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How Journalists Distort Science with Balance
The scientist's job is to discover truth about the natural world, and the journalist's is to report the world's events accurately. Why are these two professions so often at odds? Chris Mooney discusses how journalism fails science in this month's Columbia Journalism Review. If you applauded Jon Stewart's plea to "stop hurting America," Mooney's analysis will strike a chord; the he-said-she-said approach to truth fails in all kinds of venues. (via: WorldChanging)
This reminds me of This American Life episode 265, from May of this year, entitled Fake Science, which includes, in Act Four, "Fake science can be fun. Fake science can make people happy," which I think would make an excellent t-shirt iron-on. In Act One of the show, a reporter gets into a delightfully heated exchange with a Bush Administration wonk who defends the appointment of a highly dubious lead industry shill to a prominent position on a federal commission on lead safety, while genuine experts get passed over. You can almost hear the vein throbbing on the guy's forehead when the reporter catches him a flagrant lie about the appointee's ties to the lead industry. Have a listen... it's free.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
It's a pity most people still consider Fox25 the "most reliable news source". And maybe it is too...as long as you're mostly concerned with the social lives of celebrities and your neighborhood pet accidents.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Back in the 60's, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said of segregation, "The biggest enemy we have today in America is the public secular news media." They would report the two sides for or against segregation, which was really an argument for the status quo.
In reality its the rise of the stupid contrarian, the individual who is unwilling to accept the obvious but instead clings to the often illogical notion that there is always a deeper answer that only they see, which will eventually lead to acceptance of they themselves as visionaries. Blogs in particular have made life very easy for the Stupid Contrarian, as well as popular media like CSI. Scott Peterson in particular will walk free because jurors are convinced now by popular media that not only is there always DNA evidence for a crime, it is now a necessary precondition for guilt...because heck, they always find it in the last five minutes of CSI.
I beleive that it is against human nature for journalists to NOT put their own spin into a story. They may not even recognize the slant in their own writtings.
It's be a good change if executives at amjor media outlets recognized this and put in check/balances for articles rather than hiring a bunch of people who have the same belief structure.
"Fair and balanced" may have a real meaning. Perhaps public non-profit organizations such as NPR could gain back some of their legitimacy.
...yup...
He made himself look like ass who knew everything.
Bill Maher once said: "Let us not become so tolerant that we tolerate intolerance" (not sure if the phrase is his own). I think it applies very well to this topic. However many journalists are still trying to remain true to a credo of balance, are now plagued with these episodes of hyperbolic need to represent both sides of the story. In essence, they become so balanced that they try and balance issues which are incomparably unbalanced in the first place.
but consider the number of people that have walked off death row after it was found that the original "evidence" against them was bogus as proved by the new "evidence" (DNA).
Truth is a bitch. I have far less faith in science and scientists than I used to. In the late 70's academics were telling us we'd be out of fossil fuels in 10 years. And what about the continuing nonsense about what's okay and what's not okay to eat? Every damn thing causes cancer apparently.
I'm not ready to tune out the contrarians just yet.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
I generally agree with the article, but just to be the trouble-maker - what exactly are Mr. Chris Mooney's credentials for critiquing reporting on science? According to his bio (http://www.chriscmooney.com/about.asp) he studied English and his only background is in Journalism. There's no indication he has ever studied science except as a journalist and layman, there is no indication he's made any formal or credible study of the history or philosophy of science. There's every indication that he would happily rip someone for citing, in the context of a scientific dispute, the opinion of an individual of his own credentials. I don't see that this article really lives up to the very standard of evidence it purports to advocate. It isn't enough to simply say "all the REAL scientists know this is the way it is." If there is to be a higher order of accuracy in scientific reporting it is going to take more than this guy is dishing up to sell it to the overwhelmingly scientifically illterate general populace.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Balance doesn't mean that if one person speaks the truth for 10 minutes, you have to have another person to lie for 10 minutes.
