Journalism
voltagegate | April 28, 2007Zuska blasted some moron at SciAm for referring to our own Shelley Batts as "attractive" during his summary of Shelley's recent run in with the lawyers at Wiley over the reproduction of a research figure:
Excuse me? "Seems to be attractive"? WTF???
I mean, what the f*ck does that have to do with anything in the story? Why the gratuitous mention of Shelley's appearance?
Oh, I know why. Because she's a WOMAN. And women, at all times, you must remember that you are women first and foremost. Your appearance is ever and always an issue, and no matter what the hell you are ever doing - be it…
jstemwedel | December 7, 2006Uncle Fishy and RMD pointed me to this story in the New York Times about a last-minute extra assignment (due today) for students enrolled in "Critical Issues in Journalism" at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Not an extra credit assignment, mind you -- an extra assignment they all get to do just to pass the course, on account of the fact that the 200+ students enrolled in the class apparently had some trouble handling the exam without cheating:
...a Web site, RadarOnline.com, posted an account, attributed to an unidentified source, that said the Columbia Graduate…
jstemwedel | October 9, 2006I'm blaming the folks at Three Bulls! for the post that incited this one. Indeed, I started my descent into what is clearly a delusional plan in a comment there.
The short version: Pinko Punko was disturbed at how very little actual communication of content was involved in a presumably science-centered media frenzy. The "journalists" in question neither sought actual informative content from scientists (let alone striving to understand that content), nor passed on anything like it to their viewers. To those of us who expect journalism to communicate actual content (or at least try to),…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2006Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon put up a post about gender essentialism that starts by citing this post at Mixing Memory on how people's representations of homosexuality affect their attitudes toward homosexuality. Because Chris's post cited my two posts (initially sparked by Jessica's post at Feministing), I came in for some criticism from Greensmile in this comment at Pandagon. As I believed these criticisms to be based on a misunderstanding of my position, I responded. Greensmile then was kind enough to read my posts and to respond that we seem to be having "the most violent agreement",…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2006The other day I was chatting with one of my contacts within the world of journalism, who told me about attending a conference aimed at getting reporters more access to scientists. The conference actually collected a good number of working scientists who came to speak with the reporters (not just to present them information, but to answer questions at length). And, the reporters got the opportunity to see research as it was being conducted (e.g., to be in the field with scientists to watch their data collection, rather than just to hear the conclusions drawn at the end of the process). It…
jstemwedel | June 21, 2006Given that I've weighed in on "nerd culture" and some of the social pressures that influence women's relationships to this culture, I had to pass this on:
The New York Daily News ran an article extolling the advantages of nerds as lovers. It's pretty much the dreck you'd expect. Of course, the nerds in question are all male (because, female nerds?!). Also, it's not obvious to me that real nerd culture would embrace the nerd exemplars discussed in the story as bona fide nerds. Tiger Woods? Adam Brody? David Arquette? We're not really talking the pocket-protector set (nor even the, "…
jstemwedel | June 20, 2006I think after this one, we'll be ready to move on to cow (or soy) milk and solids!
My last post on the breastfeeding issue pointed you to an academic examination of some of the claims being advanced in support of the superiority of breastfeeding. Joseph from Corpus Callosum left a detailed comment expressing some dissatisfaction with that examination. You really should read the whole comment, but his main points are roughly:
You can find evidence that supporters of breastfeeding are biased, but that doesn't mean you aren't also biased.
In a body of scientific literature, we ought to weigh…
jstemwedel | June 20, 2006A few days ago I pondered the ethical dimensions of breastfeeding given a recent article trumpeting its astounding benefits for infants and mothers. Those ethical considerations took as given that the claims trumpeting in the article were more or less true.
Today, I want to point you to an examination of those very claims by Rebecca Goldin (Director of Research, Statistical Assessment Service, Assistant Professor, Mathematical Sciences at George Mason University), Emer Smyth (Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at Univ. of Pennsylvania), and Andrea Foulkes (Assistant Professor of…
jstemwedel | June 19, 2006I'm following up on my earlier post in the wake of the outing of dKos blogger Armando. At Majikthise, Lindsay Beyerstein had posted an interesting discussion of the issues around pseudonymous blogging, and whether it might sometimes be ethical to reveal the secret identity of a pseudonymous blogger. She raises lots of interesting issues about whether blogging is properly regarded as a species of journalism, and how the ethics of blogging might be related to the journalistic ethics of the "old media". As well, Armando turns up in the comments to disagree with Lindsay's analysis of the…
jstemwedel | June 5, 2006Hey, do you remember that oft cited Newsweek article from 1986 that proclaimed that the chances of a 40-year-old single, white, college educated woman getting married were less than her chances of getting killed in an act of terrorism? It turns out it was wrong. From a recent retraction of that article:
Twenty years later, the situation looks far brighter. Those odds-she'll-marry statistics turned out to be too pessimistic: today it appears that about 90 percent of baby-boomer men and women either have married or will marry, a ratio that's well in line with historical averages. And the days…
jstemwedel | April 2, 2006In a post last week, I was trying to work out whether science journalism can do something more for us than just delivering press releases from the scientists. Specifically, I suggested that journalists with a reasonable understanding of scientific methodology could do some work to assess the credibility of the research described in the press releases, as well as the credibility of the scientists issuing those press releases.
Although the post was concerned with the general question of whether science journalism can do this bit of evaluative work for a lay audience that, by and large, is both…
jstemwedel | March 30, 2006In response to my first entry on Steve Fuller's essay on Chris Mooney's book, The Republican War on Science, Bill Hooker posted this incisive comment:
Fuller seems to be suggesting that there is no good way to determine which scientists in the debate are most credible -- it all comes down to deciding who to trust.
I think this misses an important piece of how scientific disputes are actually adjudicated. In the end, what makes a side in a scientific debate credible is not a matter of institutional power or commanding personality. Rather, it comes down to methodology and evidence.
So, in other…
jstemwedel | January 10, 2006An interesting piece of the Korean stem cell fiasco that escaped my notice the first time around is that the Korean investigative television program, "PD Notebook," that exposed the faking of photographs for the now-discredited Science article did so using techniques that violated journalistic ethics.
Take a moment to let that sink in.
Here's a lab that is reporting what looks to be great success with cutting edge scientific research. Then Choi Seung Ho, producer of "PD Notebook," gets an anonymous email from someone who claims to be a member of Hwang Woo-suk's laboratory, claiming that…