The term science by press conference is a phrase referring to scientists who put an unusual focus on publicizing results of research in the media. The term is usually used disparagingly. It is intended to associate the target with people promoting scientific "findings" of questionable scientific merit who turn to the media for attention when they are unlikely to win the approval of the professional scientific community. However, its use as an insult can also be a way that scientists who labor in obscurity can criticize scientists who seek to communicate directly with the public, or scorn scientists whose work for some reason catches the public's interest.
Premature publicity violates a cultural value of most of the scientific community, which is that findings should be subjected to independent review with a "thorough examination by the scientific community" before they are widely publicized. The standard practice is to publish a paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. This idea has many merits, including that the scientific community has a responsibility to conduct itself in a deliberative, non-attention seeking way; and that its members should be oriented more towards the pursuit of insight than fame. Science by press conference in its most egregious forms can be undertaken on behalf of an individual researcher seeking fame, a corporation seeking to sway public opinion or investor perception, or a political or ideological movement.
Read more about Science By Press Conference: History of The Term, Motivations, Responsibility
Famous quotes containing the words science, press and/or conference:
“May we not assure ourselves that whatever woman’s thought and study shall embrace will thereby receive a new inspiration, that she will save science from materialism, and art from a gross realism; that the “eternal womanly shall lead upward and onward”?”
—Louisa Parsons Hopkins, U.S. scientist and author. As quoted in The Fair Women, ch. 16, by Jeanne Madeline Weimann (1981)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)