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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)