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The "embargo's" impact on public knowledge about important science and medical news
University of Illinois Press
August 2006
On Sale: August 7, 2006
192 pages
ISBN: 0252030974
EAN: 9780252030970
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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 news: 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
collu-sive practice, Kiernan offers an unprecedented
exploration of the embargo's impact on public 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.
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