The following is from Altnet which we have talked about before in class. The one of the following that I like the best is the accusation that the leaks caused deaths. Well the question I have to ask...that begs to be asked is does the American military cause deaths. Give me a break. How many eggs to you have to break to make an omelet? And the really bogus one that I don't think is talked about here is the Ivory coast revelation that the opposition guy supported putting pressure on the country secretly as the people in the country did not like the idea of outside pressures. Well that is exactly what the people in a democracy need to know, however inconvenient that might be to us idealists.
AlterNet / By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd and Tana Ganeva
comments_image 96 COMMENTS
8 Smears and Misconceptions About WikiLeaks Spread By the Media
Shredding the corporate media's malicious attacks on WikiLeaks.
December 31, 2010 |
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The corporate media's tendency to blare misinformation and outright fabrications has been particularly egregious in coverage of WikiLeaks. As Glenn Greenwald has argued, mainstream news outlets are parroting smears and falsehoods about the whistleblower site and its founder Julian Assange, helping to perpetuate a number of "zombie lies" -- misconceptions that refuse to die no matter how much they conflict with known reality, basic logic and well-publicized information.
Here are the bogus narratives that keep appearing in newspapers and on the airwaves.
1. Fearmongering that WikiLeaks revelations will result in deaths. So far there's no evidence that WikiLeaks' revelations have cost lives. In fact, right before the cables were released, Pentagon officials admitted there were no documented instances of people being killed because of information exposed by WikiLeaks' previous document releases (and unlike the diplomatic cables, the Afghanistan files were unredacted).
That's not to say that the exposure of secret government files can't somehow lead to someone, somewhere, someday, being hurt. But that's a pretty high bar to set, especially by a government engaged in multiple military operations -- many of them secret -- that lead to untold civilian casualties.
2. Spreading the lie that WikiLeaks posted all the cables. WikiLeaks has posted fewer than 2,000 of the 251,287 cables in its possession. The whistleblower released those documents in tandem with major news outlets including the Guardian, El Pais and Le Monde, and used most of the redactions employed by those papers to protect the identities of people whose lives could be endangered by exposure. The AP detailed this process in a December 3 article, but this did not stop officials and pundits from howling that WikiLeaks "indiscriminately" dumped all the cables online. Much of the media mindlessly repeated the claim.
Greenwald and others have battled to kill the myth that the whistleblower site threw up all the cables without taking any precautions to protect people, but it keeps coming up. Just this week NPR issued an apology for all the times contributors and guests have implied or outright voiced the falsehood that WikiLeaks blindly posted all the cables at once.
3. Falsely claiming that Assange has committed a crime regarding WikiLeaks. The State Department is working really hard to pin a crime on Julian Assange. The problem is that so far he doesn't appear to have broken any laws. Assange is not a U.S. citizen, he does not work for the U.S. government, and the documents WikiLeaks posted were procured by someone else. As Greenwald has repeatedly pointed out, it's not against the law to publish classified U.S. government information. If it were, hundreds of journalists would be in prison right now.
While the government tries to conjure up a legal justification for prosecuting Assange, the media is helping out by fanning the narrative that he's some criminal mastermind. Major outlets continue to host guests who accuse Assange of criminal behavior without quite specifying what his crime is. In a much derided CNN debate between Bush Homeland Security adviser Fran Townsend and Glenn Greenwald hosted by Jessica Yellin, Greenwald had to repeatedly bat away the assertion that Assange has "profited" from "criminal" acts.
The effort to tar Assange as a criminal -- spearheaded by government officials and helped along by the media -- may have a chilling effect on future whistleblowers.
4. Denying that WikiLeaks is a journalistic enterprise. Public officials and pundits continue to claim that WikiLeaks is not a journalistic outlet, even though it procured the scoop of a decade. But much of what WikiLeaks does is identical to the activities of other news sources. WikiLeaks receives secrets from anonymous sources, which it then reveals to the public -- news is nothing if not a checks and balances system for the government, a fundamental right of a free press. Secondly, it curates those secrets before revealing them -- a journalist selecting relevant and appropriate material from a confidential document is not that different from WikiLeaks redacting certain parts of the cables.
Because WikiLeaks’ actions fall under the First Amendment, all journalists should be outraged if the American government attempts to prosecute. If WikiLeaks is prosecuted for conducting a journalistic enterprise, what rights will be stripped from journalists in the future? One of the most respected journalistic institutions in the world, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is speaking out. Earlier this month, 20 faculty members drafted and signed a letter to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder saying that WikiLeaks' prosecution will set a “dangerous precedent for reporters in any publication or medium, potentially chilling investigative journalism and other First Amendment-protected activity ... Prosecution in the Wikileaks case would greatly damage American standing in free-press debates worldwide and would dishearten those journalists looking to this nation for inspiration.”
The Walkley Foundation, an institution of journalism in Assange’s home of Australia, put it more succinctly in its own letter of support for WikiLeaks: “To aggressively attempt to shut WikiLeaks down, to threaten to prosecute those who publish official leaks, and to pressure companies to cease doing commercial business with WikiLeaks, is a serious threat to democracy, which relies on a free and fearless press.”
5. Denying a link between Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks, despite Ellsberg's support of the site. In 1969, Daniel Ellsberg secretly photocopied classified documents that proved the Johnson administration had lied to the American public about the chances of winning the Vietnam War, which it knew from the beginning were slim to none. By 1970, Ellsberg had become disillusioned with the desperate situation and began circulating the documents, first to U.S. senators, then to the New York Times, which reported the contents in a groundbreaking series of articles that set in motion the end to the war...and the Nixon administration. By doing so, he helped end an unjust war carried out in the name of the American people. His actions are widely heralded.
In a parallel scenario, WikiLeaks is acting the part of the Times and other outlets that reported the Pentagon Papers -- releasing information of secret, and in many cases, unjust actions carried out in the name of the American people without our knowledge. Alleged leaker Bradley Manning is the Ellsberg in this situation; similarly, if chats between himself and Adrian Lamo printed in Wired are true, he unleashed the cables out of an overwhelming sense of justice, saying, "I want people to see the truth regardless of who they are because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."
Earlier this month, Ellsberg appeared on the Colbert Report and praised Manning. “If Bradley Manning did what he's accused of, then he's a hero of mine and I think he did a great service to this country,” said Ellsberg. “We're not in the mess we're in, in the world, because of too many leaks....I say there should be some secrets. But I also say we invaded Iraq illegally because of a lack of a Bradley Manning at that time.”
6. Accusing Assange of profiting from WikiLeaks. Newspapers this week led with reports that Assange has signed a lucrative book deal, information that inspired mainstream outlets like CNN to mock Assange for "profiting" from the cables despite his anti-corporate ideology. In the CNN interview mentioned above, Jessica Yellin asked Glenn Greenwald if he had "Any qualms about the fact that he is essentially profiting from classified information." Greenwald pointed out that Assange is hardly profiting from the leaked materials, but rather trying to make a dent in the legal fees he's accruing as governments around the world go after him. Greenwald also pointed out that trying to make money from journalism is pretty routine in the profession. Bob Woodward, for example, has written multiple books based on classified documents.
7. Calling Assange a terrorist. Last week Vice-President Joe Biden, part of an administration that's overseen the escalation of the disastrous war in Afghanistan, joined Mitch McConnell and Sarah Palin in calling Assange a "terrorist."
As far as we know, Assange's leaks haven't killed anyone. Nor has he threatened to perpetrate violence to promote a political agenda, the definition of terrorism. Nevertheless public officials continue to try to link Assange to terrorism in the public consciousness.
8. Minimizing the significance of the cables. Even though only a tiny fraction of the cables have been released, many critics promote the idea that they reveal "nothing new" and are therefore of no value. But even the cables released so far have contained important revelations about the U.S. and its allies.
Here are just a few of the stories revealed by the documents:
-- U.S. special forces working inside Pakistan
-- UK agreed to shield U.S. interests in Iraq probe
-- Secret bombings of Yemen
-- State Department role in the Honduran coup
-- U.S. pressured Spain to drop Bush torture probe
-- U.S. sought to retaliate against Europe over refusing to allow Monsanto GM crops
-- Drug Enforcement Agency goes global, beyond drugs
-- Shell's grip on the Nigerian state
The promise that the next release will target a U.S. bank, and that it will have an effect similar to the Enron disclosures, according to Assange, certainly portends that the trove of information we haven’t yet seen could be explosive. And that is incredibly valuable to the American public.
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is an associate editor at AlterNet and a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor. Formerly the executive editor of The FADER, her work has appeared in VIBE, SPIN, New York Times and various other magazines and websites. Tana Ganeva is an AlterNet editor. Follow her on Twitter. You can email her at tanaalternet@gmail.com.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Monday, January 03, 2011
e-news:The “Digital Newsstand” Race Becomes: Who Is More Willing To Trick Users, Apple Or Google?
MG Siegler
Breaking news: old school publishers seem hell-bent on insuring their content doesn’t catch on in the red-hot tablet space.
A story in the Wall Street Journal this evening details how Google, Apple, Amazon and others are all racing to try to do deals with major publishers in order to set up their “digital newsstands”. Of course, all of this has been going on for months now as the publishers seem to be aware that tablets (okay, really just the iPad so far) are actually taking off this time and they’d be wise to get on board. The problem, naturally, is that they want to be on board on their terms. And those, naturally, are old school terms. In other words, out-of-date and somewhat sleazy terms.
Here’s one main blurb of the WSJ piece:
Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher’s app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes. According to people familiar with the matter, Apple would ask consumers who subscribe to an iPad version of a magazine or newspaper for permission to share personal information about them, like their name and email address, with the publisher.
Some publishers remain unhappy with this arrangement because they think few customers would opt to share such data, according to these people.
So what the publishers seem to be demanding is that Apple opts users into sharing information without telling them. Or, to put it another way, “make it opt-out or we opt-out”. Classy.
Of course few customers would opt-in to sharing such data. Because who the hell wants to be marketed to relentlessly just because they signed up for a magazine subscription? No one. Except that’s the way the magazine subscription model currently works. Not because it’s a good model, but because in the days before technology started destroying print, people were naive enough not to realize what was going on. Obviously, the publishers would like to transition that happiness in slavery to the tablet space.
And while Apple doesn’t appear to be biting on that at this time, the publishers apparently are turing their sights towards chief rival Google. From the piece:
In recent weeks, these people say, Google has told publishers it would take a smaller slice on any sales they make of Android apps than the 30% cut Apple typically takes on iTunes sales. Google has also proposed giving publishers certain personal data about app buyers to help with marketing related products or services.
It’s not clear if in the Google scenario this would be opt-in (like Apple is proposing) or opt-out. But if Google wants to secure these deals ahead of Apple, it’s pretty clear what they’ll have to do. Hopefully they won’t do that.
Apple is also apparently on the verge of a new feature in iTunes that would allow for publishers to offer simple content subscription services. This too has been rumored for some time, and makes a lot of sense. After the initial interest wore off, it seems that most magazine apps are dwindling in sales numbers. The reason for this is obvious: they’re far too much money and too much of a pain to download. To get Time each week, you have to pay $4.99 each time. There is no subscription option. Others, like Newsweek, do have a subscription option, but it’s a bit convoluted. And others, like the Wall Street Journal, have an option (their own) that’s even more convoluted.
In order for the digital newsstand idea to work, it has to actually be a newsstand. As in, a centralized place where you can find and buy anything you’re looking for with a few easy clicks. You know, like iTunes. The stand-alone app model isn’t working for this content. But the publishers are wary of iTunes because they don’t want to give Apple the 30 percent cut, and, more importantly, they want that subscriber data.
And so we appear to be where we were a few months ago, at a stalemate. Talking to Google about a rival newsstand seems like a good bargaining tool, but the Android platform still doesn’t have a tablet that’s nearly as popular as the iPad. Amazon has the popular Kindle device, but it’s in black and white and doesn’t exactly seem like the future of magazine content consumption. You can be sure that Apple will want something like this digital newsstand in place by the launch of the iPad 2. And as they like to do, they’ll probably launch it even if they only have a few publishers on board.
And there will be some on board. Because they stand to lose a lot more than Apple does if they don’t get their content to hit on the iPad.
MG Siegler
Breaking news: old school publishers seem hell-bent on insuring their content doesn’t catch on in the red-hot tablet space.
A story in the Wall Street Journal this evening details how Google, Apple, Amazon and others are all racing to try to do deals with major publishers in order to set up their “digital newsstands”. Of course, all of this has been going on for months now as the publishers seem to be aware that tablets (okay, really just the iPad so far) are actually taking off this time and they’d be wise to get on board. The problem, naturally, is that they want to be on board on their terms. And those, naturally, are old school terms. In other words, out-of-date and somewhat sleazy terms.
Here’s one main blurb of the WSJ piece:
Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher’s app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes. According to people familiar with the matter, Apple would ask consumers who subscribe to an iPad version of a magazine or newspaper for permission to share personal information about them, like their name and email address, with the publisher.
Some publishers remain unhappy with this arrangement because they think few customers would opt to share such data, according to these people.
So what the publishers seem to be demanding is that Apple opts users into sharing information without telling them. Or, to put it another way, “make it opt-out or we opt-out”. Classy.
Of course few customers would opt-in to sharing such data. Because who the hell wants to be marketed to relentlessly just because they signed up for a magazine subscription? No one. Except that’s the way the magazine subscription model currently works. Not because it’s a good model, but because in the days before technology started destroying print, people were naive enough not to realize what was going on. Obviously, the publishers would like to transition that happiness in slavery to the tablet space.
And while Apple doesn’t appear to be biting on that at this time, the publishers apparently are turing their sights towards chief rival Google. From the piece:
In recent weeks, these people say, Google has told publishers it would take a smaller slice on any sales they make of Android apps than the 30% cut Apple typically takes on iTunes sales. Google has also proposed giving publishers certain personal data about app buyers to help with marketing related products or services.
It’s not clear if in the Google scenario this would be opt-in (like Apple is proposing) or opt-out. But if Google wants to secure these deals ahead of Apple, it’s pretty clear what they’ll have to do. Hopefully they won’t do that.
Apple is also apparently on the verge of a new feature in iTunes that would allow for publishers to offer simple content subscription services. This too has been rumored for some time, and makes a lot of sense. After the initial interest wore off, it seems that most magazine apps are dwindling in sales numbers. The reason for this is obvious: they’re far too much money and too much of a pain to download. To get Time each week, you have to pay $4.99 each time. There is no subscription option. Others, like Newsweek, do have a subscription option, but it’s a bit convoluted. And others, like the Wall Street Journal, have an option (their own) that’s even more convoluted.
In order for the digital newsstand idea to work, it has to actually be a newsstand. As in, a centralized place where you can find and buy anything you’re looking for with a few easy clicks. You know, like iTunes. The stand-alone app model isn’t working for this content. But the publishers are wary of iTunes because they don’t want to give Apple the 30 percent cut, and, more importantly, they want that subscriber data.
And so we appear to be where we were a few months ago, at a stalemate. Talking to Google about a rival newsstand seems like a good bargaining tool, but the Android platform still doesn’t have a tablet that’s nearly as popular as the iPad. Amazon has the popular Kindle device, but it’s in black and white and doesn’t exactly seem like the future of magazine content consumption. You can be sure that Apple will want something like this digital newsstand in place by the launch of the iPad 2. And as they like to do, they’ll probably launch it even if they only have a few publishers on board.
And there will be some on board. Because they stand to lose a lot more than Apple does if they don’t get their content to hit on the iPad.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Love this one from Slashdot, great with the US trying shut down Wikileaks:
US To Host World Press Freedom Day
| from the enjoy-the-freedom dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Wednesday December 08, @13:44 (Media)
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/08/188244/US-To-Host-World-Press-Freedom-Day?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
rekrowyalp writes "From the press release: 'The United States is pleased
to announce that it will [0]host UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day event
in 2011. The United States places technology and innovation at the
forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has
empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances,
express opinions on world events, and exchange information in
environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals' right to
freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the
determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and
to restrict the free flow of information.' Oh the irony."
