Last May, when This American Life acknowledged that it had run a 23-minute-long segment premised on a fraudulent scientific study, America's most respected radio journalists did something strange: They declined to apologize for the error. "Our original story was based on what was known at the time," host Ira Glass explained in a blog post. "Obviously the facts have changed."
It was a funny admission. Journalists typically don't say that "facts change"; it is a journalist's job to define and publicize facts. When a reporter gets hoodwinked by a source, she does not imply that something in the fabric of reality has shifted. She explains that she was tricked.
With science coverage, though, the situation seems to be different—which is why Glass' remark, while unusually blunt, wasn't actually wrong.
...there's probably no field of journalism that's less skeptical, less critical, less given to investigative work, and less independent of its sources than science reporting. At even the most respected publications, science journalists tend to position themselves as translators, churning the technical language of scientific papers into summaries that are accessible to the public. The assumption is that the source text they're translating--the original scientific research--comes to them as unimpeachable fact.
mo
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/journalists-should-hold-scientists-accountable
le related
AP’s Seth Borenstein is just too damn cozy with the people he covers – time for AP to do something about it | Watts Up With That?
It was a funny admission. Journalists typically don't say that "facts change"; it is a journalist's job to define and publicize facts. When a reporter gets hoodwinked by a source, she does not imply that something in the fabric of reality has shifted. She explains that she was tricked.
With science coverage, though, the situation seems to be different—which is why Glass' remark, while unusually blunt, wasn't actually wrong.
...there's probably no field of journalism that's less skeptical, less critical, less given to investigative work, and less independent of its sources than science reporting. At even the most respected publications, science journalists tend to position themselves as translators, churning the technical language of scientific papers into summaries that are accessible to the public. The assumption is that the source text they're translating--the original scientific research--comes to them as unimpeachable fact.
mo
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/journalists-should-hold-scientists-accountable
le related
AP’s Seth Borenstein is just too damn cozy with the people he covers – time for AP to do something about it | Watts Up With That?