1. Why do journalists interview people? Why do people agreed to be interviewed by journalists?
The implicit individual contract is that each side gets something: the journalist gets material, some contribution to an interesting story, and the person interviewed gets to tell his or her story.
But that’s not the whole thing. Journalism isn’t just a way of making money (or, perhaps, of being a loss leader for some other business); it’s also a public trust. I’m not saying there’s something amazing about journalism; lots of jobs are public trusts, including doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers, bus drivers, farmers, etc. We’re all making a living here, but we’re also doing our part to help our civilization run smoothly.
So there’s also an implicit social contract: journalists uncover and share important news (they “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”), and the rest of us donate our time to help them out.
In my own professional life, I spend lots of time doing research, teaching, and writing, but I also sometimes act in a journalistic role, and other times I help out journalists. I think that when I act as a journalist, I follow these implicit contracts–at least, I try!–but in my experience as a source, sometimes it feels that the news organizations are not holding up their side of the bargain.
2. Agreement or controversy, but no room for uncertainty
A few years ago I was contacted by a newspaper regarding the claim by a couple of economists that mortality rates among middle-aged white people was increasing.
I’d found a problem with the economists’ published paper–they hadn’t done sufficient age adjustment, and it turned out that after adjusting for age, the mortality rate in this demographic category was increasing for women but decreasing for men–and so this was worth correcting.
At the same time, this group’s mortality rate, even if not increasing, was still not decreasing in the way that it was in many other rich countries, and so the economists’ general point–that we should be concerned about this trend–was still largely valid.
And here was the problem. If I wanted to chime in and agree with that published paper, that would’ve been fine. Or if I wanted to “debunk” it, that would’ve been newsworthy too. But for me to say: Yeah, their general point is right but, no, mortality rates among men in that group were not actually increasing . . . Nah, that’s too subtle.
What the journalists wanted was either a clean story in which those economists were heroes, or a juicy dispute between two warring factions of academics. My half-assed intermediate position just didn’t work for them.
I felt that, by soliciting and gaining my sincere efforts and then discarding what I had to say, the reporter was violating the individual and social contract.
It would be as if someone asked you to donate something to a bake sale for their good cause, and you offered to bake a banana bread, and they said that would be great and you should leave it at a certain spot, and then they never came to pick it up and the bread went stale. They’re under no obligation to serve your bread, but it’s abusive of your goodwill for them to ask for something they’re not going to use. I think that’s sometimes how people feel about small-dollar campaign contributions, when it doesn’t seem that the candidate spent the money efficiently: the money meant something to you but apparently nothing to them.
Another time I was angry at about some shady journalists who pretended to be associated with MIT. In that case, my take on the matter did not fit into the simplistic story they wanted to tell about scientific heroes and villains. Again, no reason they had to agree with my take; what I didn’t like was that they misrepresented the facts. But journalism is all about storytelling, right?
3. Ghosted!
A few weeks ago I was contacted by a major news organization about a story they were running–they wanted my take as a statistician on the matter, as they’d seen a post of mine on the topic in question. I said sure, I’d be happy to talk with them. They followed up with some questions and I responded with a message expressing my uncertainty.
And then . . . crickets!
I sent a couple followup emails to see what was up, and the producer didn’t respond. I had the horrible feeling that they didn’t want me on the show because whatever I would say wouldn’t fit their predetermined storyline. Indeed, my annoyance at that was one reason for writing the present post. I felt . . . exploited, almost: I’d given them my trust and then when I didn’t act like an authoritative expert, they decided they didn’t need me.
But then, after I started writing this post but fortunately before I posted it, they got back to me! They were just super busy. OK, super busy is annoying too, but, no, it’s not at all true that they only wanted me to tell them what they already wanted to hear. Indeed, in this case I was arguably putting their responses into my preconceived storyline! So, a good cautionary tale.
