9 Ways Journalists Show They Don't Get Science

Over on Guardian blogs, there's hot discussion about perceptions of hacks and lab geeks, who often seem to work at cross purposes. It was sparked by a post authored by the online editor of Nature, Ananyo Bhattacharya.   The comment below turned the discussion around and drew widesread approval from academics.  Definitely there are some salient points.  Hat tip to "jferdy5" for his/her insights on science reporters' shortcomings, listed below:

• 1. False equivocation: one of the reasons why there's doubt about global warming is because journalists take a handful of crackpots, many of which have never studied science, and then "equivocates," or gives roughly equal weight, to this argument versus broad scientific concensus.
• 2. Anecdotes do not equal systematic evidence (they're inferior): "while vaccinations may work for millions of people, that will not help little Billy who now has autism." Sounds familiar?
•  3. Manufacturing dissent: taking a fringe opinion (anti-Global warming, anti-vaccination, anti-evolution, etc) and giving it a disproportional amount of space. 
•  4. Expert opinion: articles should clearly define why Dr. X is considered an expert. Frequently, I find they're either an economist, statistician, or other person who hasn't published in a particular area and seems to be motivated by political views rather than dispassionate scientific debate.
•  5. Data journalism: this is a particularly insipid form of pseudo-science: journalists should not simply tabulate national rates based on their own analyses because they do not do the correct statistical tests (Fisher exact tests, etc) to check if a result is scientifically valid or not. It's bad to do this because the result may look scientifically valid when it is not.
•  6. The use of "narrative:" linking together anecdotes using emotive language manipulates and misleads readers. In law it's called "leading the witness," in science, "systematic bias." In journalism, why is it considered "good writing?"
•  7. No clear authors of articles: it's hard to examine the validity of science "reporting" if we do not know who is doing it. Simply putting "Guardian" or "New York Times" does not help. Scientists are required to disclose their names and sources of funding, journalists should do the same. 
•  8. No citations: most Guardian articles, and in many papers, will discuss a study in inflammatory terms and not provide a link to the article, when they're available on pubmed. As well, no one cares what an untrained journalists' interpretation is. Just put the results and let us make up our mind. And no, sassy science headlines don't draw in readers, they just make your paper look stupid.
•  9. Sending a reporter to a country does not trump public health statistics: if the WHO reports that malnutrition in Malawi or India is declining, it does not matter how many people your "Development" reporters interview, you cannot recalculate / dispute a national malnutrition / AIDS / TB rate based on a few subjective, systematically biased, personal interviews.
•  The Guardian does all of these. Perhaps we can have a discussion about it, and why journalism is responsible for driving pseudo-science and the decline of Western civilization?

WikiLeaks plugged

A bank blockade is about to staunch the flow of information from Julian Assange's notorious WikiLeaks website. According to reports in the Guardian and the New York Times, two of the newspapers that splashed the news from a torrent of secret documents uploaded to the website mostly by a low-level American soldier, Bradley Manning, publishing has stopped abruptly. What's lacking is, er, liquidity.

Julian Assange announced Monday that his pro-transparency hacker website will temporarily halt publication because of a cash shortage and will now concentrate on fundaising efforts. Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, Western Union, and Paypal boycotted WikiLeaks last year after the release of thousands of classified U.S. State Department cables and a threat to leak a big stash of documents incriminating the Bank of America. Consequently, the organization has lost about 95 percent of its revenues, Assange said at a press conference in London. Mortgage frauds hinted at in B of A emails were published on the related site Anonymous in March, but had less impact than anticipated. Arizona and Nevada had already filed charges for

a host of deceptive practices by Bank of America, including falsely advising people that they must be in default before getting a modification, promising modifications would be made permanent after an initial trial period, and pursuing foreclosures even after assuring homeowners that the foreclosure process was stopped.

Already, the death knell is sounding and commentators are writing obituaries for the website, like this one in the Atlantic. While Manning remains in solitary confinement, the Australian whistleblower Assange is out on bail in Britain.

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Another Scribe Down.