Reminds me of this.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
The Right is fond of saying that the media has a liberal bias, and they are right to a small extent. The media and the entertainment industry (funny how similar those two can be) is slightly left of center on certain social issues. Can you imagine an episode of Friends or Boston Public or 60 minutes concluding that abortion is wrong, or that environmental regulations are too strict?
But the conservative Right is more wrong than right. Media is driven by profit first and foremost, not by some "liberal bias". Gilette and Time Warner and Vivendi would rather see their stock go up than seriously investigate the truth. The truth doesn't necessarily translate into profit, especially when it challenges the status quo.
Mooney's article is dead on. In order to appear balanced--that is, in order to keep viewers/readers/listeners happy--that is, in order to make a profit, the news media cannot come down on one side or the other, when the truth is to the side (and not in the middle).
This is why I actually enjoy getting my news from places like Mother Jones (left) and the National Review (right). Media sources that are ideologically oriented, rather than "balanced", are often able to report arguments or issues that the mainstream media would avoid.
you can find some folks with very outlandish views who have been proven wrong, but the views they have often seem to appeal to those with certain agendas (like journalists).
Whoa, wait a minute. I hope there aren't very many journalists with agendas, 'cuz that would make them activists, not journalists.
But I guess that just depends on how cynical you are...
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
The scientist's job is to discover *FACTS* about the natural world, not truth.
"Fact": from Latin factum, neuter past participle of facere "to make; to do". Facts are created, not discovered.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
1. Many Americans avoid science like the plague and a newspaper with many science stories sells less than those with sports and entertainment. Additionally science literacy in the US is poor at best. That means that many reporters and editors don't understand what they are reporting and and as a result don't do the subject justice. They may even give junk science equal weight.
2. Some science topics are so politicized (such as abortion, stem cell research, global warming, evolution) that any reporting is criticized with giving one side more weight than the other no matter how careful the reporter is. That leads to editors avoiding in depth analysis of these subjects.
3. Many science topics require a lot of space for in depth analysis and newspapers would rather give space to articles on topics that sell better. Also, they will cut off a story to make space for some fluff story, thereby leaving out the most important parts. Science journalists need to write with these space constraints in mind; put the most salient points up front before readers and editors stop reading. This is unlike in scientific journals where the entire article must be read to understand the point being made.
As a "skeptic" I found both Jon's comments on Crossfire and this article to be enjoyable -- in the sense that here's someone saying what we've known to be true for years.
If any of you feel this way, you might enjoy some fine skeptical sites such as:
The James Randi Educational Foundation
http://www.randi.org/
Committe for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
http://www.csicop.org/
Bad Astronomy
http://www.badastronomy.com/
Slashdotters and others continue to believe there is/was no bias in the media against Bush. I had one guy actually argue with me that journalists are "more exposed to the facts" than the public and that's why they tried to help Kerry.
The media can't even get basic science right. So why do people trust them for political coverage? Reading Newsweek's inside scoop on the Kerry campaign, you learn about Kerry's damaging indecision and obsession with talking to advisors on his cell phone, and you learn that he didn't release his war diary because it reveals that he met with terrorists in Paris. Isn't it rather odd that all that didn't come out before the election? And yet the media tried it's hardest to even go so far as to forge documents to attack old National Guard Service. And yet people give CBSNews a pass to this day for it--if FoxNews had done that to Kerry, everyonen would be chewing their heads off.
News editors instructed their journalists to refer to the Swift Boat Vets as "unsubstantiated claims" and yet the Kerry campaign was forced to acknowledge that Kerry wasn't in Cambodia on Christmas and that he may have earned a Purple Heart due to self-inflicted wounds. And yet the mainstream media buried that story and continued to claim the Swift Boat Vets were "exaggerating."
Moral of the story--you can't trust the media for ANYTHING.
