Lizzie blamed the news media for a horrible bit of news reporting on the ridiculous claim that “the climate crisis is causing certain grapes, used in almost all champagne, to be on the brink of extinction.” The press got conned by a press release from a sleazy company, which in this case was “a Silicon Valley startup” but in other settings could be a pollster or a car company or a university public relations office or an advocacy group or some other institution that has a quasi-official role in our society.
Lizzie was rightly ticked off by the media organizations that were happily playing the “sucker” role in this drama, with CNN straight-up going with the press release, along with a fawning treatment of the company that was pushing the story, and NPR going with a mildly skeptical amused tone, interviewing an actual outside expert but still making the mistake of taking the story seriously rather than framing it as a marketing exercise.
We’ve seen this sort of credulous reporting before, perhaps most notably with Theranos and the hyperloop. It’s not just that the news media are suckers, it’s that being a sucker—being credulous—is in many cases a positive for a journalist. A skeptical reporter will run fewer stories, right? Malcolm Gladwell and the Freakonomics team are superstars, in part because they’re willing to routinely turn off whatever b.s. detectors they might have, in order to tell good stories. They get rewarded for their practice of promoting unfounded claims. If we were to imagine an agent-based model of the news media, these are the agents that flow to the top. One could suppose a different model, in which mistakes tank your reputation, but that doesn’t seem to be the world in which we operate.
So, yeah, let’s get mad at the media, first for this bogus champagne story and second for using this as an excuse to promote a bogus company.
Also . . .
Let’s get mad at the institutions of academic science, which for years have been unapologetically promoting crap like himmicanes, air rage, ages ending in 9, nudges, and, let’s never forget, the lucky golf ball.
In terms of wasting money and resources, I don’t think any of those are as consequential as business scams such as Theranos or hyperloop; rather, they bother me because they’re coming from academic science, which might traditionally be considered a more trustworthy source.
And this brings us to Clarke’s law, which you may recall is the principle that any sufficiently crappy research is indistinguishable from fraud.
How does that apply here? I can only assume that the researchers behind the studies of himmicanes, air rage, ages ending in 9, nudges, the lucky golf ball, and all the rest, are sincere and really believe that their claims are supported by their data. But there have been lots of failed replications, along with methodological and statistical explanations of what went wrong in those studies. At some point, to continue to promote them is, in my opinion, on the border of fraud: it requires willfully looking away from contrary evidence and, at the extreme, leads to puffed-up-rooster claims such as, “The replication rate in psychology is quite high—indeed, it is statistically indistinguishable from 100%.”
In short, the corruption involved in the promotion of academic science has poisoned the well and facilitated the continuing corruption of the news media by business hype.
I’m not saying that business hype and media failure are the fault of academic scientists. Companies would be promoting themselves, and these lazy news organizations would be running glorified press releases, no matter what we were to do in academia. Nor, for that matter, are academics responsible for credulity on stories such as UFO space aliens. The elite news media seems to be able to do this all on its own.
I just don’t think that academic science hype is helping with the situation. Academic science hype helps to set up the credulous atmosphere.
Michael Joyner made a similar point a few years ago:
Why was the Theranos pitch so believable in the first place? . . .
Who can forget when James Watson. . . . co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, made a prediction in 1998 to the New York Times that so-called VEGF inhibitors would cure cancer in “two years”?
At the announcement of the White House Human Genome Project in June 2000, both President Bill Clinton and biotechnologist Craig Venter predicted that cancer would be vanquished in a generation or two. . . .
That was followed in 2005 by the head of the National Cancer Institute, Andrew von Eschenbach, predicting the end of “suffering and death” from cancer by 2015, based on a buzzword bingo combination of genomics, informatics, and targeted therapy.
Verily, the life sciences arm of Google, generated a promotional video that has, shall we say, some interesting parallels to the 2014 TedMed talk given by Elizabeth Holmes. And just a few days ago, a report in the New York Times on the continuing medical records mess in the U.S. suggested that with better data mining of more coherent medical records, new “cures” for cancer would emerge. . . .
