That observation should tell scientists and physicians that getting significant messages to the public requires a greater respect for and cooperation with popular mass media, says a University of Illinois researcher. The public's ambivalence toward science, she said today in a speech to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is shaped both by the mainstream media's narrow, results-oriented coverage and by the scientific community's general dismissal of popular mass media. People use the resources they have available to construct a vision of the world that makes sense for them and lets them live their lives.
Useful resources are as likely to come from entertainment television as from recognized authorities.
This is a fact that the scientific and medical communities need to acknowledge and work with, not deplore. In it, Treichler and Catherine Warren of North Carolina State University provide a detailed examination of media coverage of AIDS and its impact on women. She has studied the cultural dimensions of AIDS for more than a decade. Rather than asking what they learned and why they are mentioning it, physicians belittle their comments. This rejection shows the failure of science and medicine to respect other sources of knowledge and to grasp the power of other kinds of narratives.