Discuss this story at:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/08/188244/US-To-Host-World-Press-Freedom-Day?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/12/152465.htm
US To Host World Press Freedom Day
| from the enjoy-the-freedom dept.
| posted by samzenpus on Wednesday December 08, @13:44 (Media)
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/08/188244/US-To-Host-World-Press-Freedom-Day?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
rekrowyalp writes "From the press release: 'The United States is pleased
to announce that it will [0]host UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day event
in 2011. The United States places technology and innovation at the
forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has
empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances,
express opinions on world events, and exchange information in
environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals' right to
freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the
determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and
to restrict the free flow of information.' Oh the irony."
Discuss this story at:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/08/188244/US-To-Host-World-Press-Freedom-Day?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/12/152465.htm
Wiki Leaks Update:
WikiLeaks Took Advice From Media Outlets
| from the pentagon-papers-on-the-resume dept.
| posted by timothy on Sunday December 05, @11:50 (Censorship)
| https://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/12/05/1639253/WikiLeaks-Took-Advice-From-Media-Outlets?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
formfeed writes "According to the AP (through Google News), WikiLeaks
isn't just sitting on the recent material so they can release it bit by
bit to the press, as many people implied. On the contrary, it's quite the
other way around: '[0]only after considering advice from five news
organizations with which it chose to share all of the material' are they
releasing it themselves. These newspapers 'have been advising WikiLeaks
on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to
those documents.' AP questions whether WikiLeaks will follow these
redactions, but nevertheless seems quite impressed by this 'extraordinary
collaboration between some of the world's most respected media outlets
and the WikiLeaks organization.'" I wonder if some of the
[1]anti-WikiLeaks fervor evident among US lawmakers will also be brought
to bear against the AP and other mainstream media sources. Update: 12/05
17:42 GMT by [2]T : Yes, that's WikiLeaks, rather than (as originally
rendered) WikiPedia. HT to reader Mike Hearn.
Discuss this story at:
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/12/05/1639253/WikiLeaks-Took-Advice-From-Media-Outlets?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i0Vruimmvy8loGklsz34QyGDKMDA?docId=120c7bf5d3a34dbaadf1280dace2e456
1. http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/131885-senators-unveil-anti-wikileaks-legislation
WikiLeaks Took Advice From Media Outlets
| from the pentagon-papers-on-the-resume dept.
| posted by timothy on Sunday December 05, @11:50 (Censorship)
| https://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/12/05/1639253/WikiLeaks-Took-Advice-From-Media-Outlets?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
formfeed writes "According to the AP (through Google News), WikiLeaks
isn't just sitting on the recent material so they can release it bit by
bit to the press, as many people implied. On the contrary, it's quite the
other way around: '[0]only after considering advice from five news
organizations with which it chose to share all of the material' are they
releasing it themselves. These newspapers 'have been advising WikiLeaks
on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to
those documents.' AP questions whether WikiLeaks will follow these
redactions, but nevertheless seems quite impressed by this 'extraordinary
collaboration between some of the world's most respected media outlets
and the WikiLeaks organization.'" I wonder if some of the
[1]anti-WikiLeaks fervor evident among US lawmakers will also be brought
to bear against the AP and other mainstream media sources. Update: 12/05
17:42 GMT by [2]T : Yes, that's WikiLeaks, rather than (as originally
rendered) WikiPedia. HT to reader Mike Hearn.
Discuss this story at:
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/12/05/1639253/WikiLeaks-Took-Advice-From-Media-Outlets?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i0Vruimmvy8loGklsz34QyGDKMDA?docId=120c7bf5d3a34dbaadf1280dace2e456
1. http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/131885-senators-unveil-anti-wikileaks-legislation
In our last class I would like to analyse this story for meaning:
People with a university degree fear death less than those at a lower literacy level
03 December 2010 @ 09:09 am EST
People with a university degree fear death less than those at a lower literacy level. In addition, fear of death is most common among women than men, which affects their children's perception of death. In fact, 76% of children that report fear of death is due to their mothers avoiding the topic.{AND CHILDREN ARE NOT MEN OR WOMEN SO WE DO NOT KNOW IF THERE IS ANY DIFERENCE IN AFFECT OR Fear) Additionally, more of these children fear early death and adopt unsuitable approaches when it comes to deal with death.
These are some of the conclusions drawn from a research entitled Educación para la muerte: Estudio sobre la construcción del concepto de muerte en niños de entre 8 y 12 años de edad en el ámbito escolar, [Education On Death: A Study On The Building Of The Concept Of Death In Children Aged Between 8 And 12 At School] conducted at the Department of Personality, Assessment and Psychological Treatment at the University of Granada by Claudia Fabiana Siracusa, and led by professors Francisco Cruz Quintana y Mª Nieves Pérez Marfil.
For the purpose of this study, researchers took a sample of 288 children, aged between 8 and 12, including their parents, tutors and teachers. The professors at the University of Granada analysed how adults' understanding of the concept of death affects children's attitudes, fears, beliefs and approaches to death.
A change In Mentality
This study revealed the need for a change in mentality within families and at school, regarding death and the end of life. The reason is that an appropriate approach to death is key to children's health and personality. Other conclusions were that all children –to a higher or lower degree- have had experiences related to death, that they believe in life after death, and that they are concerned about it. Additionally, it is more common among girls to believe in life after death than among boys.
As regards teachers, 80% of them reported that death was not included in the curriculum. Six out of ten recognised that they have occasionally talked about death with their students, mostly due to the death of a students' relative.
In the light of the results obtained, University of Granada researchers consider that it is essential to provide death education "as a way to value life, and an instrument to end with the misguided and unreal idea transmitted by the media. Such education would provide children with the appropriate strategies and resources to approach death during their lives, avoiding any slight or severe negative impact on their physical or psychological health."
Another finding was that a high educational level prevents negative attitudes, as fear of death and avoiding the topic. In accordance with the teachers that participated in the study, "at present, the education system does not have any formal and systematic method to deal with death in class. If death were introduced in the education system, children would have a more real and intense approach to life, and many of the problems derived from the mourning process in the adulthood would be prevented."
People with a university degree fear death less than those at a lower literacy level
03 December 2010 @ 09:09 am EST
People with a university degree fear death less than those at a lower literacy level. In addition, fear of death is most common among women than men, which affects their children's perception of death. In fact, 76% of children that report fear of death is due to their mothers avoiding the topic.{AND CHILDREN ARE NOT MEN OR WOMEN SO WE DO NOT KNOW IF THERE IS ANY DIFERENCE IN AFFECT OR Fear) Additionally, more of these children fear early death and adopt unsuitable approaches when it comes to deal with death.
These are some of the conclusions drawn from a research entitled Educación para la muerte: Estudio sobre la construcción del concepto de muerte en niños de entre 8 y 12 años de edad en el ámbito escolar, [Education On Death: A Study On The Building Of The Concept Of Death In Children Aged Between 8 And 12 At School] conducted at the Department of Personality, Assessment and Psychological Treatment at the University of Granada by Claudia Fabiana Siracusa, and led by professors Francisco Cruz Quintana y Mª Nieves Pérez Marfil.
For the purpose of this study, researchers took a sample of 288 children, aged between 8 and 12, including their parents, tutors and teachers. The professors at the University of Granada analysed how adults' understanding of the concept of death affects children's attitudes, fears, beliefs and approaches to death.
A change In Mentality
This study revealed the need for a change in mentality within families and at school, regarding death and the end of life. The reason is that an appropriate approach to death is key to children's health and personality. Other conclusions were that all children –to a higher or lower degree- have had experiences related to death, that they believe in life after death, and that they are concerned about it. Additionally, it is more common among girls to believe in life after death than among boys.
As regards teachers, 80% of them reported that death was not included in the curriculum. Six out of ten recognised that they have occasionally talked about death with their students, mostly due to the death of a students' relative.
In the light of the results obtained, University of Granada researchers consider that it is essential to provide death education "as a way to value life, and an instrument to end with the misguided and unreal idea transmitted by the media. Such education would provide children with the appropriate strategies and resources to approach death during their lives, avoiding any slight or severe negative impact on their physical or psychological health."
Another finding was that a high educational level prevents negative attitudes, as fear of death and avoiding the topic. In accordance with the teachers that participated in the study, "at present, the education system does not have any formal and systematic method to deal with death in class. If death were introduced in the education system, children would have a more real and intense approach to life, and many of the problems derived from the mourning process in the adulthood would be prevented."
Anti Journalism: And this Blog Presents The Freedom Reporter of the Year to: Bradley Manning THE REAL TOTAL MAN OF THE YEAR!!
Is Wired Hiding Key Evidence On Bradley Manning?
| from the also-who-killed-jfk dept.
| posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 28, @16:45 (The Media)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/28/1946213/Is-Wired-Hiding-Key-Evidence-On-Bradley-Manning?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[0]Hugh Pickens writes "Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon that for more
than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed but
[1]refuses to publish the key evidence in the arrest of US Army PFC
Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source. "In late May,
Adrian Lamo — at the same time he was working with the FBI as a
government informant against Manning — gave Poulsen what he purported to
be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private
allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables,
documents and video which WikiLeaks released throughout this year,"
writes Greenwald. Wired has only published about 25% of the logs writes
Greenwald and Poulsen's concealment of the chat logs is actively blinding
journalists who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did
not do. "Whether by design or effect, Kevin Poulsen and Wired have played
a critical role in concealing the truth from the public about the Manning
arrest," concludes Greenwald. "This has long ago left the realm of mere
journalistic failure and stands as one of the most egregious examples of
active truth-hiding by a 'journalist' I've ever seen.""
Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/28/1946213/Is-Wired-Hiding-Key-Evidence-On-Bradley-Manning?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/27/wired/
Is Wired Hiding Key Evidence On Bradley Manning?
| from the also-who-killed-jfk dept.
| posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 28, @16:45 (The Media)
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/28/1946213/Is-Wired-Hiding-Key-Evidence-On-Bradley-Manning?from=newsletter
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[0]Hugh Pickens writes "Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon that for more
than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed but
[1]refuses to publish the key evidence in the arrest of US Army PFC
Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source. "In late May,
Adrian Lamo — at the same time he was working with the FBI as a
government informant against Manning — gave Poulsen what he purported to
be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private
allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables,
documents and video which WikiLeaks released throughout this year,"
writes Greenwald. Wired has only published about 25% of the logs writes
Greenwald and Poulsen's concealment of the chat logs is actively blinding
journalists who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did
not do. "Whether by design or effect, Kevin Poulsen and Wired have played
a critical role in concealing the truth from the public about the Manning
arrest," concludes Greenwald. "This has long ago left the realm of mere
journalistic failure and stands as one of the most egregious examples of
active truth-hiding by a 'journalist' I've ever seen.""
Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/28/1946213/Is-Wired-Hiding-Key-Evidence-On-Bradley-Manning?from=newsletter#commentlisting
Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/27/wired/
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
If you would like to see the following article with all the bells and whistles (bar charts, pie charts etc.) go to this URL:http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/story/82886/how-broken-is-game-journalism-an-analysis-of-three-gaming-sites/
How Broken is Game Journalism? An Analysis of Three Gaming Sites
RSS by Joseph Jackmovich on 02 December 2010, 32495 views
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Top ten lists, objectification of women, and the wholesale copying of press releases; these are some of the unfortunate trends in gaming journalism today.
Some would call game journalism a kind of enthusiast press, and on many counts I find it hard to disagree with them. Like with other forms of enthusiast press, big gaming sites rely not only on strict gaming news, but also an array of gaming-related stories to flesh out their coverage. Sometimes these related stories fall within acceptable levels. At other times some of the content posted to gaming blogs makes me feel simply terrible for the state of the field.
Jim Sterling, review editor at Destructoid, says that calling game journalism a form of journalism at all is usually incorrect.
“I think calling it ‘journalism’ is wrong most of the time,” Sterling said. “Publishers have way too much power over outlets, the review scoring system is mired in backwards thinking that says anything below a 7/10 is unacceptable, and we have some websites writing purely for Google Trends and not for their readers.”
Stating that “we’re in an industry ruled by PR bullshit,” Sterling went on to discuss how outlets are under the thumb of publishers when negative coverage comes to light.
“I’ve lost count of the amount of times I or my editor-in-chief have received a phone call over something I’ve said,” Sterling said. “Nobody really digs honesty, least of all big publishers who get any score below an eight.”
Brett Walton, founder of VGChartz.com, thinks that the world of gaming journalism needs a kick to get itself on track. Walton is on the same page as Sterling when it comes to the issue of publishers having too much power in regard to the flow of information to outlets.
“Well, personally I feel that gaming journalism needs a big shake up,” Walton said. “Much of the current ‘journalism’ consists of re-worded press releases. Essentially, the publishers have most of the power and control the flow of information to the press. Given online media's reliance on ad revenues to fund sites (VGC included), we have to be careful to build and cultivate relationships. The pattern is along the lines of - we cover their PR, they send us review copies and invite us for visits, we give positive reviews and they support with ad budgets and campaigns.”
These are serious issues, and ones that are particularly troubling to a field that depends on official sources for the kind of coverage that brings in a strong foundation of readership. It’s difficult to run a site simply on original content so the foundation of news becomes central to bringing in readers on a regular and recurring basis.
How severe and structural is the problem of reliance on official sources? Is gaming coverage professional or does coverage lean towards off topic and sexist pieces to generate hits?
Anecdotal glances through top gaming sites reveal gamers to be little more than children in men’s bodies, giggling at the sight of breasts and having pseudo-intellectual discussions about facial hair. But is the coverage presented really as bad as it looks? To find the answers to these questions I planned a content analysis to gauge how well some gaming news outlets are performing.
I decided to visit three top gaming sites: Joystiq, Destructoid and Kotaku. Using a sampling method known as the constructed week, I assembled a total of 161 randomly selected articles from the three publications representing a week of coverage during the month of October. For each day of the constructed week, I pulled 25% of each publication’s total published articles, leading to a total of 63 articles from Kotaku, 51 from Joystiq, and 47 from Destructoid.
I wanted to find out quantitatively exactly how gaming journalism is performing when it comes to several factors: topic of coverage, number and type of sources, number of errors, aggressive and/or sexist material, and tendency to editorialize hard news.
My main interests were the measurements of sourcing and editorializing. It was my hypothesis that gaming journalism has an unhealthy alliance with official sources for information, and that many times those official sources are the only sources cited. Many fields of journalism suffer from this same type of problem, but it is beyond the scope of this study to discuss exactly why that is.
For editorializing, this is a trend I am seeing more and more on internet-based news delivery services. The trend to editorialize produces more entertaining or controversial content, generating hits and getting more people talking in the comments and becoming unique users for the purposes of calculating traffic data and advertising rates.
Unfortunately editorializing also forces the opinion of the writer into the news. While many argue that this allows the site to gain unique voices for reporting, I say that those unique voices can be heard through original pieces and not through hard news data. It is my hypothesis that gaming journalism is heavily editorialized and I feel that professional coverage suffers as a result.
The first focus of analysis was the first thing a reader sees – the headline. Headlines were graded as acceptable, misleading, wrong, or overly sensational. Out of 161 headlines, 141 were acceptable, which translates to an 87 percent acceptability rate. The remaining 14 percent was made up of four misleading headlines, one factually wrong headline, and 15 overly sensational headlines. The breakdown of misleading headlines by publication can be seen in the graph below.
For examples of misleading headlines, below are three randomly selected misleading headlines along with their publication.
# EA Loses Spine, Drops Taliban from Medal of Honor – Destructoid
# What Do Boobs And Goombas Have In Common? – Kotaku
# These Are Some Nice Nuts – Kotaku
Overall headlines are acceptable, but while unacceptable headlines are in a minority they unfortunately serve as stark anecdotal examples as some of the failings of game journalism. However, while 14 percent may seem like a small number, it is far too high for any field of professional reporting. Especially as a headline is the first thing a reader sees in a story, proper headline usage is critical in building positive relationships with readers, particularly that incredibly important first impression. How would you expect a reader new to gaming and gaming reporting to react if the first headline they saw on a noteworthy game blog was “These Are Some Nice Nuts?”
