Similar effect when reading the news on a topic that one is an expert in - they usually get it incredibly wrong. And then you turn the page and read the next article completely forgetting how bad the reporting actually is - there is no reason to assume they do a better job on topics that one is not an expert in! I think this bias had a name but I can't remember it.
I first heard this explained by John C. Dvorak and it has terrified me ever since.
Originally I just believe that journalist just had a terrible understanding of IT, but when you think about it, there's no reason why it's just IT. Why would journalist have a better understanding of medicine, politics, climate, finance or any other topic covered. Basically you're left it a situation where you can only trust highly specialized publication, who hire subject matter experts and let them act as the journalist.
This raises the question: Are journalists actually required?
As a journalist who's a CS dropout, then later a BoA, and who works as a web dev on the side: I agree.
BUT:
1) The journalist's work is sometime a soul-crushing effort to turn complex things that can't really be made simple into a readable summary. I cover Quantum tech as someone who has at least a grasp of physics: it's insanely difficult.
2) Journalists that behave like the ones you describe, are bad for the whole profession. What you describe is a systemic problem in journalism, which I think it's especially bad in the big newsrooms of big newspapers that are struggling to survive or have still to figure out a proper business model for their future.
That said, I think there are a lot journalist who, like yours truly, tend to stick to what they've studied and know. I would never write about medicine, but I know I'm able to write about tech avoiding the complete lack of knowledge some colleagues show.
The real problem: this works for me as a freelancer. Staff writers are considered fungible, and they have to adapt to whatever needs to be written.
Sorry for the sparse thoughts, I have to much in my mind about this, but not enough time to put it down properly right now. I still wanted to chime in, though. :)
P.s. Journalism schools are also part of the problem. They form a cohort of people who think they can do exactly that: write about anything. It's bullshit, and it does not work well for the category. The best colleagues I know all come from very different study fields, and they sort of fell into journalism by chance.
> Journalism schools are also part of the problem. They form a cohort of people who think they can do exactly that: write about anything. It's bullshit, and it does not work well for the category.
This.
100% this.
(I spent about a decade in the trenches as first a part-time then full-time tech journalist -- wrote a column for the UK Computer Shopper for several years -- and the reason CS's feature quality stayed high was because the editors recruited techies who could write and trained them in the basics of journalism, rather than hiring generalist journalists and expecting them to pick up a CS degree by osmosis.)
Isn't there a serious risk of bias, there, though? For example, if a journalist is specialized in CS and have to write about the ecological impact of technology, you can expect them to be biased in favor of technology, even in good faith.
While what you're suggesting seems common sense and is indeed better than current situation, I think it could be even better if rather than having one journalist writing one piece, every piece was a joint effort by several journalists, some expert on the subject and some not.
> Isn't there a serious risk of bias, there, though? For example, if a journalist is specialized in CS and have to write about the ecological impact of technology, you can expect them to be biased in favor of technology, even in good faith.
All journalists are biased. Pretending they can be unbiased is silly.
Beyond that, a journalist specialized in CS writing about the ecological impact of technology is no longer "sticking to what they've studied and know" any more than a sportswriter would be writing about the ecological impact of a new stadium.
Just like in academia, interdisciplinary research is best served not by a single polymath, but by a collaboration between domain experts. In this case, the proper (money-is-no-object) approach for an editor to take, would be to attach both an ecology-expert journalist and a tech-expert journalist on the piece, likely with the tech-expert driving doing the research and the ecology-expert writing the piece.
One could argue that in your situation a journalist trained in CS is simply not the educated party that should be writing a piece anyway. Knowing CS doesn't mean you understand the ecological impact of technology, you'd want someone with an ecology degree.
Sure, but then that journalist doesn't know about technology and is biased toward ecology :)
Although, I guess that rather than having experts and non-experts co-writing the article, it would even be better to have experts on all identified topics. So here, it would be both the journalist with a technological background and the one with an ecological background.
It seems a bit unrealistic to have experts on all subjects at hand, though, so I guess mixing non experts could at least be a minimum effort.
It is not a journalist's job to be an expert in the subject they are covering. That's why journalists interview experts, and why journalists don't use themselves as sources.
If you are writing from your own knowledge rather than attributing your information to others, I would argue that you aren't really practicing journalism. (There's nothing wrong with that, I just think it's something else.)
Unless a journalist is merely acting as a typist "not using themselves as sources" is not enough.
