I have just watched the BBC's report on the newly created 3D map of dark matter using Hubble data; and it made my heart sink.

I applaud the BBC for giving airtime to such discoveries, but for such a respected organisation their research was awful.

It's no wonder the vast majority of people are either bewildered or disinterested the the universe as a whole when the facts they are given are completely wrong.

It's a shame that tonight 60 million or so people in the UK and many other people around the world were told Hubble shone a beam of light out into the depths of the universe and studied how it was bent by the gravity of dark matter billions of light years away!

And this was a report from the BBCs science correspondant!

I remain downhearted that perhaps the most important story of the week was reported in such a shoddy manner.

Does anyone else feel space is being let down by TV coverage?

Yes I do! Don't get me started...

Only programs worth watching are the xmas lectures and The Sky at Night - just caught up with the 650th edition - Fab!

Nick

I saw that report too, without a doubt the worst piece of journalism i've ever seen. Also, I think he said Hubble "fired a beam of light" LOL

Absolutely appalling and - after yesterday's insulting scheduling of the 650th edition of THE SKY AT NIGHT at 01.55, another sign of BBC TV's disgraceful "dumbing down" of its science content. I was in another room so only heard the "fired a beam of light" line in the background, and was sure I'd misheard, but had it confirmed at my astronomical society's meeting tonight.

COME ON!!!! It's not rocket science... well okay, it is, kind of... but any 9 yr old space mad kid knows that Hubble COLLECTS light, not fires it out of its end like some ***** James Bond villain's laser cannon.

I'm literally baffled how a so-called "science correspondent" could get the story so totally wrong. But then again, this is the same broadcasting company that had Jonathan Cainer on a HORIZON talking about Pluto - the same Jonathan Cainer who wrote in his column today about how Comet McNaught is "a portent" and WILL shine "brighter than anything you've ever seen in the sky before..."

Unbelievable.

The thing that worries me is that there must be many things reported by the media which I might accept, but which are just as badly mangled as those subjects about which I know something. Whether through sheer laziness, inertia, or their own agendas, I don't even trust the 'quality' media any more. I used to work for a TV and newspaper group, and I have to say that my illusions were shattered very early on.

Oh, and in case anyone is interested, HRH The Queen Mother *was* a reptiloid alien. Well, I can certainly attest to the fact that the picture desk guys always had to paint her teeth a different colour before publication - they really were quite, er, green...

One of the joys of the WWW is that at least we have somewhere like UMSF; as for the general space policy issues, well...


Bob Shaw

Quite a contrast the BBC online News report about it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6235751.stm

The problem is News networks employ a "science correspondent".... who must cover every aspect of science, which is impossible to do properly. And clearly this one knew absolutely nothing about astronomy/space science.

I just viewed the report myself. A link is at the top right of this page:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6235751.stm

Incredible. If it was a live broadcast, then I'd have put it down to a slip-up... but an edited piece which surely must have been reviewed when it was written and put together... Argh!

I feel the same way. And not just because of space exploration. Whenever I see a local story covered that involves events I witnessed, or, occasionally, when things I have been involved in have been on the news, it is shocking how wrong reporters get it. I have reached a point in which I don't accept information from television news until I have verified it elsewhere.

The problem, I feel, comes from the fact that news reporters are, by and large, communications majors. In other words, they have been taught how to put together a story that will draw in readers, but they may have no background (and often don't) in the subject they are talking about.

I realized how pathetic the media situation in America has gotten while speaking to a friend of mine, who works for our local NBC affiliate.. She is trained in meteorology, as well as communications. Here in the Knoxville, Tennessee area, we live in a valley, between the Cumberland Plateau and the Smoky Mountains. She was trying to explain why we have had warmer air here in Knoxville than these two regions. She nearly lost her job for using the words "topography" and "altitude." According to NBC management, this was "too sophisticated" for ordinary viewers. This left me speechless.

Wow. I have to say that as an American I'm probably even more appalled when hearing this. The BBC is considered the gold standard of English-language broadcast journalism by many of us (we're pretty accustomed to extreme scientific ignorance in our own media ) Well, there goes another fond illusion...

We've got the same feeling in France too and I stongly back Bob and Ted when they say that, as I see how bad they report on what I know, it has to be the same for all subjects.
I just finish "Moondust" which is about how the Moonwalkers "felt down" to Earth and all the meaning of the Apollo program (highly recommendable). To give an exemple of how bad the general puublic understand "space" there is an exemple of somebody telling Denis Tito after he completed his flight to the ISS : so, you went to the Moon?!!!
I can hardly stand such ignorence.
I'll never thank Doug enough to have created UMSF.

