I attended an interesting conference session today on the relationship between bioethicists and the media. Most of the discussion focused on the ways the media distorts or simply does a bad job reporting controversial issues, especially on difficult or abstract subjects such as arise in bioethics. The question was pitched as “How should bioethicists relate to the media?”

Most of the discussion centered on the phenomenon of reporters seeking quotes from ethicists - which then are distorted, reduced to sound-bite meaninglessness, or, worst of all, used as “balance” in the kind of he said/she said articles that present the most outrageous or false statements on an equal footing with informed or rational commentary. Many session participants complained of their bad experiences in that regard, and there was talk of how to get reasoned approaches to ethical issues better represented in the news media.

There was also some discussion of whether ethicists should take “educational” or “advocacy” roles in dealing with the media - whether they should speak in a neutral, explanatory voice, or take a clear position on controversies and use their knowledge and insight to advocate for that position. There are good arguments on both sides. (The most compelling one for the “advocacy” position, to me, is that the enemies of reasoned discourse have no compunction about explicit advocacy in the guise of “expert opinion” - meaning that only one side of the argument is being presented in a forceful way, while real ethicists are constrained to a neutral role that leaves intellectually dishonest advocacy unopposed.)

These are important issues, but I think the matter has broader significance. My concern is that there is very little effective public discourse on ethical issues at all. Many at the conference session bemoaned the low level of public knowledge about controversial topics of all kinds, but there was no consensus on what scholars or professionals should do about that. The public simply does not seem to have a taste for knowledge on those subjects. In a conversation after the session, I and some other members agreed we were confounded by the lack of active public-level publishing on bioethical topics. There is a very active popular-science publishing genre - good authors regularly have best-sellers on very abstruse scientific topics, and the last few years have been a golden age for science writing. There seems to me no reason the same phenomenon can’t take place in bioethics, but where is our Natalie Angiers, our Matt Ridley, our Stephen Jay Gould? The closest thing seems to me to be execrably argued - or simply dishonest - tomes of complaint by the likes of Leon Kass, or freakin’ Dinesh D’Souza. (That’s not entirely true. For one thing, virtually the entire President’s Council have published tomes of complaint, not just Kass, and it’s also true that there has been some good work on cloning, genetic engineering, and life extension. But that’s the tip of the iceberg to what could and should be done.)

That is the kind of thing I would like to see bioethics doing in the media - and not just the print publication media, either. Where is our Cosmos, our Ascent of Man, our E.R. or Medical Investigation? (Actually, that’s an intriguing thought! What kind of medical-ethics-based dramas could we create for TV? Many of the popular medical shows introduce controversial issues in some episodes, but what about one that centered on them as a theme? We could have, say, I.R.B., in which intrepid and remarkably good-looking research-safety committee members forcefully cite the Belmont Report in committee hearings, and then race into laboratories in slow motion just in time to fling themselves between evil researchers and subjects who didn’t read the fine print on their consent forms. Or, say, House, Ph.D., in which a grumpy and iconoclastic ethicist antagonizes the academic establishment with his cynicism, while simultaneously enlightening them with his brilliant displays of symbolic logic. And, of course, there’s an obvious opening for Medical Forensics, in which bioethicists engage in formal debates over clinical cases while working around the clock on dazzling, cutting-edge position papers with really hard-hitting footnotes.) At any rate, there’s room for effective public education, and for engaging the public in the excitement and intellectual reality of the controversies they are currently being misled on. A public that snaps up intellligent popularizations on relativity theory, black holes, or evolution science will, I keep thinking, read equally accessible, but uncompromising, books on social and ethical controversies.

Who will write them, and how should they be written? What would good work of this kind look like, and why is what is already available so bad?