As both Walton and Sterling mentioned earlier, publishers have an unwieldy amount of influence over outlets and the information they can receive. Out of 161 articles, 126 of them had only a single source listed, equaling 78 percent. Only 11 articles used 2 or more sources, and 24 cited none. When it comes to the issue of citing only official sources for a story, 91 or 56 percent of articles only went to the official source, which can include press releases, quotes from developers about their upcoming game, or quotes from publishing executives. Below are two graphs detailing the breakdown of sourcing by publication.
It’s hard to single out where this problem originates from. Publishers and other officials are expected to be tight-lipped about information, but to what extent are outlets responsible for searching out more sources? Obviously a good deal of game-specific information merits only a single source, so maybe the problem of sourcing is a flaw with the makeup of game journalism itself.
In any case, the makeup of an industry is no excuse for complacent reporters and even if searching out other sources constitutes a good deal of dead ends, that’s par for the course for a journalist. Readers demand and expect journalists to go the extra mile and find not only the story that is being told, but also those stories that aren’t being told.
Jim Sterling had something to say about this topic that I wholeheartedly support. He advocates that outlets need to be more daring in their coverage, and that outlets should express solidarity in that tenacity.
“We need more outlets to have the balls to risk getting blacklisted by publishers,” Sterling said. “If enough publications did it, then publishers would be forced to re-assess how they deal with negative publicity.”
When it comes to the subject of coverage, it would not be a stretch of the imagination to guess that larger companies receive the most coverage. As more people are interested in the work of larger companies, coverage of those companies equals more relevant news for more people. Of course running the news of larger companies over smaller ones can have the effect of causing unbalanced coverage; especially when that fact is combined with the problems of sourcing discussed earlier.
Electronic Arts had the largest percentage of coverage with 12 percent of the 161 articles. Sadly, articles unrelated to gaming tied for second with Sony at 9 percent. Nintendo and Microsoft rounded out the top five covered topics at 8 percent and 6 percent, respectively. Of the unrelated posts analyzed, Kotaku published 73 percent of them.
The fact that topics unrelated to gaming rank above coverage for companies like Nintendo and Microsoft is absolutely terrible. While blame can be pointed at editors, writers, or readers I hold that those primarily responsible are the editors of these publications.
In an internet world, the ability to comment on stories allows readers, editors, and writers to interact on coverage in a way never before possible. The problem is that comments can be heavily moderated to reduce the appearance of dissent to these articles. You’ll discover that going through many of these unrelated stories that there is little comment about why this particular story is being placed on a gaming website. Is that because readers truly enjoy this unrelated coverage or is it because of heavy-handed moderation? As publications allow for little transparency in their moderation procedures, I place responsibility in the hands of those in charge of producing content.
The following is a randomly selected list of three unrelated gaming articles, by publication.
# The Sakura Wars Creator, The Young Idol and the Rumored Sleepover – Kotaku
# Medal of Honor: This is Beard 1 – Kotaku
# Treat Yourself to this Pac-Pumpkin Halloween Lawn Decoration – Joystiq
A fundamental issue to this problem is that these blogs thrive on hits and post counts. Given their immense popularity, anything that is published will generate at least some readership, so the guideline seems to be “post often, anything goes, censor dissent,” rather than simply “let’s report solid news about video games.”
These sites are some of the top gaming sites in the world yet 12% of their coverage deals with lawn decorations, facial hair, and Japanese culture. It is unfair to paint Joystiq and Destructoid equally as culpable in this respect as Kotaku is responsible for a majority of these posts, but all of these sites have a responsibility to not only responsible and professional coverage, but responsible and professional coverage relevant to gaming as a subject matter.
The world of internet news is driven by interactivity. Readers do more than simply read; they interact. Reporters and readers communicate in story comments, Twitter, and various internet forums. As a result internet reporting has a tendency to promote an editorial form that promotes people to discuss a story rather than simply digest it.
Of the articles analyzed 68% demonstrated some form of editorializing. Kotaku editorialized at 60 percent, Joystiq at 67 percent, and Destructoid at 79 percent.
While I understand the need for publications to editorialize to generate interest and controversy in news stories, there are clear problems in the levels of editorializing seen.
Writers are in a position of authority to readers pushing opinions through hard news can have detrimental effects on simply digesting the news itself. If a game release is mentioned to be garbage in the article, gamers unfamiliar with the title may not research that opinion and simply take it as fact. Couple the authority of writers with the potentiality for harsh comment moderation and you have a readership that is digesting more opinions than news.
If gaming journalism is ever to become a respected and professional field, editorializing should be left to the editorial page. Analysis and commentary can be presented separately from stories in a different section. Alternatively (and less ideal) is the application of opinions solely at the end of a news story, rather than interspersed throughout. While this still maintains the same problems as aforementioned, at least the opinions would stand out by themselves and be more easily recognizable by readers.
Grammatical and factual errors are the bane of any journalist. Details as minute as a misspelled name or improperly placed photograph can lead to libel or false light lawsuits. While gaming journalism is not quite at risk as other fields of enthusiast press to libel suits, the standard of perfection in copy should be desired and in most cases, attained.
Of the articles analyzed 30 grammatical errors were found in a total of 161 articles. There was only one factual error discovered, in the form of an incorrect headline. Below is a breakdown of total grammatical errors by publication.
Distributing out the numbers of grammatical errors with the number of published articles, Kotaku has a 36 percent chance of having a grammatical error in an article, with Joystiq at 4 percent and Destructoid at 11 percent.
As these stories are all internet-based, an accurate count of grammatical or factual errors is always in flux. Stories can be edited while they are live with no announcement to the reader of the edit. Of course this means that stories should be totally clear of grammatical errors as long as editors maintain vigilance and allow for readers to point out errors so they can be corrected.
Edits should be transparent. While striking out or changing large chunks of copy are very different kinds of edits, a note of an edit being made to a story should at the very least be included somewhere on the page to allow readers insight into the workings of the publication. Stories are always alive on the internet, able to be changed a minute or a year after publication. Some record should remain of changes made.
The final study of measurement is the inclusion of sexist and aggressive/offensive text or images in stories. Professional journalists should strive for the absolute elimination of sexist tonality in stories and aggressive/offensive tonality should be left to the editorial page.
There was a total of 27 aggressive/offensive articles for a total of 17 percent and a total of 12 sexist articles for a total of 7 percent.
Below is a randomly selected list of three sexist articles, by publication.
# Shop Contest: Pinkwashing – Kotaku
# Dream Club for Xbox 360 Destroys Subtlety with Hostess Sausage Feeding – Kotaku
# Here’s Where Cammie Dunaway Literally Went – Joystiq
Below is a randomly selected list of three aggressive/offensive articles, by publication.
# See Duke Nukem Forever’s First Person Pissing, Gameplay in Action – Kotaku
# Review: Medal of Honor – Destructoid
# Killzone 3 Beta Open to PS Plus Subscribers Only – Destructoid
For sexism to exist in game journalism it not only perpetuates a negative stereotype of gamers but it establishes that stereotype as existing even in the coverage of gaming. Gamers should not be ashamed or worried to go to their favorite gaming sites in public or at work. I had to explain the hostess sausage feeding article to a few people in the graduate lounge at my university because of its content. Gamers are not breast-obsessed adolescents with only the objectifying of women and killstreaks on our minds. We are adults – treat us as such.
As for aggressive/offensive tonality, there is a certain amount of taste that each publication must agree upon themselves. For the addition of sensationalism there does come a price however. If an outlet wants to be sensational and aggressive in its tonality, it simply gives up the illusion of being professional. Professional journalists do not pen the kind of aggressive and offensive content found not only in game journalism stories, but also some of its headlines.
So what does all of this mean for game journalism? It means that while some of the problems may not be as severe as some may think, there is still a long way to go. But first game journalism needs to decide whether it’s an enthusiast press or not; also whether it wants to maintain a colloquial tone with readers or evolve a more professional tone.
Dan Amrich, a man with years in the field working for outlets like GamePro, Official Xbox Magazine, and GamesRadar, admits that the title of “game journalist” has always given him pause.
“I was never comfortable being called a ‘games journalist,’” Amrich said. “I was an entertainment reporter and a game critic, whereas journalism implies a more noble goal and a different skillset than I employed…I am providing a service, but I am not sure if I am providing journalism.”
Amrich has a strong point, and it’s one that I wrestle with as well. But is game journalism consigned to the fate of enthusiast press or can it become more?
Pulitzer Prize winner and Indiana University professor Tom French says that journalism is a part of memorializing the times that we all share together.
“The main job is to chronicle a little bit of what life is like on this planet,” French said. “Gaming is a part of many people’s lives and becoming more so every day. It’s important that journalists covering gaming take the job seriously.”
I contend that it can become more, but it requires the effort of editors and writers around the globe. We need to show solidarity in our professionalism and our commitment to the readers rather than spewing sexist and unrelated nonsense on our front pages. We can be professional, if only we act like it.
It’s time we changed. Gamers before were ostracized because they were nerds, social outcasts incapable of gainful interaction with others. Gaming, and gamers, has grown a great deal since then.
But the coverage has not. I am not part of a group that disrespects women and has a fascination with Japan and anime simply because I play video games. Stop presenting gamers as such.
Let’s turn our strength of colloquial reporting and passion for the industry into a passion for powerful reporting. Let’s discover trends, investigate poor game development, and do a real service for our readers.
Game journalism does not have to settle for the crumbs of information thrown from the tables of publishers and public relations agencies. Like other fields of journalism, game journalism should be expected to hold up the traditions of investigative reporting, fact-finding, and a dedication to giving the readers accurate and prompt information.
Journalism is a proud field with many powerful figures in its past. Ernie Pyle, Alice Dunnigan, the Bernstein and Woodward duo; these are names synonymous with the field of journalism. If game journalists want to share their title with some of these storied writers, they need to stop acting like contracted PR agents and start acting like journalists.
Is it foolish to compare game journalism to the likes of these storied journalists? Maybe.
Is it foolish to not aspire to give the best and most complete coverage available to readers, despite the field? Definitely.
We can do better.
Disclaimer: This article is the work of one writer, and does not necessarily reflect the views of gamrFeed or VGChartz.
Header photo credit: Flickr user e.phelt
How Broken is Game Journalism? An Analysis of Three Gaming Sites
RSS by Joseph Jackmovich on 02 December 2010, 32495 views
* Digg
* ?
* ?
Top ten lists, objectification of women, and the wholesale copying of press releases; these are some of the unfortunate trends in gaming journalism today.
Some would call game journalism a kind of enthusiast press, and on many counts I find it hard to disagree with them. Like with other forms of enthusiast press, big gaming sites rely not only on strict gaming news, but also an array of gaming-related stories to flesh out their coverage. Sometimes these related stories fall within acceptable levels. At other times some of the content posted to gaming blogs makes me feel simply terrible for the state of the field.
Jim Sterling, review editor at Destructoid, says that calling game journalism a form of journalism at all is usually incorrect.
“I think calling it ‘journalism’ is wrong most of the time,” Sterling said. “Publishers have way too much power over outlets, the review scoring system is mired in backwards thinking that says anything below a 7/10 is unacceptable, and we have some websites writing purely for Google Trends and not for their readers.”
Stating that “we’re in an industry ruled by PR bullshit,” Sterling went on to discuss how outlets are under the thumb of publishers when negative coverage comes to light.
“I’ve lost count of the amount of times I or my editor-in-chief have received a phone call over something I’ve said,” Sterling said. “Nobody really digs honesty, least of all big publishers who get any score below an eight.”
Brett Walton, founder of VGChartz.com, thinks that the world of gaming journalism needs a kick to get itself on track. Walton is on the same page as Sterling when it comes to the issue of publishers having too much power in regard to the flow of information to outlets.
“Well, personally I feel that gaming journalism needs a big shake up,” Walton said. “Much of the current ‘journalism’ consists of re-worded press releases. Essentially, the publishers have most of the power and control the flow of information to the press. Given online media's reliance on ad revenues to fund sites (VGC included), we have to be careful to build and cultivate relationships. The pattern is along the lines of - we cover their PR, they send us review copies and invite us for visits, we give positive reviews and they support with ad budgets and campaigns.”
These are serious issues, and ones that are particularly troubling to a field that depends on official sources for the kind of coverage that brings in a strong foundation of readership. It’s difficult to run a site simply on original content so the foundation of news becomes central to bringing in readers on a regular and recurring basis.
How severe and structural is the problem of reliance on official sources? Is gaming coverage professional or does coverage lean towards off topic and sexist pieces to generate hits?
Anecdotal glances through top gaming sites reveal gamers to be little more than children in men’s bodies, giggling at the sight of breasts and having pseudo-intellectual discussions about facial hair. But is the coverage presented really as bad as it looks? To find the answers to these questions I planned a content analysis to gauge how well some gaming news outlets are performing.
I decided to visit three top gaming sites: Joystiq, Destructoid and Kotaku. Using a sampling method known as the constructed week, I assembled a total of 161 randomly selected articles from the three publications representing a week of coverage during the month of October. For each day of the constructed week, I pulled 25% of each publication’s total published articles, leading to a total of 63 articles from Kotaku, 51 from Joystiq, and 47 from Destructoid.
I wanted to find out quantitatively exactly how gaming journalism is performing when it comes to several factors: topic of coverage, number and type of sources, number of errors, aggressive and/or sexist material, and tendency to editorialize hard news.
My main interests were the measurements of sourcing and editorializing. It was my hypothesis that gaming journalism has an unhealthy alliance with official sources for information, and that many times those official sources are the only sources cited. Many fields of journalism suffer from this same type of problem, but it is beyond the scope of this study to discuss exactly why that is.
For editorializing, this is a trend I am seeing more and more on internet-based news delivery services. The trend to editorialize produces more entertaining or controversial content, generating hits and getting more people talking in the comments and becoming unique users for the purposes of calculating traffic data and advertising rates.
Unfortunately editorializing also forces the opinion of the writer into the news. While many argue that this allows the site to gain unique voices for reporting, I say that those unique voices can be heard through original pieces and not through hard news data. It is my hypothesis that gaming journalism is heavily editorialized and I feel that professional coverage suffers as a result.
The first focus of analysis was the first thing a reader sees – the headline. Headlines were graded as acceptable, misleading, wrong, or overly sensational. Out of 161 headlines, 141 were acceptable, which translates to an 87 percent acceptability rate. The remaining 14 percent was made up of four misleading headlines, one factually wrong headline, and 15 overly sensational headlines. The breakdown of misleading headlines by publication can be seen in the graph below.
For examples of misleading headlines, below are three randomly selected misleading headlines along with their publication.
# EA Loses Spine, Drops Taliban from Medal of Honor – Destructoid
# What Do Boobs And Goombas Have In Common? – Kotaku
# These Are Some Nice Nuts – Kotaku
Overall headlines are acceptable, but while unacceptable headlines are in a minority they unfortunately serve as stark anecdotal examples as some of the failings of game journalism. However, while 14 percent may seem like a small number, it is far too high for any field of professional reporting. Especially as a headline is the first thing a reader sees in a story, proper headline usage is critical in building positive relationships with readers, particularly that incredibly important first impression. How would you expect a reader new to gaming and gaming reporting to react if the first headline they saw on a noteworthy game blog was “These Are Some Nice Nuts?”
As both Walton and Sterling mentioned earlier, publishers have an unwieldy amount of influence over outlets and the information they can receive. Out of 161 articles, 126 of them had only a single source listed, equaling 78 percent. Only 11 articles used 2 or more sources, and 24 cited none. When it comes to the issue of citing only official sources for a story, 91 or 56 percent of articles only went to the official source, which can include press releases, quotes from developers about their upcoming game, or quotes from publishing executives. Below are two graphs detailing the breakdown of sourcing by publication.
It’s hard to single out where this problem originates from. Publishers and other officials are expected to be tight-lipped about information, but to what extent are outlets responsible for searching out more sources? Obviously a good deal of game-specific information merits only a single source, so maybe the problem of sourcing is a flaw with the makeup of game journalism itself.
In any case, the makeup of an industry is no excuse for complacent reporters and even if searching out other sources constitutes a good deal of dead ends, that’s par for the course for a journalist. Readers demand and expect journalists to go the extra mile and find not only the story that is being told, but also those stories that aren’t being told.