Journalists gather, assemble and interpret information, and sometimes they build the dreaded 'narrative' for the reader. In this case they must not only _source_ knowledge but consume and comprehend it - at which point they _are_ operating in the specific domain of the information they gathered.
Different knowledge requires differing degrees of investment to comprehend, and for non-trivial subjects being an SME that covers most of the domains involved is going to allow you to validate interpretations made on assembled knowledge i.e the stuff you are operating on rather than merely regurgitating.
I am open to the idea that a journalist could separately have good investigative skills and other journalistic things I am not aware of while not being an SME in much of anything - but in which case they should always work with one or more SMEs, much like the sibling comment's suggestion from 'cousin_it'.
Some topics are simpler than others. For example, a lot of stories on "science" tend to focus on people instead. They tell the narrative of the research team, and their success, and usually pick out a single individual to tell a human story about. Often this takes a moralistic or political angle. "A [politically fashionable identity group member] has [destroyed boundaries / revolutionized topic / other post-modern language]." This is not necessarily a bad story to tell, but it's clearly about people and groups of people, rather than a story about science.
By contrast, if journalists were solely focusing on the science, the article would simply be a reprint (or summary) of a research paper. Now, to be fair, some news outlets do a very nice job of this, while others turn everything into a human story, or at least, focus on a part of the story the journalist can understand.
I think this is partially due to the limitations being described. The journalist likely can't understand the science in a meaningful way, but can understand the people, and how they talk about their research, and how the public perceives that. Helpfully, this will also likely be the story that will appeal to more readers. And so, the incentives are aligned in a few directions against the "better" (read: more precise, and requiring more expertise) story.
I could bring as examples innumerable “Experts“ who give bad and highly opinionated comments that journalist can skew and apply to their own narrative.
If you are versed in what you write about it’s easier to separate fluff and worthless commentary from actual information.
Would it be too much to ask that, when a journalist writes on a topic they don't understand, they should ask an expert "hey can you sanity check this" before publishing?
I asked some science journalists about this on Twitter. Tight deadlines are a problem, but the bigger issue is that there’s some sort of journalistic principle about not letting “sources” see—-or approve—-the completed article.
I don’t totally understand why, but I think they were a little unclear on what most scientists want, which is more like checking language and details (a lot of words that seem synonymous aren't in technical contexts) than controlling the overall message.
Newspaper comment sections are highly problematical. You have occasional thoughtful posts mixed in with hundreds of completely moronic, bigoted, and deeply stupid posts. When a comments section gets bad enough that it demands moderation, perhaps it's better to get out of that business entirely. (No need to get rid of the letters to the editor.)
If the journalist talked to the expert while writing the article, the expert will always be happy for a chance to sanity check. The only reason that's so often not done is because the journalist is on a power trip.
> This raises the question: Are journalists actually required?
Depends. The alternative is bloggers.
This situation is ugly. All sorts of motives are being tossed at the journalist, here, but it may be as simple as they think they have a “scoop,” which is pure gold, for journalists (especially young ones).
That said, there are standards that journalists are supposed to meet; usually about things like the number of independent sources they use, and whatnot. It’s fairly obvious that many journalists don’t meet those standards, but they are supposed to.
We’ve all seen what happens with bloggers. There’s good ones, which are basically the same as top-quality journalists, and there are bad ones, which are nightmares that make Joseph Goebbels smirk from his lava pool.
I have been getting downright despondent over the quality of the writing in today’s journalists. I see at least three typos in pretty much every publication I read, every day. Sometimes, terrible ones, in the headline.
I think it’s a shame that the first ones out the door were the editors.
Journalists can do great work, provided the incentives are lined up right. One of the only French newspaper that is consistently in the black is an investigative weekly paper called "le canard enchainé". It is read by pretty much anyone, young, old, poor, rich. It is owned by its journalists, accepts no advertising, has a paper subscription model, and nothing they print is put online.
Thing is, they make ministers and sometimes entire French governments fall when they uncover corruption scandals, they have an impeccable reputation for protecting their sources, and they publish scoop after scoop after scoop. The value they offer is unique, you won't be able to read the information they publish anywhere else, and I believe this is how they maintain their integrity and value to the public.
In Holland we have "The Correspondent" which is independently funded too (AFAIK). While I do feel they play it a bit too 'safe' and try to straddle the line between doing 'regular' journalism and more daring stuff, they do some good work, and it's nice to know they're not chasing ad revenue.
