Vivid, frightening images abound in social marketing for the same reason that home-alarm companies show criminals kicking in suburban doors: They get attention, stir feelings, and form lasting memories—making Gut sit up and take notice—and so they are far more likely to influence behavior than an earnest request to “Please, wear your seat belt.” This thinking lay behind the American Cancer Society’s ads telling young women to use sunscreen or risk death. The ACS’s research found “young women as a group were oblivious to the risk and felt that skin cancer isn’t a serious problem,” Dr. Leonard Lichtenfeld told the New York Times. Women told the ACS that “to get the message through to me, you have to shock me and get my attention. ” So they did. Countless other groups have learned this lesson and the result is a steady escalation of what some have dubbed “shockvertizing.” “You have to try something new to get through,” an ad exec said in defense of his workplace-safety campaign, which featured graphic deaths and corpses. “It’s a never-ending arms race in the advertising business.”
An insidious new weapon in the arms race is the video news release, filmed and distributed by public relations companies. Raw video has always been made available to television news programs for use in newscasts, but video news releases are intended to look and sound like the finished product so television stations are able to them run them, in whole or in part, as news stories in their newscasts. And they do. For a 2006 report, the Center for Media and Democracy in Washington, D.C., tracked a sample of thirty-six video news releases and found seventy-seven television stations ran them without telling viewers the material was not produced by reporters. In one-third of those cases, the entire video news release was aired. This practice has erupted into public controversy several times—particularly in 2004, when the Congressional Government Accountability Office revealed that several federal agencies distributed video news releases that didn’t identify the source of this “news”—but still it goes on. For TV producers, it’s free. For marketers, it’s the ideal way to inject a message into the body politic without anyone seeing the needle.
Still, most activists, NGOs, and charities with a message they want the public to hear can only dream of deploying such sophisticated techniques. For them, there is only one option: Take it to the media. But there is a limited number of reporters, news pages, and airtime available—and vast numbers of individuals and organizations who have a message they want delivered to the public. Attracting the media’s attention is a major challenge.
One technique for getting noticed is the sort of camera-friendly stunt pioneered by Greenpeace—hang a banner from a bridge or climb a nuclear plant’s cooling tower. Celebrities also help. But for those who have neither the ability to scale major infrastructure nor Sean Penn on speed-dial, there is really only one way to grab the attention of distracted editors and reporters: Dispense with earnest, thoughtful, balanced, well-researched work and turn the message into a big, scary headline.
“What Danger Lurks in the School Cafeteria?” asks a January 2007 press release from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a Washington, D.C., consumer-advocacy group. “Conditions in America’s school cafeterias could trigger potentially disastrous outbreaks of food poisoning at any time, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which ranks food service operations in a new report released today.” Of course it is true that “potentially disastrous outbreaks” could happen “at any time,” just as it’s true that a school could be crushed by an asteroid any second now. The crucial question is how likely it is. The answer is hinted at near the bottom of the press release, where CSPI says it has documented “over 11,000 cases of foodborne illnesses associated with schools between the years 1990-2004.” That may sound frightening, but compare it to the Centers for Disease Control’s estimated number of food poisonings across the United States in a single year: 76 million. And 11,000 food poisonings in schools over fourteen years works out to 786 cases a year—in a student population of more than 50 million. That means the chance of a student getting food poisoning at school is about 0.00157 per cent. It seems the accurate headline for this press release would be “School Cafeterias Reasonably Safe”— but a press release with a headline like that will never get a second look inside a newsroom.
The competing demands of being accurate and being heard can be particularly hard on scientists. Stephen Schneider—a Stanford climatologist and an early proponent of the hypothesis that human activity was changing climate—spoke about this with admirable clarity in an interview with Discover magazine. “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings, as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”
Unfortunately, the language of science is the opposite of the simple, definitive statements the media want. In science, all knowledge is tentative, every fact open to challenge. Science never delivers absolute certainty. Instead, facts are said to be known with degrees of confidence. Is the earth getting warmer and is human activity the cause? In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) answered that question with this statement: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate.” In 2001, the IPCC said, “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.” And in 2007, with further research pointing to the same conclusion, the IPCC reported that “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. ” The phrase “very likely” is about as strong as science gets. In the 2007 IPCC report, it was defined as meaning a 95 percent chance that it is so. That’s a common scientific convention: Something is taken as established fact if there is 95 percent confidence that it is correct.
When the national science academies of eleven leading nations got together in 2005 to issue a historic joint statement on climate change, the first sentence read: “There will always be uncertainty in understanding a system as complex as the world’s climate.” It goes on to say, “There is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring. . . . It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities. This warming has already led to changes in the Earth’s climate.” By scientific standards, that language is tough, and yet it still hinges on the phrase “it is likely.” Uncertainty is so central to the nature of science that it provides a handy way of distinguishing between a scientist talking as a scientist and a scientist who is using the prestige of his white lab coat to support political activism: Look at the language. If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist.