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Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

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Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#321

Post by pydry »

tiznow wrote: post #312
Roark66 wrote: post #296

To be skeptical they first need competency to understand both sides of the argument. Unfortunately the longer I observe the work of journalists the more I become convinced,except few individuals, most people that become journalists do so because they failed in their primary choice of career. This is a huge threat to democracy that one of the most important functions in society (to inform) has been "outsourced" to a b…

"most people that become journalists do so because they failed in their primary choice of career." Well this is braindead. I assure you most journalists want to be journalists more than anything else -- that's the only reason to hang around in that industry.

My impression is that it's nowadays a poorly paid career of choice for the propertied upper classes for whom the job is an identity and means of social signaling and only incidentally an income.

Same as acting - perhaps easier to get into though.

They were for sure a lot more talented when there existed such a thing as a working class journalist.

They probably also had more resources available to them to do real journalism - before tech took the lion's share of the advertising pie.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#323

Post by _djo_ »

mcpackieh wrote: post #174
mike_hearn wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not that they can't do it, they just don't want to. Journalists with no science background are happy to write quite technical fact checks of articles - even articles written by scientists - when those articles are contradicting something the journalists are already invested in. And often the problems don't need specialist knowledge to spot. The before/after images purporting to be of surgery in this arti…

The issue is that journalists could do better if they wanted to, but they don't want to and there's no system of incentives in place that would make them want to. There's no such thing as a journalism license they could lose, and publishing nonsensical science articles doesn't hurt their careers in any way because nobody expects better of them. After all, they're just journalists with no STEM education... Even if you…

I don't think you have any idea of the kind of time pressures journalists are under, and how little time they have to devote hours or days of deep research to each and every story they work on. At best you can get that for a large story if you're an investigative journalist, but very few have that privilege.

All of the journalists I know personally would love to have more time to dig into stories, to do more background research, to spend more time following them up, and to get to understand a subject more deeply. None are given that opportunity in today's high pressure, short-staffed, and cut-to-the-bones newsrooms.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#324

Post by meowface »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #223
no_butterscotch wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes additionally journalists are a sort of priestly caste in our secular society. I'm personally not a fan as there's a lot of self-anointed representation by journos: "We're the voice of the people!" No you are not my voice! You are not elected! You are the voice of advertisers, your business and your political interests!

WaPo runs “Democracy dies in darkness” while parroting the absolute lie that was Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian Dissinformation”… that imo takes extra arrogance beyond just “we’re the voice of the people” or CNN’s “This might be illegal for you to read but we can because we are trained journalists”.

I don't believe WaPo ever claimed that. They wrote this in October 2020: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/24/hunter-bid...

>Insisting that the Hunter Biden laptop is fake is a trap. So is insisting that it’s real.

That's not saying it's Russian disinformation. Just that it's unconfirmed to be either disinformation or real. (Which, at the time, was the correct assessment.)

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#325

Post by marttt »

tiznow wrote: post #312
Roark66 wrote: post #296

To be skeptical they first need competency to understand both sides of the argument. Unfortunately the longer I observe the work of journalists the more I become convinced,except few individuals, most people that become journalists do so because they failed in their primary choice of career. This is a huge threat to democracy that one of the most important functions in society (to inform) has been "outsourced" to a b…

"most people that become journalists do so because they failed in their primary choice of career." Well this is braindead. I assure you most journalists want to be journalists more than anything else -- that's the only reason to hang around in that industry.

+1, former and trained journalist here. I would say all the best journalists I know in person (many of them among the very best ones in my country) have almost exclusively had journalism as their primary choice of career.

What separates top level and (as a cynical metaphor or stereotype) "screwed up former musician, now a critic and journo, lost in life" level journalists is that the former ones really-really understand the ethics of journalism. They make well-grounded, extremely careful ethical decisions, and they are able to make them fast.

As a side note, in my country, I'd say ethical reasoning in journalism has reached a higher level during the post-pandemic years (and, now, the war in Ukraine). I think journalists' grasp of science (scientific reasoning) has improved quite a bit as well during this same period.

Obviously, everything can always be better (also, 90% of everything is not-so-good), but todays' best journalism is actually pretty decent, isn't it.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#326

Post by biophysboy »

oneshtein wrote: post #309
biophysboy wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theres definitely lots of evidence: COVID on surfaces, animals that can catch COVID photographed in the market, cases surrounding/emerging from this point. But the smoking gun would be a covid positive sample from one of the animals, which we can’t get. This is what I mean by the evidence always being a little cloudy.

COVID jumped from humans to animals lot of times already. Whole animal farms were cleaned out.