4. Which journalists should we trust to tell our stories to?
Coincidentally, while I was in the middle of writing this post (in which I’m acting both as source in telling my story and as journalist in shaping it for you), I happened to listen to an episode of the 404 Media podcast where Jason Koebler of 404 was interviewing independent journalist Marisa Kabas. One thing that came up in the interview was that, when it came to sharing stories about tech and the government, many of their sources were much more comfortable talking with independent media such as Kabas and 404 than with major news organizations such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Now, I have nothing bad to say about the Times or the Post. Or, to be precise, I do have complaints (see here and here), but these are large organizations, and every large organization has its serious flaws, even my own employer!
The question here isn’t whether the Post or the Times are good institutions; the question here is: If you have a story to tell, would you rather tell it to Kabas or 404, or would you rather tell it to some random reporter from one of these major news organizations? (OK, I guess the Post is now a minor news organization, but you get the point.)
Kabas and Koebler said that lots of people in the trenches would trust them more. And so would I. If I wanted to tell some story about bad things going on in my workplace, or in my corner of academia or business, I’d trust Kabas or 404 more than I’d trust someone from a major news organization.
What’s going on here? How can this be?
I’ve read enough from 404 Media to have a sense that they have integrity, will report their stories seriously, and that they’re not tied to simplistic storylines. In contrast, my impression of major news organizations have been a mix of good and bad. I’m sure that NPR has lots of wonderful reporters, but they also emit a continuing stream of junk-science hype. As to newspaper/magazine/radio/TV reporters: they’re almost always under the gun, in so much pressure to finish their piece that I’ll often find myself giving them tons of background material that they never use.
And then there’s the push toward simple storytelling, which I noted in part 2 of this post above.
There’s also a selection effect. I think I’d have more confidence telling my story to a random NYT reporter than to a random blogger on the internet! So in some sense it’s not so fair to compare 404 Media to the New York Times. It would make more sense to compare 404 Media to some small set of Times reporters who I respect a lot.
And when you get contacted by someone you’ve never heard of, like those fake MIT journalists, be careful!
5. When do the news media show respect to the people who share their stories?
Another thing that came up in that 404 interview was the idea that these particular independent journalists take the stories they’re writing seriously. It’s not all a big joke to them, and they respect the people who share their stories.
That sounds obvious, but in my experience with major media, I don’t always see it. As noted above, sometimes reporters got my cooperation but then withdraw when I don’t want to tell the story their way. Or, more generally, they can be fishing for a quote that will slot into their set narrative. They don’t want my story at all, which in some way is fine–they have every right to report the news however they want–but when they do this, they’re exploiting me and others who are giving them our time and our stories for free. They’re violating the individual contract, and they’re violating the social contract. (That said, often I’ve had excellent experience from journalists in the organized news media, such as with Stephanie Lee, formerly of BuzzFeed and now at the Chronicle of Higher Education, who have openness and who are really listening to what people tell them.)
Another example of the problem of the news media not showing respect, this time not involving me in any way, is discussed in this article by Jessica Olin about Amanda Knox, that young woman who was imprisoned in Italy for four years for a murder that it seems she never committed. The relevance to the present post is this passage, reporting reactions to a book that Knox wrote after being released from prison and returning to the United States:
In the New Yorker, Mark Singer dutifully explained why she had been acquitted but warned that ‘if she now elects to exploit and cash in on her celebrity, it will prove that she hasn’t learned much worth emulating.’ On the LRB blog, Lidija Haas predicted that ‘few will want to read’ the book.
Writers employed arch language – the killing was described as the result of a ‘sex escapade’ and ‘high jinks’ – and framed events as though they were fictional. The playwright John Guare, who called Knox ‘my kind of murderess’, wondered whether she was a heroine in the mould of ‘Daisy Miller, an innocent young girl who goes to Europe for experience? Or is she Louise Brooks, the woman who takes what she wants and destroys everything? Or is she Nancy Drew caught up in Kafka?’ Nathaniel Rich wrote in Rolling Stone: ‘One might expect that the lead role in this blockbuster would be assigned to the victim,’ but ‘the show was stolen by an accidental ingénue.’ . . . In the New York Times, Sam Tanenhaus was dismissive of Knox’s ‘well-orchestrated round of TV appearances’ . . .