Let's see:
The scientists are in search of verifiable, scientific truth, which is contained in repeatable experimentation and proven theorems.
The media are in the business of reporting truth, in all its interpretations(including what may be truth for one person, but not for others)
Balanced journalism can report the opinions as truth(provided they properly qualify it, which they do inaccurately far too often, when they bother to at all)
If the media only reported scientific truth, they might as well just translate the original scientific paper into plain english(it's closer to technical writing, not reporting) since the original paper is a report... It reports what happened in the experiment, and the theory behind it, and what conclusions one can draw within the constraints of the margins of error.
There's not much room for scientific reporters anymore, simply because they become translators. And it's a very very unexciting aspect of science, once all the theories get proven(after all, most proven theories take decades to be disproved, the ones that do get disproved at all).
It could theoretically be exciting to report on the process of "proving" a theory, provided you jazzed it up, and that can lead to all sorts of adverse consequences for the truth that just got proven. After all, when you jazz up the consequences/corollary of a theorem that just got proven, you can change its "truth value" from true to false.
The garden variety journalists seem to have a very hard time with that concept, the fact that if a theorem is true, given an exacting set of conditions/details(which get erased by the process of transforming to english) it can become false if those conditions are relaxed(after all, it's scientific truth, how could it be false?). But science only works with "whole truths" and "detailed truths" and those don't always translate well into modern languages.
The point of my post is to debunk the notion that there is always subjectivity and that the minority is always right. Some times facts simpy exist. It requires a certain degree of intelligence to accept facts and not attempt to out-think them. The Stupid Contrarian never will get to this point - you can raise the temperature 10 degrees in December and they will still claim no global warming exists. Why? Because secretly they hope someone smarter than them will prove this and they will be able to claim the genius status of being the first to recognize it. Or maybe they are just a**holes who will never give in due to their own politics or perspective.
It's amazing, sometimes, how often people will say that news reports do a very poor job of reporting on the things the speaker knows about--and then the speaker will go ahead and trust news reports on things the speaker doesn't know about.
In an "Evaluating Information" tutorial that I used to teach several years ago, I wrote in the manual:
===
Newspapers are one of the worst places to go for source information. Few newspapers research any more than their biggest features. The rest are reproduced nearly verbatim from press releases, press wires, and, believe it or not, e-mail chain letters.
Even those feature articles which are researched by reporters are tainted by the newspaper's need for controversy. The official policy will usually mention "balance", but the way balance works usually makes evaluation of the information difficult. "Balance" means finding the same number of experts in opposition as are in support.
For example, suppose a newspaper decides to do a feature article about standing beneath doors in earthquakes. There are about a thousand experts in the field of earthquake survival, suppose, and two of them oppose standing beneath doorways. In the name of balance, most newspaper articles will present an interview with no more than two supporting experts to 'balance' the only two opposing experts they could find.
Suppose, now, that no earthquake survival experts oppose standing in doorways. In the interests of balance, the newspaper reporter will find a non-expert and treat this person as an expert, in order to balance the report. They might, for example, choose a doctor at a hospital. This doctor will claim that everyone who has presented themselves at the hospital for standing in a doorway has been injured. You might think this sounds silly, but the next time you're reading a newspaper or watching a news show in which a doctor is being interviewed for something other than their specialty, look at it in this perspective. Is the doctor basically saying that everyone who comes to the emergency room has an emergency?
===
This is a long-standing problem. It's become quite a bit more obvious now that it is easier to hear from experts who complain about bias--but even that can become a russian doll-like nest of "balance" acts.
Jerry
After reading the cover teaser "Was Darwin Wrong?", I was absolutely expecting articles of exactly the sort described in this story. One article by a scientist arguing the validity of evolution, and one by some guy apologetically describing creationism and other pseudoscience.
Instead, the article opens with a teaser page asking the same question. Following that is a page with a giant screaming "NO". I laughed my ass off. And nowhere to be found was the sad little counterpoint article -- the magazine actually had the guts to commit to a single point of view.