In Tribute

Derek A. Brown, Journalist, Born May 7, 1947 in Bearsden, Glasgow, Scotland; married Eileen J. Brailsford, 1972; died February 23, 2011 in Herefordshire, England

The correspondent who countered brutality with humour and wordplay

Hogamany was celebrated in style at Nizamuddin East in the early 1990s thanks to the British foreign correspondent, Derek Brown. You couldn’t predict which tall, dark man would cross his threshold first on any given Scottish New Year, but a burra peg of whisky and a sumptuous spread of food would be waiting. Laughter would always punctuate Brown’s parties.

Derek Brown, who died last week in England at age 63, had worked as a journalist for four decades with the same newspaper, The Guardian. He was based in Delhi from 1987 through 1993 as their South Asia Bureau Chief, where he worked together with the reporter Ajoy Bose. Brown and his wife, Eileen, regarded India as their favorite posting during the 13 years spent “in foreign parts”, which included assignments in Brussels and Jerusalem. From Delhi, the couple took many road trips in their cherished white Ambassador before shipping out, in Derek’s jocular phrase, “from Bombay back to Blighty”. Brown’s final newspaper column appeared in The Guardian Weekly the day before he died. He is survived by his wife Eileen, his sister Sylvia and brother David, and his mother, Renee, who is 94.

While Brown clearly relished storytelling, he was a stickler for accuracy. His reporting frequently covered conflict, whether in Belfast, West Bengal or the West Bank, and perhaps it was to counteract the brutality Brown witnessed that he had fine-tuned his sense of humour and wordplay. The reporter of Falstaffian proportions took delight in the unexpected, and he was a close observer. On holiday, he might make do with “mutual incomprehension, moderated by much giggling and goodwill”, but he analyzed unfolding events with care and pulled no punches. He did not hesitate to “put the ugh in ugly” and to disclose the reality of that polite euphemism, communal strife. He covered Ayodhya, Kabul, Kashmir, caste wars and the long war in Sri Lanka.

Brown observed: “The civil war in Sri Lanka was unavoidable, and is unwinnable. It is the ghastly outcome of a sequence of events compounded of bigotry, obstinacy, and muddled thinking on both sides of the narrow straits separating the poor, bloodied little island from its gigantic neighbour, India.”

Much to his annoyance, Brown was briefly banned from Sri Lanka because of a headline that accompanied his extensive profile of its leader, Ranasinghe Premadasa. Presidential staff perceived an insult and withheld visas after reading the following title:

“Dhobi wallah to president: The rise to prominence and power of Sri Lanka’s new leader, Ranasinghe Premadasa, whose roots lie far from the country’s traditional ruling caste”.

The author Simon Winchester, a lifelong friend, recalled how, in addition to his collection of adventure tales and Penguin first editions, “Derek kept a hoard of newspaper headlines from his time in India in a tin box in the living room, many of them so funny one would weep.” That unfortunate one from Brown’s own news desk probably did not make it into this Pandora’s box of clippings.

In 1997, Derek Brown returned from the Middle East to London to help launch the online edition of The Guardian, and he stayed on staff until 2002, after which he contributed columns for the weekly print edition from his home office in Herefordshire county.

In order to mourn him in cyberspace, friends and colleagues must first tick a box on a Facebook page that says “I like Derek Brown, Rest In Peace.” Surely he’d chortle about that, as well as the fact that this obituary was outsourced to America, near Silicon Valley.

(The author is a journalist who has worked with The Independent and The Lancet. She reported from South Asia, West Asia and Southeast Asia for over a decade)

Obituary in the Indian Express
Photo of Derek Brown in New Delhi c 1991 is courtesy of Roger Hutchings

Wikileaks switches to Torygraph!

According to Luke Harding, of the Guardian, who recently co-wrote a quickie book about the Wikileaks saga, the Telegraph is nudging out the Guardian as Britain's public outlet and interpreter of Julian Assange's scoops. But how long this will last is anyone's guess. Negotiations between the Australian and the leftleaning British paper had been quite fraught, especially following the serialization of the book in the daily. Enter the Torygraph. Harding's tweet cited a rather anodyne piece in the Financial Times. The promised leaked cables exposing international banks and money institutions are expected to be released in the Telegraph now.