SCIENCE IN NEWSPAPERS 483 



SCIENCE IN NEWSPAPERS 



By Db. J. A. UDDEN 



UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS 



IT is well known that charlatans and fools sometimes exploit the press 

 for their own purposes. Our journalists are often men of chiefly 

 literary training. They may be able to diagnose a case of megalomania 

 among writers of verse and they may know how to identify a literary 

 pirate. But they are not always prepared to detect scientific frauds or 

 able to discern the fallacies of self-hypnotized persons proclaiming new 

 laws in physics or chemistry. It is no wonder that there exists a gen- 

 eral distrust among scientific men for "newspaper science." 



This condition is to be regretted. The press is a great educational 

 institution in our age. It is an agent that should be enlisted in the 

 service of science to disseminate knowledge among men. The inefficient 

 service of the American press in this direction in the past is, I believe, 

 a natural result of the momentum of social conditions generally. It is 

 to some extent to be ascribed to the tardiness of our educational institu- 

 tions in responding to changing social conditions. To be more specific: 

 the journalistic profession is recruited from our high schools and col- 

 leges. Few students who have taken up scientific subjects in the curric- 

 ulum seek, or secure, work on newspapers. Language students, young 

 men and women who have spent their time in studying Greek, Latin, 

 modern languages and literature, are more often given such employ- 

 ment. Suitable courses are not always selected by those who train them- 

 selves for newspaper writing. They should be able not only to write 

 good English, but they should also possess a large fund of general 

 knowledge, including the elements of natural science, which now enters 

 into our endeavors almost everywhere. 



The above statements express a vague feeling which the present 

 writer has entertained for some time. It has been his desire to inves- 

 tigate the basis for this feeling. When recently an opportunity seemed 

 to offer itself for making some observations on the attitude of the press 

 to science, I decided to make use of it. I collected the reports published 

 by the six dailies of Toronto during the meeting of the Twelfth Inter- 

 national Geological Congress, last summer. Copies of nearly all of the 

 six local dailies published from the 7th to the 14th of August were 

 secured, and clippings were made of the reports, articles and items 

 touching on the congress or its members. 



The text of these clippings contained about 55,500 words. A rough 

 classification of the contents of this text placed the various paragraphs 