Jim Sterling had something to say about this topic that I wholeheartedly support. He advocates that outlets need to be more daring in their coverage, and that outlets should express solidarity in that tenacity.
“We need more outlets to have the balls to risk getting blacklisted by publishers,” Sterling said. “If enough publications did it, then publishers would be forced to re-assess how they deal with negative publicity.”
When it comes to the subject of coverage, it would not be a stretch of the imagination to guess that larger companies receive the most coverage. As more people are interested in the work of larger companies, coverage of those companies equals more relevant news for more people. Of course running the news of larger companies over smaller ones can have the effect of causing unbalanced coverage; especially when that fact is combined with the problems of sourcing discussed earlier.
Electronic Arts had the largest percentage of coverage with 12 percent of the 161 articles. Sadly, articles unrelated to gaming tied for second with Sony at 9 percent. Nintendo and Microsoft rounded out the top five covered topics at 8 percent and 6 percent, respectively. Of the unrelated posts analyzed, Kotaku published 73 percent of them.
The fact that topics unrelated to gaming rank above coverage for companies like Nintendo and Microsoft is absolutely terrible. While blame can be pointed at editors, writers, or readers I hold that those primarily responsible are the editors of these publications.
In an internet world, the ability to comment on stories allows readers, editors, and writers to interact on coverage in a way never before possible. The problem is that comments can be heavily moderated to reduce the appearance of dissent to these articles. You’ll discover that going through many of these unrelated stories that there is little comment about why this particular story is being placed on a gaming website. Is that because readers truly enjoy this unrelated coverage or is it because of heavy-handed moderation? As publications allow for little transparency in their moderation procedures, I place responsibility in the hands of those in charge of producing content.
The following is a randomly selected list of three unrelated gaming articles, by publication.
# The Sakura Wars Creator, The Young Idol and the Rumored Sleepover – Kotaku
# Medal of Honor: This is Beard 1 – Kotaku
# Treat Yourself to this Pac-Pumpkin Halloween Lawn Decoration – Joystiq
A fundamental issue to this problem is that these blogs thrive on hits and post counts. Given their immense popularity, anything that is published will generate at least some readership, so the guideline seems to be “post often, anything goes, censor dissent,” rather than simply “let’s report solid news about video games.”
These sites are some of the top gaming sites in the world yet 12% of their coverage deals with lawn decorations, facial hair, and Japanese culture. It is unfair to paint Joystiq and Destructoid equally as culpable in this respect as Kotaku is responsible for a majority of these posts, but all of these sites have a responsibility to not only responsible and professional coverage, but responsible and professional coverage relevant to gaming as a subject matter.
The world of internet news is driven by interactivity. Readers do more than simply read; they interact. Reporters and readers communicate in story comments, Twitter, and various internet forums. As a result internet reporting has a tendency to promote an editorial form that promotes people to discuss a story rather than simply digest it.
Of the articles analyzed 68% demonstrated some form of editorializing. Kotaku editorialized at 60 percent, Joystiq at 67 percent, and Destructoid at 79 percent.
While I understand the need for publications to editorialize to generate interest and controversy in news stories, there are clear problems in the levels of editorializing seen.
Writers are in a position of authority to readers pushing opinions through hard news can have detrimental effects on simply digesting the news itself. If a game release is mentioned to be garbage in the article, gamers unfamiliar with the title may not research that opinion and simply take it as fact. Couple the authority of writers with the potentiality for harsh comment moderation and you have a readership that is digesting more opinions than news.
If gaming journalism is ever to become a respected and professional field, editorializing should be left to the editorial page. Analysis and commentary can be presented separately from stories in a different section. Alternatively (and less ideal) is the application of opinions solely at the end of a news story, rather than interspersed throughout. While this still maintains the same problems as aforementioned, at least the opinions would stand out by themselves and be more easily recognizable by readers.
Grammatical and factual errors are the bane of any journalist. Details as minute as a misspelled name or improperly placed photograph can lead to libel or false light lawsuits. While gaming journalism is not quite at risk as other fields of enthusiast press to libel suits, the standard of perfection in copy should be desired and in most cases, attained.
Of the articles analyzed 30 grammatical errors were found in a total of 161 articles. There was only one factual error discovered, in the form of an incorrect headline. Below is a breakdown of total grammatical errors by publication.
Distributing out the numbers of grammatical errors with the number of published articles, Kotaku has a 36 percent chance of having a grammatical error in an article, with Joystiq at 4 percent and Destructoid at 11 percent.
As these stories are all internet-based, an accurate count of grammatical or factual errors is always in flux. Stories can be edited while they are live with no announcement to the reader of the edit. Of course this means that stories should be totally clear of grammatical errors as long as editors maintain vigilance and allow for readers to point out errors so they can be corrected.
Edits should be transparent. While striking out or changing large chunks of copy are very different kinds of edits, a note of an edit being made to a story should at the very least be included somewhere on the page to allow readers insight into the workings of the publication. Stories are always alive on the internet, able to be changed a minute or a year after publication. Some record should remain of changes made.
The final study of measurement is the inclusion of sexist and aggressive/offensive text or images in stories. Professional journalists should strive for the absolute elimination of sexist tonality in stories and aggressive/offensive tonality should be left to the editorial page.
There was a total of 27 aggressive/offensive articles for a total of 17 percent and a total of 12 sexist articles for a total of 7 percent.
Below is a randomly selected list of three sexist articles, by publication.
# Shop Contest: Pinkwashing – Kotaku
# Dream Club for Xbox 360 Destroys Subtlety with Hostess Sausage Feeding – Kotaku
# Here’s Where Cammie Dunaway Literally Went – Joystiq
Below is a randomly selected list of three aggressive/offensive articles, by publication.
# See Duke Nukem Forever’s First Person Pissing, Gameplay in Action – Kotaku
# Review: Medal of Honor – Destructoid
# Killzone 3 Beta Open to PS Plus Subscribers Only – Destructoid
For sexism to exist in game journalism it not only perpetuates a negative stereotype of gamers but it establishes that stereotype as existing even in the coverage of gaming. Gamers should not be ashamed or worried to go to their favorite gaming sites in public or at work. I had to explain the hostess sausage feeding article to a few people in the graduate lounge at my university because of its content. Gamers are not breast-obsessed adolescents with only the objectifying of women and killstreaks on our minds. We are adults – treat us as such.
As for aggressive/offensive tonality, there is a certain amount of taste that each publication must agree upon themselves. For the addition of sensationalism there does come a price however. If an outlet wants to be sensational and aggressive in its tonality, it simply gives up the illusion of being professional. Professional journalists do not pen the kind of aggressive and offensive content found not only in game journalism stories, but also some of its headlines.
So what does all of this mean for game journalism? It means that while some of the problems may not be as severe as some may think, there is still a long way to go. But first game journalism needs to decide whether it’s an enthusiast press or not; also whether it wants to maintain a colloquial tone with readers or evolve a more professional tone.
Dan Amrich, a man with years in the field working for outlets like GamePro, Official Xbox Magazine, and GamesRadar, admits that the title of “game journalist” has always given him pause.
“I was never comfortable being called a ‘games journalist,’” Amrich said. “I was an entertainment reporter and a game critic, whereas journalism implies a more noble goal and a different skillset than I employed…I am providing a service, but I am not sure if I am providing journalism.”
Amrich has a strong point, and it’s one that I wrestle with as well. But is game journalism consigned to the fate of enthusiast press or can it become more?
Pulitzer Prize winner and Indiana University professor Tom French says that journalism is a part of memorializing the times that we all share together.
“The main job is to chronicle a little bit of what life is like on this planet,” French said. “Gaming is a part of many people’s lives and becoming more so every day. It’s important that journalists covering gaming take the job seriously.”
I contend that it can become more, but it requires the effort of editors and writers around the globe. We need to show solidarity in our professionalism and our commitment to the readers rather than spewing sexist and unrelated nonsense on our front pages. We can be professional, if only we act like it.
It’s time we changed. Gamers before were ostracized because they were nerds, social outcasts incapable of gainful interaction with others. Gaming, and gamers, has grown a great deal since then.
But the coverage has not. I am not part of a group that disrespects women and has a fascination with Japan and anime simply because I play video games. Stop presenting gamers as such.
Let’s turn our strength of colloquial reporting and passion for the industry into a passion for powerful reporting. Let’s discover trends, investigate poor game development, and do a real service for our readers.
Game journalism does not have to settle for the crumbs of information thrown from the tables of publishers and public relations agencies. Like other fields of journalism, game journalism should be expected to hold up the traditions of investigative reporting, fact-finding, and a dedication to giving the readers accurate and prompt information.
Journalism is a proud field with many powerful figures in its past. Ernie Pyle, Alice Dunnigan, the Bernstein and Woodward duo; these are names synonymous with the field of journalism. If game journalists want to share their title with some of these storied writers, they need to stop acting like contracted PR agents and start acting like journalists.
Is it foolish to compare game journalism to the likes of these storied journalists? Maybe.
Is it foolish to not aspire to give the best and most complete coverage available to readers, despite the field? Definitely.
We can do better.
Disclaimer: This article is the work of one writer, and does not necessarily reflect the views of gamrFeed or VGChartz.
Header photo credit: Flickr user e.phelt
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
This is long, but I recommend that you read it all:
The line between science and journalism is getting blurry....again
By Bora Zivkovic
Human #1: "Hello, nice weather today, isn't it?"
Human #2: "Ummm...actually not. It's a gray, cold, windy, rainy kind of day!"
Many a joke depends on confusion about the meaning of language, as in the example above. But understanding the sources of such confusion is important in realms other than stand-up comedy, including in the attempts to convey facts about the world to one's target audience.
In the example above, Human #1 is using Phatic language, sometimes referred to as 'small talk' and usually exemplified, at least in the British Isles, with the talk about the highly unpredictable weather. (image: by striatic on Flickr)
Phatic language
Phatic discourse is just one of several functions of language. Its role is not to impart any factual information, but to establish a relationship between the people. It conveys things like emotional state, relative social status, alliance, intentions and limits to further conversation (i.e., where the speaker "draws the line").
If a stranger rides into a small town, a carefully chosen yet meaningless phrase establishes a state of mind that goes something like this: "I come in peace, mean no harm, I hope you accept me in the same way". The response of the local conveys how the town looks at strangers riding in, for example: "You are welcome...for a little while - we'll feed you and put you up for the night, but then we hope you leave". (image: Clint Eastwood in 'Fistful of Dollars' from Squidoo)
An important component of phatic discourse is non-verbal communication, as the tone, volume and pitch of the voice, facial expression and body posture modify the language itself and confirm the emotional and intentional state of the speaker.
It does not seem that linguistics has an official term for the opposite - the language that conveys only pure facts - but the term usually seen in such discussions (including the domain of politics and campaigning) is "Conceptual language" so this is what I will use here. Conceptual language is what Human #2 in the joke above was assuming and using - just the facts, ma'am.
Rise of the earliest science and journalism
For the sake of this article, I will use two simplified definitions of science and journalism.
Journalism is communication of 'what's new'. A journalist is anyone who can say "I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it."
Science is communication of 'how the world works'. A scientist is anyone who can say "I understand something about the world, you don't, let me explain it to you".
Neither definition necessitates that what they say is True, just what they know to the best of their ability and understanding.
Note that I wrote "science is communication". Yes, science is the process of discovery of facts about the way the world works, but the communication of that discovery is the essential last step of the scientific process, and the discoverer is likely to be the person who understands the discovery the best and is thus likely to be the person with the greatest expertise and authority (and hopefully ability) to do the explaining.
For the greatest part of human history, none of those distinctions made any sense. Most of communication contained information about what is new, some information about the way the world works, and a phatic component. Knowing how the world works, knowing what is happening in that world right now, and knowing if you should trust the messenger, were all important for survival.
For the most part, the information was local, and the messengers were local. A sentry runs back into the village alerting that a neighboring tribe, painted with war-paints, is approaching. Is that person a member of your tribe, or a stranger, or the well-known Boy Who Cried Wolf? What do you know about the meaning of war-paint? What do you know about the neighboring tribe? Does all this information fit with your understanding of the world? Is information coming from this person to be taken seriously? How are village elders responding to the news? Is this piece of news something that can aid in your personal survival?
For the longest time, information was exchanged between people who knew each other to some degree - family, neighbors, friends, business-partners. Like in a fishing village, the news about the state of fishing stocks coming from the ships at sea is important information exchanged at the local tavern. But is that fish-catch information 'journalism' (what's new) or 'science' (how the world works)? It's a little bit of both. And you learn which sailors to trust by observing who is trusted by the locals you have already learned to trust. Trust is transitive.
Someone in the "in-group" is trusted more than a stranger - kids learned from parents, the community elders had the authority: the trust was earned through a combination of who you are, how old you are, and how trustworthy you tended to be in the past. New messengers are harder to pin down on all those criteria, so their information is taken with a degree of skepticism. The art of critical thinking (again, not necessarily meaning that you will always pick the Truth) is an ancient one, as it was essential for day-to-day survival. You trust your parents (or priests or teachers) almost uncritically, but you put up your BS filters when hearing a stranger.
Emergence of science and of journalism
The invention of the printing press precipitated the development of both journalism and science. But that took a very long time - almost two centuries (image: 1851, printing press that produced early issues of Scientific American). After Gutenberg printed the Bible, most of what people printed were political pamphlets, church fliers and what for that time and sensibilities went for porn.
London Gazette of 1666 is thought to be the first newspaper in the modern sense of the word. (image: from DavidCo) Until then, newspapers were mostly irregular printings by individuals, combining news, opinion, fiction and entertainment. After this, newspapers gradually became regular (daily, weekly, monthly) collections of writings by numerous people writing in the same issue.
The first English scientific journal was published a year before - the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1665 (image: Royal Society of London).
Until then, science was communicated by letters - those letters were often read at the meetings of scientists. Those meetings got formalized into scientific societies and the letters read at such meetings started getting printed. The first scientific journals were collections of such letters, which explains why so many journals have the words "Letters", "Annals" or "Proceedings" in their titles.
Also, before as well as for a quite a long time after the inception of first journals, much of science was communicated via books - a naturalist would spend many years collecting data and ideas before putting it all in long-form, leather-bound form. Those books were then discussed at meetings of other naturalists who would often respond by writing books of their own. Scientists at the time did not think that Darwin's twenty-year wait to publish The Origin was notable (William Kimler, personal communication) - that was the normal timeline for research and publishing at the time, unusual only to us from a modern perspective of 5-year NIH grants and the 'publish or perish' culture.
As previously oral communication gradually moved to print over the centuries, both journalistic and scientific communication occured in formats - printed with ink on paper - very similar to blogging (that link leads to the post that served as a seed from which this article grew). If born today, many of the old writers, like Montaigne, would be Natural Born Bloggers ('NBBs' - term coined by protoblogger Dave Winer). A lot of ship captains’ logs were essentially tweets with geolocation tags.
People who wanted to inform other people printed fliers and pamphlets and books. Personal letters and diaries were meant to be public: they were as widely shared as was possible, they were publicly read, saved, then eventually collected and published in book-form (at least posthumously). Just like blogs, tweets and Facebook updates today….
The 18th century 'Republic of Letters' (see the amazing visualization of their correspondence) was a social network of intellectual leaders of Europe who exchanged and publicly read their deep philosophical thoughts, scientific ideas, poetry and prose.
Many people during those centuries wrote their letters in duplicate: one copy to send, one to keep for publishing Collected Letters later in life. Charles Darwin did that, for example (well, if I remember correctly, his wife made copies from his illegible originals into something that recipients could actually read), which is why we have such a complete understanding of his work and thought - it is all well preserved and the availability of such voluminouos correspondence gave rise to a small industry of Darwinian historical scholarship.
What is important to note is that, both in journalism and in science, communication could be done by anyone - there was no official seal of approval, or licence, to practice either of the two arts. At the same time, communication in print was limited to those who were literate and who could afford to have a book printed - people who, for the most part, were just the wealthy elites. Entry into that intellectual elite from a lower social class was possible but very difficult and required a lot of hard work and time (see, for example, a biography of Alfred Russell Wallace). Membership in the worlds of arts, science and letters was automatic for those belonging to the small group of literate aristocracy. They had no need to establish formalized gatekeeping as bloodlines, personal sponsorship and money did the gatekeeping job quite well on their own.
