I read the news today, oh my! (a poll)

[andrewducker]

Where "newspaper" includes online websites of a news-related bent that use journalists. Not blogs run by individuals.

[Poll #1799169]

Yes, the third question is there solely to prevent me from having to go through and look at the results individually.

Comments

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

If they're on something science based I tend to assume that they're innacurate, even though I don't have a great deal of scientific knowledge. This is mostly because I've spent a lot of time reading Ben Goldacre's column :). I expect that newspapers are equally innacurate on many topics, but I often forget to be sceptical, hence I ticked accurate for the 2nd question.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, me too.

If I read a computing-based article in a mainstream newspaper that wasn't written by someone who works with them then chances are I'll find at least one inaccuracy. But I forget that when reading articles about politics/economics/etc.

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

Is this just a tech thing though? I do find inaccuracies all the time in computer coverage but not in film or music, for example.

[andrewducker]

Well, it depends on what I'm reading - if it's just about "Movie blah is coming out soon" then it's simple enough to get it right. But I've read interviews with writers that I know stuff about which start off with "Neil Gaiman, who got his start writing Superhero comic Sand Men..." (well, not quite that bad, but you catch my drift)

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I worked as a journalist for 10 years and can tell you how much effort we put in to be accurate. When things are not accurate it's for one of several reasons:

1. The source poorly explained him or herself.

2. The reporter was drunk or hungover.

3. One of the copy editors was a dickweed.

4. The information came to the newspaper right before deadline and there was no way possible to fact check in time for it to get into print and the reporter's boss was determined to get it into the paper no matter what.

[andrewducker]

I've read huge amounts of articles about computers where the journalist clearly just transcribed what they thought the person said, didn't understand it, and managed to get something wrong that passing it in front of someone who speaks computer could have sorted.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you have. And that goes to my #1 reason why bad information gets out there.

As a journalist we are told to transcribe. The problem is that people who actually get what they are talking about assume that we do too.

And the thing is we are not allowed to pass the information to a third party who "speaks (whatever the topic is)" because that is a violation of journalism ethics.

We are only allowed to report what people say to us and, sadly, the people who really know shit tend to tell us to fuck off because they are spending their time doing shit rather than talking about it and the ones who want to talk about it don't get that they are not talking to an expert in their field.

This is why I'm happy I'm not a journalist anymore.

People who have never been journalists don't get that we are forbidden to ask other people to check the information a random asshole has given us , but we are for a very good reason - because we'd have to reveal our source or at least what the source said and that would ensure that fewer people talked to us.

Again, so glad I'm not a journalist anymore.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - I believe that The Guardian started employing some science writers so that they wouldn't get caught making mistakes all the time. If you don't have that luxury then you're going to run into problems.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I mean I remember the first month I was covering murder trials - I'm sure I made a million mistakes in explaining the law on various things, because I was dependent on the prosecutor and defense attorney at explaining it to me - and each had an agenda.

A couple years into it I knew what was going on, but there was no way for me to know other than watching what happened.

[drplokta]

The answer here is for journalists to learn to "speak (topic)" themselves before they cover it. Yes, that means that journalists can't be all-rounders and will have to spend years gaining in-depth knowledge of a topic before they can start to be journalists at all, but it's still what needs to happen.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

That would be ideal but that would require either newspapers being willing to pay experts enough money for them to be willing to chose journalism over their actual profession or for newspapers to be willing to pay to train journalists to study and become experts.

Neither of those situations are likely - because newspapers have tons of people willing to work cheap for them for the "honor" of being a journalist and readers for the most part don't demand expertise.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

...and the skills are different and out time is limited and to understand some professions takes a very long time indeed and full-time work at it to boot. I see this as the analgous problem to the one that software developers have with domain knowledge.

A place I worked for once tried to solve their 'crap accounting applications' problem by sending the accountants off to learn coding at night school. Trouble is that both professions require a TON of work on an ongoing basis just to keep up with what's current (plus courses exams etc.) and there just isn't time in any one person's life to do both. They all packed in the programming study after a few months.


