Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Oh No, It's Not My Problem
One should probably not laugh at the NYTimes, they are, after all, "the paper of record" for the entire nation, but this story just cracked me up.
Here's an idea - why don't the news outlets put a few scientists on retainer. You know, someone who would have a clue when they read a journal. Someone that could maybe help the helpless reporter understand? Just an idea.
Related Tags: science, science reporting, scientific journals, sarcasm
But the editors of Science were not alone in telling the world of Dr. Hwang's research. Newspapers, wire services and television networks had initially trumpeted the news, as they often do with information served up by the leading scientific journals.That's good, the essence of good science is skepticism. But it was a couple of paragraphs later that things got interesting
Now news organizations say they are starting to look at the science journals a bit more skeptically.
There are limits to the vetting that science reporters, who are generally not scientists themselves, can do. Most journal articles have embargoes attached, giving reporters several days to call specialists in the field, check footnotes on an article and scrutinize the results.Is it too much to ask that people who report on a subject as complex as science actually know something about it? Does this answer the botttom line question of where 'spin' comes from? I think so. If you are trying to tell someone something and they have insufficient background on the subject, spin is pretty easy.
"Scientific discoveries are more difficult because they often require in the generalist reporter a good deal of study, follow-up interviews and some guidance on how to make sense of technical matters," said Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, which studies journalism. "But I think the scandals do require both a new level of skepticism on the part of the reporter and also maybe some new protocols between scientists and journalists."
Here's an idea - why don't the news outlets put a few scientists on retainer. You know, someone who would have a clue when they read a journal. Someone that could maybe help the helpless reporter understand? Just an idea.
Related Tags: science, science reporting, scientific journals, sarcasm
