Journalism: March 2008 Archive Page

Here's a "glass is half full" headline that makes me proud to work at Seton HIll:

Seton Hill U Students Step In, Help Officer Being Attacked By Man

Here's a "glass is half empty" headline that makes me go "oops":

Seton Hill student turns Taser on Greensburg police officer

Here's a more neutral headline that went out on the state news wire:

Westmoreland Co. university student turns Taser on police officer

Here's what seems to be a mistake:

According to the news accounts I've read, Spisak was the one who assaulted the officer, so I don't know why this image has the label "victim."

The New Yorker discusses the fate of print news:

Philip Meyer, in his book "The Vanishing Newspaper" (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody's doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of the $450-million Newseum, in Washington, D.C., but, more and more, what Bill Keller calls "that lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and cellulose" is starting to feel like an artifact ready for display under glass.

Taking its place, of course, is the Internet, which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for American readers. For young people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so. As early as May, 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for news among younger people. According to "Abandoning the News," published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers' stock valuation.

The Australian publishes an interesting detail about coverage of climate change:

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth still warming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not whethat you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."

Duffy: "It's not only that it's not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there's any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it's put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary."

The other day I was listening to NPR and heard someone (a scientist? activist? somewhere in between?) discussing differences in satellite photos taken in about 1997 and 2004 (or something like that -- I didn't catch the details), and using the differences in these photos to illustrate the effects of global warming. I didn't keep listening long enough to find out whether the reporter asked the guest whether it made good scientific sense to make draw conclusions from two isloated data points. It would be a very different thing if you looked at photos taken every year on the same date over a period of 10 years, and the photos showed a consistent change (with some variation for the typical random fluctuation one expects from the climate).

I've been following climate change politics for some time, mostly because it's a good example of a meta-narrative that all news stories seem to have to fit -- along with "your children are in danger from strangers they meet on the internet" (when the vast majority of perpetrators are family members).

This article from Politico poses some interesting questions.

The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe. The real question is why so many people are playing. The answer has more to do with media psychology than with practical politics.

Journalists, for instance, have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is. Most coverage breathlessly portrays the race as a down-to-the-wire sprint between two well-matched candidates, one only slightly better situated than the other to win in August at the national convention in Denver.

One reason is fear of embarrassment. In its zeal to avoid predictive reporting of the sort that embarrassed journalists in New Hampshire, the media -- including Politico -- have tended to avoid zeroing in on the tough math Clinton faces.

Avoiding predictions based on polls even before voters cast their ballots is wise policy. But that's not the same as drawing sober and well-grounded conclusions about the current state of a race after millions of voters have registered their preferences. --Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen

Wired | AP offers a brief report on the Project for Excellence in Journalism's new report:

Only a few years ago, newspaper Web sites were primarily considered an online morgue for that day's newspaper, Rosenstield said. "The afternoon newspaper is in a sense being reborn online," he said. A separate survey found journalists are, to a large degree, embracing the changes being thrust upon them. A majority say they like doing blogs and that they appreciate reader feedback on their stories. When they're asked to do multimedia projects, most journalists find the experience enriching instead of feeling overworked, he said. The newsroom is increasingly being seen as the most experimental place in the business, the report found. Most news Web sites are no longer final destinations. The report found that many users insist that the sites, and even individual pages, offer plenty of options to navigate elsewhere for more information, the project found. Rosenstiel said he's even able to reach Washington Post stories through the New York Times' Web site.

Microsoft researchers discuss Blews, which is a horrible title for a promising new tool that sorts blogosphere chatter according to the red/blue political shift, and also identifies the emotional intensity of the response.

Our current visualization shows the count of liberal inlinks to a news article as a blue "wing" on the left, and the number of conservative inlinks as a red "wing" on the right. The emotional charge of the discussion around the news link is shown as a "heat indicator" on the outside of the wings. Emotional charge ranges from a single orange square to four white-hot squares. Clicking on the wings produces a dropdown of the individual blog posts linking to the news article. In the dropdown, emotionally charged posts have a fuzzy border, while emotionally neutral posts have a solid border.

How broadcast journalism is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for informing viewers is almost nil. (Steve Salerno, Skeptic)

The mythical Red State/Blue State paradigm is just one of the more telling indications of a general disability the media exhibit in working with data. A cluster of random events does not a "disturbing new trend!" make -- but that doesn't stop journalists from finding patterns in happenstance. Take lightning. It kills with an eerie predictability: about 66 Americans every year. Now, lightning could kill those 66 people more or less evenly all spring and summer, or it could, in theory, kill the lot of them on one really scary Sunday in May. But the scary Sunday in May wouldn't necessarily mean we're going to have a year in which lightning kills 79,000 people. (No more than if it killed a half-dozen people named Johanssen on that Sunday would it mean that lightning is suddenly targeting Swedes.) Yet you can bet that if any half-dozen people are killed by lightning one Sunday, you'll soon see a special report along the lines of, LIGHTNING: IS IT OUT TO GET US?