So, why was the story of Theranos so believable in the first place? In addition to the specific mix of greed, bad corporate governance, and too much “next” Steve Jobs, Theranos thrived in a biomedical innovation world that has become prisoner to a seemingly endless supply of hype.
Joyner also noted that science hype was following patterns of tech hype. For example, this from Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute:
When Theranos tells the story about what the technology is, that will be a welcome thing in the medical community. . . . I tend to believe that Theranos is a threat.
The Scripps Translational Science Institute is an academic, or at least quasi-academic, institution! But they’re using tech hype disrupter terminology by calling scam company Theranos a “threat” to the existing order. I have no reason to think that the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute himself committing fraud? I have no reason to think so. What I do think is that he wants to have it both ways. When Theranos was riding high, he hyped it and called it a “threat” (again, that’s a positive adjective in this context). Later, after the house of cards fell, he wrote, “I met Holmes twice and conducted a video interview with her in 2013. . . . Like so many others, I had confirmation bias, wanting this young, ambitious woman with a great idea to succeed. The following year, in an interview with The New Yorker, I expressed my deep concern about the lack of any Theranos transparency or peer-reviewed research.” Actually, though, here’s what he said to the New Yorker: “I tend to believe that Theranos is a threat. But if I saw data in a journal, head to head, I would feel a lot more comfortable.” Sounds to me less like deep concern and more like hedging his bets.
Caught like a deer in the headlights between skepticism and fomo.
We can’t ignore the changing employment landscape for journalists versus public relations specialists. From my perspective, many journalists are overwhelmed and underpaid.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2022 there were almost 6 times the number of Public Relations (264,750) professionals than journalists (44,530). Add into the mix, the additional support that PR departments at large organizations can bring in from others in the organization the ratio becomes even more dramatic.
With 2022 revenues over $282 billion for Google/Alphabet this unsurprising. Where do we think those revenues came from? In many cities, car dealerships are an important pillar of democracy and transparent government because they comprise the bulk of advertising in many local news papers.
If you want to explore on your own: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes273023.htm
Todd:
Yes, we wrote about this in 2015 and it’s been getting worse since.
Somewhat related: when looking at college majors in various fields, I noted “In 2021, for example, UO [University of Oregon] awarded 126 Journalism degrees, 224 degrees in Public Relations/Image Management, and 317 in Advertising.” I was surprised!
Raghu:
If the advertising department is any good at all, it should be able to advertise itself and attract some good students!
At least in terms of attracting a large *number* of students, they’re doing great — a 5% *per year* increase in majors over the past decade. (Graph: https://eighteenthelephant.com/2023/02/04/majors-at-your-ad-here-u-of-oregon-2011-2021/). My department (Physics) could use their marketing skills!
Raghu:
Ya gotta go with your expertise. The advertising department can use advertising to attract students. The physics department can develop a death ray and use it to disrupt the classes in other divisions of the university so that students will choose physics as the only viable option.
I don’t think it’s that surprising. The amount of data available to use for advertising decisions is surely increasing by orders of magnitude every year. Companies have to find people that supposedly specialize in advertising to hope to make effective use of it. Companies are drooling to get you off that web browser, where you can block trackers etc, and on to their own apps, were they can track everything you do and pin-point your position on the waterfront so they can pitch you a seagull shit protector.
I’m not sure what an annual growth rate of only 5% in advertising majors says about a profession for which the data is growing by a thousand time or more that amount….
The treatments under discussion were *not* VEGF inhibitors:
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/03/us/hope-lab-special-report-cautious-awe-greets-drugs-that-eradicate-tumors-mice.html
It is also weird how it says “so-called”, as if implying that isn’t the actual mechanism. Which is true, that is not the mechanism. But the only one calling them VEGF inhibitors is the same author…
And the error in those studies was taking snapshots of exponentially growing tumors. Ie, small differences in growth rate lead to large differences in tumor size (during the growth phase). If they waited until the plateau phase to do the comparison, it would have yielded more realistic expectations.
