Chris Mooney on the "present both sides equally" trend in modern journalism...

[acroyear]

The Intersection:

When I'm speaking about how to fix the politics-of-science problem, I often target the media for special criticism. I point out that if journalists weren't so addicted to the norm of fify-fifty "balance," they wouldn't be so vulnerable to the machinations of science abusers who attempt to create phony "debates" over topics like evolution or global warming.

But when asked what to do about this problem, I don't throw up my hands in despair. Quite the contrary: I think that, at least to a large extent, journalists are amenable to reason. Sure, we need better science education in journalism school. But we also need to take the argument straight to journalists: There's no justification for fifty-fifty balance in coverage irrespective of the issue being covered. Rather, in each and every story, journalists have to make a judgment about how credible their sources are. The obvious reductio ad absurdum is Holocaust deniers: Should their perspective be provided, for "balance," any time someone writes about the Holocaust? Of course not.

Faced with this argument directly, I doubt any journalist would really reject it. The good news, then, is that the argument is being made more and more prominently. To give just one example: I saw Good Night, and Good Luck last night, and the Edward R. Murrow character makes this very point about the limits of "balance," quite explicitly. It was extremely heartening to see such a position being adopted in a popular movie. And as more and more media critics make this point, I am optimistic that it will eventually stick.

To this I would add, if you're eventually going to show that one of the two "sides" is full of crap, make sure you've made that clear in the first few paragraphs so to the casual reader it doesn't look like you're praising a side that really needs to be condemned.  This was the main flaw, more than any other, of the recent column in the 'Post over that NVCC teacher shoving Wells's Icons b.s. down unsuspecting students throats.

Comments

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

the issue is in things where evidence from a scientist who's actually really done a study on the issue, and "evidence" from a "scientist" that's a paid stoolie for Exxon and hasn't done a sentence of true peer-reviewed research in 10 years should NOT get the same respect.

intent is important in interpreting the interpretations of data -- just as "you can always see what you went to look for" in statistical surveys of people, you can always see the evidence that supports what you were looking for in statistical analsys in nature.

if a scientists finds something that's extremely beneficial to his financial supporters (like "there's no link between smoking and cancer", a common one throughout the 50s to 80s), it should automatically be considered suspect. scientists are skeptical by nature, especially where financial backing is concerned.

when global warming "debates" are presented in the media, because the far-right and big-business side have "scientists" on their side, the media presents the two positions as if they were equal *constantly* (rob's protests not withstanding, i'll look up examples if he really wants me to, but Chris Mooney has made a career out of finding them), regardless of the actual level of evidence (more specifically, the large quantity of ignored facts) and the crappy methodology of the scientists supported by the big-business side.