By Jenna Pierson
The college of journalism held a lecture in Knight Hall Wednesday where students heard from Angela Saini, the recent recipient of the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award on current issues pertaining to science reporting in the media.
“Not only is she a recipient of this prestigious award, but last year she was voted by her peers as being one of the best journalists in the U.K.,” said Deborah Nelson, a professor of investigative reporting at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism and the organizer of the lecture.
Saini’s work has been featured on critically acclaimed news organizations such as BBC Radio, The Guardian and Wired. She is also an author of three books, including “Superior: The Return of Race Science” and “Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong — and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story.”
The AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards have been around since 1945 and are given to esteemed individuals for written or video coverage of the sciences, engineering and mathematics, according to the website.
Saini spent the majority of her lecture discussing the need to deconstruct the idea that science is infallible, as well as the importance of acknowledging that science has historically defended sexist and racist ideologies.
“Science doesn’t operate in a vacuum,” Saini said. “Science reporting is about putting scientific ideas in context and taking the long view and seeing in history where these ideas [of racism and sexism] really came from.”
Saini used multiple examples, ranging from a “Planet of the Apes” reference to eugenics and its evolution into genetic research in order to correlate science with the human desire to project what we want to see or believe upon facts in a biased manner.
“This is the war we are waging as journalists,” Saini said. “We have to understand that every one of us is fed a narrative about ourselves and we have to get to the root of how facts are constructed and interpreted.”
Saini briefly discussed a project she is currently working on aimed at combating the rise of pseudoscience and misinformation on the internet, as well as the purposeful twisting of legitimate scientific findings to justify political and social agendas.
“It’s really tough,” Saini said of her project. “Why should we be surprised that the internet looks exactly like us and all of our personal biases and flaws?”
Saini’s current project is focused on identifying what types of measures should be put in place in order to eliminate the widespread reach of pseudoscience. She emphasized that our strong societal fear of censorship could prove to be a challenge.
“With the way social media is disseminated across cultures, how do you respond to lies?” said Simone Ebongo Bayehe, a first year journalism graduate student in a Q&A session afterwards.
The topic of fake and manipulated information was popular among the crowd, which was largely comprised of journalism students.
“There are actual states and parts of the world where governments are trying to push disinformation to benefit their agenda and there are people who monetize off of misinformation that they don’t believe but that they spread to make an income,” Saini said. “We need to improve the quality of information that is put out there and consider regulations. We have to understand that there are regulations in every area of our lives and we need these mechanisms to reduce false information.”