And this wasn’t the tabloid press; it was prestige journalism. Now I’m not saying that these writers had an obligation to take Knox’s side, or that her status as a wrongly-imprisoned person should make her writing or her life immune from criticism. Rather, I’m agreeing with Olin that there’s something disturbing in how these writers were treating Knox as a character, not as a person.
6. When I’m acting as a journalist
People send me tips all the time, and sometimes I look into these and blog them. I have to be careful–sometimes I’ll get an email about some purported scandal but it’s not something that seems bothersome at all, but often it really is a thing. Often the things I end up writing about involve malfeasance by highly placed academics at Cornell, Nevada, California, USC, Harvard and Stanford, Freakonomics, etc etc. I don’t do lots of reporting–usually I’m commenting on public documents–but I do get all these tips, often from people who want to remain anonymous, and I’m pretty careful about showing respect to the people who send me things. I can see why they would trust me more than a news organization that will already want to slot their story into some preconceived pattern.
7. Our parasocial relationships
The term “parasocial” has been used to describe the way in which ordinary people can almost feel that they personally understand how some celebrity is thinking. There is fannish behavior (not always so horrible; I don’t mind signing books for people) and sometimes the corresponding disappointment if someone does something disappointing (I guess that’s how some Larry David fans felt after he was shilling crypto).
Many journalists have a personal style, and that goes extra for people who write in the blog format. I’ve given you 20 years of myself, a bit every day, indeed I’d be disappointed if you didn’t have some sense of how I think, and not just on statistical issues. This parasocial relationship can be one reason–not the only reason, but one of them–that strangers email me and trust me with their stories. And it goes the other way too! I listen to a few podcasts from those 404 Media people and I think of them as my friends, kind of. And then there’s Nate Silver: I respect his work, we did some small projects together, I even met him once, and then when he decided to stop engaging, I was really disappointed. But I guess I shouldn’t have been disappointed: Nate has many goals, and worrying about the details of his statistical models has to be low on his priority list.
The dangerous side of parasocial relationships with the news media (setting aside personal dangers such as stalkers, which, yeah, that’s scary) is when people place trust in news influencers who are spreading lies. I’m not thinking so much of politicians and performers such as Alex Jones or Al Sharpton or Tucker Carlson–I assume that even their fans see these guys as distant political actors, not as potential friends–, but rather influencers on social media–bloggers, even!–who come off as ordinary Joes with a story to tell. For example, I could do a lot of damage if I were to persuasively write in support of bad statistical ideas and junk science!
So there are pluses and minuses from institutional “Big Journalism.” On the minus side, as discussed earlier in this post, independent journalists can give me a sense of trustworthiness and commitment–they really do seem to care about the stories people are telling them. On the other side, major news organizations can institute some quality control (with some exceptions) so that, even if they’re writing cookie-cutter stories, they’re not doing willful manipulation in the manner of propaganda outlets.
I also see the downside of parasocial relationships, in that some people who don’t know me seem to think I’m mean. I’m not mean! This is not to say that I’m always nice, just that I try my best to see things from each person’s perspective. For example, I’ve said a lot of mean things about Cass “Nudgelord” Sunstein (for example here and here), but really am trying to understand where he’s coming from.
8. Journalists are busy!
I sent an earlier version of this post to some journalists I know–a mix of people, including a former magazine editor, a former wire service and newspaper reporter, a former college newspaper editor . . . Lots of “formers” there, which tells you something about the state of the journalism business today.
One of them pointed out a selection issue I hadn’t thought of:
I think there are tons of more indie publications that consistently rise and fall every time they have a big scandal, while the new york times or npr are big enough to withstand all their scandals. So the smaller publications that you hear of end up being more trusted.
That’s an interesting point. By the time I’d heard of 404, they’d already been around for awhile. They’re independent, but they’re big enough that I’d heard of them.
