Ira Flatow is the host of
National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation: Science Friday, and founder and president of
TalkingScience, a non-profit company
whose goal is to bring the latest discoveries and innovations, controversies and cures in science and technology to a public that hardly ever hears about them.
Flatow’s career has been dedicated to making science
user friendly as evidenced by his more than 35 years of contributions to all forms of media. He has produced pieces for radio, print, television, and the Internet, with a knack for making them both informative and entertaining.
The Rockefeller University (RU) has had the pleasure of Flatow’s presence on several occasions. In May 2004, he moderated one of
RU’s Science and Media Lecture Series, specifically:
Compelled to Create? Artists and Scientists on the Process of Discovery. In an offshoot from the Rockefeller Film Series, in May 2008, he was a guest speaker at the
Science and Media Lecture Series, as organized by Alexis Gambis. On October 16th, he will be at the New York Academy of Science, where he will host the panel discussion entitled,
Science in Fiction, for the kick-off of the
Imagine Science Film Festival, the first science film festival in New York.
Ira Flatow has credits as writer, interviewer, director, and producer. For this piece, his credit is as the interviewee. Ira Flatow speaks to Natural Selections about his new book,
Present at the Future.
NS: Can you tell us about Present at the Future?
Ira Flatow: Present at the Future. It’s based on my radio program, Science Friday. It takes some of the topics we talk about on the radio show and expands upon them and brings them more up-to-date.
It has to do with basically all the topics that we talk about in science. It could have to do with Global Warming, Cosmology; it could deal with Energy Policy; it could deal with Stem Cell Research, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, and where some of the frontiers are. I mean the book, the title, is a play on words because we’re all present at the future. What we talk about is sort of looking forward into history.
NS: Right. Now, talk about Present at the Future. What do you think has changed in Science and reporting in Science since you started working?
Ira Flatow: There are fewer science reporters around. There’s a lot less science that’s being reported in the media; because as the media cuts back on its budgets, newspapers are going out of business, networks are shrinking, doing less news, science is always the first thing that gets cut back on the agenda. I mean there are Pulitzer Prize winning scientists who have been fired from newspapers because of budget cuts. There used to be tens of dozens…there used to be like, I think 70 science sections on the newspapers across the country. There’s just a fraction of them now. On the other hand, the internet is around, and it allows us to get different sources that we couldn’t get before. The internet has taken over the place of the old-time media.
NS: Science Friday has an “island” in the 3-D virtual world of Second Life, where listeners can chat on-line with other listeners during the show, walk through your library, ask questions and meet you in silico; as well as chase after trolls, fly, or simply hang out on a tropical paradise. Do you think these social communities could be the future of promoting interest in science?
Ira Flatow: I’m not sure if the future of social communities is going to be. But there’s always going to be an appetite for content. People are always going to want the stuff that we make. The stories that we report on, the news. And how it’s going to be distributed, doesn’t really matter. As long as we can make the news, we can take the content out. That’s the most important thing. Content is king now, as they say.
NS: What skills do you need to be a science reporter as opposed to being a journalist in other fields?
Ira Flatow: You can’t accept an answer just as an opinion. I always talk about this. An opinion itself is not good enough. If I ask a politician, “why do you believe in this?” they can give me an opinion about something. If I ask a scientist this, he has to back it up with the data. They have to have the research. And we ask them for the research. I always ask my reporter friends who are political reporters, “when you interview the president or a politician and they give you an opinion, do you ever raise your hand and say, ‘Excuse me, sir or madam, can you show us the data on this? Can you back this up with some facts?’ They never do that. And they should.
NS: When you are talking about a certain topic in the program, do you have to call and talk to the researchers working in that particular field?
Ira Flatow: Yes, we talk to scientists, but we also talk to opinion-makers and policy-makers. We try to go to the prime sources of the science…because they deserve to be heard and they’re responsible for it. But sometimes, they are not the best speakers in the world. So, we know who they are, the best speakers, and they’re usually well-versed on the research. So we have them speak for the scientists. But, sometimes scientists can’t give us the answers for the things that we might want to talk about. For example, in the creation evolution debate that happened that was settled down in Dover, Pennsylvania a couple of years ago. The creationists wanted it to be this story that there was a problem with evolution, when there really isn’t any problem with evolution. Just talk about a problem and they have the day. So instead of attacking it as whether there is a problem or not we talk to the decision-makers, the school board members, the teachers, about how they view, how they would teach it, and why they teach it the way they do. So we didn’t have to discuss the validity of evolution.
NS: When it comes to talking to scientists, how do you get in touch with them?
Ira Flatow: We read the papers. Every week there’s a site on the Internet called Eureka Alert and so the papers are all published in advance, and we see what papers we would like to cover and we call them on the phone.
NS: Are they usually available?
Ira Flatow: To us, they are.
NS: That is the student’s classic complaint: what little time the principal investigators have for each person in their own labs.
Ira Flatow: (Laughter.) They haven’t done a radio show for 30 years. (Laughter.) They don’t have over a million listeners. But it’s true. This is an interesting topic because there are a lot of scientists who have been burned by journalists and they won’t talk to them but they’ll talk to us because they realize that we have a good reputation and it’s taken many years to get that reputation.
NS: How can you convince scientists that it’s important to show their science outside the lab?
Ira Flatow: Well, scientists have to understand that it’s important for people to understand what they do if they want them to be funded. Scientists are always working on grants, funding, whatever corporate money, or government money. And if they want to get more of that, people have to understand what they do. They have to understand the importance of what they do. They have to be able to tell a Congressional Committee what they do that will speak to people like that. I just think it’s - you can’t hide in your laboratory and expect, that’s the way you have to do research; you have to be willing to be out front. On the other hand we are always wary of scientists who are too far out front. What are they selling us? Why? Is their grant up? Are they just looking for money? So we try to balance that out.
NS: Do you have a lot of scientists in your audience?
Ira Flatow: Oh yeah. We have a lot of scientists in our audience. And we hear from them a lot. Every week. Sometimes they get on the radio and debate with the other scientists, or compare notes, they get a little chummy sometimes, and they’re on first-name basis with the guests, and we’re like, ‘wait a minute, you must know each other,” and they’re like, “yeah, we know each other.” And that sort of thing. On the other hand, we have an audience of over a quarter million people, and most of them are probably not scientists and we get email from people who are truck drivers and get calls from people in their trucks driving across country. We get calls from people who are in their basement garages, who have got the radio on in a little booth. So, broad range. A lot of women listeners. We’re very happy, we have a large cross-section. And our podcasts - we have 10 million downloads a year of our podcasts. We have a million downloads a month of our podcast. We’re way up there. We can compete with best podcasts, with generic topics. And that proves more than anything how much people like to talk and listen to science. We’re way up there on iTunes every week.
NS: Actually you said something, something like, “people love science”?
Ira Flatow: They love science.
NS: What do they want to know?
Ira Flatow: Science answers the same basic question that philosophers and theologians have been asking for hundreds, thousands of years, that is “Where did we come from?” “Where are we going?” and “How are we getting there?” Philosophers have a way of thinking about it and theologians have a way of finding the truth for themselves and science has a different way of finding the truth. But they are all questions about who we are and why are we here? They are all universal questions that everybody always is interested about finding the answers to them.
People just want to know how the world works. They’re fascinated by small everyday life miracles. They want to have these little miracles of life. Why is the sky blue? The oldest question … They’re interested in these simple questions. They’re also interested in medical questions which we cover a lot. Diseases and things like that. But they just simply want to know why the world works. That’s why I want to know. That’s why I got into this. That’s what interests me most. That’s how the world works. That’s why it works that way.
