Okay, I’m not coming up with an interpretation of this that could have a negative connotation. In fact the most obvious (to me) interpretation is quite flattering. 'Splain?
It sounds very vain. I don’t know what these people do, but I can imagine the department head might not want the public to think his staff believes they’re saving the universe. But that said, it’s a great quote and in many situations I’d be hard-pressed not to use it.
Agreed. I likely would have used it myself. The trick is if the powers that be actually use that phraseology to their advantage. They may take offense instead. Foolishly, if you ask me. It looks like a ripe opportunity for the university or whatever to say a particular project (and thus and and all) is underfunded.
Yes.
Even my small experience with reporters in high school at the local small town paper make me suspicious of reported facts, and even pictures.
“Brian’s braces add an s sound to his answer, and his quiz bowl answer is ruled incorrect.” Well, we didn’t have those buzzers in that game, so you obviously just had a picture of that kid from another game and decided no one would notice. If you’ll lie about the small stuff, you’ll certainly lie about the big stuff when you really have something to gain.
“Students march in protest against [something].” Yes, all ten of them in this picture. I’ll bet you $500 there are only three other people left out of this picture. So at a school with thousands of students, this cause managed a turnout of well under 1%, but for some reason the picture is on the front page of the newspaper. Could it be that reporters have a drive to look good and create interest through controversy? Hmmmm???
Also, my experience with science reporters for mass media outlets tells me that many, many reporters just don’t care if they’re accurate. Even if they’re technically accurate, most of the rest of the time they know so little about the subject that there are tens of thousands of people who could have made a more informative report on the subject. Did anyone see 60 Minutes’ report on BitTorrent? It assumed that you literally had not heard the term before, and presented no real food for thought.
No, weirdly. At least I have not been quoted on anything stupid I said. I was very briefly a reporter and then for almost a year an editor at two different publications. We would have been fired in disgrace for things that I have seen reporters do from the source side of the notebook. I find that all of them will try to get you to go along with their narrative, regardless of whether your observations make any sense to their “narrative”, called an angle. The key to avoiding going off message to what you saw, or want to say, is to repeat what you said over and over again every time they change the question. They may punish you by not using your quotes, but they will get the message that you are on to what they are up to and move on to the next “source”. Most reporters must use several sources for each story and will not waste time once they see that you are not going to give them a yes/no to whether you still beat your wife. If whether you beat your wife is the story, that is all they care about and they will try to trick you into answering it no matter how many times you tell them your employers would never retain such a person.
That’s possibly misleading but it’s not a lie.
This is shocking to you? Yes, controversial stuff attracts news coverage.
I didn’t say it was shocking, I said it was (I sort of said) it was offensive.
And yes, I think the other one is lie. It’s at the VERY least journalistic inaccuracy and laziness.
Vain? Meh. To me the hyperbole is obvious, along with a good dose of humility (just twelve guys) and their intent to try to have a large, socially positive impact.
If someone sees that as BAD, then they either flunked English lit or are generally an idiot. Which isn’t to say that academic department heads are never idiots.
Some of this can come from above. I’ve had the unpleasant experience of working for editors who get a real hard on for a story and then get upset when you don’t discover whatever facts they presumed, or actually discover the opposite. I actually had to tell one editor that I can’t force someone to say a specific thing, only to have them say, ‘True, but you can still get them to tell you what you need.’
I can easily imagine some reporters, especially those just starting out and not wanting to appear like incompetents and/or argumentative prima donnas, just going along with whatever the editor says and using questionable methods to get the quotes they want.
(Huh. I had no idea there was a time cap on post-editing)
Anyway, Cardinal, with things like the number of students at that protest you have to consider what’s more important; That there were not hundreds of students or that they had a legitimate gripe. In the latter casethen yes, of course it deserves attention and people should know there is a problem.
Sometimes things are just sad and I have to lampshade it. During the presidential campaign McCain and Palin came to town in a great big hooplah that drew just about everybody from everywhere. In response, the local Dems got together and tossed some big names around and laid out there own spiel in a local park. It was poorly coordinated and thought out and nobody knew about it. Despite my personal liberal leanings it was so bad I had to mention in my article that while tens of thousands were listening to McCain, the only people out in the park to support the Dems were six reporters.
What gets me is how much credence is given to the media…especially in light of the discrepancies between what I’ve personally experience and what makes it to print.
