us (or make us live to 150), but we never hear about what happens when someone tries to replicate the experiments that led to those conclusions.

Traditional journalistic logic was forged around the coverage of well-defined, fast-moving events, in contrast with the cumulative and self-correcting nature of science. It’s governed by impact, conflict, surprise, and sometimes by the need to explain — when it’s not outright driven by the chase for clicks and the capture of attention. This logic isn’t necessarily bad, but it has little to do with the uncomfortable nuances and lack of certainties that characterize scientific work.

Science relies on methodical doubt, on the painstaking effort to avoid arriving at the desired conclusion without first submitting to peer review (a slow and often frustrating process), on independent replication, on the possibility that you may never learn in your lifetime whether that tiny contribution — that drop in an ocean of knowledge — will have someday been useful.

Even if there’s some philosophical disagreement about “truth” as the central concern of science, as discussed in the essays collected in La ciencia y el mundo inobservable (2019), edited by Bruno Borge and Nélida Gentile, science does not wash its hands of truth when it comes to its claims about the world. In scientific work, the existence of objects (observable or not) is posited and evidence is sought for them, claims are made about them, and evaluating the truth of those claims is a central concern.

Science operates with “provisional truths” — the best available explanation until new evidence forces a revision. Its capacity for self-correction, often misunderstood as inconsistency (will someone please just tell me how much coffee I should drink!), is actually its greatest virtue, and it rests on its ability to establish what is false, often by virtue of the absence of evidence for what is claimed, or the direct conflict between available evidence and what is proposed.

This fundamental incompatibility gives rise to what Massimiano Bucchi and Renato G. Mazzolini call the genre of “science as news” as opposed to the more rigorous “public communication of science.” While the latter tends to present a more contextualized, positive, and consensual view of scientific progress, “science as news” chases the catchy angle, the controversy (whether real or manufactured to generate interest), and the immediate impact (miracle cures, life on other planets, superintelligences, etc.). If any actual science or critical thinking still survives in these stories, it’s nothing more than a fortunate accident.

And so the observation of certain frequencies in light passing through the atmosphere of a distant planet — which suggests the presence of dimethyl sulfide molecules, a substance that could indicate the existence of living organisms — becomes “British scientists find strongest evidence of life on an exoplanet.” Subtlety not included.

Pausing to note the details — that this isn’t the first time something like this has happened, or that the evidence presented is weak and contested — may not be as entertaining. But explaining the details — the low statistical significance, the possible abiotic explanations, the alternative accounts, and the need for more evidence before reaching transcendent conclusions — certainly makes for less flashy headlines. Then again, selling papers or ad space has never been the scientific community’s concern.

To make matters worse, this image of science as a factory of answers brings out the appeal of pseudoscience, which exploits this demand with flair and talent, offering complete, simple, and closed narratives that real science — constrained by evidence and intellectual honesty — can rarely provide. Science, by contrast, is forced to acknowledge that many things are still not known with certainty, or that the matter is complex, while pseudosciences — and conspiracy theories — burst in with totalizing, easy-to-understand, and emotionally satisfying explanations, regardless of whether they’re completely made up.

In a media ecosystem with newsrooms stretched to the limit, fewer journalists specialized in science communication, and more pressure to produce “content” quickly and cheaply, the regurgitation of press releases as if they were news is only growing. This leads to a kind of “churnalism” — as the term goes — that uncritically replicates carefully polished and optimistic narratives issued by institutions themselves, presenting a linear, triumphalist, and consensual vision of science, conveniently stripped of internal controversies, methodological debates, or conflicts of interest.

Paradoxically, if journalism thrives on conflict and controversy to generate interest, this dependence on official press releases flattens discussions and presents them as settled matters. And the difficulty isn’t only external — it also reflects the internal pressure within institutions to “publish or perish”, which contributes to the feeling of constant novelty that doesn’t always reflect a solid, cumulative construction of knowledge, but rather a constant reinvention of the wheel, propped up by myths about what it means to do science.

Treating science under the exclusive logic of news fosters a shallow and frequently incorrect public understanding of how the scientific process works, while also making us vulnerable to misinformation, unjustified panic, or false hope.

And if it’s news we’re after, perhaps the coverage should focus on the things that surround scientific work but make it possible.

This isn’t just about budgets. In the United States, nearly 2,000 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine — including dozens of Nobel laureates — signed an open letter warning that the country’s scientific enterprise was being systematically dismantled: grants terminated, laboratories defunded, researchers fired, and scientifically accurate terms like “climate change” flagged as objectionable by federal agencies. The letter described a growing climate of fear in which scientists were removing their names from publications, abandoning studies, and rewriting proposals to avoid political retaliation. What was once the world’s most envied research infrastructure had become, in the signatories’ words, the target of a wholesale assault — not over evidence, but over ideology.

Talking about budgets, public trust in science, educational initiatives, or perfectly well-established facts like the safety of vaccines may be a bore compared to speculations about life on other planets or the advent of artificial intelligences that in ten minutes could “solve the climate crisis” — but those are the stories worth paying attention to if any part of science is to survive before it’s too late, before we’re swallowed whole by press releases and the empty promises of overvalued companies.

As in so many other ways, maybe we should slow down a bit and embrace the value of a slow science that advances with caution, that values rigorous replication, unhurried review, and the patient accumulation of evidence over the flashy headline and instant gratification. The risk of not doing so is the abandonment of science in favor of the news.

Reputed gangster Joseph “Joey The Clown” Lombardo uses the paper to hide his face as he leaves court on March 11, 1981.Perry C. Riddle/Chicago Sun-Times

This text was originally published in 2025 in Spanish.

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