Maybe the willingness of journalists to priotize "scoops" over the actual consequences of their reporting is exactly the problem. On some level, they seem to be incapable of thinking of non-journalists as actual, real people who deserve to be treated with decency rather than things they can use in their Very Important Work which is Vital to Democracy and then toss aside - and as you hint at, this is probably structural rather than just a failing of particular reporters.
This is true. It's not a new problem. You can watch black-and-white movies, from the 1930s, where journalists cause huge problems by publishing "scoops."
The issue is that this would apply to bloggers; even more than journalists. Bloggers chase clicks. A quick shufti at the junk that populates Clickbait Row, in any site, will show what drivel people will publish, chasing clicks.
Yeah, the current situation is that because mainstream journalism are supposed to have 'standards', you get the product with predictable quality, but this quality is slowly but surely getting shittier. Blogs and twitter by contrast have no constraints, which means that variance in quality is much higher and while there are great blogs (such as, well, Slate Star Codex), trusting a random blog is an even worse idea that trusting a random journalist.
Looks like an opening for a new model of journalism begins to appear - something that captures the grassroots spirit of blogs, but filters out biased, disingenious and clickbait stuff, traces provenance of information and allows for fact-checking from multiple angles. Of course, the problem is genuinely hard because any startup that attempts this without new ideas about how the thing will be financed will fall prey to the same incentives as the conventional media and fail to make a difference.
It also helps that Slate Star Cortex isn't expected to be unbiased, so instead of pretending to be the diffuse gaze from nowhere, he can simply be up-front about what you should expect.
It's really a mixed bag... there are definitely those that purport to be journalists that are more activist than journalist and will lie, cheat, deceive in order to push an agenda over anything resembling an unbiased truth.
There are also journalists that become activist over a specific study (Nina Teicholz is a good example here). Where the more they dig into a topic, the more they take up a cause to expose corruption, even if they have a reasoned bias.
I wish more publications themselves would have an editorial oversight to reduce instances of narratives injected into their news feeds. Some are better than others at presenting news as closer to just the facts... others do better at balancing bias with multi-sourcing, which works better in video that written.
I've been watching the Rising morning show from Hill.tv lately, which is pretty centrist and more balanced than most sources. I try to avoid CNN, MSNBC and Fox News specifically at this point. Fox is good with "news" but they have too many commentary shows that offset this. CNN and MSNBC conflate it all as news and misrepresent all around. None of it can be trusted though.
Unfortunately, news sources tend to be more about being a profit center, and "journalism" is more about the narrative.
It's not just IT. You can definitely spot terrible understanding of stuff like policymaking/policy analysis and social science, business, etc. Exceptions do exist but they're rare and tend to be well-known on that account. (And I'm definitely not saying that an average journalist should be an expert in these things; what's missing is even the basic knowledge required to e.g. frame issues properly and provide missing information to aid comprehension.)
> Basically you're left it a situation where you can only trust highly specialized publication, who hire subject matter experts and let them act as the journalist.
There’s also “embedded journalism”, where the journalist needs to maintain an ongoing relationship with non-affiliated subject-matter experts. This can end up with some propaganda-like bias in favour of the embedded-in group’s beliefs; but if you can read past that, you’ll find that at least the journalist is being actively fact-checked by the people they’re embedded with. Those people are effectively working together to serve as an editor.
This always bugs me, because “science” is a giant spectrum of fields from astronomy to zoology. Nobody knows even a small portion of it, and yet we expect a few journalists to cover all of it, often on tight deadlines[0]. Politics is probably closer to many journalists’ backgrounds, and it changes slower—-last week’s background helps with this week’s scandal too.
[0] The impetus for most articles is usually the publication of a new paper, but this always seems weird because it’s really more of a hook: papers are almost always incremental progress on a problem and most of the article ends up being background and context anyway.
As you pointed out in your footnote, science is a bad topic for journalism, intrinsically. Something like Scientific American is about as good as it gets for lay audiences - solicited longform articles from the relevant experts, meant for a general audience.
I'm surprised they don't even get the show business right, I thought many publications were owned or actually in the show business and so they would have many subject matter experts available.
I wonder just how deep this rabbit hole goes? And how much of our lives is directed by misunderstandings, misinterpretations, bad translations, outright deception, etc.
As a programmer I know that my the screen I'm looking at is the visual output of a house of cards. It's amazing the whole thing works. I suppose you might say the same about society in general.
This makes me think of that Steve Jobs quote where he talks about poking things. I guess one reason why you can change things is because there's a low bar for improvement. ;)
Relevant Steve Jobs quote.
> The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.