The best thing now will be reading the letters to the editor in 2 months. The fundamentalists will be calling for blood, and it'll be interesting to see how the editors respond.
There are other alternatives besides the mainstream ones you mentioned.
Narco News has been exposing corruption in the Drug War, and other related topics. No advertising, no corporate ties, just journalism.
Anyone who wants to really understand how the drug trade works needs to check it out. It is a very left-wing site, but the information it provides is invaluable whatever your political affiliation.
Narco News is also responsible for a huge first ammendment victory for online media.
While I wouldn't disagree that scientists are people and have their own particular biases, and that the game of science is certainly politically (in the general sense) I have to call crap on a lot of this woefully biased rant.
You're basically saying scientists are a bunch of leftist commie pinko fags, or words to that effect, so they are not to be believed. Yeah, everyone should believed that biased statement. At least scientists support their ideas with experiment.
The parent post makes the claim, without direct experience or other support in evidence, that only scientists proposing to advance "popular" notions get funded. That's pure bunk.
First off, what is "popular" in science is often popular because of large amounts of evidence that it is right. Should we spend millions of dollars on a project to show that the Earth is actually flat despite the "popularity" of other ideas? No, of course not. That would be stupid, not political.
Do some scientists perhaps torpedo competing points of view on review panels? Yeah, but not as much as the parent post seems to think. And when it does happen, it's usually a personal issue and not a political one.
The thing about SCIENCE, as opposed to scientists, is that it is apolitical. It's self-correcting. Tobacco companies funded their own pocket scientists at ridiculous levels, and science still managed to conclude that smoking is bad for people. Science also managed to conclude that continental drift happens, even though the idea was very unpopular.
I get upset when non-scientists rant about science in an uninformed way. The linked article was really great, coming from a non-scientist who had done some research. The parent post says "I am an agnostic on the Global Warming question because I know that the science is so screwed up I can't believe ANY of it" -- how does this non-scientist poster "know" this? There has been lots of research, and the majority of scientists in the field are not agnostic about it; they chracterize their uncertainty, quantitatively when possible.
Scientists LOVE to fund "unpopular" ideas when the proposers provide some evidence that they might be right. Overturning popular ideas is how new knowledge is developed. We actually don't like to fund refinements to standard models ad infinitum.
Now going back to my NSF proposal due Monday, especially worrying about how to play up its innovative aspects, which is a large part of the grading criteria.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
And many journalists decide what their story is going to be about before they do their research, which was a nice point about the linked article. They decided it's going to be about a black and white issue, and then shove everything into one of those two boxes. Or they decide my brother collected comic books to pay for college (true newspaper story, but not true).
I've had a few of my discoveries covered in the newspapers and even TV. They usually don't get them right, despite every effort. It kind of reminds me how we train high school teachers in education, and not so much in the subjects they teach. At the university level, subject experts teach classes even though few have education classes (that's another issue), and while our K-12 system is low ranked internationally, our higher education is considered among the best in the world.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
you see it's just complete bullshit. It was a statistical analysis, extrapolated from 63 (yes, sixty three, and a biased sample of 63 at that) death certificates,
Wow. I'm impressed at your ability to look right at facts and not see them. The results are from "we derived a target sample size of 4300 individuals. We assumed that every household had seven individuals, and a sample of 30 clusters of 30 households each was chosen." The death certificates were "sought to ensure that a large fraction of the reported deaths were not fabrications". Which they did. But they are most certainly not the basis for the number of deaths. To claim the results are based on 63 death certificates when in fact they are based on interviews with nearly 1,000 households representing over 5,000 people is, in your words, "bullshit".
every other estimate made everywhere else is an order or two of magnitude lower. in conjunction with the 95% confidence interval, even with their data massaging, ranges from 8000 to 192,000. means something very interesting. The estimates which are two orders of magnitude less (i.e. only 1,000 people killed) are almost certainly wrong. Which isn't suprising. You'd have to be truly stupid to believe that more of our soldiers have died than Iraqi's. It also means that the estimates which are one order of magnitude less (i.e. 10,000 deaths) have an extremely low chance (less than 5%) of being correct.
