Is there a group of people in 2023 who aren’t reached by the news media and only get information from social media? That’s what we wanted to explore in a poll conducted 20 years after the Science Media Centre was set up.

We commissioned a similar poll to mark our opening in 2002. The SMC was created back then as the scientific community’s response to media frenzies on MMR, GM crops and designer babies. The goal of the Centre was to improve the media coverage of these kinds of contentious science stories by persuading more and better scientists to engage with news journalists. 

Looking back it feels like that was a simpler time. The poll we commissioned then found that the traditional news media was the main source of information about science, making it easy for us to decide where our focus should be.