As communication has moved from local to global, due to print, trust had to be gained over time - by one's age, stature in society, track record, and by recommendation - who the people you trust say you should trust. Trust is transitive.
Another thing to note is that each written dispatch contained both 'what's new' and 'how the world works' as well as a degree of phatic discourse: "This is what happened. This is what I think it means. And this is who I am so you know why you should trust me." It is often hard to tell, from today's perspective, what was scientific communication and what was journalism.
Personal - and thus potentially phatic - communication was a norm in the early scientific publishing. For example, see "A Letter from Mr J. Breintal to Peter Collinfoxl, F. RXS. contairnng an Account of what he felt after being bit by a Rattle-fnake" in Philosophical Transactions, 1747. - a great account of it can be found at Neurotic Physiology. It is a story of a personal interaction with a rattlesnake and the discovery leading from it. It contained "I was there, you were not, let me tell you what happened" and "I understand something, you don't, let me explain that to you" and "Let me tell you who I am so you can know you can trust me".
Apparently, quite a lot of scientific literature of old involved exciting narratives of people getting bitten by snakes - see this one from 1852 as well.
The anomalous 20th century - effects of technology
The gradual changes in society - invention of printing, rise of science, rise of capitalism, industrial revolution, mass migration from rural to urban areas, improvements in transportation and communication technologies, to name just a few - led to a very different world in the 20th century.
Technology often leads societal changes. If you were ever on a horse, you understand why armies that used stirrups defeated the armies that rode horses without this nifty invention.
Earlier, the speed of spreading news was much slower (see image: Maps of rates of travel in the 19th century - click on the link to see bigger and more). By 1860 Telegraph reached to St. Louis. During its short run the Pony Express could go the rest of the way to San Francisco in 10 days. After that, telegraph followed the rails. First transcontinental line was in 1869. Except for semaphores (1794) information before the telegraph (1843) could only travel as fast as a rider or boat (Thanks to John McKay for this brief primer on the history of speed of communication in Northern America. I am assuming that Europe was slightly ahead and the rest of the world somewhat behind).
The 20th century saw invention or improvement of numerous technologies in transportation - cars, fast trains, airplanes, helicopters, space shuttles - and in communication - telephone, radio, and television. Information could now travel almost instantly.
But those new technologies came with a price - literally. While everyone could write letters and send them by stagecoach, very few people could afford to buy, run and serve printing presses, radio stations and television studios. These things needed capital, and increasingly became owned by rich people and corporations.
Each inch of print or minute of broadcast costs serious money. Thus, people were employed to become official filters of information, the gatekeepers - the editors who decided who will get access to that expensive real estate. As the editors liked some people's work better than others, those people got employed to work in the nascent newsrooms. Journalism became professionalized. Later, universities started journalism programs and codified instruction for new journalists, professionalizing it even more.
Instead of people informing each other, now the few professionals informed everyone else. And the technology did not allow for everyone else to talk back in the same medium.
The broadcast media, a few large corporations employing professional writers informing millions – with no ability for the receivers of information to fact-check, talk back, ask questions, be a part of the conversation – is an exception in history, something that lasted for just a few decades of the 20th century.
The anomalous 20th century - industrialization
Industrial Revolution brought about massive migration of people into big cities. The new type of work required a new type of workforce, one that was literate and more educated. This led to the invention of public schools and foundation of public universities.
In the area of science, many more people became educated enough (and science still not complex and expensive yet) to start their own surveys, experiments and tinkering. The explosion of research led to an explosion of new journals. Those too became expensive to produce and started requiring professional filters - editors. Thus scientific publishing also became professionalized. Not every personal anecdote could make it past the editors any more. Not everyone could call oneself a scientist either - a formal path emerged, ending with a PhD at a university, that ensured that science was done and published by qualified persons only.
By the 1960s, we got a mass adoption of peer-review by scientific journals that was experimentally done by some journals a little earlier. Yes, it is that recent! See for example this letter to Physical Review in 1936:
Dear Sir,
We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the — in any case erroneous — comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.
Respectfully,
Albert Einstein
Or this one:
John Maddox, former editor of Nature: The Watson and Crick paper was not peer-reviewed by Nature… the paper could not have been refereed: its correctness is self-evident. No referee working in the field … could have kept his mouth shut once he saw the structure...
Migration from small towns into big cities also meant that most people one would meet during the day were strangers. Meeting a stranger was not something extraordinary any more, so emergence and enforcement of proper proscribed conduct in cities replaced the need for one-to-one encounters and sizing up strangers using phatic language. Which is why even today phatic language is much more important and prevalent in rural areas where it aids personal survival than in urban centers where more general rules of behavior among strangers emerged (which may partially explain why phatic language is generally associated with conservative ideology and conceptual language with politicial liberalism, aka, the "reality-based community").
People moving from small hometowns into big cities also led to breaking up of families and communities of trust. One needed to come up with new methods for figuring out who to trust. One obvious place to go was local media. They were stand-ins for village elders, parents, teachers and priests.
If there were many newspapers in town, one would try them all for a while and settle on one that best fit one's prior worldview. Or one would just continue reading the paper one's parents read.
But other people read other newspapers and brought their own worldviews into the conversation. This continuous presence of a plurality of views kept everyone's BS filters in high gear - it was necessary to constantly question and filter all the incoming information in order to choose what to believe and what to dismiss.
The unease with the exposure to so many strangers with strange ideas also changed our notions of privacy. Suddenly we craved it. Our letters are now meant for one recepient only, with the understanding it will not be shared. Personal diaries now have lockets. After a century of such craving for privacy, we are again returning to a more historically traditional notions, by much more freely sharing our lives with strangers online.
The anomalous 20th century - cleansing of conceptual language in science and journalism
Until the 20th century we did not see the consolidation of media into large conglomerates, and of course, there were no mass radio or TV until mid-20th century. Not until later in the century did we see the monopolization of local media markets by a single newspaper (competitors going belly-up) which, then, had to serve everyone, so it had to invent the fake "objective" HeSaidSheSaid timid style of reporting in order not to lose customers of various ideological stripes and thus lose advertising revenue.
Professionalising of journalism, coupled with the growth of media giants serving very broad audiences, led to institutionalization of a type of writing that was very much limited to "what's new".
The "let me explain" component of journalism fell out of favor as there was always a faction of the audience that had a problem with the empirical facts - a faction that the company's finances could not afford to lose. The personal - including phatic - was carefully eliminated as it was perceived as unobjective and inviting the criticism of bias. The way for a reporter to inject one's opinion into the article was to find a person who thinks the same in order to get the target quote. A defensive (perhaps cowardly) move that became the norm. And, once the audience caught on, led to the loss of trust in traditional media.
Reduction of local media to a single newspaper, a couple of local radio stations and a handful of broadcast TV channels (that said esentially the same thing), left little choice for the audience. With only one source in town, there was no opportunity to filter among a variety of news sources. Thus, many people started unquestioningly accepting what 20th-century style broadcast media served them.
Just because articles were under the banners of big companies did not make them any more trustworthy by definition, but with no alternative it is still better to be poorly informed than not informed at all. Thus, in the 20th century we gradually lost the ability to read everything critically, awed by the big names like NYT and BBC and CBS and CNN. Those became the new parents, teachers, tribal elders and priests, the authority figures whose words are taken unquestioningly.
In science, explosion in funding not matched by explosion of job positions, led to overproduction of PhDs and a rise of hyper-competitive culture in academia. Writing books became unproductive. The only way to succeed is to keep getting grants and the only way to do that is to publish very frequently. Everything else had to fall by the wayside.
False measures of journal quality - like the infamous Impact Factor - were used to determine who gets a job and tenure and who falls out of the pipeline. The progress of science led inevitably to specialization and to the development of specialized jargon. Proliferation of expensive journals ensured that nobody but people in highest-level research institutions had access to the literature, so scientists started writing only for each other.
Scientific papers became dense, but also narrowed themselves to only "this is how the world works". The "this is new" became left out as the audience already knew this, and it became obvious that a paper would not be published if it did not produce something new, almost by definition.
And the personal was so carefully excised for the purpose of seeming unbiased by human beings that it sometimes seems like the laboratory equipment did all the experiments of its own volition.
So, at the close of the 20th century, we had a situation in which journalism and science, for the first time in history, completely separated from each other. Journalism covered what's new without providing the explanation and context for new readers just joining the topic. Science covered only explanation and only to one's peers.
In order to bridge that gap, a whole new profession needed to arise. As scientists understood the last step of the scientific method - communication - to mean only 'communication to colleagues', and as regular press was too scared to put truth-values on any statements of fact, the solution was the invention of the science journalist - someone who can read what scientists write and explain that to the lay audience. With mixed success. Science is hard. It takes years to learn enough to be able to report it well. Only a few science journalists gathered that much expertise over the years of writing (and making mistakes on the way).
So, many science journalists fell back on reporting science as news, leaving the explanation out. Their editors helped in that by severely restricting the space - and good science coverage requires ample space.
A good science story should explain what is known by now (science), what the new study brings that is new (news) and why does that matter to you (phatic discourse). The lack of space usually led to omission of context (science), shortening of what is new (news) and thus leaving only the emotional story intact. Thus, the audience did not learn much, Certainly not enough to be able to evaluate next day's and next week's news.
This format also led to the choice of stories. It is easy to report in this way if the news is relevant to the audience anyway, e.g., concerning health (the "relevant" stories). It is also easy to report on misconduct of scientists (the "fishy" stories) - which is not strictly science reporting. But it was hard to report on science that is interesting for its own sake (the "cool" stories).
What did the audience get out of this? Scientists are always up to some mischief. And every week they change the story as to what is good or bad for my health. And it is not very fun, entertaining and exciting. No surprise that science as endeavour slowly started losing trust with the (American) population, and that it was easy for groups with financial, political or religious interests to push anti-science rhetoric on topics from hazards of smoking to stem-cell research to evolution to climate change.
At the end of the 20th century, thus, we had a situation in which journalism and science were completely separate endeavors, and the bridge between them - science journalism - was unfortunately operating under the rules of journalism and not science, messing up the popular trust in both.
Back to the Future
It is 2010. The Internet has been around for 30 years, the World Wide Web for 20. It took some time for the tools to develop and spread, but we are obviously undergoing a revolution in communication. I use the word "revolution" because it is so almost by definition - when the means of production change hands, this is a revolution.
The means of production, in this case the technology for easy, cheap and fast dissemination of information, are now potentially in the hands of everyone. When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, we call that 'citizen journalism.' And some of those citizens possess much greater expertise on the topics they cover than the journalists that cover that same beat. This applies to science as well.
In other words, after the deviation that was the 20th century, we are going back to the way we have evolved as a species to communicate - one-to-one and few-to-few instead of one-to-many. Apart from technology (software instead of talking/handwriting/printing), speed (microseconds instead of days and weeks by stagecoach, railroad or Pony Express, see image above) and the number of people reached (potentially - but rarely - millions simultaneously instead of one person or small group at a time), blogging, social networking and other forms of online writing are nothing new – this is how people have always communicated. Like Montaigne. And the Republic of Letters in the 18th century. And Charles Darwin in the 19th century.
All we are doing now is returning to a more natural, straightforward and honest way of sharing information, just using much more efficient ways of doing it. (Images from Cody Brown)
And not even that – where technology is scarce, the analog blogging is live and well (image: Analog blogger, from AfriGadget).
What about trustworthiness of all that online stuff? Some is and some isn’t to be trusted. It’s up to you to figure out your own filters and criteria, and to look for additional sources, just like our grandparents did when they had a choice of dozens of newspapers published in each of their little towns.
With the gradual return of a more natural system of communication, we got to see additional opinions, the regular fact-checks on the media by experts on the topic, and realized that the mainstream media is not to be trusted.
With the return of a more natural system of communication, we will all have to re-learn how to read critically, find second opinions, evaluate sources. Nothing new is there either – that is what people have been doing for millennia – the 20th century is the exception. We will figure out who to trust by trusting the judgment of people we already trust. Trust is transitive.
Return of the phatic language
What does this all mean for the future of journalism, including science journalism?
The growing number of Web-savvy citizens have developed new methods of establishing trustworthiness of the sources. It is actually the old one, pre-20th century method - relying on individuals, not institutions. Instead of treating WaPo, Fox, MSNBC and NPR as the proxies for the father, teacher, preacher and the medicine man, we now once again evaulate individuals.
As nobody enters a news site via the front page and looks around, but we all get to individual articles via links and searches, we are relying on bylines under the titles, not on the logos up on top. Just like we were not born trusting NYTimes but learned to trust it because our parents and neighbors did (and then perhaps we read it for some time), we are also not born knowing which individuals to trust. We use the same method - we start with recommendations from people we already trust, then make our own decisions over time.
If you don't link to your sources, including to scientific papers, you lose trust. If you quote out of context without providing that context, you lose trust. If you hide who you are and where you are coming from - that is cagey and breeds mistrust. Transparency is the new objectivity.
And transparency is necessarily personal, thus often phatic. It shows who you are as a person, your background, your intentions, your mood, your alliances, your social status.
There are many reasons sciencebloggers are more trusted than journalists covering science.
First, they have the scientific expertise that journalists lack - they really know what they are talking about on the topic of their expertise and the audience understands this.
Second, they link out to more, more diverse and more reliable sources.
Third, being digital natives, they are not familiar with the concept of word-limits. They start writing, they explain it as it needs to be explained and when they are done explaining they end the post. Whatever length it takes to give the subject what it's due.
Finally, not being trained by j-schools, they never learned not to let their personality shine through their writing. So they gain trust by connecting to their readers - the phatic component of communication.
Much of our communication, both offline and online, is phatic. But that is necessary for building trust. Once the trust is there, the conceptual communication can work. If I follow people I trust on Twitter, I will trust that they trust the sources they link to so I am likely to click on them. Which is why more and more scientists use Twitter to exchage information (PDF). Trust is transitive.
Scientists, becoming journalists
Good science journalists are rare. Cuts in newsrooms, allocation of too little space for science stories, assigning science stories to non-science journalists - all of these factors have resulted in a loss of quantity and quality of science reporting in the mainstream media.
But being a good science journalist is not impossible. People who take the task seriously can become experts on the topic they cover (and get to a position where they can refuse to cover astronomy if their expertise is evolution) over time. They can become temporary experts if they are given sufficient time to study instead of a task of writing ten stories per day.
With the overproduction of PhDs, many scientists are choosing alternative careers, including many of them becoming science writers and journalists, or Press Information Officers. They thus come into the profession with the expertise already there.
There is not much difference between a research scientist who blogs and thus is an expert on the topic s/he blogs about, and a research scientist who leaves the lab in order to write as a full-time job. They both have scientific expertise and they both love to write or they wouldn't be doing it.
Blog is software. A medium. One of many. No medium has a higher coefficient of trustworthiness than any other. Despite never going to j-school and writing everything on blogs, I consider myself to be a science writer.
Many science journalists, usually younger though some of the old ones caught on quickly and became good at it (generation is mindset, not age), grok the new media ecosystem in which online collaboration between scientists and journalists is becoming a norm.
At the same time, many active scientists are now using the new tools (the means of production) to do their own communication. As is usually the case with novelty, different people get to it at different rates. The conflicts between 20th and 21st style thinking inevitably occur. The traditional scientists wish to communicate the old way - in journals, letters to the editor, at conferences. This is the way of gatekeeping they are used to.
But there have been a number of prominent cases of such clashes between old and new models of communication, including the infamous Roosevelts on toilets (the study had nothing to do with either US Presidents or toilets, but it is an instructive case - image by Dr.Isis), and several other smaller cases.
The latest one is the Arsenic Bacteria Saga in which the old-timers do not seem to undestand what a 'blog' means, and are seemingly completely unaware of the important distinction between 'blogs' and 'scienceblogs', the former being online spaces by just about anyone, the latter being blogs written by people who actually know their science and are vetted or peer-reviewed in some way e.g., at ResearchBlogging.org or Scienceblogging.org or by virtue of being hand-picked and invited to join one of the science blogging networks (which are often run by traditional media outlets or scientific publishers or societies) or simply by gaining resepect of peers over time.