All my journalistic contacts pretty much agreed with my point that it can be frustrating to tell your story to a news organization and it turns out that they’re just trying to slot it into a preconceived structure: a clean narrative with perhaps space for a contrarian view but not much room for ambiguity. One of the challenges here is that critical journalism can require some subject-matter expertise, or access to people with subject-matter expertise, but it can be hard to find such people. Sara Silver discusses this in this story about failures of the business press in their reporting of the financials of Netflix.
But my colleagues also pointed out that a good journalist might interview lots and lots of people for a story, and there won’t be room to share all their stories in the published article. So, just for statistical reasons, it’s likely your story won’t make it to the final cut, and this isn’t necessarily a failure of the reporting process. This could be different for independent media which is more bloggy and can have more space to present a broader perspective.
Here’s how Stephanie Lee puts it:
Another factor that you allude to, but is more significant than maybe you realize, is that journalism is up against severe financial challenges. There’s been a massive decimation in staff-employed reporters (i.e. the mass layoffs at the Post, the closing of BuzzFeed News), and it’s nearly impossible to make freelance journalism work financially, and as a whole, journalists are under pressure to produce a lot of stories in a short amount of time in order to keep audiences engaged, keep the social media platforms fed, etc. This has always been true to some extent, but it’s especially exacerbated now. I sincerely appreciate your kind words about me, they made my day, but I also want to acknowledge that BuzzFeed and now the Chronicle have given me the time, space, and resources to pursue stories that I think are interesting and important, even if they take a long time, and that don’t even always result in publishable stories, and that most journalists don’t have these luxuries.
If you’re doing journalism as a job, you’re probably overworked and underpaid. Independent journalists can do better in some cases because they may be doing it in transition from one job to another, or because they’re working to build their personal reputation, or because they’re in a small-business structure in which they don’t need to work on too many stories at once. Or, as in my case, because they have a full-time job and they’re doing journalism on the side.
9. Summary
Sometimes I’m contacted by news organizations because they want an interview or a quote or background information, and, with rare exceptions, I feel like the journalists on the other end of the line are just doing their job–they’re not really interested in what I have to say, they just want some material to slot into a narrative they’ve already written. I expect that independent journalists such as from 404 would be much more respectful of what I, or other sources, had to offer them.
From the other direction, when people contact me with material, I show them respect. I don’t automatically agree with them; what’s relevant here is that I follow the implicit code: they’re giving me material and I’m telling their story.
OK, not always. On occasion I’ve received angry emails from prominent academics objecting to something or another in my posts. I’d rather they just write something in the comment section so we could have an open discussion. But if someone has something reasonable to say, I’m happy to post it, along with my take.
After writing all the above, I’m afraid I’m giving the impression that I hate most journalists. I don’t! They’re doing a job, and when people are doing a job, they typically fall into an “I’m doing my job” mindset. It happens to me too! I love research and teaching, also they’re my job, and there are days when I come into work and I’m not fully committed. Blogging’s easier because I’m doing it as extra. And maybe it feels different if you’re working in independent media, I don’t know. Again we have to watch out for selection bias, as there are tons of independent journalists or opinionators or whatever you want to call them on the internet who are some combination of stupid, corrupt, and irremediably ideological.
And those people working at the Washington Post, or the New York Times, or the BBC, or even NPR . . . they’re doing their best. They’re just unfortunately working within a framework in which their job is to regularly produce coherent narratives on deadline. So when you talk with them, they might not really be wanting your story; rather, they want a piece in a puzzle that’s already laid out on their table.
My purpose in writing this post is to frame this in terms of the implicit individual and social contracts that bind journalists to their sources. Anyone who’s reporting a news story, or is talking to a journalist, is putting in some time into what, ultimately, is a collaborative effort.
Haven’t you (or West Coast Stat Blog) also posted about the NYT’s arrogance and refusal to credit whoever reported the story first? That’s another reason.
Also, NYT is extremely editor-driven, the reporters are trying to fit a story into the editor’s preconceived storyline.
https://deadline.com/2016/11/shocked-by-trump-new-york-times-finds-time-for-soul-searching-1201852490/
Anon:
Yes, I linked to one of those posts above.
