When I blogged the other day about the media training I was doing at MIT, the first comment read as follows:
Frauds at work. Science is not about PR, Mooney. You and your ilk make me feel both ill, and embarassed to say I am a scientist. You should go crawl back under your rock.
To which Aileen Pincus, who also does media training, ably replied:
There’s no question that science is losing the public relations battle, so it’s interesting to me to still find scientists like the poster above who obviously believe that learning to communicate the science somehow harms the science. Yes, those who apply science commercially don’t suffer from such delusions, and they’re a good many of my clients. Others however, come to understand the real world of how science in funded only after long, losing struggles. Public support for science, essential to that funding, isn’t something to be scorned–and that can only happen when scientists learn how to talk to non-scientists.
Indeed--and that is only one of the reasons that many scientists are interested in having such trainings. I believe a lot of it has to do with the nastiness of the evolution and climate wars, and the sense that we have been ...