A week ago there was a discussion at the Leiter reports about what kind of philosophy gets news coverage. The initial thought was that things are biased towards sciencey stuff, though the comments on how different things are in Europe, particularly this one, were nice reading as well.
My thoughts: first, science is a lot easier to cover than philosophy. We collect data that's never been collected before, sometimes a result is overturned, but all in all we make progress in a pretty straightforward way. Philosophy is a lot slower moving, with more argumentative back and forth. On the other hand, I think good philosophy is going to be interesting to most people. Philosophy shows up all the time in newspapers, but its usually on the op-ed pages and written by people who have no idea what they're talking about.
Philosophy journalism is never going to have the straightforward new study/new technology stories of science journalism. Its often hard to tell right when an article comes out whether it will be important, ultimately. On the other hand, news has to be new. So I'd recommend a focus on conferences, books, and up-and-coming people. For example, Richard Feldman has an anthology coming out on disagreement. If I were a journalist right now, I'd be rushing to whip up a sort of book-review plus for it, involving reading the book but also interviewing the people involved, asking them what implications they think this has for disagreements in politics, religion etc. Feldman, at least, has no problem talking about those things, as he contributed a quite good essay on disagreement to an anthology titled Philosophers Without Gods. Unfortunately, this kind of reporting takes effort, and honestly it isn't even that common within science journalism.
2 comments:
Interesting post. I think one of the reasons why philosophy hasn't reaped the rewards of abundant media coverage is because quite honestly, most people have a very hard time with abstract concepts. A news brief on CO2 emissions in the atmosphere and how it's influencing global warming isn't easier to envision and quantify in the mind of the viewer. But how do you quantify morality, or any other major and intangible philosophical ideas?
In addition, I think people think of philosophers as old hags sitting alone in their offices at a major university with no friends, writing about something insane. If these stereotypes could be done away with, and television audiences could open up more to the idea of abstract thinking, I think we'd all be better off.
The "writing something insane" comment is interesting, because most people, when they think of philosophy, seem to be inclined towards the crazy stuff. How many laymen have heard of Moore's defense of common sense?
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