I should have clarified - COVID positive samples collected at the time and place of origin

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#327

Post by COGlory »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #310
throwawaymaths wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wrong. There have been at least three known lab leaks of SARS cov-19 post pandemic. Here is one in Taiwan: https://thebulletin.org/2022/01/a-lab-assistant-involved-in-... becoming-infected-at-work/amp/ Covid-19 is very slippery. Analogizing from historical pandemics is begging the question and doesn't match the data.

How am I wrong? There were countless spillover events for the original SARS. To this day, it's not known precisely how many SARS spillover events there were, because they were so numerous and tracing was so poor back then. In a different comment in this thread, I cited a review article that goes over the evidence for widespread spillover events of SARS in 2002-2003.[0] The gist of it is that SARS popped up independen…

You're mixing up animal > human transmission, and zoonotic events. They are not equivalent. Human SARS spike protein RBD could bind palm civet ACE2, but not vice versa. Palm civets (and other animals) could act as reservoirs for human SARS, (as well as non-human SARS, which contributed to the zoonotic event), but that's not the same as a new virus jumping species. It's more like getting rabies from a raccoon.

It's possible that the original SARS jumped 3 times total, based on the genetic evidence, but the later two we don't really know because of the hinam -> animal route. Still, with the number of laboratory acquired infections of SARS-CoV-2, it doesn't really tip the scales.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#328

Post by COGlory »

pcrh wrote: post #300
COGlory wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Historically, a zoonitic origin is extremely likely. Historically, there have been far, far more documented lab leaks of SARS-CoV than there have been animal-human jumps. People that wish to shutdown lab leak conversation are quick to mix in engineering. Lots of less educated people can't tell the difference. It is very possible that the virus was both zoonotic in origin, and leaked from the lab.

There are numerous cornaviruses that infect humans as well as bats and birds, and have done so for thousands of years at least. Animal-to-human transfer of novel viruses is by far the most common cause of novel epidemics. >Many human coronaviruses have their origin in bats.[75] The human coronavirus NL63 shared a common ancestor with a bat coronavirus (ARCoV.2) between 1190 and 1449 CE.[76] The human coronavirus 229E…

Yes, I'm well aware of this, but it's not really applicable to the point I'm making, because those pre-dated laboratories.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#329

Post by chiefalchemist »

Roark66 wrote: post #296

To be skeptical they first need competency to understand both sides of the argument. Unfortunately the longer I observe the work of journalists the more I become convinced,except few individuals, most people that become journalists do so because they failed in their primary choice of career. This is a huge threat to democracy that one of the most important functions in society (to inform) has been "outsourced" to a b…

The solution starts with this:

If they're not skeptical, *by definition* they're not journalists.

We need to stop giving credit where is *not* due. As it is, we're doing a version of "everyone gets a trophy". That's fine for kids. But if they want to be called a journalist they need to earn it (i.e., meet the criteria).

Furthermore, solo bloggers aside, this also falls on the editors and publishers. If some hack - notice I didn't say journalist - writes something that fails to meet the criteria then that should not be published. Full stop. But that's not what's happening. Instead we get less and less quality as the hacks drink their own Kool Aid.

The current situation is Orwellian. The hacks call themselves journalists. The journalists call the hacks journalists. The rest of us call the hacks journalists. There is zero incentive for the hacks (and associated editors and publishers) to fix their QA problem. Zer. Oh.

If your pet barks, do you call it a cat? Well, the same attention to detail should apply to journalists and journalism.

That is the start to fixing the problem. Stop letting bullshit get passed off as anything but what it is.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#330

Post by willyt »

willyt wrote: post #313
Roark66 wrote: post #296

To be skeptical they first need competency to understand both sides of the argument. Unfortunately the longer I observe the work of journalists the more I become convinced,except few individuals, most people that become journalists do so because they failed in their primary choice of career. This is a huge threat to democracy that one of the most important functions in society (to inform) has been "outsourced" to a b…

‘Journalist’ should be a profession like ‘medical doctor’ or ’structural engineer’ or ‘electrician’ or ‘architect’. Anyone can still write anything and publish it wherever they want. But the words ‘News’ and ‘Journalist’ become legally protected. If you want to claim that what you have written is ‘News’ and that you are a ‘Journalist’ you have to be registered with a professional body and you have to sign every artic…

In reply to downvotes: Interesting… Is it the idea of regulation that you disagree with? Do you also think that professionals like Structural engineers, Electricians and Doctors shouldn’t be regulated? Or is it the idea of protected words ‘e.g ‘Medical Doctor’ or ‘Prescription’?
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