Sunday, March 24, 2013

Ideal Journalist


In my personal opinion, Mooney is correct in his article in saying that the increasing ‘cheapness’ of the media in finding many reporters, most of which have received little to no training in specific areas of coverage (ex. Science journalism), has lead to a great demise in the accuracy of reporting.  On one hand, we have journalists that acknowledge their lacking scientific knowledge, and compensate by covering several scientific opinions on an issue despite the lack of evidence for some certain opinions.  These journalists introduce unfounded opinions to the general public, and can create huge misinterpretations of studies and of the facts discovered from those studies in doing so.  On the other hand, there are journalists that do not acknowledge their lack of scientific knowledge and can easily be fooled into publishing a story that may come from a disreputable source or have questionable data backing their claim.  These can be equally, if not more damaging to the general public because of the lack of the presentation of other options, which would at least allow the scientifically literate community to decipher which studies are accurate.

It is through the study of both of these extremes that one cannot tell a journalist to either publish many ideas on the same topic nor to publish one opinion on the topic.  It seems that a reactionary action is necessary to revive science journalism to where Mooney indicated it had been during the ‘space race’.   It is NECESSARY to have trained scientific journalists that can use their own training and expertise to identify newsworthy stories, assess their reliability and to convey the scientific information from these studies in an accurate way.  This would eliminate a large portion of the misinformation out there on any vast array of topics.  If journalists publishing articles were held to the same standards that scientists were in publishing scientific papers, the media would be a much more useful tool, as opposed to a circus that will spin a story to benefit the interests of the highest bidder or publish an article with the facts of the news completely rearranged due to a lack of understanding.

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