Case by case, old-time scientists are learning. Note how both in the case of Roosevelts on toilets and the Arsenic bacteria the initially stunned scientists quickly learned and appreciated the new way of communication.
In other words, scientists are slowly starting to get out of the cocoon. Instead of just communicating to their peers behind the closed doors, now they are trying to reach out to the lay audience as well.
As more and more papers are Open Access and can be read by all, they are becoming more readable (as I predicted some years ago). The traditional format of the paper is changing. So they are covering "let me explain" portion better, both in papers and on their own blogs.
They may still be a little clumsy about the "what's new" part, over-relying on the traditional media to do it for them via press releases and press conferences (see Darwinius and arsenic bacteria for good examples) instead of doing it themselves or taking control of the message (though they do need to rely on MSM to some extent due to the distinction between push and pull strategies as the media brands are still serving for many people as proxies for trustworthy sources).
But most importantly, they are now again adding the phatic aspect to their communication, revealing a lot of their personality on social networks, on blogs, and even some of them venturing into doing it in scientific papers.
By combining all three aspects of good communication, scientists will once again regain the trust of their audience. And what they are starting to do looks more and more like (pre-20th century) journalism.
Journalists, becoming scientists
On the other side of the divide, there is a renewed interest in journalism expanding from just "this is new" to "let me explain how the world works". There are now efforts to build a future of context, and to design explainers.
If you are not well informed on an issue (perhaps because you are too young to remember when it first began, or the issue just started being relevant to you), following a stream of 'what is new' articles will not enlighten you. There is not sufficient information there. There is a lot of tacit knowledge that the writer assumes the readers possess - but many don't.
There has to be a way for news items to link to some kind of collection of background information - an 'explainer'. Such an explainer would be a collection of verifiable facts about the topic. A collection of verifiable facts about the way the world works is....scientific information!
With more and more journalists realizing they need to be transparent about where they are coming from, injecting personality into their work in order to build trust, some of that phatic language is starting to seep in, completing the trio of elements of effective communication.
Data Journalism - isn't this science?
Some of the best journalism of the past - yes, the abominable 20th century - was done when a reporter was given several months to work on a single story requiring sifting through boxes and boxes of documents. The reporter becomes the expert on the topic, starts noticing patterns and writes a story that brings truly new knowledge to the world. That is practically science! Perhaps it is not the hardest of the hard sciences like physics, but as good as well-done social science like cultural anthropology, sociology or ethnography. There is a system and a method very much like the scientific method.
Unfortunately, most reporters are not given such luxury. They have to take shortcuts - interviewing a few sources to quote for the story. The sources are, of course, a very small and very unrepresentative sample of the relevant population - from a rolodex. Call a couple of climate scientists, and a couple of denialists, grab a quote from each and stick them into a formulaic article. That is Bad Science as well as Bad Journalism. And now that the people formerly known as audience, including people with expertise on the topic, have the tools to communicate to the world, they often swiftly point out how poorly such articles represent reality.
But today, most of the information, data and documents are digital, not in boxes. They are likely to be online and can be accessed without travel and without getting special permissions (though one may have to steal them - as Wikileaks operates: a perfect example of the new data journalism). Those reams of data can be analyzed by computers to find patterns, as well as by small armies of journalists (and other experts) for patterns and pieces of information that computer programs miss.
This is what bioinformaticists do (and have already built tools to do it - contact them, steal their tools!).
Data journalism. This is what a number of forward-thinking journalists and media organizations are starting to do.
This is science.
On the other hand, a lot of distributed, crowdsourced scientific research, usually called Citizen Science, is in the business of collecting massive amounts of data for analysis. How does that differ from data journalism? Not much?
Look at this scientific paper - Coding Early Naturalists' Accounts into Long-Term Fish Community Changes in the Adriatic Sea (1800–2000) - is this science or data journalism? It is both.
The two domains of communicating about what is new and how the world works - journalism and science - have fused again. Both are now starting to get done by teams that involve both professionals and amateurs. Both are now led by personalities who are getting well-known in the public due to their phatic communication in a variety of old and new media.
It is important to be aware of the shortness of our lives and thus natural tendency for historical myopia. Just because we were born in the 20th century does not mean that the way things were done then are the way things were 'always done', or the best ways to do things - the pinnacle of cultural and social development. The 20th century was just a strange and deviant blip in the course of history.
As we are leaving the 20th century behind with all of its unusual historical quirks, we are going back to an older model of communicating facts - but with the new tools we can do it much better than ever, including a much broader swath of society - a more democratic system than ever.
By the way, while it's still cold, the rain has stopped. And that is Metaphorical language...
This article was commissioned by Science Progress and will also appear on their site in 24 hours.
Tags: language, journalism, blogging, media, history, communication
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1.
1. AndiKuszewski 01:48 PM 12/20/10
It's amazing (yet unsurprising) how easily scientists can fall into that low-effort, blind acceptance state when presented with scientific data as long as it is peer-reviewed. Additionally, if it isn't peer-reviewed, it gets rejected without so much as a second glance. Watson & Crick didn't go through peer review?! Then the whole field of genetics must all be wrong! Built on a false premise! My mind is blown!!
I feel that we go through cycles of communication and critical thinking/questioning of the methods and systems like you mentioned in the explanation of early newspapers and the public becoming the editors.
Once a method of review is accepted by the people as valid, the public gets lazy, sits back, and stops questioning the actual data. Inevitably, the sources providing the data get lazy as well and over time, the data can't be guaranteed to have that same level of purity yet the public still accepts it because of the blind acceptance of the messenger. Eventually, people start protesting. I think we are starting to see a backlash of the unconditional acceptance of peer review which is a very good thing.
I gave a presentation this past summer on ways to maximize your cognitive potential, and one of the things I brought up was how an over-reliance on modern tech (such as GPS) to do our critical thinking for us, can result, over time, in a weakening of those cognitive skills. I fear the same is happening in a broader sense with how we think about science we stop using our critical thinking skills, and they become less sharp. Our sciencey radar system weakens, and we are less effective gatekeepers of scientific data.
Science has become so methodized, that we inclined to accept the process without questioning why we are using that approach in the first place. The small group that continues to question often gets punished or mocked. Creativity and critical thinking has been suffering for the last decade or so, but I think with the addition of modern technology, social networks, and transparency, things have already begun to change and it won't be stopped, as much as the traditional scientists may resist.
The fact that there is so much controversy, friction and discord right now in science, science communication, and journalism in general, can only mean progress. It means the Revolution is already taking place, and change is inevitable. These are all good things.
Also I love the juxtaposition of old & new methods of science communication using the basic ideas in a new medium, to achieve higher goals.
Loved this piece!
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2.
2. billsmith 02:31 PM 12/20/10
Bravo. The distinction between communication of trustworthiness, explanation, and novelty is an excellent one. I hope all Scientific American writers study this essay.
Whether it's recent political events or discoveries in medical science, I often feel like a newspaper article is just pointless fluff added onto the first paragraph. There is no greater context of what was known before and how this new information fits into a bigger picture.(And yet I read them anyway. How sad.)
If you write that a dictator suffers a coup, explain to me in detail who was upset with him and why and explain how similar upheavals affected other countries. If a scientific study seems to contradict one that you wrote about last month, explain how one of the studies is irrelevant, or how they are both part of a more complicated truth.
Science Daily is one of my favorite sources for accurately reported science news, but their "Related Stories" sidebar still often amusingly provides evidence that the "breakthrough" reported by a university press office is just one piece of a decade-long puzzle.
I forgive them the lapses, though, partly because their writers and "Related Stories" often provide a fair amount of context. But more than that, the links to the ACTUAL PAPERS being reported on are highly reassuring and informative.
I hope that Scientific American writers will try to include accurate context whenever possible. I also hope that they will realize the power of transparency and without exception provide links to the original journal articles, abstracts, and researchers' websites. (Thank you to those who have started doing this more often.)
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3.
3. EricMJohnson 05:27 PM 12/20/10
As someone with training in science, journalism, and (now) history I think this is a wonderfully synthesized and provocative piece of writing. Too many professionals in journalism as well as science (and the editors in both fields especially) have come to fear phatic language because it reveals that both endeavors are human activities with all of the failings that come along with that. By emphasizing conceptual language, as you say, it merely gives the illusion of objectivity. But we are all biased. Good scientists and good journalists use different tools but their shared goal is to try and move beyond their personal biases and report on the world as it really is. Trust is built through hard work and reputation and it must be constantly earned. It is an individual process and can't be shifted to the anonymous entity of "brand authority" (whether that is Nature, The New York Times, or BBC News).
I would argue that the commitment to promoting brand authority actually serves to undermine critical thinking. Readers turn off their BS filters because the brands have convinced them that the critical thinking has already been done. But when readers must enter into conflicting interpretations it forces them to make up their own mind about the issues based on the integrity of the source and the veracity of the information (and then, perhaps, even write about it themselves which continues to promote the critical thinking process). Blogs fill an important gap in our media ecosystem, one that has increasingly become a monoculture as more and more sources of information are controlled by a handful of media conglomerates.
The critique by some traditional journalists about how some blogs are poor quality misses the point. Just look at the poor quality of the mainstream media today! When Judith Miller can promote known falsehoods about Iraqi WMDs using anonymous sources in the Times, when Fox News receives the highest ratings and is the most trusted news organization despite the fact that viewers are more likely to be woefully misinformed (according to a recent WPO report: http://bit.ly/fNeK1b) the problem is not one of media platform, it is one of media literacy. The traditional media gatekeepers have become less interested in what is true and more interested in what is good for the bottom line (as well as continued access to institutions of power: http://huff.to/an9dAB). We are currently in the Golden Age of media and, I for one, am very hopeful about what this means for scientific literacy as well as for democracy in general.
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4.
4. xprof 08:12 PM 12/20/10
When writing about science and journalism, how can one omit reference to science journalists like Natalie Angier and Olivia Judson who are equally at home in the field, the laboratory and at the typewriter, and who superbly articulate scientific concepts and discoveries in a stimulating and informative way?
Leo Toribio
Pittsburgh, PA
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5.
5. Bora Zivkovic in reply to xprof 08:56 PM 12/20/10
Excellent writers like that have been mentioned under the link "good science writers are rare" up there. I did not say they don't exist, but that they are rare, and then go on to describe how they come about: they either spend years studying and specializing, or they come to journalism from a scientific background.
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6.
6. Bora Zivkovic in reply to AndiKuszewski 08:59 PM 12/20/10
Thank you. I guess in our busy lives it is usually a good heuristic to trust again people we trusted before. Once we invest a lot of trust in someone over prolonged time, it is a difficult realization they may be wrong - as it implies we are wrong as well, something that is hard to admit.
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7.
7. Bora Zivkovic in reply to billsmith 09:00 PM 12/20/10
Thank you. Yes, under pressure by a number of bloggers over time, it is good to notice that some media organizations have started more routinely to link to primary papers, e.g., BBC and Reuters. Let's home more do.
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8.
8. Bora Zivkovic in reply to EricMJohnson 09:04 PM 12/20/10
Thank you. You make a number of excellent points here. I agree that this is a Golden Age of sorts - never before in history did we have as much quantity and quality of science coverage and as ease of access to it by as many people around the world.
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9.
9. clrbear430 09:10 PM 12/20/10
Spellcheck, spellcheck!! There are a number of errors in the above Observation. For example:
Charles Darwin did that, for example (well, if I remember correctly, his wife made copies from his illegible originals into something that recipients could actually read), which is why we have such a complete understanding of his work and thought - it is all well preserved and the availability of such voluminouos correspondence gave rise to a small industry of Darwinian historical scholarship. [Voluminous?]
**I do like the abundance of links in this post.**
Just because we were born in the 20th century does not mean that the way things were done then are the way things were 'always done', or the best ways to do things - the pinnacle of cultural and social development.
Don't assume everyone reading this post is older than 10!! I started to read interesting articles from the Internet approximately when I was 8.
Claire Binkley
West Chester, PA
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10.
10. Bora Zivkovic in reply to clrbear430 09:21 PM 12/20/10
Thank you. An occasional typo on a blog is actually a part of phatic communication - it is a demonstration that the writer spoke directly, with no filters.
And in such situations typos happen - one becomes typo-blind after spending a lot of time with one's own piece of text. A fresh set of eyes (copyeditor if lucky, spouse more usually) can find them, but that adds one more layer of distance between the writer and the reader.
Which is why blog-readers are so tolerant of typos, even if they vocally point them out in works published by corporate media.
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The line between science and journalism is getting blurry....again
By Bora Zivkovic
Human #1: "Hello, nice weather today, isn't it?"
Human #2: "Ummm...actually not. It's a gray, cold, windy, rainy kind of day!"
Many a joke depends on confusion about the meaning of language, as in the example above. But understanding the sources of such confusion is important in realms other than stand-up comedy, including in the attempts to convey facts about the world to one's target audience.
In the example above, Human #1 is using Phatic language, sometimes referred to as 'small talk' and usually exemplified, at least in the British Isles, with the talk about the highly unpredictable weather. (image: by striatic on Flickr)
Phatic language
Phatic discourse is just one of several functions of language. Its role is not to impart any factual information, but to establish a relationship between the people. It conveys things like emotional state, relative social status, alliance, intentions and limits to further conversation (i.e., where the speaker "draws the line").
If a stranger rides into a small town, a carefully chosen yet meaningless phrase establishes a state of mind that goes something like this: "I come in peace, mean no harm, I hope you accept me in the same way". The response of the local conveys how the town looks at strangers riding in, for example: "You are welcome...for a little while - we'll feed you and put you up for the night, but then we hope you leave". (image: Clint Eastwood in 'Fistful of Dollars' from Squidoo)
An important component of phatic discourse is non-verbal communication, as the tone, volume and pitch of the voice, facial expression and body posture modify the language itself and confirm the emotional and intentional state of the speaker.
It does not seem that linguistics has an official term for the opposite - the language that conveys only pure facts - but the term usually seen in such discussions (including the domain of politics and campaigning) is "Conceptual language" so this is what I will use here. Conceptual language is what Human #2 in the joke above was assuming and using - just the facts, ma'am.
Rise of the earliest science and journalism
For the sake of this article, I will use two simplified definitions of science and journalism.
Journalism is communication of 'what's new'. A journalist is anyone who can say "I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it."
Science is communication of 'how the world works'. A scientist is anyone who can say "I understand something about the world, you don't, let me explain it to you".
Neither definition necessitates that what they say is True, just what they know to the best of their ability and understanding.
Note that I wrote "science is communication". Yes, science is the process of discovery of facts about the way the world works, but the communication of that discovery is the essential last step of the scientific process, and the discoverer is likely to be the person who understands the discovery the best and is thus likely to be the person with the greatest expertise and authority (and hopefully ability) to do the explaining.
For the greatest part of human history, none of those distinctions made any sense. Most of communication contained information about what is new, some information about the way the world works, and a phatic component. Knowing how the world works, knowing what is happening in that world right now, and knowing if you should trust the messenger, were all important for survival.
For the most part, the information was local, and the messengers were local. A sentry runs back into the village alerting that a neighboring tribe, painted with war-paints, is approaching. Is that person a member of your tribe, or a stranger, or the well-known Boy Who Cried Wolf? What do you know about the meaning of war-paint? What do you know about the neighboring tribe? Does all this information fit with your understanding of the world? Is information coming from this person to be taken seriously? How are village elders responding to the news? Is this piece of news something that can aid in your personal survival?
For the longest time, information was exchanged between people who knew each other to some degree - family, neighbors, friends, business-partners. Like in a fishing village, the news about the state of fishing stocks coming from the ships at sea is important information exchanged at the local tavern. But is that fish-catch information 'journalism' (what's new) or 'science' (how the world works)? It's a little bit of both. And you learn which sailors to trust by observing who is trusted by the locals you have already learned to trust. Trust is transitive.
