Maybe stop victim blaming government science communicators?
They tell their agencies' stories well. Their jobs are still getting cut.
Journalist Michael Hobbes called out the New York Times on Bluesky this week for an op-ed titled “I Worked at U.S.A.I.D. for Over 8 Years. This Is Our Biggest Failure.” The piece’s thesis is basically that the agency didn’t do a good enough job explaining to Americans why it was so important. The writer, a former agency communications head, points out that after providing aid to 40 million people during the 2020-23 Horn of Africa drought, the agency just quietly ended the successful program. He suggests there could have been a presidential address or something, some celebration of that success to get Americans excited about the work. And yeah, anyone who’s worked a job knows that doing good work quietly isn’t enough—you have to be seen and recognized for doing that work to be retained and promoted.
I’ve started to see this same narrative in the news about agencies across the federal government—that they didn’t do enough to sell themselves to the American people, so now they’re getting cut for wasteful spending. It’s an overly simplistic take. For one thing, not every government agency can (or should) devote resources to telling its story or courting the media. Some are explicitly prohibited from doing so. (Not to mention the communications blackouts during both Trump administrations). That leaves it entirely up to the media.
What’s more, Don Moynihan, a policy professor at the University of Michigan, points out, the media isn’t typically interested in straightforward success stories—scandals and failures drive clicks. In any case, I don’t see a world where USAID telling its story better would have swayed Elon Musk, who based his cuts to the federal government on personal grudges and conspiracy theories. As Hobbes writes: USAID was targeted by lies and misinformation that justified its disposal into the “wood chipper.” “Ultimately,” he writes, “this narrative turns conservative attacks into even more calls for the left to reform.”
Telling good stories, at least in this moment, isn’t saving government agencies. Take NASA, for example. The space agency’s original charter mandated it share the story of its science and exploration efforts with the widest possible audience, and it takes that responsibility quite seriously. There’s a saying NASA communications folks love to repeat—”the camera is the mission.” Across its field centers and at headquarters, NASA has a huge staff of skilled video producers, science writers, photographers, public affairs officers (who write press releases and work with journalists), science visualization experts, graphic artists, animators and social media storytellers. Nearly every mission, from solar probes to instruments on the International Space Station, has its own communications budget. The American taxpayer can closely follow where their money goes at NASA—and learn about the scientific discoveries they pay for.
And frankly, we do a great job at it. The video team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center just released a stunning, inspiring documentary about the James Webb Space Telescope that’s available to stream for free (it’s also coming to theaters soon). There’s an entire team here called Live Shots that makes NASA scientists available for TV and radio interviews for outlets big and small—sometimes hundreds for a single mission milestone or event. The NASA live broadcast team just won an Emmy award for their coverage of the 2024 total solar eclipse. That team also won an Emmy for the first TV broadcast from the Moon during Apollo 11. I saw their work in person during the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return in 2023—a full broadcast set up in a day on a remote desert military base from nothing that went off without a hitch. I work on the agency’s audio team, which consists of alums from public radio stations science magazines. We produce high-quality podcasts for a wide variety of audiences in both English and Spanish. We’ve won Webby and Signal awards for our storytelling work.
Anywhere you go in America (and even globally), you see NASA logos on t-shirts and baseball caps. There are NASA Lego sets and NASA Barbie dolls. This is a government agency, unlike maybe the EPA or USGS or USAID, that enjoys broad public awareness and support. It’s an agency that has fans, has been seen as a force for good, has inspired countless young people to pursue STEM careers, has invented products we use every day, from memory foam to freeze-dried food, CAT scans to Velcro. I pointed all this out in a quote post, which went a little more viral than I expected…
Now, we aren’t perfect—if anything, NASA might communicate a bit too much and without enough of a unified messaging strategy. It’s a symptom of our distributed structure, with field centers in Texas, Florida, Maryland, California and more. And stories go through a complex review process to ensure they’re accurate, which can drain some of the excitement and life from them. Critics, like Keith Cowing at NASA Watch, are hard on us, and there’s always room for improvement. A communications gap between scientists and the public is at least partially to blame for distrust in science. But clearly, telling our story well at NASA hasn’t saved us. We’re facing unprecedented budget cuts and science communicators are likely first on the chopping block. And if there’s no science left to cover (science funding is being cut by almost 50%) what good are we anyway?
The point is, it’s a waste of time to victim blame/gaslight government communicators. The best press releases and science explainer videos are just no match for a consistent stream of viral propaganda. Even the agencies that are doing the best job at telling their stories can’t face down the deluge. This administration is cutting broadly popular programs and spreading disinformation. Cancer research is getting cut. Medicaid is getting cut. Hurricane forecasts are getting cut. We don’t even really need science communicators to explain to the American public why we should try to cure cancer or accurately predict hurricanes, do we?
What can we do differently? We can start by rejecting the framing that puts us in this position. The news media does not have to report as facts things that are obviously untrue, no matter what officials say—how can these deep cuts to federal agencies really be about reducing government spending when Congress is also voting on a budget that would balloon the national debt, and when conflicts of interest are so obvious? How are these cuts legal? How can it be agency communicators’ faults when their jobs are cut not based on the quality of their work or the importance of their agency, but in the name, simply, of cutting jobs? Of weakening institutions?
Agency communicators are limited in what they can do in their official capacities. It’s up to journalists (maybe the New York Times?) to go further, investigating the real motivation behind the cuts, telling the public what they’re losing. News outlets have an enormous privilege and responsibility to choose the stories, framings and perspectives that they give oxygen. This victim blaming is a waste of time when we don’t really have time to waste.
Reading list
What I’ve been reading and listening to recently (and you might be interested in too):
Oxygen May Have Caused a Mass Extinction. Then It Led to Human Life (Laura Poppick, Rolling Stone)
I first learned about the “great oxygenation event” from a talk about the origins of life on Earth at AGU in Chicago a few years ago. Laura Poppick does a great job telling the story here—how death paved the way for life. It’s an excerpt from her upcoming book, Strata: Stories from Deep Time. Geology makes great material for science journalism books (see: John McPhee), so I’m excited to read this one!
If Books Could Kill (Michael Hobbes)
I have to recommend this podcast from Michael Hobbes, since I shared his Bluesky post today. Hobbes and his co-host dive into the “most harmful books,” broadly construed, from Freakonomics to The Population Bomb, and what they got wrong.
Inside the Bold Geoengineering Work to Refreeze the Arctic’s Disappearing Ice (Alec Luhn, Scientific American)
Science journalist Alec Luhn traveled to the Canadian Arctic to report this feature about a team trying to refreeze sea ice. I always enjoy Luhn’s reporting and I’ve written a bit about geoengineering in the Arctic myself, so I liked this piece.
‘Cancer is just everywhere’: could farming be behind Iowa’s unfolding health crisis? (Carey Gillam, The Guardian)
Cancer rates in Iowa are on the rise—it’s a story that I think will be in the headlines more and more in coming years. And no one wants to say it, but pollution from farming seems to be the culprit. This one hits close to home and I’m glad to see it covered in a major international outlet.