Same here, and I'm pretty much convinced it's worldwide and not limited to TV but general media (read newspapers). When I do the every morning scan thru my bookmarks, I always start by UMSF and space related stuff and finish with the local spanish newspapers. Their coverage of space news is simply s*** and I have the feeling that in case I was on the medical business, for instance, I would say the same about med news coverage.

Hehe Bob. You sound just like me a while ago. I don't think there's anything we can do about it, however. Realistically, we are the minority here...

It's not just the news that are incorrect and dumbed down. You see it everyday business. I work as a web designer and with most clients it is difficult to explain some concepts... like server space! It's like someone buying a car and not wanting to know that it as a tank.
I think that this type of thinking is one of the root problems in todays world. Although we live in a technological society were knowledge means power, most people prefer to know as little as possible... Media just adapts to the market :-(

My latest Sunday newspaper included as a gift a Discovery channel VCD documentary about colonizing Mars (of all things !).
Although it was supposed to be © 2005, I soon realized it was much much older, since it talked about plans to send Pathfinder to Mars !
It also mentioned that Cassini would reach Saturn at 2014, and how wonderful it would be that we would have something landing on Titan at the time

(This is as far as I was able to watch, at this point my wife suggested that I should either stop yelling or stop watching )

This was a documentary that reached about 100,000 homes last Sunday

Yes I saw that ridiculous dark matter report on BBC news as well. Has anybody contacted the BBC about it? I've noticed this kind of thing before when they make a brave effort to report a breaking scientific news story. Thery're usually much better when they've had time to digest the information and produce a properly researched documentary. It seems to be within the news team itself that the necessary science background is decidedly patchy. I wonder if anyone in news management actually comprehends how bad the howlers sometimes are?

Yep. I sent in a complaint last night. No reply yet.

I know, I'm amazed too.

Well done. Too many of us (like me) just grumble silently.

Considering the reporter's academic background, I'm extremely surprised that this particular howler was broadcast.

They've pulled it.

However............

............to enjoy this gem again, simply paste the following into your browser and it should open in Windows Media Player. Quick - while stocks last!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/avdb/news/vide...046_16x9_nb.asx



(Poor Andy Coates - NOT his fault, of course!)

The weird thing is, they must have deliberately played the animation of Hubble observing the universe in reverse. It shows Hubble "firing it's beam of light" lol When in fact the light should be shown entering the telescope.

...wow. Thanks for the clip, ollopa; now I fully understand the outrage.

My hypothesis: The unfortunate correspondent confused Hubble with the "Doomsday Machine" in the original Star Trek:

http://www.memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Image:...y_Machine_2.jpg

Thanks, Ollopa, for posting the link.

I didn't see it live, and was trying to put off watching it until I'd summed up the courage: but now I see that it's one of those things - like moments in Fawlty Towers - which are just so embarassingly awful that I cringed while seeing it. Toe-curling, "please make it stop" comedy.

I rather hope there's been a dreadful misinterpretation of a more technical press release: perhaps with a title something like "Hubble shines light on the Universe's dark matter".

But flip. That's awful.

E- ...And I'm being generous.

Andy

No, that's not going to wash. The guy was a "science correspondent", he gets paid for reporting science news stories. The story didn't break at five to 6, it was all over the net 24hrs earlier, so all he had to do was go online and read the info while having a cup of coffee. During the afternoon I put together a 30 slide Powerpoint presentation on the item for my astro society meeting that night, with consideably less resources than the BBC has.

Hubble has been up there since (gulp!) 1991, and there can't be many people who don't know that it takes pretty pictures, so is a CAMERA, and cameras COLLECT light, they don't shoot it out of their lenses.

This was lazy, poor and frankly stupid reporting, and it shouldn't be just dismissed as silly. The BBC is publicly funded over here through the licence fee, we have no choice - unless we want to sample prison food - but to pay the annual fee, even if we don't particularly want to watch so-called celebrities poncing around ballroom floors in acres of swishing taffeta, or standing beside has-been singers murdering our favourite songs, or sit through humour-free episodes of "My Family" or other shows. Every year the Beeb takes over £100 from me, and although I can't say it's not worth it - I get to listen to 5 Live while I sit here writing, and get to see The Sky At Dawn, and Spooks - it's episodes like this that make me genuinely angry.