But I don’t think the problem is just with the New York Times. The NYT is one of the last news organizations still standing, so it has a lot of responsibility and it gets a lot of criticism, including from me–fair enough. But lots of other news organizations have similar problems; we just don’t usually hear about them.
Wow, that was a long post. Let me ask one thing: do you see these implicit social contracts being rapidly degraded? I’m not just referring to journalist/interviewee relationships, but virtually all such implicit contracts (bipartisan Congressional discussions, academic disagreements, trust that researchers didn’t make up their data, neighborly discussions, etc.). I’m inclined to see many of these that we took for granted are now becoming strained if not broken. So, do you see such a trend – and if so, what do you think accounts for that?
Dale:
I don’t know. Your question is worth looking into. There have been surveys showing a steady decline in trust for almost all American institutions (with the police and military being the only exceptions, as I recall), so that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story, as in the above post I’m not speaking of the contract between the news media and society, so much as the contract between the news media and its sources. So lots to look at. Although, as is so often the case with important topics, it’s not so clear how to study the problem in a systematic and scientific way.
Twenty years ago a former journalist gave me and a few other people a three-hour class on interacting with journalists. He said journalists are taught some standard ways to frame stories and to write them, so they don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking and rewriting, they can just plug in the elements to a standard outline. Story types are things like Good guys vs Bad guys; David vs Goliath; Economics – who wins/who loses; Here’s something bad, who is to blame?; and a few others. And then for telling the story, they often either start with an episode — a specific person or event — and then connect that to a larger story, or they can start with the broader view but focus on some way it has changed, like prices are going up or whatever.
The guy said that if you ask the journalist what angle they’re taking, you can make sure that what you say makes sense for that angle. You don’t have to agree with their take — if they’re planning on a good guys/bad guys story and you think they have it backwards you should say so — but if they’re planning a story about “Here’s something bad, who is to blame?”, which sounds like the way the “mortality in white men” was being framed — then you have to say one of: it’s not happening, or it’s not bad, or this is who to blame.
The guy teaching the class strongly recommended trying to figure out the angle, which, again, he said they are often willing to tell you. He said if you don’t do this you risk wasting your time and the journalist’s time: they may not find a way to use what you tell them, whether or not it’s factually correct and interesting. So, Andrew, it sounds like this is what you ran into with that story about mortality in white men.
In the end I had only a few journalist interactions but there was one time I found it useful. It was about fifteen years ago. The Bay Area was several years into a fairly extreme drought, and a TV reporter somehow got my name as someone who (along with my wife) was trying to conserve water: only drought-tolerant plants in our yard, catch our shower warmup water and use it to water them, egg timer in the shower to make sure we keep our showers short, etc. He asked if he could interview us on camera and have us show some of these things to the viewers. I said sure. I was imagining he was going to do a piece about what we could all be doing to conserve water. Fortunately, when he got here I asked him what angle he was taking, and he said “the utility is telling everyone to do all this stuff to conserve water, but they lose X gallons every day through leaking pipes they aren’t fixing.” So, some combination of good guys/bad guys and David vs Goliath, with us water-conservers as David/good guy and the utility as Goliath/bad guy. I said no thanks and sent him packing. Yes, of course the utility has water leaks, they have like 5000 miles of water lines that cross fault lines and landslide zones, but they were actually doing pretty well, all things considered — only a very small percentage of water was lost to leakage in utility-controlled lines — and I certainly didn’t feel comfortable suggesting that people shouldn’t conserve water because the real problem was the utility. So I sent him packing. I’m sure he still did the story with some other water-conserving chumps (in his framing) but at least I didn’t waste my time talking to him, or being a tool for him.
The “angle” thing was key to NYT losing my trust forever. I mean, I already kind of didn’t trust them super well, but when they contacted me and my collaborator Hadi on Pooled Testing, they definitely intentionally gave me a vibe about “pooled testing is a good thing but needs to be done right” but then published an article with a title like “here’s why pooled testing is useless”… They then eventually changed the title but a few days later, which I only found out when we looked into it later at one point a year ago or so.
