Does Television Impact Our Perception Of Science

How much does television impact our perception of science? This is the question the articles I have read are trying to answer. The articles that are going to be discussed are "Living With Television: The Dynamics of the Cultivation Process," "Science on Television: How it Affects Public Perceptions," "Knowledge, Reservations, or Promise?," "Science on Television in the 21st Century," and "How Ecological Science is Portrayed in Mass Media." This topic is of importance because scientists should not necessarily have a bad rep when most are only trying to help us understand the world and all that entails. Science can be intimidating, though, and that could be the main reason why there was ever a negative perception of scientists. In the first

The paper by Dudo et al. (2011) mentions that scientists are least likely to be categorized as bad by public perception now; and it also brings up that the one science field that does not seem to be impacted heavily by television viewership is the medical field, which is something the Gerbner (1987) article states as well. The Dudo et al. (2011) article elaborates on this by stating that scientists are being portrayed in a more positive light nowadays- outside of the medical field. While this is a good thing, other science fields are being overlooked completely by television producers. A good example is described in "How Ecological Science is Portrayed in Mass Media." In this journal, Baker, Williams, Lybbert, and Johnson (2012) conducted a survey to determine how much ecological science is covered in mainstream media. They concluded that it is rarely covered and that this trend is not changing over time (Baker et al., 2012). Newspapers and newsletters provided the most common outlet for ecology to the public in the Baker et al. (2012) article, which is a similar statement that was made in the Gerbner (1987) and Nisbet et al. (2002)

If it is not popular opinion, a natural disaster, or something wildly interesting it will more than likely not appear on television anytime soon. While this is depressing for anyone who is even mildly interested in science, we have still come a long way as a society as far as scientists are depicted. During my youth, there were at least ten different cartoons that had an evil scientist as the antagonist. This is not the case anymore. Watching kids' shows today, most of them are educational in some form or another and the antagonist usually is not a person but is instead a problem that the main characters are trying to find an answer to. Right now, as far as science in itself goes, there are a handful of channels that claim to be science based and they typically do provide a lot of information, but they mainly focus on topics that would be interesting or that are trending currently. They do not cover an extremely broad array of topics. Television will continue to evolve, and more science-based programs will pop up as millennials take over that job market since science is a trending topic amongst that generation. This is my opinion, so I guess we will have to see how it