I'm giving a talk to a Women's Institute meeting tonight in a tiny village hall in the wilds of Cumbria. There'll be maybe 10 people there, plus as many bourbons as I can eat and as much tea as I can drink. It's people like that who rely on the BBC and other broadcasters to inform them accurately. They were told that a telescope shot a beam of light out to the edge of the universe. Some will have believed it, because, well, come on, it was on the BBC News... I'll have to set them straight tonight, when they ask about it, as they surely will. I don't mind, but I shouldn't have to set them straight because it's not my job to, it's the science correspondent's job.

God help us when we finally find life on Mars, or receive a SETI signal.

Hello everyone,

I must admit that I stopped wathching ANY tv about 5 years ago. But a year ago I was still downloading the Polish headline news off the internet as an *.asf file. And in January '06 they told the 40 M people here in their prime time edition that the Stardust spacecraft sampled the comet by firing a probe towards it. And the name of the probe was... Deep Impact. How about that?

And similarly to the BBC, the ONLINE reports issued the same day were well researched and NOT inaccurate. I guess the "internet" people tend to have a better background in sci tech than the "screen" people they employ.

And by the way, to cheer up a bit - presenting sci tech on tv also has some positive aspects to it. I noticed that Polish TV resumed airing reruns of a 1980s French-made science cartoon series. I was wondering whether our members from France could recognise it by the appearance of the depicted character:

Louis Antoine de Bougainville

There was also another series about biology and about space science (the latter featured a flying character named Ordie or something close to that).

Best regards from Poland,

Karol P.

This one has always been one of my favorites:

Yow!!!!! No wonder she broke up... I'm pretty certain that the airframe was never rated for exceeding C!

-the other Doug

My favourite was in print, not on the telly...

The Times a couple of years back had a report on an exoplanet I think around 10 times as massive as Jupiter. It was accompanied by the Times's own diagram, showing three disks of vastly different sizes, "to scale", to demonstrate to the reader that the exoplanet's diameter was 10 times that of Jupiter, and around 100 times that of Earth.

Maybe they had a flat-Earther in their graphics dept.

[rant mode]

You know, I'm still after all these years trying frantically to figure out why truly momentous events & sights like the journeys of the MERs, Cassini, the Hubble Deep Fields, etc., etc, just can't compete in the public's eye with the latest breathless update on Brangelina.

I've been blaming this on poor PR on the part of the space community, but clearly it's much more fundamental than that, and apparently global to boot. It's very easy to blame substandard science education, but again that begs the question: who really enjoyed the regimen of school for its own sake in any subject? Bottom line is what really guides whatever evolves into people's interests, and therefore attention to accuracy, demand, funding...?

It's paradoxical and quite bitterly ironic that fictional, usually puerile 'spaceoperas' flourish commercially while actual space research activities draw minimal media attention, most of which is inaccurate and/or equally puerile when reported at all (at least in the United States). The public's interest in space seems to be there, but tragically disconnected from reality...how to connect these vital dots????

[/rant mode]

No, he wouldn't. Any correspondent would know that the Doomsday Machine fires an anti-proton beam, not a beam of light. Then again maybe he would if he though protons and photons are the same.

".... just can't compete in the public's eye with the latest breathless update on Brangelina. "

Find and read Cyril Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" <classic sf short story or novellete from the 50's> and realize he made a simple numerical mistake. He put the story 300 years in the future and it was only 30.

"Comet McNaught is passing close to the Sun, whose gravity pulls material off, giving it a big and visible 'debris field'"



http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/6251663.stm

I just read that also and was going to post it. Another pearler eh ?

Nice.

Another favorite was the article that talked about dust on the Mars Rovers, but how the designers planned for this, and attached small fans to the top of the deck to keep the solar panels clean.

That caption has now been edited.

Mchan: Sadly, I think that most of these guys think that photons and (if they know of them at all) antiprotons are tangible objects about the size of a tennis ball, color-coded for easy identification and only found in mysterious labs located in European castles on cliffs surrounded by continuous thunderstorms and populated by clinically insane, cackling near-sighted old men with tangled long white hair. (If I missed a stereotype here, please feel free to fill it in! )

Ed: Thanks for the tip; heard of the story, now have to read it. A fav of mine is Pohl's The Space Merchants...looks like it's almost in the same vein.

[EDIT]: Just had a weird thought, and please forgive me if it's OT. What if UMSF PIs & astronauts commanded huge salaries & led lavish lifestyles? Do you think that public attention to space would increase to the same level as "entertainment"?