The point I’m making is, the journalist was deceptive, and burned my trust in the organization as well as her personally. Of course, the she’s never gonna contact me again, and I wasn’t a subscriber to the NYT, but I will also never be a subscriber at this point.
On the other hand, I’m literally planning to subscribe to 404 media and they’ve done amazing reporting since the early days of DOGE running rampant. They’ve broken news about Flock cameras and all sorts of great reporting. They seem to be what journalism was in theory supposed to be about.
I remember that this came up before. I guess this is the article you object to, at any rate it’s the article you are mentioned in:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/health/coronavirus-pool-testing.html
I have to say I don’t see anything wrong with the article. Of course anything can be improved, but generally I think this is OK for an article that the journalist presumably had less than a day to write.
If your objection was the previous -title-, whatever that was…well, that’s still an issue of trust with the organization as a whole, but as you probably know the headlines are usually written by specialized headline-writers, not by the journalists who write the articles. Usually the journalist doesn’t know what the title will be. This has always bothered me, especially since I have occasionally seen a headline that is totally at variance with the article, but for some reason it’s pretty standard.
the main issue is she actually had considerably more than a day, it was like a week at least is my memory, and essentially none of the points we were making made it into the article. I dont have access at the moment and am not going to look up an archive version on my phone but the main point we were making is if you use pooled testing to screen wide swaths of workers, then your positivity rate will be low and all the math works out and you could prevent the spread of the virus within an organization like a hospital or university or factory. further as time went on you’d have lower positivity as the virus failed to spread. you could do this at 1/20 or 1/40th the cost of individual screening, and screen daily or every other day… and we had proof because we had a hospital actually DOING it for all their residents.
you have access perhaps you can tell me if any of that comes through? i dont think it did, and they spent a lot of time talking about the difficulty of doing individual diagnosis with pooling and positivity rates of 5-10% which was literally irrelevant to the real application.
the reporter actively misled us compared to what we discussed. perhaps the editor cared more to downplay the usefulness. in any case as an institution they failed to inspire me to trust them to provide interviews in the future.
Also you might want to say that reporters dont necessarily have knowledge enough to understand subtleties, but the author was a PhD in biochemistry or something similar. she had the background needed.
I don’t understand why anyone would “trust” a journalist to begin with.
I read the NYT or any other reporting with a probabilistic framework. Of course they aren’t going to have all the relevant facts or details on any topic, (although depending on the topic the reporting might be more or less comprehensive).
I don’t know why anyone would stop reading the NYT due to a lack of “trust.” Their reporting is sometimes boring but sometimes they provide information that’s useful for assessing probabilities, even of it’s the probability of how likely it is that an incorrect portrayal would be reported to a mass audience.
Joshua:
As discussed in the above post, I think there can be reasons for a source to trust a journalist. I trust Stephanie Lee. The reporters from 404 Media say that their sources have good reasons to trust them, and I believe them on this. When I act as a journalist, sources trust me, and for good reason.
Andrew –
I like Stephanie Lee’s reporting. I’m particular she was a good source for information during the covid pandemic (in particlar related to the highly flawed Santa Clara study). But for me, having a high “prior” on the quality of her journalism, doesn’t equate to “trust.” When I read her subsequent reporting on the trends in the teaching of reading, I approached it with skepticism. I expected it to somewhat favor, broadly, one orientation on the issue, that would necessarily need to be tested against other orientations. I also expected it to stand up relatively well against other orientations, because I’d expect her to approach her investigation in a way that examines the different orientations. But I wouldn’t just assume she integrated other orientations until I stress tested her reporting.
Maybe it’s a language thing around what “trust” means.
Joshua:
I’m talking about being a source for a news article, not just being a reader. As a reader, yes, you can make your own judgment each time.
As a source, trust is very important: if I trust a journalist, I can open up to her, say what I really think, without being worried that my words will be twisted or that some subset of my story will be taken out of content.
And as a sometime journalist myself, I value the trust that my sources place in me. They’ll share confidential information, secure in the knowledge that I will not misrepresent them. People often send me things and want to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from others. I respect that anonymity. This does not mean that I agree with every source or that I always place them in a favorable light or that I report on everything they send me. But I respect the integrity of their stories.
