A brilliant short summary of the problems with popular media: Balance, controversy, and replication

My friend Alex Zwissler over at the Chabot observatory did a nice post that begins with an experiment you can do at home:

This will be really exciting. …Today we’re going to do a real life SCIENCE experiment! … OK, well sort of.  For those of you nice enough to have read my previous posts, you’ll recall I’ve often woven in the impact of the media on our perceptions of science related issues. Today we’re going to get really sciency and dig way deeper.

So for our experiment we need to set up our “lab”, which will physically reside inside of your mind.  In order to ensure there is no danger of external contamination, turn off the TV and set your digital devices to airplane mode or something (admit it, you never really turn them off when taking off anyway).  Find a quiet place to sit, and close your eyes.

Now I want you to think back to a time when you had the occasion to read or see a news story about a topic or event with which you had personal experience.  You may have been one of the subjects of the story, or your company or family member was, or maybe you were just a firsthand witness to the circumstances that were being reported.  Now, quickly, think about the reporting …were all the facts correct, and perhaps more importantly, were all the facts included?  Was the context and meaning for those facts accurately portrayed?  Again, was anything missing or misrepresented?

According to my precise calculations based on the replication of this experiment many times, I can reliably predict the following…the story that you read or saw got it all wrong.  The journalist left things out, misrepresented the facts, got the context wrong, and just plain blew it.  You questioned the professionalism of that journalist, and perhaps even their intent.  And most importantly, the more you knew about the actual facts, the worse the story was.

So let’s deconstruct this…there are many things going on here at once.  First on the media side (we’ll came back to you later) there are a number of factors at work.  I won’t get into an exhaustive list here, but for me the top three are “balance”, “controversy” and “replication”.

Read more…

Alex’s explanations mirror my own experience and are both evocative and concise, so I heartily recommend his exposition.  I’ve certainly talked with great reporters who do get the story right most of the time, but those are an exception to the general rule.  With the decline of expert journalism, it’s only going to get worse, so it’s important to be a savvy consumer of modern media-don’t take action on important issues based solely on what you read in the news without lots of independent investigation!

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