Panel investigates media reporting on science and politics of stem cells

To watch a video of this forum, click here.

By Benjamin Gleitzman
Special to the Harvard News Office

Stem cells, politics, "fairness," and what one participant termed "the disintegration of traditional journalism," were all on the bill at the HSCI public forum titled "Stem Cells and the Media," hosted by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

A panel of four science journalists who have extensively covered the stem cell "story" gathered in the Radcliffe Gym to discuss and debate the challenges and complexities of stem cell research coverage by the mainstream media.

"This is the most political issue in science," said William Saletan, a national correspondent for Slate magazine. Due to what Saletan called "organized political gamesmanship," which he says both supporters and opponents of embryonic stem cell research engage in, the media has come to cover the topic as a political story.

"We are not trying to tell people how to think," said Dan Vergano a science writer for USA Today and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard this year. Vergano said he considers his most important job to be fair to the reader, rather than to provide extensive coverage of political rhetoric. "If someone says something insane, we don’t put that in the paper," Vergano said, laughing.

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