A former dean of Sydney University’s Faculty of Medicine, where I work, once appointed me to a role where I was to try and increase the news media profile of our staff’s research and to encourage them to offer their expertise as commentators on news developments in health and medicine.
The dean emailed all research staff urging them to list their areas of expertise and provide contact details for a subject-indexed expertise list.
From a total campus and hospital (clinical) academic staff of around 1,000, some 70 responded to the invitation. And many of these refused to provide their mobile and after-hours contact details. One told me “look, I don’t want some journalist calling me up on a Sunday morning.”
I was not surprised by this indifference nor by the ignorance of even basic rudiments of media routines. Throughout my career I’ve had many conversations with colleagues which quickly reveal ambivalence about media engagement, with many being deeply distrustful.
The values implicit in the Sir William Osler’s 1905 advice to doctors that they should not “dally with the Delilah of the press” sadly remain alive today in academic research circles.
Concerns are often muttered about the impropriety of research colleagues actively engaging with the media to publicise their research and, particularly, to advocate for policy – an activity said by some to “politicise” science.
An early study of first authors whose research had received press coverage found that, while most authors were satisfied with the coverage, a substantial minority thought that media attention “gives the impression that the researcher is seeking publicity” and “creates jealousy among colleagues”.
Such concerns were echoed in a major 2006 study undertaken for England’s Royal Society in which 20% of British scientists believed colleagues who appeared in the media were “less well regarded” by their peers – seen as “selling out” or seeking “self publicity”.
To this minority, public engagement was something “light” or “fluffy” and “done by those who were ‘not good enough’ for an academic career”.
The potential pitfalls of media engagement are well documented, focusing on concerns about sensationalised framing and the misrepresentation inherent in reducing scientific and conceptual complexity to a seven second sound bite.
Consequently, it is common to hear instances of poor relations between researchers and journalists. For example, 60% of British researchers want to engage with politicians about their research, but far fewer (31%) want to talk to journalists, despite common knowledge that politicians are voracious consumers of news, where they daily encounter expert and public opinion directly relevant to their portfolios.
There is also a generalised perception among researchers that they are ineffective public communicators. The Australian government’s Inspiring Australia report noted that:
Communicating science to audiences other than their peers is not a performance expectation for most scientists, and many find it difficult to explain their work and its value in lay terms. Few scientists are properly trained in media or public communication skills.
In recent years, colleagues and I have published research on how public health research translates into health policy and practice (see here, hereand here).
Policymakers we interviewed, including politicians and senior bureaucrats, told us repeatedly that a high and compellingly framed news media profile of an issue was almost essential (although not sufficient) in progressing any health policy.
They also emphasised that credible, accessible researchers – who believed firmly that research was not just for the pay-walled consumption of other researchers, but should be widely disseminated and discussed – were vital to the advance of policy reform.
In one of our papers, from 2012, we investigated the views of 35 Australian researchers in six fields of public about whether and how they sought to influence public health policy.
These researchers were voted by their peers as the six “most influential” Australia-based researchers in their respective fields.
In long interviews, we asked them broad questions on the role of researchers in influencing public policy (for example, What role do you believe researchers should have in relation to public health policy?); the nature of researcher influence; and strategies to achieve influence (for example, What strategies, if any, have you used to increase policymakers’ awareness or use of your research?).
With very few exceptions, those researchers, voted by their colleagues as being most influential, firmly believed they had a duty to increase public awareness of their work and to try and influence public policy on its implications.
Importantly, they were active responders and initiators of media contact (see table).