And never mind that their estimate excludes Fallujah which had so many deaths they excluded it as a statistical outlier. If they "massaged" their data, they made it more conservative by not including Fallujah.
Humanity's capacity for self delusion is depressing.
As you yourself have demonstrated. Thanks for playing!
Welcome to the real world. This ain't a real time sim where everything is neatly tallied up. I gave you the HONEST ("no one really knows for sure") answer, not a political answer, and not a mathematically unsound answer.
I don't need a counterstudy to debunk the Lancet study. It's METHODS were flawed based on well established theories of statistics. If I see a plane with a wing missing, I can declare the plane will not fly well without having to produce a more functional plane.
You keep saying it was "done scientifically" but it wasn't. The people involved clearly had an agenda. They made a good show of doing actual research, but most of it is just a fudge designed to befuddle gullible people. It takes more than a scientist and some numbers added togeether to be "scientific". Some care has to be taken with the method of the experiment or research. Biases have to be carefully removed. If possible, controls must be put in place.
We're spending WAY too much time on this. :-)
--- Ban humanity.
It's a funny old world.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
About 4 years ago CNN.com ran a story entitled "Cloned algae taking over coastline".
The story focused on a type of algae that had been asthetically enhanced through selective breeding and cloning for the aquarium trade, but that had gotten into the wild and done well in places in the mediteranian and now in southern california. At that time CNN had discussion forums and the usual erruption of pro and anti-GM/frankenstuff debate.
Now I personally have quite a bit of experience with cultivating both houseplants and aquatic plants, and in those fields the term 'clone' is simply used to refer to a plant grown from a cutting. Nothing sinister in that practice whatsoever unless you're up to putting granny's flowerbox to the torch. I pointed this out and lambasted the author of the article for ignorance and deceptive reporting. That pretty much killed the debate, at least regarding the algae, and CNN amazingly revised the article a few hours later and removed all mention of cloning.
Of course it's sad that this algae is damaging some marine environments, but the journalists excitement to jump aboard a hot-button issue like that got in the way of the truth in a big way. Especially since the problem is in California, where "Cloned plants" could get banned by the overactive legislature.
Here's a similar article that still exists: http://www.rense.com/general2/ag.htm if you type in "Cloned algae california" to google it's amazing how many misleading stories there are about it.
This is not just about science. It's even more visible in politics, which of course the primary example here was, since it was about abortion. Also it doesn't have anything to do with journalists being balanced, rather the opposite.
The idea that journalists should be fair and balanced is used as a reason for being incorrect. Nobody is ever objective, and a good journalist is not balanced, but honest. Instead of hiding opinions behind a veil of alleged objectivism, any writer should be clear about where he/she is standing in the controversy.
The idea of balance and objectivism is made worse by the idea that you should have separate people for doing news: Journalists. The result is that most of what is said in the news is said by people whos knowledge and education is in words, not in the subject that is covered. A journalist usually do not have the knowledge to say what is wrong and what is right, and is likely to spread false information even if he tries to be objective and balanced.
We need to stop listening to journalists, and start listening to people who know what they are talking about.
Seems like if you are going to report on science, the reporting shouldn't be about who has the most scientists backing a theory, but reporting on the *science* behind why more scientists believe one theory than the other.
That is to say, science isn't democratic. In some rare cases, the majority of scientists can be dead wrong about a theory. It's highly unusual, it's true, but not without precedent. So, if you are going to report about science, report on the experiments and studies that have been done, along with meaningfully explanatory commentary, to show *why* the majority of scientists feel a theory does, or in this case, does not, have validity.