Of course I don't know what kind of back story there might be between these two, but keep it off camera, okay, boys? Comically unprofessional.(I'd never heard of this site before... at first I thought it had something to do with journalism, but it seems to be a random assortment of clips.)

From Michael White, of Adaptive Complexity:

There is a particular narrative about science that science journalists love to write about, and Americans love to hear. I call it the 'oppressed underdog' narrative, and it would be great except for the fact that it's usually wrong.

The narrative goes like this:

1. The famous, brilliant scientist So-and-so hypothesized that X was true.

2. X, forever after, became dogma among scientists, simply by virtue of the brilliance and fame of Dr. So-and-so.

3. This dogmatic assent continues unchallenged until an intrepid, underdog scientist comes forward with a dramatic new theory, completely overturning X, in spite of sustained, hostile opposition by the dogmatic scientific establishment.

We love stories like this; in our culture we love the underdog, who sticks to his or her guns, in spite of heavy opposition. In this narrative, we have heroes, villains, and a famous, brilliant scientist proven wrong.

I'm sure you could pick out instances in science history where this story is true, but more often it is not.

The general public prefers to get its science, or indeed information on any advanced subject, in the form of narrative, while scientists themselves (who already know how to interpret scientific data) often find the narrative a distraction. Everyone can identify with people, so the thinking goes, so it makes sense to emphasize the narrative so that non-specialist audiences will keep reading for long enough to absorb a few facts.  The nitpicky details that are exciting to specialists are too abstract for the casual reader, just as the narrative that appeals to the intelligent general reader (a rare breed in today's culture, to be sure) bores specialists to tears.  White hits the nail on the head when he explains why our culture perpetuates these myths.

I don't mean to suggest that oversimplification is the only way to report on science, but scientists themselves can help the process along by recognizing that journalists thrive on conflict, character, and emotion. There are of course straight news stories that might present the scientific background to an timely issue, but unless there's a direct economic or political impact, or a tie-in with a movie or some other event from popular culture, chance are that a writer will have to pitch a story about a scientist as a feature or profile -- hence the focus on personality over science.

Times Online:

In December 2005 a study in the journal Nature offered the observation that the circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, which sustains the Gulf Stream, had weakened by up to 30 per cent over the previous few decades. This figure and its juxtapositioning alongside the melodrama of films such as The Day after Tomorrow were amplified through the cooperation of scientists and media to result in headlines such as "Alarm over dramatic weakening of Gulf Stream" ( The Guardian, Dec 1, 2005). The urban myth that emerged from this episode was that we were closer to a mini Ice Age in the UK than had previously been thought. Eighteen months later, however, and unremarked by the media, two studies in equally reputable journals pointed out that such a trend was within the range of natural variability and may signify nothing at all.

A second example concerns the claim that, "by the end of this century, climate change will have killed around 182 million people in sub-Saharan Africa" (Christian Aid, May 2006). This number - 180 million African dead - has become one of the most widely cited numbers in the litany of doom that accompanies talk of climate change. In this case, however, the number 180 million was sexed-up science. Christian Aid took the worst-case climate scenario, the highest population scenario and the scenario with the least public health intervention and conjured the number into being. And here it has stayed, a number detached from its receding scientific origins in which assumptions were overlain on scenarios that captured uncertainties.

So... according to the headline, we should only *sometimes* accept exaggerated and bogus numbers as scientific fact?

Chronicle (subscription)

Each year Ms. O'Connell, a former dean of admissions at McDaniel College, in Maryland, gives between 35 and 40 presentations, during which she urges parents to stay calm despite the "scary headlines" they have seen in newspapers.

Ms. O'Connell often tries to reassure students by telling them that if they have conducted a thoughtful search, they need apply to only four or five colleges.

Sometimes that's a tough sell. "You don't see people nodding," she says. "They'll say, 'No, I've got to apply to 12 schools, or else I won't get in anywhere.'"

Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for enrollment management at DePaul University, encounters the same perception. He has spent a lot of time, he says, talking to reporters who want to know why applying to college is so "awful for everyone," or how "nobody can afford it."

"I feel like I'm sort of a buzzkill," he says, "because after I finish talking to them, I've told them they don't have a story."

An excellent article that I'd like to be able to show my journalism students. It isn't common that the story is "there isn't much of a story here." But articles that work against the accepted trends suggest a journalist is thinking independently, rather than following the herd.

Krages.com (PDF)

In the event you are threatened with detention or asked to surrender your film, asking the following questions can help ensure that you will have the evidence to enforce your legal rights:

1. What is the person's name?
2. Who is their employer?
3. Are you free to leave? If not, how do they intend to stop you if you decide to leave? What legal basis do they assert for the detention?
4. Likewise, if they demand your film, what legal basis do they assert for the confiscation?