Excellent Media Insight

I meant to post sooner on this excellent article by the Columbia Journalism Review, Blinded by Science. In it, author Chris Mooney discusses examples and the various problems the media faces in attempting to achieve a “balanced” story. Right off the bat, he discusses Los Angeles Times reporter Scott Gold’s tensions with his editorial bosses in an article he published that discussed a new Texas law requiring doctors to discuss the theory that abortion can cause breast cancer. In the report, he presented viewpoints and overwhelming support that abortion does not, in fact, cause breast cancer. Studies have been performed, and the National cancer Institute has wholly rejected the theory, known more succinctly as the ABC theory. Mr. Mooney notes that all of Gold’s reporting is accurate to the letter, but still, his editors bemoaned the lack of an opposing viewpoint in a leaked internal memo.

Huh? As Mooney discusses in great detail, this is absurd and really ruins any chance of objective, accurate, scientific reporting because fringe elements will always be allowed to profess their viewpoints as if 50% of the world is on their side. Editors see balance as giving equal coverage to both sides of a story, regardless of how ludicrous, shoddy, and misrepresentative the science behind the dissenting opinion. Such was the case with Scott Gold, and unfortunately, his next story did not fair as well as his first, bowing to his editor’s complaints. Mooney tells it like it is:

Scott Gold had it exactly right on abortion and breast cancer. Then he produced an article on “intelligent design” so artificially “balanced” it was downright inaccurate and misleading. The basic notion that journalists should go beyond mere “balance” in search of the actual truth hardly represents a novel insight.

Wired magazine recently had some excellent coverage on intelligent design, the theory proposed by religious scientists (and by scientists, I mean a mathematician and a physicist, not biologists) to explain the unexplainable: our complexity and where we come from. Of course, the name includes nothing of its religious origin, just an Orwellian trick to subdue the angst the G-word stirs up in people. I cannot even begin to profess my feelings on ID(intelligent design), but I can say that reporting of the type done by Gold to appease his editors is dangerous for scientific progress. It undermines and denigrates the work of those in search of the truth, giving credence to those that currently have none. The support and evidence provided by ID(intelligent design) proponents is scant and full of euphemistic observations. (“Well, we cannot explain the complexity of the human eye with evolutionary theory; therefore, it must have been created by an intelligent being beyond our understanding.” These intelligent designers seem to imply that comprehension of the human eye, for example, is forever beyond our reach. If such were the case, why even study it at all? We should just abandon our research labs and take it at face value that a far more intelligent creature is at work.)

As Mooney points out, it is understandable that the media is not well-versed in science, but surely they can do a better job finding sources that do! It’s like shopping for a car: I do not know a great deal about cars, but when I shop for one, I talk to people and find reputable dealers. I’m not going to rely on a hole-in-a-wall used-car dealer trying to pawn off some POS: I know better. Journalists are intelligent, and should be able to apply such principles in their scientific reporting. Unfortunately, they do a very lousy job at it, and having editors push for balanced reporting serves little interest other than to pacify readers for the sake of being fair and politically correct.

I am sad that editorial boards would choose to focus on those aspects of journalistic standards as opposed to conveying truthful, accurate descriptions of scientific reality. Given that, I aim to maintain a certain, accurate level of balance to this story, leaving you with an astute observation by Mooney that should not be forgotten:

That doesn’t mean that scientific consensus is right in every instance. There are famous examples, in fact, of when it was proved wrong: Galileo comes to mind, as does a lowly patent clerk named Einstein. In the vast majority of modern cases, however, scientific consensus can be expected to hold up under scrutiny precisely because it was reached through a lengthy and rigorous process of professional skepticism and criticism.