Let them. If the paper is doing its job, it should stand behind its reporting and analysis. To do otherwise is irresponsible and it’s also caving in to politicians who know how to work the refs.
I’m glad you referred to it as an “idea” since it is pretty rare in practice.
You probably want a cite for that too… hmmm, with all the poll-driven “news” stories out there I wonder if I can find one where the newsroom is polled about there beliefs and maybe even voting habits. I seem to recall one… about 20 years ago.
Of course fact checking is important, or at least should be. But your example is not a good one because of the complexity of the issue. What the reporter should do in that case is find someone of expertise to present the alternative viewpoint. Maybe that’s a fine line but that’s what I would have done. I’m not going to become a budgeting expert overnight.
Avoiding pointing out facts “because of the complexity of the issue” is another responsibility frequently avoided by poor journalists.
Precisely this. Unless you are writing a comment or opinion piece, it is not your job as a reporter to point this out. The reporter should be invisible in the story.
Oh for Pete’s sake, it is exactly the job of a journalist to report and explain the facts around an issue or event. If a public official says the tax rate is X and it’s actually Y, it would be misleading to let the public official’s comment stand uncorrected.
If the President said “16 children die every day in the US because of gun violence” and the fact was it was 16 people, the inability to find anyone to mouth those words shouldn’t preclude a responsible journalist from including it in the story. It should be sourced, obviously, but just because an “expert” exhales and forms the words doesn’t make it any more true or relevant than if he doesn’t.
I think we just have a different idea of the location of the line where the reporter is making a judgement call that isn’t his to make. Just because some of the readers think something is obviously true or obviously untrue doesn’t make them either.
If the reporter quotes someone who says what you did, that the tax rate doesn’t cover the deficit, then odds are pretty good that he’s going to get calls and letters telling him that the Governor is full of it as well as calls and letters telling him that the someone who says otherwise is full of it.
(Bolding mine) That can often be a lot harder than it sounds. Quite often the people with the expertise to provide comment on a matter don’t want to (or can’t); or their views are the same as the other people you’ve already interviewed, or the only people you can find with the other viewpoint aren’t really “qualified” to comment on it in the context of the story.
As I thought about it a little more, it seemed to me that readers are often annoyed with reporters because they won’t draw the same conclusions that they do, which is what Garfield appeared to be doing. I may be picking a few nits but what may appear to be the obvious conclusion to some readers isn’t necessarily so and since reporters routinely seek out opposing viewpoints, they are often reluctant to draw any conclusions and instead let the readers make their own decisions. Opinions are for another part of the newspaper.
Your second statement (journalists have political views!) is not related to your first. And when I say not related, I mean point-blank that it is not related at all. Journalists may or may not be biased, but the existence of opinions on political subjects doesn’t make them biased. Most of them try (with varying degrees of success) to keep those views out of their work. Anyway bias is a separate topic from stupidity.
I am not talking about opinions, I am talking about facts.
If a politician says the population in a city grew by 3 million people in a decade, and the census says it actually lost 3 million, it is not a matter of opinion, and it is the responsibility of a journalist to provide factual information to his readers.
There are such things as facts, and they do not need to be left up to each individual reader to decide whether or not they are true. It is fine and good and responsible of a journalist to point out these facts, when they are relevant to the story at hand.
“Letting the readers make their own decisions” or drawing conclusions refers to readers forming opinions based on facts. But they need to be provided the facts in order to do so.
In the tax example, it is presumably a fact what the tax rate actually is. It is presumably a fact what the tax brought in last year. It is math to figure out how much that tax rate would have brought in last year. It is presumably a fact what the deficit is. It is math to figure out whether or not one amount is bigger than the other.
So, it’s a fact to report what the official said.
It’s a fact to report what the tax rate is.
It’s a fact to report what the tax brought in before the raise.
It’s a fact to report what the math says the tax will bring in after the raise.
It’s a fact to report what the deficit is.
It’s a fact to report whether one number is larger than the other.
Which brings up a related dumb story/reporter pet peeve of mine.
“Sheriffs departments funding short 1.5 million this year”.
Whats the total budget? 2 million? Oh shit, break out the personal assualt weapons and hunker down!
30 million? Oh, just put off buying new cruisers for a year, delay a bit of hiring, do a bit of belt tightening and blah blah all will be okay.
Numbers without context…GAAHHHHHHH it drives me crazy.
The implications of journalistic stupidity/carelessness include deceptive and outright false and damaging medical and scientific reporting.
Case in point: this week’s story about ex-Cleveland Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar, who says his brain damage has been reversed by a “pioneering” Florida doctor named Rick Sponaugle. Accounts published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and a widely distributed Associated Press version regurgitate Kosar’s claims about this wondrous “integrated” physician.