This may sound facetious, but it's not. Operational analysis of systems sometimes points to very odd-seeming solutions. This conjecture is purely intuitive, but let's fantasize for a moment that fame & fortune are very visible rewards of scientific excellence; would public attention be refocused thereby? [/EDIT]

Damn right it has - should have seen the email I sent

Doug

"...A fav of mine is Pohl's The Space Merchants...."
I think that's a collab between Pohl and Kornbluth. Many years later, (90's?), Pohl did a sequel by himself. Kornbluth, as I recall, died of malignant hypertension induced heart attack or stroke. The hypertension was supposedly post WW-2 stress related or something. A great loss to the field. (I may be confusing this with Henry Kuttner, who also died young in the 50's)

They replied to my complaint re the now infamous "Hubble shooting a beam of light" report...

Dear Mr Atkinson

Thank you for your e-mail regarding the 'Six O'clock News' broadcast ton 08 January 2007.

I understand you found a factual error in the programme regarding the Hubble Space Telescope. Let me assure you that we aim to keep all of our reports factually accurate on all occasions, however it is inevitable that some mistakes may occur on occasion; obviously we aim to keep this as minimal as possible. We always aim for the highest standards in reporting.

Nevertheless, please be assured I have registered your comments regarding this issue and have made them available to the 'Six O'clock News' production team and the senior BBC management. Feedback of this nature helps us when making decisions about future BBC programmes and your comment will play a part in this process.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact the BBC.

Regards

Adam Sims
BBC Information

Not good enough, just a fob off letter. I'm taking it further, particularly in light of yesterday's comet caption (well done Doug!)

A total fob-off.

The problem isn't that they reported things totally factually incorrectly - the problem is that such a thing is able to happen when the facts are all set out ready to understand on multiple web-pages.

I've written to correct perhaps a dozen science stories over the past couple of years - all things that 10 seconds with google show to be wrong, but still they - the BBC - one of the most highly regarded organisation in the entire industiry - get badly wrong.


Doug

Another one from Yahoo's slideshow....

"The McNaught Comet streaks across the evening sky over Devil's Head mountain......"

Now that was indeed naughty, if true - but I could have sworn McNaught was quite decently attired in a long flowing gown . . . .

This "Streaker" is clad only in long flowing hair, like Lady Godiva.

Rubbish!

I've had a haircut, ooh, not six months ago!

Ygor did it, and very stylish it was, too - the extra fingers help with the scissors.

Bob Shaw

...yeah, I'm convinced that Franky lacked the fine manual dexterity required for the job!

You know, that sure is part of the problem, though: the public fears science, in whatever form, and the media knows this & tries to make it warm and fuzzy, never placing any burden on the audience to think. Fear usually does result from (and I do not use the word pejoratively) ignorance.

Sigh...I was going to write "how do we make people less afraid of science?", but that's definitely not a morally appropriate way to frame the problem. Maybe the question is how do we make science as interesting to the general public as the latest antics of Donald Trump & Rosie O'Donnell? (Surely some of the dogfights that inevitably occur during project development could at least compete with that! )

EDIT: Got it!!! How about a reality TV series called "The Mission"? Premise here is to follow the late developmental stages of a medium-class project (say Mars 2011?) all the way until launch, complete with headaches, squabbles, joy, and triumph. If done correctly, this would be truly compelling viewing and thereby a huge boon for UMSF.

Newspapers even get the basics wrong, adding the wrong spacecraft photo to an article etc...

Well - technically the NOVA 'Mars Rocks' and 'Welcome to Mars' programs kind of did that - An anxious Steve watching one of the Mini-TES getting shock tested etc.

Doug

Yep, and that's why I recognized Adam and the gang the other day in LA
May be I'll be in the MSL's

Not Astronomy, but spaceflight this time ...
On 23rd January, a Belgian newspaper published 2 full pages on the upcoming Moon program and that China will beat the USA to the Moon by 2024... while Japan & India will just start with unmanned probes in 2009.
Moreover, even the UK will start a separate program " Moonlight " to start exploring the Moon by 2010...
And the Moon should be point of departure for a Mars mission ...
Top of the bill, the article stated that it was possible to buy real estate via crazyshop website and that Israeli's were buying it all ...
Seriously...

A local newspaper published this monday an article about Corot's "first light".
The "bad astronomy" in this case was due to an incorrect (imo) translation of "Corot sees first light" into something like "Corot detects the first light of the stars".

You would expect space daily to do better than put a picture of THEMIS the INSTRUMENT (in space aboard Mars Odyssey since '01).... On a page about THEMIS the MISSION ( 5 spacecraft launching this month to study Solar interaction with the earth )

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/THEMIS_L...Feb_15_999.html