News production and scientific knowledge : exploring popularization as a process

This Chapter looks at popularization through the press focusing on the drafting of the popularizing news article as an instance of the linguistic, textual and discursive re-elaboration of specialized knowledge for purposes of journalism. It is centred on the analysis of a representative sample of popular science articles, published in British newspapers, that are investigated in parallel with the scientific research papers on which they are based, and aims at identifying the main strategies enacted in the production of lay versions of scientific/technological knowledge, and at reconstructing the various material operations performed in this process. It starts from an idea of the newspaper article as originating from the re-elaboration, reformulation and re-use of pre-existing texts, relying on a consolidated tradition of attention for the professional aspects of journalism (e.g. Bell 1991) and on more recent studies characterized by a broad and socially situated view of media research (NT&T 2009; cf. also Blommaert 2005). The analysis confirms and reinforces previous findings (cf. Garzone 2006: 88ff., 2007) that the discursive organization of popularizing news articles is only marginally influenced by that of the scientific papers used as sources and, more in general, by the specialized communication practices prevailing in the scientific community; the lexical and textual material extracted from scientific discourse is integrated in the discursive structure of the news article and incorporated into a different pragmatic frame. Discussing more in depth two representative cases, Garzone shows that popular science articles comply with all the textual and discursive requisites peculiar to journalism, and in spite of frequent recourse to entextualization, maintain a generic structure that is hardly altered by the contamination with the scientific research papers occasioning them. Neither are popular science articles exempt from some problems that are typical of news discourse, first and foremost ‘misreporting’ (Bell 1991: 216). Of course, the popularization process, involving operations of deletion, simplification, synthetisation, (re-)construction and recontextualization of knowledge (Calsamiglia/van Dijk 2004; Garzone 2006) as well as shifts in illocutionary point from expositive/argumentative to informative, inevitably leads to a change in semiotic co-ordinates and a variation in register (Halliday 1978: 23). But in many cases alterations in illocutionary force go well beyond the shift to informativity, presumably because of the tendency to adapt scientific information to the existential perspective of the lay reader. This often determines a serious misrepresentation of the real meaning and significance of scientific findings, as criteria of newsworthiness prevail over the rigour and trustworthiness that would have to be inherent properties of the dissemination of science. Garzone concludes that even where there is no underlying ideology to induce the newswriter to confer a slant on the scientific information conveyed, it is the ideology of journalism that prevails over the need for accuracy and completeness involved in the dissemination of science.