I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
From time to time the regional newspaper contacts my workplace for news (headers like "Business LLC is doing this thing to end world famine") to fill blank space. Every single time we try to be as exact as possible while leaving technicalities aside, but the reporters every single time manage to 1) extract a click-baity/sensationalist headline from an isolated phrase during the dialog and 2) gets 90% of the text slightly wrong on the limit of being a lie.
Dated a journalist who would ask me to explain tech things. Aghast, I asked if this was how she wrote about everything. It was. She's now a management consultant which explains alot.
It was the barest of understandings. When I realised there is a class of people who make decisions on what journalists write, I realised how misaligned the 'tech zeitgeist' can be
I'd like to know how you would explain a complicated topic to the average reader, all keeping it between 600-700 words, on a tight deadline, with quotes from a variety of people, and engaging enough to hold a reader's attention to know how this particular topic will impact their lives.
These are the hurdles reporters face when reporting on complicated topics.
That's how stories are written. Short, succinct and informative enough to give the readers what they need for the day. Now, there are times when reporters work on "enterprise" pieces that dives fairly deep into a particular topic. Many national papers have investigative teams that churn out one or two stories A YEAR, but they are dense thorough. Perhaps that what you might enjoy reading.
Sure, I'm aware that this is how things are done. The problem is that the goal isn't really to convey the information in its best form, it's to alter the information to suit the existing form.
When people are complaining about how a format doesn't suit what it is trying to present, I don't believe the correct response is to underline how difficult it is to properly format things that way. If the format is set in stone for various reasons, perhaps the solution is to not publish things that are complicated rather than failing in an attempt to simplify complex issues.
Would it be worthwhile to create an index where people that are experts in something could vouch for the journalists that seem to know what they're talking about?
E.g. I can verify that on the information security topic Joseph Cox from Motherboard is constantly on topic, but that information is useless to me personally, because by the time Vice publishes something it's already old news for people in the industry (or anyone following infosec twitter really). But that information could be useful for someone else and in return I would like to know which journalists actually know a thing or two about say ML/AI or astrophysics.
>If we wait till we're ready, we'll never get started.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
Carl Zimmer, New York Times (science);
Dennis Overbye, New York Times (physics, astronomy);
Geoffrey A. Fowler, Washington Post (technology);
Nicole Nguyen, Wall Street Journal (technology);
Dexter Filkins, New Yorker (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan);
Ben Smith, New York Times [ex-BuzzFeed] (media);
Bob Woodward
That's the incredibly frustrating thing about the problems of journalism. It's a horribly broken, extractive institution, but there are simply no better solutions. Information flow is just too important, it has too many potential exploits, and there's no uninterested agent that can validate it (eg gov't regulation of what journalists publish would be a disaster).
But I think in the time since then I have allowed for the idea that it's more complex than this. The "getting it wrong" part is not universal - some people do better than others. Further, when we are experts in something, we are more opinionated, and those firm opinions are not always universally held or appropriate for a general audience, they may even be distracting.
I think the more general thing to say is it's hard to assess the quality of reporting and quoted sources when it's a topic we're less familiar with -- not that the reporting is necessarily all terrible.
As an expert, what you want when you work with many journalists is a dedicated journalist handler who is not an expert.
Make sure this person understands the basics properly and they make sure the journalist understands. After some time explaining the same topic you both usually know the common misunderstandings and easiest-to-understand explanations. Then, give the journalist a phone number and tell them to call for any questions whatsoever.
At least for us, during field measurements, that usually worked quite well, I didn't find any significant mistakes afterwards.
Personally, I call it the Dan Brown effect, because when I was a teen I read "The Da Vinci Code" (I am not expert) a few months before reading "Digital Fortress" (I am somewhat knowledgable) and I found it so profoundly bad that it mad me angry for wasting my time.
Great point. I have exactly same experience when one guy who wrote something with total confidence and absolute cluelessness. I would not have known had I not been very familiar with the subject. This made me think what all other things they might be ignorant but still write with such an expert tone.
In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann amnesia effect. He used this term to describe the phenomenon of experts believing news articles on topics outside of their fields of expertise, even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the experts' fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding. He explains the irony of the term, saying it came about "because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have
We really need to retire "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" and relegate it to a /glossary on HN along with the various philosophical razors, "Dunning-Kruger effect", "X fallacy", "gaslighting", and other intellectual placeholders like that.
As soon as I read the grandparent comment, I knew there was going to be a flood of people arriving to supply us with some wiki link.
This way we can just cut to the chase with "Ah, I smell a case of /glossary#4 going on!".