[In fact there isn't even time to do one, unless you have a real deep enthusiasm for your subjebt AND are one of those 'freaks that don't sleep' (those annoying gits who get by just fine on 4 hours or 6 hours every other day and have about three times the energy of a normal human being - I have known a few and it's not something you can learn or fake or keep up with - it *seems* to be biological and that who we are all in competition with in the world - but I digress... ) ]

That's not even scratching the surface of perhaps not being suited in terms of mental abilities/strengths to learn "the thing you are going to write about". Sure, *some* people seem tobe able to learn to do pretty much anything fairly well - but that's probably NOT actually typical... and the best *writers*(coders) just may not be those people.

I don't have a solution beyond as good comminicationas you can manage, and acknowledgelemnt that the process is never goign to be perfect and a willgin ness to publish clarifying/correcting articles PLUS the audience's own appreciation that this WILL happen, that this is normal, expected, and down to the inherent imperfection of human communication - NOT (necessarily) to anyone's particular competence, It's essentially NOT possible to get things 100% right first time ( or maybe ever) and knowledge is not fixed, but an ever-changing, living breathing entity.

This latter seems (by observation) hard (for a lot of people). It is, I think, why so many people seem to get confused by science - they are wanting certainty and the power of science is in it's ever-expanding/revising/correcting *process*.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

also, apoplogies that I can't type and can't be arsed to proofread

[andrewducker]

Having multiple people involved is good - that's what proof-readers are there for.

I mean, to solve the "crap accounting applications" problem we involve business people (who work with the applications), business analysts (who know the larger business workflow), IS analysts (who know where the data is stored, how you get to it, and what's already dependent on it) and developers (who know what the application can do and how hard it will be to change it). And then we get them all around a big table and draw lots of diagrams until we're all on the same page.

And that means we only fuck up some of the time, rather than all of the time :->

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

yeah - I was using the example not so much as any comment on how to do it right, just to highlight that acquisition of sufficient domain knowledge to be useful may not actually be feasible....

but th co. in question used all the usual methods - I thin the real issue, was/is, as ever, just change - and a residual clinging to the notion that you can write "the spec" then do the work... [bwah ha ha ha ha!]

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

Today's session of the Leveson Inquiry would suggest some additions to your list.

[ajr.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing you're an American; here in the UK, newspapers don't do quite as much fact-checking as they do in the USA - over here it amounts to "Will this story get us sued?" If no, then print it. If yes, just shave the edges of until it passes muster.

Here in the UK, newspapers will think nothing of inventing quotes out of thin air if they can't get a quote from someone - said someone usually refusing to give a quote because they know their words will be twisted to fit the paper's agenda, so they really can't win.

Another big problem in the UK is papers just repeating PR puff shit and the like as 'news'. Pretty much literally cutting a few paragraphs out of whatever's come in and pasting them together again.

Over here, #3 is more likely to be "The copy editors were all fired and the poor idiot journalists have to subedit their own shit now. Because that works well."

(Oh, should add, my knowledge comes from people working in tabloid journalism. The broadsheets may be better, but I wouldn't put huge sums on it.)

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've heard that about UK papers but did not want to comment on it because I've never experienced it and when talking about my former profession would rather stick to what I know.

[coughingbear]

It's always more complicated, of course, and I have read articles on subjects about which I am knowledgeable which have been accurate, but I usually find large or small things that are wrong. But I picked 'accurate' for the second question because I mostly forget to remind myself of that when reading about areas I know little about.

Some facts, though, I do assume are being accurately reported - eg that x accident has happened, y people were taken to hospital. They may be wrong, or at least overtaken by subsequent events, and if I'm really interested I will check back later, but I assume that it was the best available information at the time. Any story about a celebrity I tend to assume is inaccurate, or at least capable of other interpretations, but I don't read them very often.

