>As I pay more attention, I am increasingly appalled at how the media and
we, the public, seem to accept any study that comes along without a
critical examination of its actual worth or meaning.  Many of these studies
are designed to look at just one aspect of a topic, but are interpreted as
having wider meaning.  We are seeing far too much of that lately.

I attended a pharmaceutical symposium several years ago where the keynote
speaker was a NY Times medical reporter. She asked the group, "How many
different kinds of drugs are there?" The audience of clinicians and
researchers offered a variety of responses based on how you choose to
classify drugs: for example there are beta-blockers, anti-inflammatories,
diuretics, etc.; there are opioids, steroids, etc.; and so on. After a few
minutes, the speaker said, "You are all wrong. There are only 2 kinds of
drugs: Killer Drugs and Miracle Drugs. That is the public perception, and
those are the only things that will ever get any press. Anything else just
simply isn't newsworthy to the public."

The same applies to bee research. There are only 2 kinds of news that the
public cares about right now: "Bees are dying and dragging the rest of us
down with them!" and "Urban pioneer/elderly couple/cute kid get back to
nature by keeping bees in their apartment/suburban yard/school." Anything
else is not going to sell newspapers.

What's to be done? We cannot change the public or the news media --- the
rules they follow have been around since the dawn of time. All we can do is
try to play the system. The media reports that we are most offended by are
the ones where people have played the system quite well. Were it to be in
the NY Times, would the headline of the pollen-substitute study read,
"Miracle food saves bees, mankind breathes sigh of relief"?

Maybe Psychology and Mass Communications should be mandatory subjects in
university applied sciences curricula.

Randall Austin
Bee enthusiast in NC

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