During the Swedish seminar ‘Gräv’ on investigative journalism this weekend, Ulrika Björkstén , head of the scientific news team at Swedish National Radio SR, and free-lance journalist Marcus Hansson, were awarded an honorary mention at the prestigious investigative journalism award ‘The Golden Shovel’ (Guldspaden), by the Swedish Association for Investigative Journalism, FGJ.
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Björkstén and Hansson received the award for a four part reportage on Cold Fusion, the E-Cat and Andrea Rossi called ‘The Blind Belief in Cold Fusion’ (English transcription here 1, 2, 3, 4). A comment on the reportage by Mats Lewan can be found here.
The motivation of the Golden Shovel Jury was: “For having broken new ground in science journalism in an engaging way”.
The reportage was broadcasted in May 2014. Notably, SR avoided to report on the Lugano report a few months later, where clear amounts of excess heat and isotopic changes in the fuel were observed after a 32-day run of the E-Cat by the same researchers who were criticized in the reportage. The measurement was supported by the Swedish utility research institute Elforsk.
Also to be noted is this remark in the last part by Björkstén, who holds a PhD in physical chemistry:
“…because there are four very clear warning flags. The first, that made us decline reporting on this, is this cold fusion story. It is an area where there repeatedly since 1989 have been these people claiming that they have cold fusion, and it has never been proven to be true. And as you usually say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is no reason to report on such experiments until there is credible evidence.”
Since the Science Radio at SR is considered to have high credibility, the reportage has made it difficult for other Swedish media to report on cold fusion and the E-Cat story.
If you have opinions on this reward, it could be a good idea to make a comment.
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