I’m not asking you as a reader to believe or agree with everything I post. But I would hope that you as a source would trust me to make good use of what you share with me.
Some people can evaluate the evidence like “source A says X, source B says Y, my considered opinion is Z” on one or two topics (usually their job or homemaking and a hobby). Its almost impossible to do that for everything you have a casual interest in, and to not be influenced by what sources chose to talk about and their unspoken messages about what is worth talking about and what opinions are respectable. So its wise to be very careful about what sources of information you let in, especially when you are not really paying attention.
I agree that Andrew’s second kind of trust is also important (eg. is the reporter just fishing for a soundbite to fit a predetermined narrative, will they respect practices like “background,” if you give them a name to call will they be polite and efficient or waste your friend’s time).
Andrew –
I misinterpreted the context for your use of trust. Yes, certainly in that context it makes sense. If someone has demonstrated integrity and respect in how they treat you as a source, they certainly merit trust.
This has been my experience with journalists who ask me about a very different area of expertise–modern European history. They generally have some pre-conceived idea in mind and if my expert opinion doesn’t conform to it, they either just drop the whole thing or twist what I said by clever sound- or text-editing to make it seem like I am agreeing with them.
I might be one of the few who read the print editions of the Times and Post every day. Is there an implied contract between media and reader? I ask because I’m old, and many of the big stories in the papers I pass on because tl:dr. I mentally categorize them as “it’s complicated” stories. That’s a major change in my reading habits–50-70 years ago I read everything in the papers. Of course, back then the papers were perhaps 50 percent ads so the news hole has expanded. Somehow I doubt there are many 20-30 year olds who read everything in their suscription media. I may be wrong, but aren’t the media much more competitive these days, meaning they need the simple story line to attract eyeballs?
A related angle: with the rise of social media, and especially outlets like Reddit, people seem to no longer care about the byline when entrusting. This is also spreading to AI when GPT cites Reddit posts. Reddit posts are frequently pseudonymous. Same with Yelp reviews and the likes. Lots of people seem to be willing to trust anonymous sources. This has concerned and troubled me for a while.
Kaiser:
My pet peeve was always when people would talk about a “New York Times article” or a “New Yorker article” or a “Lancet study” or whatever, without giving the author. As a person who’s published in hundreds of different places, I think it’s much more relevant to know who the author is, rather than knowing the publication. So I’d always say, “an article by” whoever, also mentioning the publication when that seemed relevant.
But then a few years ago, people were getting on my case, saying that I was criticizing people personally. I don’t think it’s personal to say someone’s name! But, since then, I often just give the publication, not the author, just in case seeing an author name is distracting. It’s not like the author’s name is a secret; you can just click through.
The chatbot thing is another story because they don’t always give the reference. I guess you can find the references, if they’re real, by googling them, or by asking the chatbot to provide a link.
Back when editing was really meaningful, this venue meant something. Once editing became “keep this piece in the vibe of our publication” the responsibility for the piece shifted from the publication to the author. (I realize this is an overgeneralization, but I think it’s directionally correct. Publishing something that is wrong but popular is no longer as black an eye as it once was.)
“Publishing something that is wrong but popular is no longer [a] black…eye”
If you don’t mind. Understatement of the decade. Journalists don’t gives rats rump about truth. Selling clicks is their game. That includes scientists with their it-doesn’t-change-the-conclusions teritorial defense song and Nobels-turned-propagandists like Krugman attempting to attract mates with their coo-cooing to their dedicated audience.
The Seattle Times has a number of paid article providers that routinely blatantly misrepresent the issues they write about. The Times claims that it “retains editorial control”. If true – and I believe it is – it’s just an admission that its editors don’t give a geoduck about truth vs fiction, an inference readily confirmed by the rest of the Times’ reporting. For example, when I pointed out to the Times’ “statistics” editor (translation of “statistics editor”: leftist “journalist” with appropriate DEI credentials who can order non-decimal numbers correctly) that perhaps the reason black incomes are lower than Asian incomes in Seattle is that the Asians have been recruited from all over the world for their high capability and educational attainment, while blacks on average have somewhere far south of half the education that Asians have and are about four times as likely to live on public support, the response was to publish a similar article and table with similar ingoranmous claims (four rows, two columns, you can guess what they are) several months later but put it on the back page instead of the front page.
