ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which scientific claims are produced as plausible or implausible, credible or ‘incredible’. We considered a range of terms here, including ‘crafted’, ‘manufactured’, or simply ‘made’. The crux of the matter is that some communicators in some genres assume a transparency of mediation – the scientific facts are real, objective and ‘out there’. These facts simply require transmission. However, other communicators are explicitly reflective and self-conscious about the craft that goes into making their claims about science. The terrain becomes even more complicated if we acknowledge that some communicators who carefully craft their claims disavow the work that goes into making them appear credible, whilst what counts as plausible in a Hollywood movie may differ markedly from what counts as plausible in, for example, the speculations of an expert committee convened by a sitting legislature. We are interested in how some science is (at least temporarily) ‘made real’,
while some is (temporarily) ‘made false’. Our particular concern is with recent discussions about human therapeutic and reproductive cloning, but much of our discussion pertains to science more generally.We suggest that claims about therapeutic and reproductive cloning cannot simply and unreflectively be assigned to one side or the other of the divisions between truth and falsehood, reality and imagination, or fact and fiction. We review the flexibility of discourses about therapeutic cloning, an area of scientific research first mooted in 1997, that (as discussed in Chapter 3) initially promised cures just beyond the immediate temporal horizon. We suggest that this is a horizon that has advanced or retreated with reference to key news events. The re-evaluating of the claims of Hwang as fraudulent has been the most obvious and dramatic element in the uncertainty about these horizons. At the same time it is our contention that since 1997, human reproductive cloning has come to be presented, by some, as a more imminent technoscientific prospect. This is despite the efforts of other key actors to maintain its positioning as fantastic, indeed, as a science fiction. Our examination of truth claims about science in this chapter is explored
through an explicit focus on questions around diverse media genres. In a report
about the relationship between scientists and the media, published in 2000, Ian Hargreaves, former Director of the Centre for Journalism Studies at Cardiff University, argues that: ‘If we are to understand the way that the media and science interact . . . we need to do so from the premise that crude oversimplification about the media is as damaging as crude oversimplification about science’ (Hargreaves and Ferguson 2000: 4). We would agree. We cannot hope here to rehearse the work of an entire and diverse field of research that encompasses dimensions of sociology, politics, cultural and communications studies, to take just a few examples. However, by drawing attention to some of the complex circuitous relationships in play in relation to ‘the media’ we hope to illuminate some of the nuance that is obscured in statements that characterise a diverse, nationally and regionally specific, multi-genre, multi-platform industry as a single homogeneous object. The media include, for example: television, radio, the internet, cinema, regional and national press, specialist trade publications and academic publications. They encompass a wealth of content designed to inform, entertain and persuade. The issues of which channel to select and of which genre or form to choose in order to inform, entertain or persuade – or all of the above – are explored and debated by media professionals as well as many others, including, of course, scientists and policy makers. Some claims made about ‘the media’ reduce this complexity. Moreover, the lack of attention to detail may obscure crucial features of media operations, including, for example, features of different genres. We aim to avoid some of this confusion, conflation and transposition in our account, whilst demonstrating the rhetorical stakes in moves across channel and genre boundaries.1