Someone in the "in-group" is trusted more than a stranger - kids learned from parents, the community elders had the authority: the trust was earned through a combination of who you are, how old you are, and how trustworthy you tended to be in the past. New messengers are harder to pin down on all those criteria, so their information is taken with a degree of skepticism. The art of critical thinking (again, not necessarily meaning that you will always pick the Truth) is an ancient one, as it was essential for day-to-day survival. You trust your parents (or priests or teachers) almost uncritically, but you put up your BS filters when hearing a stranger.
Emergence of science and of journalism
The invention of the printing press precipitated the development of both journalism and science. But that took a very long time - almost two centuries (image: 1851, printing press that produced early issues of Scientific American). After Gutenberg printed the Bible, most of what people printed were political pamphlets, church fliers and what for that time and sensibilities went for porn.
London Gazette of 1666 is thought to be the first newspaper in the modern sense of the word. (image: from DavidCo) Until then, newspapers were mostly irregular printings by individuals, combining news, opinion, fiction and entertainment. After this, newspapers gradually became regular (daily, weekly, monthly) collections of writings by numerous people writing in the same issue.
The first English scientific journal was published a year before - the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1665 (image: Royal Society of London).
Until then, science was communicated by letters - those letters were often read at the meetings of scientists. Those meetings got formalized into scientific societies and the letters read at such meetings started getting printed. The first scientific journals were collections of such letters, which explains why so many journals have the words "Letters", "Annals" or "Proceedings" in their titles.
Also, before as well as for a quite a long time after the inception of first journals, much of science was communicated via books - a naturalist would spend many years collecting data and ideas before putting it all in long-form, leather-bound form. Those books were then discussed at meetings of other naturalists who would often respond by writing books of their own. Scientists at the time did not think that Darwin's twenty-year wait to publish The Origin was notable (William Kimler, personal communication) - that was the normal timeline for research and publishing at the time, unusual only to us from a modern perspective of 5-year NIH grants and the 'publish or perish' culture.
As previously oral communication gradually moved to print over the centuries, both journalistic and scientific communication occured in formats - printed with ink on paper - very similar to blogging (that link leads to the post that served as a seed from which this article grew). If born today, many of the old writers, like Montaigne, would be Natural Born Bloggers ('NBBs' - term coined by protoblogger Dave Winer). A lot of ship captains’ logs were essentially tweets with geolocation tags.
People who wanted to inform other people printed fliers and pamphlets and books. Personal letters and diaries were meant to be public: they were as widely shared as was possible, they were publicly read, saved, then eventually collected and published in book-form (at least posthumously). Just like blogs, tweets and Facebook updates today….
The 18th century 'Republic of Letters' (see the amazing visualization of their correspondence) was a social network of intellectual leaders of Europe who exchanged and publicly read their deep philosophical thoughts, scientific ideas, poetry and prose.
Many people during those centuries wrote their letters in duplicate: one copy to send, one to keep for publishing Collected Letters later in life. Charles Darwin did that, for example (well, if I remember correctly, his wife made copies from his illegible originals into something that recipients could actually read), which is why we have such a complete understanding of his work and thought - it is all well preserved and the availability of such voluminouos correspondence gave rise to a small industry of Darwinian historical scholarship.
What is important to note is that, both in journalism and in science, communication could be done by anyone - there was no official seal of approval, or licence, to practice either of the two arts. At the same time, communication in print was limited to those who were literate and who could afford to have a book printed - people who, for the most part, were just the wealthy elites. Entry into that intellectual elite from a lower social class was possible but very difficult and required a lot of hard work and time (see, for example, a biography of Alfred Russell Wallace). Membership in the worlds of arts, science and letters was automatic for those belonging to the small group of literate aristocracy. They had no need to establish formalized gatekeeping as bloodlines, personal sponsorship and money did the gatekeeping job quite well on their own.
As communication has moved from local to global, due to print, trust had to be gained over time - by one's age, stature in society, track record, and by recommendation - who the people you trust say you should trust. Trust is transitive.
Another thing to note is that each written dispatch contained both 'what's new' and 'how the world works' as well as a degree of phatic discourse: "This is what happened. This is what I think it means. And this is who I am so you know why you should trust me." It is often hard to tell, from today's perspective, what was scientific communication and what was journalism.
Personal - and thus potentially phatic - communication was a norm in the early scientific publishing. For example, see "A Letter from Mr J. Breintal to Peter Collinfoxl, F. RXS. contairnng an Account of what he felt after being bit by a Rattle-fnake" in Philosophical Transactions, 1747. - a great account of it can be found at Neurotic Physiology. It is a story of a personal interaction with a rattlesnake and the discovery leading from it. It contained "I was there, you were not, let me tell you what happened" and "I understand something, you don't, let me explain that to you" and "Let me tell you who I am so you can know you can trust me".
Apparently, quite a lot of scientific literature of old involved exciting narratives of people getting bitten by snakes - see this one from 1852 as well.
The anomalous 20th century - effects of technology
The gradual changes in society - invention of printing, rise of science, rise of capitalism, industrial revolution, mass migration from rural to urban areas, improvements in transportation and communication technologies, to name just a few - led to a very different world in the 20th century.
Technology often leads societal changes. If you were ever on a horse, you understand why armies that used stirrups defeated the armies that rode horses without this nifty invention.
Earlier, the speed of spreading news was much slower (see image: Maps of rates of travel in the 19th century - click on the link to see bigger and more). By 1860 Telegraph reached to St. Louis. During its short run the Pony Express could go the rest of the way to San Francisco in 10 days. After that, telegraph followed the rails. First transcontinental line was in 1869. Except for semaphores (1794) information before the telegraph (1843) could only travel as fast as a rider or boat (Thanks to John McKay for this brief primer on the history of speed of communication in Northern America. I am assuming that Europe was slightly ahead and the rest of the world somewhat behind).
The 20th century saw invention or improvement of numerous technologies in transportation - cars, fast trains, airplanes, helicopters, space shuttles - and in communication - telephone, radio, and television. Information could now travel almost instantly.
But those new technologies came with a price - literally. While everyone could write letters and send them by stagecoach, very few people could afford to buy, run and serve printing presses, radio stations and television studios. These things needed capital, and increasingly became owned by rich people and corporations.
Each inch of print or minute of broadcast costs serious money. Thus, people were employed to become official filters of information, the gatekeepers - the editors who decided who will get access to that expensive real estate. As the editors liked some people's work better than others, those people got employed to work in the nascent newsrooms. Journalism became professionalized. Later, universities started journalism programs and codified instruction for new journalists, professionalizing it even more.
Instead of people informing each other, now the few professionals informed everyone else. And the technology did not allow for everyone else to talk back in the same medium.
The broadcast media, a few large corporations employing professional writers informing millions – with no ability for the receivers of information to fact-check, talk back, ask questions, be a part of the conversation – is an exception in history, something that lasted for just a few decades of the 20th century.
The anomalous 20th century - industrialization
Industrial Revolution brought about massive migration of people into big cities. The new type of work required a new type of workforce, one that was literate and more educated. This led to the invention of public schools and foundation of public universities.
In the area of science, many more people became educated enough (and science still not complex and expensive yet) to start their own surveys, experiments and tinkering. The explosion of research led to an explosion of new journals. Those too became expensive to produce and started requiring professional filters - editors. Thus scientific publishing also became professionalized. Not every personal anecdote could make it past the editors any more. Not everyone could call oneself a scientist either - a formal path emerged, ending with a PhD at a university, that ensured that science was done and published by qualified persons only.
By the 1960s, we got a mass adoption of peer-review by scientific journals that was experimentally done by some journals a little earlier. Yes, it is that recent! See for example this letter to Physical Review in 1936:
Dear Sir,
We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the — in any case erroneous — comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.
Respectfully,
Albert Einstein
Or this one:
John Maddox, former editor of Nature: The Watson and Crick paper was not peer-reviewed by Nature… the paper could not have been refereed: its correctness is self-evident. No referee working in the field … could have kept his mouth shut once he saw the structure...
Migration from small towns into big cities also meant that most people one would meet during the day were strangers. Meeting a stranger was not something extraordinary any more, so emergence and enforcement of proper proscribed conduct in cities replaced the need for one-to-one encounters and sizing up strangers using phatic language. Which is why even today phatic language is much more important and prevalent in rural areas where it aids personal survival than in urban centers where more general rules of behavior among strangers emerged (which may partially explain why phatic language is generally associated with conservative ideology and conceptual language with politicial liberalism, aka, the "reality-based community").
People moving from small hometowns into big cities also led to breaking up of families and communities of trust. One needed to come up with new methods for figuring out who to trust. One obvious place to go was local media. They were stand-ins for village elders, parents, teachers and priests.
If there were many newspapers in town, one would try them all for a while and settle on one that best fit one's prior worldview. Or one would just continue reading the paper one's parents read.
But other people read other newspapers and brought their own worldviews into the conversation. This continuous presence of a plurality of views kept everyone's BS filters in high gear - it was necessary to constantly question and filter all the incoming information in order to choose what to believe and what to dismiss.
The unease with the exposure to so many strangers with strange ideas also changed our notions of privacy. Suddenly we craved it. Our letters are now meant for one recepient only, with the understanding it will not be shared. Personal diaries now have lockets. After a century of such craving for privacy, we are again returning to a more historically traditional notions, by much more freely sharing our lives with strangers online.
The anomalous 20th century - cleansing of conceptual language in science and journalism
Until the 20th century we did not see the consolidation of media into large conglomerates, and of course, there were no mass radio or TV until mid-20th century. Not until later in the century did we see the monopolization of local media markets by a single newspaper (competitors going belly-up) which, then, had to serve everyone, so it had to invent the fake "objective" HeSaidSheSaid timid style of reporting in order not to lose customers of various ideological stripes and thus lose advertising revenue.
Professionalising of journalism, coupled with the growth of media giants serving very broad audiences, led to institutionalization of a type of writing that was very much limited to "what's new".
The "let me explain" component of journalism fell out of favor as there was always a faction of the audience that had a problem with the empirical facts - a faction that the company's finances could not afford to lose. The personal - including phatic - was carefully eliminated as it was perceived as unobjective and inviting the criticism of bias. The way for a reporter to inject one's opinion into the article was to find a person who thinks the same in order to get the target quote. A defensive (perhaps cowardly) move that became the norm. And, once the audience caught on, led to the loss of trust in traditional media.
Reduction of local media to a single newspaper, a couple of local radio stations and a handful of broadcast TV channels (that said esentially the same thing), left little choice for the audience. With only one source in town, there was no opportunity to filter among a variety of news sources. Thus, many people started unquestioningly accepting what 20th-century style broadcast media served them.
Just because articles were under the banners of big companies did not make them any more trustworthy by definition, but with no alternative it is still better to be poorly informed than not informed at all. Thus, in the 20th century we gradually lost the ability to read everything critically, awed by the big names like NYT and BBC and CBS and CNN. Those became the new parents, teachers, tribal elders and priests, the authority figures whose words are taken unquestioningly.
In science, explosion in funding not matched by explosion of job positions, led to overproduction of PhDs and a rise of hyper-competitive culture in academia. Writing books became unproductive. The only way to succeed is to keep getting grants and the only way to do that is to publish very frequently. Everything else had to fall by the wayside.
False measures of journal quality - like the infamous Impact Factor - were used to determine who gets a job and tenure and who falls out of the pipeline. The progress of science led inevitably to specialization and to the development of specialized jargon. Proliferation of expensive journals ensured that nobody but people in highest-level research institutions had access to the literature, so scientists started writing only for each other.
Scientific papers became dense, but also narrowed themselves to only "this is how the world works". The "this is new" became left out as the audience already knew this, and it became obvious that a paper would not be published if it did not produce something new, almost by definition.
And the personal was so carefully excised for the purpose of seeming unbiased by human beings that it sometimes seems like the laboratory equipment did all the experiments of its own volition.
So, at the close of the 20th century, we had a situation in which journalism and science, for the first time in history, completely separated from each other. Journalism covered what's new without providing the explanation and context for new readers just joining the topic. Science covered only explanation and only to one's peers.
In order to bridge that gap, a whole new profession needed to arise. As scientists understood the last step of the scientific method - communication - to mean only 'communication to colleagues', and as regular press was too scared to put truth-values on any statements of fact, the solution was the invention of the science journalist - someone who can read what scientists write and explain that to the lay audience. With mixed success. Science is hard. It takes years to learn enough to be able to report it well. Only a few science journalists gathered that much expertise over the years of writing (and making mistakes on the way).
So, many science journalists fell back on reporting science as news, leaving the explanation out. Their editors helped in that by severely restricting the space - and good science coverage requires ample space.
A good science story should explain what is known by now (science), what the new study brings that is new (news) and why does that matter to you (phatic discourse). The lack of space usually led to omission of context (science), shortening of what is new (news) and thus leaving only the emotional story intact. Thus, the audience did not learn much, Certainly not enough to be able to evaluate next day's and next week's news.
This format also led to the choice of stories. It is easy to report in this way if the news is relevant to the audience anyway, e.g., concerning health (the "relevant" stories). It is also easy to report on misconduct of scientists (the "fishy" stories) - which is not strictly science reporting. But it was hard to report on science that is interesting for its own sake (the "cool" stories).
What did the audience get out of this? Scientists are always up to some mischief. And every week they change the story as to what is good or bad for my health. And it is not very fun, entertaining and exciting. No surprise that science as endeavour slowly started losing trust with the (American) population, and that it was easy for groups with financial, political or religious interests to push anti-science rhetoric on topics from hazards of smoking to stem-cell research to evolution to climate change.
At the end of the 20th century, thus, we had a situation in which journalism and science were completely separate endeavors, and the bridge between them - science journalism - was unfortunately operating under the rules of journalism and not science, messing up the popular trust in both.
Back to the Future
It is 2010. The Internet has been around for 30 years, the World Wide Web for 20. It took some time for the tools to develop and spread, but we are obviously undergoing a revolution in communication. I use the word "revolution" because it is so almost by definition - when the means of production change hands, this is a revolution.
The means of production, in this case the technology for easy, cheap and fast dissemination of information, are now potentially in the hands of everyone. When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, we call that 'citizen journalism.' And some of those citizens possess much greater expertise on the topics they cover than the journalists that cover that same beat. This applies to science as well.
In other words, after the deviation that was the 20th century, we are going back to the way we have evolved as a species to communicate - one-to-one and few-to-few instead of one-to-many. Apart from technology (software instead of talking/handwriting/printing), speed (microseconds instead of days and weeks by stagecoach, railroad or Pony Express, see image above) and the number of people reached (potentially - but rarely - millions simultaneously instead of one person or small group at a time), blogging, social networking and other forms of online writing are nothing new – this is how people have always communicated. Like Montaigne. And the Republic of Letters in the 18th century. And Charles Darwin in the 19th century.
All we are doing now is returning to a more natural, straightforward and honest way of sharing information, just using much more efficient ways of doing it. (Images from Cody Brown)
And not even that – where technology is scarce, the analog blogging is live and well (image: Analog blogger, from AfriGadget).
What about trustworthiness of all that online stuff? Some is and some isn’t to be trusted. It’s up to you to figure out your own filters and criteria, and to look for additional sources, just like our grandparents did when they had a choice of dozens of newspapers published in each of their little towns.
With the gradual return of a more natural system of communication, we got to see additional opinions, the regular fact-checks on the media by experts on the topic, and realized that the mainstream media is not to be trusted.
With the return of a more natural system of communication, we will all have to re-learn how to read critically, find second opinions, evaluate sources. Nothing new is there either – that is what people have been doing for millennia – the 20th century is the exception. We will figure out who to trust by trusting the judgment of people we already trust. Trust is transitive.
Return of the phatic language
What does this all mean for the future of journalism, including science journalism?
The growing number of Web-savvy citizens have developed new methods of establishing trustworthiness of the sources. It is actually the old one, pre-20th century method - relying on individuals, not institutions. Instead of treating WaPo, Fox, MSNBC and NPR as the proxies for the father, teacher, preacher and the medicine man, we now once again evaulate individuals.
