Embargoed Science

by Vincent Kiernan

The popular notion of a lone scientist privately toiling long hours in a laboratory, striking upon a great discovery, and announcing it to the world is a romanticized fiction. Vincent Kiernan's Embargoed Science reveals the true process behind science an elite few scholarly journals control press coverage through a mechanism known as an embargo. The journals distribute advance copies of their articles to hundreds and sometimes thousands of journalists around the world, on the condition that journalists agree not to report their stories until a common time, several days later. When the embargo lifts, airwaves and newspaper pages are flooded with stories based on the journal's latest issue. In addition to divulging the realities behind this collusive practice, Kiernan offers an unprecedented exploration of the embargo's impact on public and academic knowledge of science and medical issues. He surveys twenty five daily U.S. newspapers and relates his in-depth interviews with reporters to examine the inner workings of the embargo and how it structures our understanding of news about science. Kiernan ultimately argues that this system fosters "pack journalism" and creates an unhealthy shield against journalistic competition. The result is the uncritical reporting of science and medical news according to the dictates of a few key sources.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published August 7, 2006

Reviews

[Lei Lei · Rating 3 out of 5]

Still highly relevant to science journalism today but the arguments could have all been made in just a quarter of the amount of pages

[Peter Dunn · Rating 2 out of 5]

OK the book is a decade old now at the point at which I write this review, which might seem an eternity in this fast paced media world. However it still has some useful things to say about how the use of embargoes in science focused media relations, particularly in explaining the history of how that evolved.

The author clearly is no fan of embargoes, and he presents several very cogent arguments as to how they could be damaging to the coverage and public understanding of science. However he has little to suggest as to what we might replace the embargo system with other than an absolute free for all.

The use of embargoes clearly has its problem but I am not sure if a free for all would be much better. One key problem for the arguments presented is that the author tries to stick to the line that science journos are best left in unconstrained competition with each other, but then he lapses into assertions about the public service of the media forgetting that in fact they are mostly driven by profits, readership numbers, and audience figures, and not necessarily the public good.

The book brings us little further on embargoes than Churchill’s famous quote that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” The use of embargoes may indeed be the worst system for conducting science media - except for all the others.