Hemant Mehta sent me a link to this graph from GraphJam:
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It’s a joke (duh), but I’d say that’s true for the mainstream media. On blogs, though, it’s a different story. After all, Cassini, MESSENGER, Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra — these all get positive coverage here. And APOD has tons of NASA shots, and it’s the biggest astronomy/space site on teh interwebs.
Blogs rule.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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October 26th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Oh, whew- thank goodness you stepped in to clear away the fog of uncertainty with your wisdom by clarifying that it was just a joke. For I moment I actually thought this graph was making a statement that the media refuses to cover our advances in alien communication.
October 26th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Story of my life!
October 26th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Things blow up things at Nasa? Was that while the Mythbusters were there. I seem to remember something about a women in a diaper.
October 26th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Also, unfortunate love triangles…
October 26th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
For all the effort NASA puts into PR, it can’t seem to eradicate two stubborn myths that affect the public discourse about its mission.
First is the myth that NASA’s budget is an exorbitantly large and growing slice of the federal pie. People make all kinds of claims without any seeming reference to actual budget numbers.
Second is the notion that, at least in terms of human spaceflight, NASA runs an independent shop. The reality is that the parameters of NASA human spaceflight mission have always been established by the White House. Kennedy directed NASA to go to the Moon. Bush directed NASA to go back. In between, the various occupants of the White House were essentially content with watching NASA run in circles.
October 26th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
It’s pretty easy to do this kind of graph; I did a similar one in grad school showing the rise of public opinion about HST over time after the launch. at the time I used Nexis to do the search.
MSM is not going to be your “go to place” for all things science — if you did that, you’d never get past UFOs in Texas and beached whales…
October 26th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
@justcorbly
That’s why when ever I see a dumd post railing against NASA’s budget I ALWAYS respond by compairing the DOD annual budget to NASA’s. Thing is, I never seem to get a responce to those posts
Heck I even compaired the R&D budget of the DOD to NASA’s… R&D has about 10 times the annual for NASA.
October 26th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Sorry, this graph makes no sense, it sums up to 200%!
October 26th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Oded, I was just about to type that.
October 26th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Well, I’m sure as soon as they achieve “alien communication” that bar of the graph will shoot right up.
October 26th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
oded and ibeechu, i think that’s “100% of topic covered”, not “as a percentage of stories about nasa”
October 26th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Why isn’t covering up alien communications on there?
October 26th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
The graph adds up to 200%
October 26th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
The 200% is part of the gag, people.
October 26th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Everyone complaining about 200%, is at least a 110% wrong.
October 26th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
I can add a little addendum to this. (Bravo, Phil for doing this post)
There are mainstream media that does cover NASA news, but they are papers in areas where there is a NASA center, because that center means a lot to the lives of people in the area, and there you’ll see a lot more coverage. For instance, Florida Today, Orlando Sentinel, and Houston Chronicle all cover a day by day account of shuttle missions and any spacewalks.
Big science news does get coverage, but its not 100% definite, and mostly in a weekly section.
October 26th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Yeah, it’s pretty funny but I don’t think there’s any accuracy here.
I’d think that over the last year most major market publications have had at least a tidbit on:
Spitzer
Cassini
Chandra
Kibo
Kaguya
Messenger
Chandrayaan-1
Something on Virgin Galactic
Something on SETI
a story on SpaceX
and an update on the Hubble situation.
Not enough coverage – but certainly not zero as depicted.
I know the graph above is being silly, but I really would like to see a graph that seriously covers positive vs negative space news.
I guess what this graph really illustrates is that the negative news “sticks” more that the positive with the general public. If not, I don’t think any of us would find it funny.
October 26th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Well, yes it’s kind of a joke, but in the joke lies some element of truth about how NASA is perceived.
Steve A: you are correct about the weekly section– we used to call it the ‘Science ghetto’… as if science is so out of the mainstream that it needs its own page, totally ignoring how much a part of our lives science is…
I blame it on the fact that in school we had science class and english class and art class and for some reason never did science or art or language arts mix… when, indeed, they should have!
October 27th, 2008 at 5:29 am
It seems a lot of the cool things NASA actually do go largely unreported lately…
Take IBEX, for instance. Most people seem to havenot even noticed it. A couple of times I’ve even seen a news headling saying something along the lines of “Probe X lands successfully on Mars” — to which I stop and think “Hang on… I don’t remember hearing about that one.”
Everyone (especially in the news, it seems) gets so hung up on things going wrong sometimes, they forget to mention when things go right!
October 28th, 2008 at 9:19 am
Hehehe – this graph clearly doesn’t consider Weekly World News to be main-stream. :-0