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Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

I think that this is deeply wrong. "The Media" is a popular punching bag, but the media largely repeats what large institutions tells it. Journalists don't (for the most part) have the skills necessary to dive deep into scientific literature.

For every big "scientific" view that has an agenda behind it that either vastly overreaches the available research or lags decades behind the available research, you can generally point a finger at one or more corporations, government agencies, or not-for-profits.

GMO fearmongering? Largely environmentalist NFPs.

Breast cancer overdiagnosis? Largely cancer fundraising NFPs.

Nutritional science? Largely the government.

Let's tell pregnant women to live in a thick cocoon of craziness? Medical insurers.

And so forth.

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I've wondered if GMO fear mongering isn't an attempt to brand certain foods as premium and therefore charge a lot more for them.

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/foodgentrification-and-culinar...

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that it's not the media's fault, because the media just blindly repeats whatever they're told. This is exactly why it's the media's fault!

If a journalist doesn't have the skills to understand what they're reporting on, then they shouldn't be reporting on it. We wouldn't put up with a report on Afghanistan that says the place is full of Arabs because the reporter was told that by some nutcase and couldn't be bothered to check the CIA World Fact Book before he went on the air, but we're constantly exposed to the scientific equivalent.

The world is an inherently confusing place. Media's job is to filter out the noise and present us with the signal. Instead, they just amplify it all, and we all know that amplifying a noisy signal doesn't really help.

I'm sorry, but you're holding the media to an impossible standard. This isn't about "checking the CIA World Fact Book," it's "Read dozens of dense studies that assume PhD-level study in the relevant fields."

The media does light fact-checking, and it's exactly that fact-checking that allows institutions to set an agenda. If a reporter sees a press release about a new study in, say, the field of cancer, and they try to fact-check it, they're likely to go and talk to the American Cancer Society. Which, as it turns out, has a point of view about cancer that it promotes.

What the hell else is the journalist going to do? They Just Can't read up all the relevant literature -- that's a full time job, and they already have jobs.

Interview some random scientist whose name they pulled out of a hat? That's not likely to help.

If they can't properly fact-check what they report, then what good are they? Any monkey with a laptop can regurgitate press releases these days. I suppose this is why traditional media is rapidly becoming irrelevant.

You know, I think that the job they do is pretty important, if also kind of far from the idealized view of the media as this almost omniscient gatekeeper institution.

If someone wants to pour over tens of thousands of press releases, do some light fact-checking on them, discard the ones that are just obviously crazy or unimportant, and sort them by topic, maybe get a bit of context on them or flesh them out a little, then that strikes me as pretty useful. Certainly I don't want to deal with a raw torrent of press releases. I want someone to filter them for me, if even lightly.

If the end result is not a one-stop shop for all the truth and accuracy in the world, well, that's unfortunate, but it also strikes me as life. It'd be great if someone could just synthesize raw, objective truth out of all that data, but I don't believe that's possible. Given that it's not possible, I won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

And since those institutions-with-agendas are pushing their agendas in other ways than just through the media, we should probably try to address that problem at the root instead of just blaming journalists.

> If someone wants to pour over tens of thousands of press releases, do some light fact-checking on them, discard the ones that are just obviously crazy or unimportant, and sort them by topic, maybe get a bit of context on them or flesh them out a little, then that strikes me as pretty useful.

That's what a wire service does.

> It'd be great if someone could just synthesize raw, objective truth out of all that data, but I don't believe that's possible. Given that it's not possible, I won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

What would be certainly possible though is for them to stop putting lies inside. Exaggerating claims and inventing linkbait nonsense actually requires work - work which shouldn't be done in the first place.

Fellow scientists and peer reviewers don't even fact-check properly. Are you holding journalists to a higher standard?

Are you saying that not fact-checking properly is acceptable?

> The media does light fact-checking, and it's exactly that fact-checking that allows institutions to set an agenda.

This is true only of some media. For example, The New Yorker has a fact-checking department that holds their journalists to high standards. Reading their long-form articles, it is clear that the writers have taken the time to understand things deeply. Nobody writes a 10,000-word essay on science the night before on a deadline.

It's quite reasonable to expect a journalist reporting on science to read dozens of articles (or review papers) about a field and to interview many scientists. It's not hard to find people with that level of understanding in a field who would be happy to write public-facing magazine articles. Many of the best science writers do.

They could at least stop making up bullshit claims in headlines and text. Research institution don't usually go saying they're 100% certain something is this-or-that and has huge implications for everything. It's the media outlets that add those things to the articles.

Surprisingly, I don't recall a relevant xkcd, but then there's the famous Science News Cycle: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1174.

> What the hell else is the journalist going to do? They Just Can't read up all the relevant literature -- that's a full time job, and they already have jobs.

Well, you're telling us that Reddit and Hacker News can do what journalists can't, even though people posting there are definitely not employed to fact-check things.

>They could at least stop making up bullshit claims in headlines and text.

The problem there is that journalism has been decimated and they have to do something (to get clicks) to survive. I'm just pointing that out, not defending it.

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