FWIW, I wasn’t very impressed with Topol’s hot takes on COVID, when he found himself at the center of a perfect talking head glam shot opportunity. He was about as balanced as the Stanford guys, just in the opposite direction. “Pay no attention to the data; it might undermine my point…”
Len:
I was slammed in the news media a few years ago. At the time it upset me, but on the plus side it eliminated my desire to be in the media spotlight. I’m happy to participate in public discussions but I don’t want to be the public face of anything.
It seems to me that the champagne grape story is a different kettle of fish from the Theranos story. The world is complicated, and most people don’t know enough about more than a few things to think critically about them. As Lizzie pointed out, climate change really is driving species to extinction, and there is plenty in the media about that, so if you don’t know much about climate change and grapevines, the champagne story could sound plausible. Isn’t it different when people are investing money and supposedly doing due diligence?
And, how can we be surprised that people believe things that aren’t so when only about a third of Republicans think that Biden’s election was legitimate?
“…it requires willfully looking away from contrary evidence…”
Not the point of this post, really, but this line just hit too close to home at the moment. Over the Christmas holiday, a (moron) relative decided to start up an “Obama was born in Kenya” argument for some reason. But here’s the especially dumb and strange part: he believes that the birth certificate that was released is legitimate. He just doesn’t believe it says “Barack Obama” on it. I told him, if he believes the birth certificate is real, I can pull it up on my phone right now and you can see for yourself that it has his name on it. His response was “well, that’s just your opinion. They’re like assholes, everybody has one.” Which, yes… but it’s my opinion because it’s just a straight up fact?
I always forget the name of Clarke’s Law! Just not catchy enough for me I guess … anyway, this got me thinking of which I would want if I could have only one: improve the standards of academic science or journalism, but this seems tricky given my current data on which is worse and which has more influence in this day and age. I will say that even though the funds lost to academic crap science are smaller than Theranos, I’d like to believe their potential losses are bigger. The money going to Theranos would have gone to some other unlikely-to-change-the-world-in-a-good-way startup, but the funds going to research on nudges etc. comes at the expense of researchers who maybe do have the next great idea, but they don’t get the funds or leave science because funding is so low or salesman-esque.
And, at the collision of academic and journalism standards, I think that I and others need to tell journalists what they’re doing. If I had gotten the email sooner and spoke to someone at NPR, I would have asked them if they really planned on supporting this company so blatantly (though I know the junior person I would likely be chatting with would be unlikely to either care and/or be able to change much).
The sad part is I now don’t want to send in funds to VPR — so the outcome of some stupid `AI’ company press release is less money for Eye on the Sky (https://www.vermontpublic.org/show/eye-on-the-sky), which feels wrong.
So why don’t we have an organization like Snopes or Politifact devoted specifically to STEM journalism? The focus could be on the highest-circulation national outlets, and on claims that could be evaluated by any non-specialist who knows enough about methodology and academic culture to have a sense of where to dig.
Hey! The Top New Most Reliable Science Stories could be covered in a mag published by the National Academy of Sciences! That’s a great idea! Science Press Institute of the National Academy of Sciences – SPINAS! :))
In the UK we have the Science Media Centre (https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/), although they generally recruit specialists from the same field as the paper in question. These comments tend to be fairly uncritical though; I get the impression that the experts in question normally do not want to call any of the fundamental premises of a paper into question, but rather are more interested in the media exposure that they themselves get for commenting.
Thanks for the link to the SMC. Even if uncritical, some of the comments do seem interesting. What I had in mind was fact checkers who focus on STEM articles in the highest-circulation news outlets. Obvious mistakes (e.g., CNN’s 2021 claim that 90% effectiveness for COVID vaccines means that for every million vaccinated passengers, 100,000 will get infected) are caught by readers, but what slips through is misinformation that can only be spotted in the original research article. Specialists aren’t necessarily needed to catch major errors. (For instance, I once saw news reports on a study of the pandemic’s impact on infants whose mothers never had COVID. I looked at the study, noticed that the journalists weren’t aware of some statistical flaws, and emailed the editor, who then published my email as a commentary. This was JAMA Pediatrics – but I’m not a pediatrician.)
Yes, it could work. PubPeer for news articles. Reminds me of this too: https://fullfact.org/