Science on American Television
A History
296 pages
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23 halftones, 1 table
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6 x 9
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© 2012
As television emerged as a major cultural and economic force, many imagined that the medium would enhance civic education for topics like science. And, indeed, television soon offered a breathtaking banquet of scientific images and ideas—both factual and fictional. Mr. Wizard performed experiments with milk bottles. Viewers watched live coverage of solar eclipses and atomic bomb blasts. Television cameras followed astronauts to the moon, Carl Sagan through the Cosmos, and Jane Goodall into the jungle. Via electrons and embryos, blood testing and blasting caps, fictional Frankensteins and chatty Nobel laureates, television opened windows onto the world of science.
But what promised to be a wonderful way of presenting science to huge audiences turned out to be a disappointment, argues historian Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette in Science on American Television. LaFollette narrates the history of science on television, from the 1940s to the turn of the twenty-first century, to demonstrate how disagreements between scientists and television executives inhibited the medium’s potential to engage in meaningful science education. In addition to examining the content of shows, she also explores audience and advertiser responses, the role of news in engaging the public in science, and the making of scientific celebrities.
Lively and provocative, Science on American Television establishes a new approach to grappling with the popularization of science in the television age, when the medium’s ubiquity and influence shaped how science was presented and the scientific community had increasingly less control over what appeared on the air.
Eugenie Scott | Nature
“[A] well researched, thought-provoking book.”
James L. Baughman, author of Same Time, Same Station
“This is a smart and thorough history of the contested place of scientific knowledge on American television. Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette skillfully revisits an array of efforts that from TV’s earliest years sought to teach Americans about science and scientists, including educational and entertainment programs as well as news documentaries. Science on American Television will engage historians of science as well as those who study the history of broadcasting and science communication, and those baby boomers who remember Mr. Wizard with affection.”
Thomas Lovejoy, George Mason University
“A fascinating and compelling story of the dance between science and television over the decades. This beautifully written and solidly researched account of scientists, scientific institutions, and the world of television is a wonderful story and also one of profound importance because of the centrality of science to the future of our nation and world. Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette has produced that rarity: a work of great scholarship that is as accessible as television itself.”
David Knight, Durham University
“To the chagrin of scientists, modern populations are not well-informed about science—its nature, its method, and its content—and Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette seeks to show why. She introduces us to sages, pundits, intellectual prizefighters, and mandarin scientists, some shy and apolitical and others relishing the chance to appear on television; producers with an eye for what goes well on the medium; and sponsors who foot the bill and eye the audience numbers. Rooted in sixty years of television history, in which there have been some great successes but where the overall story is of hopes disappointed, she tells a fascinating story of attempts to get those millions of viewers, who are paying for science through taxes and purchases, to love it.”
Matthew H. Hersch, University of Pennsylvania
“What many scholars attempt to do, Marcel LaFollette accomplishes. Picking up where Science on the Air left off, Science on American Television explores the peculiar relationship between broadcast television and popular science education, and its history of false starts, wrong turns, and cultural touchstones.”
Contents
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Inventions and Dreams
Chapter 2
Experimenting with Illusion
Chapter 3
Elementary Education, Basic Economics
Chapter 4
Dramatizing Science
Chapter 5
Taking the Audience’s Pulse
Chapter 6
Saving Planet Earth: Fictions and Facts
Chapter 7
Adjusting the Lens: Documentaries
Chapter 8
Monsters and Diamonds: The Price of Exclusive Access
Chapter 9
In Splendid Isolation: The Public’s Television
Chapter 10
Defining What’s New(s) about Science
Chapter 11
Entrepreneurial Popularization
Chapter 12
Warning: Children in the Audience
Chapter 13
Rarae Aves: Television’s Female Scientists
Chapter 14
The Smithsonian’s World: Exclusivity and Power
Chapter 15
All Science, All the Time
Acknowledgments
Notes
Manuscript Sources
Selected Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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