It’s in times like these that we need a man named Hans who cries out for empathetic behavioral change rather than dependence on purely technological cures. He’s a great example of what a difference good public outreach can be for any field. You must watch til the end:
Hans Rosling, you are a great man. Every new talk he gives I fall a little harder.* There is also a documentary about him (from Swedish TV?), if you’re interested. It’s not a work of art – I’ve never seen another documentary start with a statistician putting on his pants – but it gets interesting in the middle. Citing the change in child mortality rates in Egypt in the last the last 25 years, he observes that often journalists miss slow trends in favor of splashier discrete events.
I saw another criticism of journalism today: Why Don’t Journalists Link to Primary Sources? This is in the Bad Science blog written by Ben Goldacre of the Guardian. He talks about several distortions of recent health studies in particular, but his general points are interesting:
If we had a culture of linking to primary sources, if they were a click away, then any sensible journalist would have been be too embarrassed to see this article go online. Distortions like this are only possible, or plausible, or worth risking, in an environment where the reader is actively deprived of information.
…They count on it being inconvenient for you to check. It’s also an interesting difference between different forms of media: most bloggers have no institutional credibility, and so they must build it, by linking transparently, and allowing you to easily double check their work.
I’m not sure I buy this. Good sources like the BBC do link to the primary studies. The problem is that it’s almost always inconvenient for readers to check, not because there is no link, but because no one has that amount of time to double check every single article they come across even if the sources are available. Perhaps you can make the argument that a bit of crowdsourcing will be in play here so that even if no individual catches all the distortions, on average, the net at large will spot all egregious errors, but there’s a problem even then. When some piece of news or rumor as it were goes viral, the correction that follow rarely does.
These two things make me wonder about the value of real-time news reporting. While it is certainly valuable to learn that there has been a nuclear incident in Japan, isn’t the real value of that news the discussion it starts about nuclear power and the more in-depth analyses that follow? There doesn’t seem to be a balance right now before long form journalism and fast paced news. I think this is probably true for photojournalism too.
* New hero: Hans Rosling.