In this session, three science journalists talked about moments in their careers in which they chose to take a non-objective position in the name of science.

Declan Butler, senior reporter of Nature, shared with the audience his proactive participation in the case of the six medical workers – five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor – who were charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998. On August 2006, Butler found the Libyan court was about to sentence them to death. As the lawyers defending the medical workers called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove their innocence, Butler helped launch a campaign calling for a fair trial for the nurses, based on scientific evidence. “There was a shocking lack of evidence”, he said. The story gained broad media coverage in Europe. At the end, following a deal reached with the European Union, the five nurses and the doctor were extradited to Bulgaria, where their sentences were commuted by the Bulgarian president and they were freed.

Seth Shulman, freelance writer and an independent investigator specialised in science-related issues, presented his case study on science in Bush’s administration, defending the importance of alternative funding for investigative journalism. Funded by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), he spent three years examining documents, talking to people and investigating government’s moves in science political agenda in the US. He found strong evidence of science suppression, which he gathered in the report “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making”, released in 2004. The document received great media attention, with positive consequences to UCS and to Shulman himself – he published a book on the issue in 2006 called Underming science: suppression and distortion in the Bush administration – but not so good for the government. “The funds are there, we just need to find alternative sources to do our job”, he concluded.

Gustavo Faleiros, a Brazilian environmental reporter, spoke about the media institution for which he works – O Eco online – and the main environmental investigations lead by its journalists. O Eco was created as an NGO by two well-established journalists in Brazil and a political scientist, with the aim of tackling environmental issues that were not being covered by the big media. Currently, it has a team of five full-time reporters, 12 columnists and 30 freelancers throughout Brazil. Faleiros showed many situations in which Eco exposed important environmental problems in Brazil, which sometimes involved and bothered the government. In one of these episodes, in 2007, a scoop by a reporter in Brasília – Brazilian capital – revealed that a negative assessment about damns in the Amazon Forest done by government experts was being ‘reviewed’ because president Lula did not like it. The report caused a big embarrassment for the Brazilian government, which was obliged to make the document public and raised the case for more transparency in government’s decisions. “We bring a science approach to the political debate”, he said.   

The presentations were followed by a debate, where the panellists were asked, among other questions, about the principle of objective reporting in journalism, which was obviously not followed in the cases presented. The panellists argued that journalists’ commitment should not be to balance, but to transparency, data and science. “It’s about bringing forward the information”, said Shulman. Asked if it was journalists’ duty to save the planet, Faleiros answered 'yes indeed', but using scientific data and not joining the environmental campaigners.

Carla Almeida