But bullshitting is an American tradition, going back to Twain and Henry Morton Stanely, two of the most famous bullshitters of all time – and even Ben Franklin and Poor Richard’s Almanac.
“yeah….! That’s it! Yeah…the climate!! Yeah!!…its’ gonna be a…a…yeah! a disaster!! Yeah! That’s it! A BIG disaster he he! Yeah yeah! Huge! Floods! Heat waves! Tornados!! Earthquakes! That’s it!! Big disaster!!! He he!!”
Anonymous
You can make your points without resorting to what I see as irrelevant claims about race, DEI, and environmental views. All of your criticisms of the Seattle Times can also be pointed at Fox, Breitbart, etc. In my mind, claims about the failure of editors would be stronger that way – they increasingly seem to abandon truth for the almighty click. But you diatribe against particular left wing (I’ll use the left/right distinction here despite my distaste for it – but it seems to match your view of the world) views is misplaced and undermines anything you are trying to say. I think this is not new for you (but I’m guessing since there are so many that use the “Anonymous” label). The constant harping against left wing views while ignoring the many conservative untruths adds little to the discussion in my opinion. And it matches the current administration’s many claims against Democratic views and actions (e.g. weaponization of the Justice Department) which merely illustrate its own comparable (and often worse) views and actions.
I also err on the side of caution and don’t usually mention someone’s name when critiquing their work.
Unfortunately, I am having trouble trusting identified sources. First, because it is hard to verify the actual source even when it is identified. Second, because too many “official” sources cannot be trusted (starting with government sources but going on to virtually all sources). Yes, unidentified is worse, but I think they are converging.
My experiences went:
Reporter: “We’re writing a story about q and understand you argue for not-q.
Me: “q doesn’t answer the question put to the jury; we should be talking about r”
Reporter: Thank you”
Article: “not-Savehn says not-q”
OR
Article: “Savehn says not-q because relevance”
I think the most important thing to remember is that journalists are successful if they are good story tellers. I like to believe that academic lecturers have some responsibility to illuminate the “truth” (perhaps I am naive). But journalism is about selling newspapers by telling stories. Complicated or nuanced stories are hard to tell.
Back in the late 1970’s, Byte magazine had a great columnist, Jerry Pournelle, the science fiction writer. He was great at telling stories. But, at the time, I knew as much (or more) about PC’s than he did, at it was clear that some of the time (lots of the time) the things he was writing sounded completely correct and compelling, but unfortunately they were wrong. But his pontifications sounded great.
This is why serious science is not done via debate, and in fact debates about evolution, climate change, etc etc are smoke-screens for junk (non) science. Persuasion and good story telling can be compelling, even when it is completely disconnected from reality.
That seems like a strange characterization to me. I believe journalists have a responsibility to illuminate the truth – not that they fulfill this, but often academics not either. But the press was supposed to play an important role and I find it sad that they now only need to be good story tellers, truth be damned. I also don’t understand your statement that “serious science is not done via debate.” If you mean that the debate becomes performance and that gets in the way of serious science, then I mostly agree. But if you mean that debate is not essential to serious science, then how are we to progress on issues like climate change, medical treatments, monetary policy, etc.?
You make it sound like if people do serious science then they are likely to find themselves in agreement, but that doesn’t seem to comport with many decisions we face. Even if the scientific “facts” were not in dispute, the policy implications will be. Perhaps you are suggesting that serious science and policy are, or should be, completely separate things. I have to think more about that, but my initial reaction is to think that is unrealistic and unwise.
Academic writing and journalism are not so far apart, even if the stakes are different. “They want a piece in a puzzle that’s already laid out on their table” made me think that some researchers, pushed by the need to have a reference for every claim, might just fish for something that supports their claim, without wanting to know the full story.