Apparently no reporters thought to ask for documentation of Sponaugle’s “15 years of brain research” (he’s actually an anesthesiologist who runs a drug detox clinic in Florida, and whose therapy consists of unspecified intravenous fluids and nutritional supplements. According to the Pub Med online database, Sponaugle hasn’t published a single paper in any recognized scientific journals). Kosar says his brain PET scans document reversal of injury, but there’s no evidence any reporter asked to have an outside specialist review them.
Bottom line: the press gives credence to a dubious practitioner whose claims are heavily non-believable (if there’s evidence you can reverse organic brain injury and make it disappear from scans, the Nobel committee will beat a path to your door).
It’s not just woo that gets a free pass from the news media. “Major breakthroughs” in legitimate science are breathlessly reported without any real analysis of their applicability in the real world or what work needs to be done before the results can be confirmed.
Yes, that seems to be not a very thorough article. The next day the same guy wrote an article about whether the Browns’ defense will be 4-3 or 3-4 next year. So…there’s that (not an excuse; an explanation).
To give a little credibility back to the paper, “groundbreaking” is in quotes in the headline, meaning the paper isn’t calling it groundbreaking, the doctor or the athlete is. And the 15 years of research claim is qualified by “he said”, so the paper is reporting that the doctor said he has been researching the brain for 15 years.
Contrary to my previous posts about fact-checking, “I’ve been researching the brain for 15 years” is kind of hairy to fact check, because it depends heavily on an interpretation of the word “researching”.
The thing is … I’m not accusing anyone of being stupid. I’m suggesting that biases are such that being correct is not all that important when a “journalist” is on the right side of an issue.
Sports reporters’ ability to report medical issues (increasingly important in sports) is quite bad in general.
At the very least, the reporter should have noted that the doctor’s credentials were in anesthesiology, not neurology, his association with a naturopath who relies heavily on enemas for “detoxification”, and that it is rather unusual to say the least to be involved in “brain research” for 15 years and not have published a single research paper on the brain (or, it would appear, on any other scientific/medical subject). It took me about ten minutes to find this on Google. To be fair, though, it was probably far more important to research the 4-3 defense. :dubious:
You don’t just report alleged scientists’ claims uncritically - you need to make an elementary effort to educate readers about their qualifications and record.
I’m sorry if I misunderstood your position. If I am opposed to the original premise of this thread, it’s because the reporters with whom I worked were generally bright people and genuinely cared about getting the story right.
Have you ever heard the phrase “lying with statistics”? Give me leave to sort through all the facts out there and I will prove anything on any side of any subject.
Or did you not just live through this election season?
Facts are important, but they are important in the way Wikipedia is important. You must have a base of facts to proceed onward. But Wikipedia is useless for analysis, interpretation, understanding, nuance, policy, history, and most everything else that overlays the factual base.
Having the facts and then explaining what the facts “mean” or worse, what the facts “really mean” has been shown to be impossible. We didn’t always think this way. Most of the 20th century was a search for the proper - objective - way to gather the “right” information and then use that as your basis for reality. This wasn’t just the idea behind modern news reporting. Various political movements called for fact-based technocrats to run the country. I’d argue that modern science fiction was built on the notion that there was a “right” way of doing things that everybody could - and should - agree upon, because the authors reflected this philosophy, which itself was embedded in the optimism about progress and the future of their times. From about the 1950s through the 1970s there was a vogue for political novels in which some outsider who told the people “the truth” and gave them non-biased policies would sweep the country, left and right. How naive was that?
We no longer believe in reality crossing political boundaries. It’s clear that the left and right operate in separate realities, because they view the world through separate lens - call them separate axiom systems. Things that are obvious to one side - based entirely on a set of facts - are delusional or hateful to the other. As an extreme: If your axiom is that government is the enemy then any set of facts will be interpreted in that light. Fact checking in such a world fails because both sides can draw upon any number of very accurate facts - we are overloaded with facts about many things although oddly nearly factless about many other things - that support their case. Being reductionistic about what a fact is in this world is hopeless. It really does matter what the meaning of “is” is. In most cases the definition of “tax rate” or “deficit” can’t even be pinned down without pages of fine print. What will be brought in afterward is a mere guess, not a fact at all.
I am not at all anti-fact, despite saying this. Facts are important. But context is everything. What people really want is context, not facts. They can’t work it out for themselves. There are too many facts (and holes without good facts at all) on too many subjects with too much complexity that would require too much time. What people want from journalism is what it means, or better, what it really means. And that journalism can’t really give them.
I think a huge part of the issue is that people disagree over “What it means”, too. For some people the issue could be Extremely Very Important Indeed while for others (even in the same area/field/location) it could be Utterly Irrelevant. And the journalist frequently has to write a story explaining to the latter group why the thing in question is a Big Deal.