Posted by
Andrews on Saturday, April 18, 2009 8:41:08 AM
I was following a link from
Best of the Web yesterday when I was reminded, yet again, of the reason to take much reporting with a grain of salt. Now, granted, the article to which it linked was in mosnews.com, not one of the paragons of journalism, but still it highlights a problem common to a lot of journalism.
The article in question was about a man who had a 5 cm pine branch removed from his lung.The reporter cites an unnamed "they" as suggesting the branch grew from a bud the man inhaled. However, an attentive reader makes some very valid points in the comments:
According to this site
http://cru.cahe.wsu.edu/CEPublications/pnw0152/pnw0152.html "Cuttings
of firs and pines usually are very difficult to root." The interior of
the lung would be a very hostile environment for propagation. More
telling is my observation that there are NO ROOTS! A bud should send
out roots before there is any growth of needles. Also the needles
appear mature. New needles first appear in what is called a "candle"
and are are soft, curved inward, and are pale in appearance.
So, why do I mention this?
The answer is simple, and has applicability far beyond mosnews.com. You see, reporters often make statements of dubious worth. Now, yes, some of it is
because of innate bias,
as I described before. On the other hand, very often the problem is not so much bias as it is lack of knowledge. Oh, reporters know reporting, they studied journalism after all, and they live in an environment completely filled with reporters, and sometimes they may even gain some knowledge in their specialty, be it medicine or the stock market or foreign affairs or politics, but they often pretend to expertise in all fields.
Now, I complain about this phenomenon when it is engaged in by people from difficult fields, such as medicine or science. I find it absurd that Linus Pauling thought his brilliance in chemistry qualified him
to give medical advice, or that doctors think their medical expertise gives them knowledge of politics. And how much more absurd is it when fields requiring a lot less intellect, such as reporting (or law) think their training makes them expert in everything?
However, reporters are often less honest in their pontificating than any other profession. Where we at least know when lawyers or doctors or Nobel prize winning chemists are being blow-hards, reporters often hide their own posturing behind citations of unnamed "experts" or of "opinion" or other clever means to present their own pet theories as the reasoned conclusion of those in the know. Or, if that is not possible, then they simply shop around until they find experts who mirror the beliefs they wish to promote. (Whether done consciously or unconsciously, there is a tendency among some reporters to consult only experts who have opinions matching the reporter's own. How else to explain the remarkable uniformity of "expert" opinion in specific papers, even in fields like economics where there is a notable lack of consensus among the professionals.)
Which brings me back to my point. When reading news, be it a story about a pine tree "growing" in someone's lung or the "stimulus" causing an economic turn around, be sure to think things through a bit. Even if the reporter cites countless experts.
POSTSCRIPT
I started this post a few days ago and abandoned it. However, as I started seeing the absurd "tree growing in the lung" story on the morning talk shows, I decided I had to revive it, as the absurdity of this story required some comment.
POSTSCRIPT II
Regarding the related topic of press bias, I recommend my post "
The Death of Impartial Media" and "
An Adversarial Press?".