As nobody enters a news site via the front page and looks around, but we all get to individual articles via links and searches, we are relying on bylines under the titles, not on the logos up on top. Just like we were not born trusting NYTimes but learned to trust it because our parents and neighbors did (and then perhaps we read it for some time), we are also not born knowing which individuals to trust. We use the same method - we start with recommendations from people we already trust, then make our own decisions over time.
If you don't link to your sources, including to scientific papers, you lose trust. If you quote out of context without providing that context, you lose trust. If you hide who you are and where you are coming from - that is cagey and breeds mistrust. Transparency is the new objectivity.
And transparency is necessarily personal, thus often phatic. It shows who you are as a person, your background, your intentions, your mood, your alliances, your social status.
There are many reasons sciencebloggers are more trusted than journalists covering science.
First, they have the scientific expertise that journalists lack - they really know what they are talking about on the topic of their expertise and the audience understands this.
Second, they link out to more, more diverse and more reliable sources.
Third, being digital natives, they are not familiar with the concept of word-limits. They start writing, they explain it as it needs to be explained and when they are done explaining they end the post. Whatever length it takes to give the subject what it's due.
Finally, not being trained by j-schools, they never learned not to let their personality shine through their writing. So they gain trust by connecting to their readers - the phatic component of communication.
Much of our communication, both offline and online, is phatic. But that is necessary for building trust. Once the trust is there, the conceptual communication can work. If I follow people I trust on Twitter, I will trust that they trust the sources they link to so I am likely to click on them. Which is why more and more scientists use Twitter to exchage information (PDF). Trust is transitive.
Scientists, becoming journalists
Good science journalists are rare. Cuts in newsrooms, allocation of too little space for science stories, assigning science stories to non-science journalists - all of these factors have resulted in a loss of quantity and quality of science reporting in the mainstream media.
But being a good science journalist is not impossible. People who take the task seriously can become experts on the topic they cover (and get to a position where they can refuse to cover astronomy if their expertise is evolution) over time. They can become temporary experts if they are given sufficient time to study instead of a task of writing ten stories per day.
With the overproduction of PhDs, many scientists are choosing alternative careers, including many of them becoming science writers and journalists, or Press Information Officers. They thus come into the profession with the expertise already there.
There is not much difference between a research scientist who blogs and thus is an expert on the topic s/he blogs about, and a research scientist who leaves the lab in order to write as a full-time job. They both have scientific expertise and they both love to write or they wouldn't be doing it.
Blog is software. A medium. One of many. No medium has a higher coefficient of trustworthiness than any other. Despite never going to j-school and writing everything on blogs, I consider myself to be a science writer.
Many science journalists, usually younger though some of the old ones caught on quickly and became good at it (generation is mindset, not age), grok the new media ecosystem in which online collaboration between scientists and journalists is becoming a norm.
At the same time, many active scientists are now using the new tools (the means of production) to do their own communication. As is usually the case with novelty, different people get to it at different rates. The conflicts between 20th and 21st style thinking inevitably occur. The traditional scientists wish to communicate the old way - in journals, letters to the editor, at conferences. This is the way of gatekeeping they are used to.
But there have been a number of prominent cases of such clashes between old and new models of communication, including the infamous Roosevelts on toilets (the study had nothing to do with either US Presidents or toilets, but it is an instructive case - image by Dr.Isis), and several other smaller cases.
The latest one is the Arsenic Bacteria Saga in which the old-timers do not seem to undestand what a 'blog' means, and are seemingly completely unaware of the important distinction between 'blogs' and 'scienceblogs', the former being online spaces by just about anyone, the latter being blogs written by people who actually know their science and are vetted or peer-reviewed in some way e.g., at ResearchBlogging.org or Scienceblogging.org or by virtue of being hand-picked and invited to join one of the science blogging networks (which are often run by traditional media outlets or scientific publishers or societies) or simply by gaining resepect of peers over time.
Case by case, old-time scientists are learning. Note how both in the case of Roosevelts on toilets and the Arsenic bacteria the initially stunned scientists quickly learned and appreciated the new way of communication.
In other words, scientists are slowly starting to get out of the cocoon. Instead of just communicating to their peers behind the closed doors, now they are trying to reach out to the lay audience as well.
As more and more papers are Open Access and can be read by all, they are becoming more readable (as I predicted some years ago). The traditional format of the paper is changing. So they are covering "let me explain" portion better, both in papers and on their own blogs.
They may still be a little clumsy about the "what's new" part, over-relying on the traditional media to do it for them via press releases and press conferences (see Darwinius and arsenic bacteria for good examples) instead of doing it themselves or taking control of the message (though they do need to rely on MSM to some extent due to the distinction between push and pull strategies as the media brands are still serving for many people as proxies for trustworthy sources).
But most importantly, they are now again adding the phatic aspect to their communication, revealing a lot of their personality on social networks, on blogs, and even some of them venturing into doing it in scientific papers.
By combining all three aspects of good communication, scientists will once again regain the trust of their audience. And what they are starting to do looks more and more like (pre-20th century) journalism.
Journalists, becoming scientists
On the other side of the divide, there is a renewed interest in journalism expanding from just "this is new" to "let me explain how the world works". There are now efforts to build a future of context, and to design explainers.
If you are not well informed on an issue (perhaps because you are too young to remember when it first began, or the issue just started being relevant to you), following a stream of 'what is new' articles will not enlighten you. There is not sufficient information there. There is a lot of tacit knowledge that the writer assumes the readers possess - but many don't.
There has to be a way for news items to link to some kind of collection of background information - an 'explainer'. Such an explainer would be a collection of verifiable facts about the topic. A collection of verifiable facts about the way the world works is....scientific information!
With more and more journalists realizing they need to be transparent about where they are coming from, injecting personality into their work in order to build trust, some of that phatic language is starting to seep in, completing the trio of elements of effective communication.
Data Journalism - isn't this science?
Some of the best journalism of the past - yes, the abominable 20th century - was done when a reporter was given several months to work on a single story requiring sifting through boxes and boxes of documents. The reporter becomes the expert on the topic, starts noticing patterns and writes a story that brings truly new knowledge to the world. That is practically science! Perhaps it is not the hardest of the hard sciences like physics, but as good as well-done social science like cultural anthropology, sociology or ethnography. There is a system and a method very much like the scientific method.
Unfortunately, most reporters are not given such luxury. They have to take shortcuts - interviewing a few sources to quote for the story. The sources are, of course, a very small and very unrepresentative sample of the relevant population - from a rolodex. Call a couple of climate scientists, and a couple of denialists, grab a quote from each and stick them into a formulaic article. That is Bad Science as well as Bad Journalism. And now that the people formerly known as audience, including people with expertise on the topic, have the tools to communicate to the world, they often swiftly point out how poorly such articles represent reality.
But today, most of the information, data and documents are digital, not in boxes. They are likely to be online and can be accessed without travel and without getting special permissions (though one may have to steal them - as Wikileaks operates: a perfect example of the new data journalism). Those reams of data can be analyzed by computers to find patterns, as well as by small armies of journalists (and other experts) for patterns and pieces of information that computer programs miss.
This is what bioinformaticists do (and have already built tools to do it - contact them, steal their tools!).
Data journalism. This is what a number of forward-thinking journalists and media organizations are starting to do.
This is science.
On the other hand, a lot of distributed, crowdsourced scientific research, usually called Citizen Science, is in the business of collecting massive amounts of data for analysis. How does that differ from data journalism? Not much?
Look at this scientific paper - Coding Early Naturalists' Accounts into Long-Term Fish Community Changes in the Adriatic Sea (1800–2000) - is this science or data journalism? It is both.
The two domains of communicating about what is new and how the world works - journalism and science - have fused again. Both are now starting to get done by teams that involve both professionals and amateurs. Both are now led by personalities who are getting well-known in the public due to their phatic communication in a variety of old and new media.
It is important to be aware of the shortness of our lives and thus natural tendency for historical myopia. Just because we were born in the 20th century does not mean that the way things were done then are the way things were 'always done', or the best ways to do things - the pinnacle of cultural and social development. The 20th century was just a strange and deviant blip in the course of history.
As we are leaving the 20th century behind with all of its unusual historical quirks, we are going back to an older model of communicating facts - but with the new tools we can do it much better than ever, including a much broader swath of society - a more democratic system than ever.
By the way, while it's still cold, the rain has stopped. And that is Metaphorical language...
This article was commissioned by Science Progress and will also appear on their site in 24 hours.
Tags: language, journalism, blogging, media, history, communication
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1.
1. AndiKuszewski 01:48 PM 12/20/10
It's amazing (yet unsurprising) how easily scientists can fall into that low-effort, blind acceptance state when presented with scientific data as long as it is peer-reviewed. Additionally, if it isn't peer-reviewed, it gets rejected without so much as a second glance. Watson & Crick didn't go through peer review?! Then the whole field of genetics must all be wrong! Built on a false premise! My mind is blown!!
I feel that we go through cycles of communication and critical thinking/questioning of the methods and systems like you mentioned in the explanation of early newspapers and the public becoming the editors.
Once a method of review is accepted by the people as valid, the public gets lazy, sits back, and stops questioning the actual data. Inevitably, the sources providing the data get lazy as well and over time, the data can't be guaranteed to have that same level of purity yet the public still accepts it because of the blind acceptance of the messenger. Eventually, people start protesting. I think we are starting to see a backlash of the unconditional acceptance of peer review which is a very good thing.
I gave a presentation this past summer on ways to maximize your cognitive potential, and one of the things I brought up was how an over-reliance on modern tech (such as GPS) to do our critical thinking for us, can result, over time, in a weakening of those cognitive skills. I fear the same is happening in a broader sense with how we think about science we stop using our critical thinking skills, and they become less sharp. Our sciencey radar system weakens, and we are less effective gatekeepers of scientific data.
Science has become so methodized, that we inclined to accept the process without questioning why we are using that approach in the first place. The small group that continues to question often gets punished or mocked. Creativity and critical thinking has been suffering for the last decade or so, but I think with the addition of modern technology, social networks, and transparency, things have already begun to change and it won't be stopped, as much as the traditional scientists may resist.
The fact that there is so much controversy, friction and discord right now in science, science communication, and journalism in general, can only mean progress. It means the Revolution is already taking place, and change is inevitable. These are all good things.
Also I love the juxtaposition of old & new methods of science communication using the basic ideas in a new medium, to achieve higher goals.
Loved this piece!
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2.
2. billsmith 02:31 PM 12/20/10
Bravo. The distinction between communication of trustworthiness, explanation, and novelty is an excellent one. I hope all Scientific American writers study this essay.
Whether it's recent political events or discoveries in medical science, I often feel like a newspaper article is just pointless fluff added onto the first paragraph. There is no greater context of what was known before and how this new information fits into a bigger picture.(And yet I read them anyway. How sad.)
If you write that a dictator suffers a coup, explain to me in detail who was upset with him and why and explain how similar upheavals affected other countries. If a scientific study seems to contradict one that you wrote about last month, explain how one of the studies is irrelevant, or how they are both part of a more complicated truth.
Science Daily is one of my favorite sources for accurately reported science news, but their "Related Stories" sidebar still often amusingly provides evidence that the "breakthrough" reported by a university press office is just one piece of a decade-long puzzle.
I forgive them the lapses, though, partly because their writers and "Related Stories" often provide a fair amount of context. But more than that, the links to the ACTUAL PAPERS being reported on are highly reassuring and informative.
I hope that Scientific American writers will try to include accurate context whenever possible. I also hope that they will realize the power of transparency and without exception provide links to the original journal articles, abstracts, and researchers' websites. (Thank you to those who have started doing this more often.)
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3.
3. EricMJohnson 05:27 PM 12/20/10
As someone with training in science, journalism, and (now) history I think this is a wonderfully synthesized and provocative piece of writing. Too many professionals in journalism as well as science (and the editors in both fields especially) have come to fear phatic language because it reveals that both endeavors are human activities with all of the failings that come along with that. By emphasizing conceptual language, as you say, it merely gives the illusion of objectivity. But we are all biased. Good scientists and good journalists use different tools but their shared goal is to try and move beyond their personal biases and report on the world as it really is. Trust is built through hard work and reputation and it must be constantly earned. It is an individual process and can't be shifted to the anonymous entity of "brand authority" (whether that is Nature, The New York Times, or BBC News).
I would argue that the commitment to promoting brand authority actually serves to undermine critical thinking. Readers turn off their BS filters because the brands have convinced them that the critical thinking has already been done. But when readers must enter into conflicting interpretations it forces them to make up their own mind about the issues based on the integrity of the source and the veracity of the information (and then, perhaps, even write about it themselves which continues to promote the critical thinking process). Blogs fill an important gap in our media ecosystem, one that has increasingly become a monoculture as more and more sources of information are controlled by a handful of media conglomerates.
The critique by some traditional journalists about how some blogs are poor quality misses the point. Just look at the poor quality of the mainstream media today! When Judith Miller can promote known falsehoods about Iraqi WMDs using anonymous sources in the Times, when Fox News receives the highest ratings and is the most trusted news organization despite the fact that viewers are more likely to be woefully misinformed (according to a recent WPO report: http://bit.ly/fNeK1b) the problem is not one of media platform, it is one of media literacy. The traditional media gatekeepers have become less interested in what is true and more interested in what is good for the bottom line (as well as continued access to institutions of power: http://huff.to/an9dAB). We are currently in the Golden Age of media and, I for one, am very hopeful about what this means for scientific literacy as well as for democracy in general.
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4.
4. xprof 08:12 PM 12/20/10
When writing about science and journalism, how can one omit reference to science journalists like Natalie Angier and Olivia Judson who are equally at home in the field, the laboratory and at the typewriter, and who superbly articulate scientific concepts and discoveries in a stimulating and informative way?
Leo Toribio
Pittsburgh, PA
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5.
5. Bora Zivkovic in reply to xprof 08:56 PM 12/20/10
Excellent writers like that have been mentioned under the link "good science writers are rare" up there. I did not say they don't exist, but that they are rare, and then go on to describe how they come about: they either spend years studying and specializing, or they come to journalism from a scientific background.
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6.
6. Bora Zivkovic in reply to AndiKuszewski 08:59 PM 12/20/10
Thank you. I guess in our busy lives it is usually a good heuristic to trust again people we trusted before. Once we invest a lot of trust in someone over prolonged time, it is a difficult realization they may be wrong - as it implies we are wrong as well, something that is hard to admit.
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7.
7. Bora Zivkovic in reply to billsmith 09:00 PM 12/20/10
Thank you. Yes, under pressure by a number of bloggers over time, it is good to notice that some media organizations have started more routinely to link to primary papers, e.g., BBC and Reuters. Let's home more do.
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8.
8. Bora Zivkovic in reply to EricMJohnson 09:04 PM 12/20/10
Thank you. You make a number of excellent points here. I agree that this is a Golden Age of sorts - never before in history did we have as much quantity and quality of science coverage and as ease of access to it by as many people around the world.
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9.
9. clrbear430 09:10 PM 12/20/10
Spellcheck, spellcheck!! There are a number of errors in the above Observation. For example:
Charles Darwin did that, for example (well, if I remember correctly, his wife made copies from his illegible originals into something that recipients could actually read), which is why we have such a complete understanding of his work and thought - it is all well preserved and the availability of such voluminouos correspondence gave rise to a small industry of Darwinian historical scholarship. [Voluminous?]
**I do like the abundance of links in this post.**
Just because we were born in the 20th century does not mean that the way things were done then are the way things were 'always done', or the best ways to do things - the pinnacle of cultural and social development.
Don't assume everyone reading this post is older than 10!! I started to read interesting articles from the Internet approximately when I was 8.
Claire Binkley
West Chester, PA
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10.
10. Bora Zivkovic in reply to clrbear430 09:21 PM 12/20/10
Thank you. An occasional typo on a blog is actually a part of phatic communication - it is a demonstration that the writer spoke directly, with no filters.
And in such situations typos happen - one becomes typo-blind after spending a lot of time with one's own piece of text. A fresh set of eyes (copyeditor if lucky, spouse more usually) can find them, but that adds one more layer of distance between the writer and the reader.
Which is why blog-readers are so tolerant of typos, even if they vocally point them out in works published by corporate media.
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