It’s rare when a tech issue is accurately portrayed in the press, and it’s obvious to folks in the know that the press doesn’t know what they’re talking about…and yet we assume they get everything else right in everything else they write.
Go figure.
It’s not that “science” reporters don’t care, it’s that they can’t afford to care. Many “science” and “health” reporters are designated such because their editors decided that their newspaper/TV/radio station needed one. They are also generalists; they may have to cover a story about technology one day and physics or biology or the environment the next. There is no way a reporter can keep up with all of the issues going on in science, and often no time for the reporter to do his homework, so what you, the media consumer, get is an incomplete or inaccurate story.
That said, there are fellowships and programs for reporters who want to be good science reporters. The University of North Carolina, for example, offers a master’s program in science and health journalism, and other universities also offer doctoral-level programs in health communication. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to take the time off needed to complete such a program, and unless you have the financial resources to do it, it’s cost-prohibitive.
Yes, I’m sure that’s the case and the fundamental reason for the situation. What gets me riled up is the overall attitude so many times, though, even if it’s mostly on the part of the editors who assigned the reporters. There seems to be an attitude sometimes of “we report better because we’re not trained in the field”, which has a gaping logic hole in it. An otherwise respectable podcast I get said that the LHC was guiding beams of light with magnets. I just couldn’t take it anymore and turned it off. Seriously, light is affected by magnets? Doesn’t that sound suspicious? You didn’t get this proofed by anyone with some background? That’s just lazy and careless.
I’m not defending them, but I wonder how much of it falls into: We’ve got this thing (LHC) built by career scientists (Multiple PHD’s) and we have to tell White Trash Amerika what they’re doing in the 22 seconds we’ve got before the next Ambulance Chaser Advert runs.
I spent years as a reporter, and even more years in public relations, where it was part of my job to train people to talk to reporters. In all those years I can only remember a couple of times where it seemed to me that a reporter deliberately tried to slant the story – and in one case it was because the subject tried to weasel his way out of answering a direct, yes or no question.
In a lot of cases, the subjects of the story thought they said X. When I looked back at my own notes of the interview, my notes suggested the subject in fact said Y.
In some cases, the subject refused to take our advice of “just answer the question and shut the hell up,” and then was surprised the reporter found the extraneous comments more interesting than the actual answer.
In most cases it was because the subject tried to provide a highly technical, nuanced answer on a topic they had made their life’s work, and couldn’t explain it in a way that could be understood by a person who hadn’t spent years studying the topic. I’ve noticed this particularly with engineers who go ballistic if they say “98.8 percent of the time” and it gets reported as “nearly always.”
And finally, there was the case of one client who wanted to sue a newspaper for libel, even though he couldn’t identify a single error or mistake or misquote in the story. We had to explain to him that a story that reports bad news is not “libel” if what it reports is actually true.
the other reason I see a lot is “I know the truth, but I am not sure of the ‘official’ version so I am just going to shut the hell up”
I tell my clients to never ever ever say no comment…if its something you don’t want to comment on at least tell the journalist, I need to double check my facts, I want to make sure my info is correct, I have only heard gossip and I want to check first, or the old standby of that info is a bit commercially sensitive, I shouldn’t talk about it…anything but NO COMMENT
When my mom was a political reporter, she used to get threatened with libel suits all the time, even if she had every word on tape. It’s very rare for legit reporters to intentionally misquote anyone, and outright “fabricated” quotes don’t happen at all. The main two things that happen are that reporters truncate or paraphrase quotes, or (the thing that people get the most angry about), they get accurately quoted on something they thought was off the record. Nothing is off the record.
As for being “tricked,” well you can’t get tricked into saying something you don’t want to say. You can become overly trusting, maybe, but they’re still not tricking you into saying anything you don’t really think. Never say anything you don’t want to see in print.
I wasn’t tricked into saying anything. I was simply quoted by a journalist who was a friend of the family, and with whom I had been talking at a family BBQ. The quote itself wasn’t stupid. It was just rather banal. But I was pretty angry that he had used a casual, social conversation without asking me. I haven’t spoken to him since.
When I was 16, the local paper did a spot on me as a “young artist” (their phrase, not mine; it was for writing). I told them that I wrote in chemistry and calculus. . .then said, “oh, can you not say that? I don’t want my teachers to get mad at me.”
They said “sure.”
It was in the article anyway. I was kinda ticked, but it wasn’t the end of the world.