Science and marketing (1)

Gitte Meyer of the Copenhagen Business School notes that during the past decades, swarms of scientists from a wide range of fields have migrated from their ..... and descended onto the marketplace, adapting themselves to marketing practices in the process.

With surprising ease, science journalism seems to be adapting too; penduling comfortably between old-fashioned enlightenment, aimed at promoting science as a ....., and PR exercises, aimed at selling science on behalf of private interests.

This development provides ..... for thought in more than one sense.

In one respect, it prompts a critical question regarding conventional science journalism, marked by a lack of distinction ..... science popularization: does this kind of science writing in fact differ significantly from marketing practices?

At first ..... at least, there does not appear to be a big difference - if any at all - between promoting and selling.

Moreover, it prompts ..... on what kind of practices journalists, who are committed to enlightenment ideals about the rule of reason - ambiguous as those ideals are - should pursue in modern societies in order to keep the ideals alive.

Should they ..... to conventions and simply continue to promote or to sell science?

Or should they acknowledge that to promote what is seen, navely perhaps, but nevertheless as a general benefit, is a far ..... from selling the same thing, in much the same way, on behalf of vested interests?

The fundamental convention of science journalism is the convention of science transmission; that is, the ..... that journalists should relate to science by way of transporting scientific facts from scientists to a lay public for consumption.

The convention also contains the ..... that journalists should not interfere in any way with the scientific facts.