Shouting out about bad science in the media

Shouting at the TV – madness or necessity? Russ Swan loves a good shout whenever he spots a scientific inaccuracy, and he thinks you should join him…

You don't need me to tell you that the single fundamental requirement of all science is observation. We look around us, and we notice things. As we try to understand those things, we bring into play our imagination, past experience, and knowledge from others. Slowly we piece together a picture of the universe that seems to make sense.

It all starts with observation, and I reckon that people who work in science probably have slightly better observation skills than the average human.

You might think this trait would be shared by the growing legion of those working in the media, and especially in film and TV. You might think that careful observation of the world would be a necessary prerequisite to any portrayal, whether in fiction or documentary. And you might think that the basics – night follows day, the sun rises and sets, and so on – would be fairly well understood by those people whose job it is to put moving pictures on our screens.

But you'd be wrong. At the top of my list of Things That Make Me Shout At The Television is the way sunrises and sunsets are depicted. I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice that, more often than not, they go the wrong way.

In the northern hemisphere, where something like 90% of the world's population lives, the sun rises by going up and to the right, and it sets going down to the right. It does this every single day, and always has. Watch TV for a short time, though, and you might notice that 90% of the time the sun is shown going up or down to the left.

I'm not entirely sure why this should be, but it's probably a combination of laziness, stupidity, and arrogance on the part of the programme makers. Perhaps the camera operator slept in and missed that important establishing shot of sunrise over the mountains: never mind, just film the sunset and run it backwards. Nobody will notice the difference.

Well I blooming well notice.

Perhaps stock footage is being used, and the small detail that this was shot in the southern hemisphere does not even enter the consciousness of the producer. Nobody will care.

Well I care.

The problem is not restricted to the sun. How often do you see the moon rising in the evening, as a waning crescent? The answer must be: never in real life, but regularly on screen. As anybody with even the vaguest grasp of celestial mechanics will appreciate, it is simply impossible for this to happen.

The lit side of the moon always faces the sun, whether you are viewing it from London or from Mars. But not if you are viewing it on TV. It's almost as if the sun throws out dark rather than light.

Even as august an institution as the Open University gets this wrong, in an otherwise commendable new series of 60-second science videos on YouTube. Its episode on 'The Rotating Moon' depicts the phases going from old moon to new moon, which is of course the exact opposite of what actually happens.

We know that television is all about deception, even in the supposedly-factual programmes that provide some blessed relief from the unfunny sitcoms and talentless karaoke contests currently infesting the schedules.

That polar bear nest that was filmed in a zoo, rather than the high Arctic, is barely the tip of the glacier. Last month's BBC series Spy in the Huddle demonstrated some fantastic footage from cameras built into animatronic penguins that could, apparently, get closer inside the colonies than any human camera operator. But who filmed the robotic cameras themselves at such close range, if not a human?

Perhaps I'm in a minority for noticing these things, and in an even smaller minority for thinking it matters. But it does. Most people get most of their information via TV and online video these days, and the people who create this material have a duty to get the basic things right and to be honest about the cheats they use.

Perhaps most importantly, people like you and me have a duty to hold programme makers to account and challenge them when they get it wrong. Viewing need not be a passive experience, and I hope more people will start pointing out the basic errors that would otherwise go unchecked. Even if that does mean shouting at the telly.