MSM
gregladen | April 29, 2017From MMFA:
Broadcast networks are decreasing their climate coverage at a time when the case for reporting on the issue is become more and more compelling. By ignoring this serious matter, media are failing to inform audiences about pressing impacts on human migration patterns, women, and the economy.
In 2016, media had no shortage of compelling reasons to cover climate change -- from the revelation that it was the third consecutive hottest year on record to the United States’ election of a climate denier to its highest office. Yet broadcast news outlets’ coverage of climate change dropped a…
gregladen | June 7, 2014Given recent attention to the issue of consensus in climate change research, this is a good time to mention a paper that came out recently by John Abraham, John Cook, John Fasullo, Peter Jacobs, Scott Mandia and Dana Nuccitelli called "Review of the consensus and asymmetric quality of research on human-induced climate change."
I'll paste the abstract below but first I'll summarize it in a sentence. The few papers that explicitly deny the basic science of climate change are rightfully rejected by the peer review process because they are crap. Bit they do find more attention by main stream…
grrlscientist | March 15, 2010tags: embargoed science, embargoes, publishing, MSM, journalism, science writing
Image: Orphaned?
Embargoes: you either love them or hate them, and I hate them. No, let me rephrase: I despise embargoes. In fact, science story embargoes have been my daily rant for literally years. No, really. Every f*cking day. Well, except maybe for Sundays, which is devoted to ranting about all those religious wackaloons who have been trying to recruit visiting the previous week and preaching at me when I was absent-minded enough to open the door. But until a few months ago when I finally managed to…
bioephemera | May 26, 2009
This would be funnier if it weren't so painfully true. Also see the sequel.
I didn't get to this for a few days because I was working too hard to blog last week. In the meantime, Language Log responded with an especially egregious example of this sort of oversimplification.
Cartoon by Jorge Cham, via Sheril at the Intersection.
bioephemera | May 25, 2009Just when I was wondering why there hasn't been more mainstream coverage of the Jared Diamond/New Yorker lawsuit I blogged about at the beginning of this month, Columbia Journalism Review has an update. And in a recent article in Science, Diamond commented, saying "The complaint has no merit at all."
Oddly, the Science article (which is unfortunately subscription-only) frames this whole situation as a conflict between different disciplines - mainly science and journalism.
Three worlds collide in this case. First is the world of science, specifically anthropology, which uses fieldwork and…
ddobbs | March 13, 2009From Andrew Sullivan:
I watched the Daily Show with growing shock last night. Did you expect that? I expected a jolly and ultimately congenial discussion, after some banter. What Cramer walked into was an ambush of anger. He crumbled from the beginning. From then on, with the almost cruel broadcasting of his earlier glorifying of financial high-jinks, you almost had to look away. This was, in my view, a real cultural moment. It was a storming of the Bastille. It was, as Fallows notes, journalism.
This is truly is something to see, just as Stewart's pieces on Cramer and CNBC, back to his…
thusspakezuska | March 9, 2009For the second time in a week (see here and here) I've blogged about something from the Philadelphia Inquirer. You may or may not know that the Inquirer recently went into bankruptcy proceedings. I don't know what I would do without the Inquirer to read everyday. Blogging is great but it simply cannot replace, in my opinion, regular newspaper reporting. Somewhat tangentially related to that: I recently renewed my subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was given the option to receive it, for a somewhat lesser price, as only an electronic edition. It completely replicates…
ddobbs | February 8, 2009The note below was originally a response to a comment that Bora Z left on my "More on uneasy symbiosis (mashup? smashup?) of mainstream and citizen media, but given the interest in this subject I thought I best give it its own post.
Thanks for writing, Bora. The limitations of small papers that you point out echo closely Helen Branswell's comments in Effect Measure's post; she defended an all-subjects-reporter colleague (whom I take it had been slighted about his flu reporting) along similar lines, noting that he had too much ground to cover to do them all in the sort of depth she was able…
ddobbs | February 7, 2009Effect Measure -- inspired by a thoughtful note from bird-flu ace reporter Helen Branswell -- ponders the implications of the increasing lack of specialization, and thus deep subject-specific expertise, among MSM reporters.
The conclusion we draw from this is that if you really want to know what's going onin the flu world you shouldn't depend on newspapers as a source of information but go to the next (meta)level, where news, comment, the peer reviewed science literature and the gray literature of official reports, press releases, and rumor filters are done better (or at least different)…