[kmusser]

My father worked as an editor for the main Chicago paper for many years and he always said most of what was in the paper was wrong. Usually not intentionally, just the turn around to get the stories in print was so tight that they don't have time to get them right - and usually don't bother to go back and fix things after the fact, the next day the paper is on to different stories.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

"the" main Chicago paper?
The last city in the country to still have both competing morning and evening papers still has two.

[kmusser]

I wouldn't expect UK readers to know that though, besides I'm not sure the Sun-Times counts as a real paper since it went tabloid ;-)

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

*laugh* I doubt out-of-town punters care to hear us slag the proletariat tabloid vs. the paper that ran its last pro-Hitler editorial in 1943.

[kashandara.livejournal.com]

Generally if reading a newspaper article on a subject I know a reasonably amount about, it's a science/biology/medicine article, and in my experience what information they have is pretty much accurate but is so simplified or missing so much other essential information that it becomes functionally useless if you don't already know the background or go read up on it somewhere else. I'm not sure it's the same thing (except in those instances where it's been done deliberately to get the shock reaction that particular paper wants I guess)

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Articles about linguistics are either totally ignorant of the existence of a science that studies language, or act like the linguist they are speaking to has invented the entire discipline in the past year. Generally. As for stuff about queer politics-type things, pretty much always godawful, often maliciously or discriminatorily so.

I tend to check bio-sciences things out with the girlie, and she feels similarly - the exception being whoever writes Minicosm in the Metro, which is usually really good.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

I may believe the concrete details are accurate, but in the case of education, the opinions / analyses etc are often wildly wrong.

[anef.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately if the article involves statistics or the interpretation thereof it is generally wrong.

[nwhyte]

I just find it a bit incredible that people take what is in the newspapers seriously. I read the Guardian for the same reason I read SF - entertainment whole writers share some of my world view. But for actual real political commentary and analysis, you have to look at what the politicians actually say and make up your own mind.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

In my experience of stories I know about (i.e., not just stories in areas I have expertise in), the general standard of UK print reporting is, on average, "not actionably divergent from the facts". It is often materially misleading in some regard - typically in the direction you would expect from the editorial slant of the paper, but sometimes totally at random. For front page stuff, there's some fantastic weasel wording that goes on which gives a very strong impression on a quick skim, but if you read carefully and closely, can be read as saying something much less striking.

Direct quotes are almost always not direct quotes spoken by the source to the journalist, in my experience. For stories I know about, the quotes are usually lifted straight from the press release or wire story, which is Ok. (They're often not actually said by the person attributed, but written by a press officer who gives that person about 10 pressured minutes to agree it or cause immense hassle by insisting on rewriting.) But there will be some tweaking in some papers, and some will make quotes up out of thin air, which is not Ok.

Every time this happens I'm surprised at how bad it is. Even for uncontroversial stories.

I like to think I bear thing in mind properly when reading all the other articles, and treat them as provisional suggestions of what might be going on. But I know that I'm probably kidding myself and I've swallowed stuff that simply isn't true - even when I read a later correction.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I have seen stories in the newspapers, apparently written by their Energy Correspondent, that confused megawatts and megawatthours.*

From there I’ve seen the standard of reporting and analysis deteriorate. It’s the standard of analysis that upsets me. I’m accepting of errors of fact or interpretation that happen whilst some event is actually happening. When someone sits down to write a serious and big piece about something I expect more than a basic comprehension of the key terms and concepts. I’m lucky if I even get a basic understanding of the facts. I’ve seen 20 page energy specials bemoaning the fact that you can’t store energy from the wind and then turned over the page to a full page article about energy storage.

This is pretty poor because what’s happening in the UK energy market is much more interesting and much more worrying than *gasp* energy company puts up retail prices in response to wholesale prices rises.

So based on the evidence that the labelled specialists in my field are either unable to understand their field or unable to explain it I view the whole profession of journalists as incompetent. This is before I consider their ethicality.

I wouldn’t trust a damn thing written in any newspaper, with the possible exception of Financial Times.


*Mind you, I’ve seen the First Minister implicitly make the same mistake**.

**Not that I think it was a mistake. I suspect he was being artful***

***Deceitful.