For a reporter incompetence rarely takes the form of basic journalistic skills – the competition is too heavy for a truly incapable reporter to get far. But it can take the form of being totally unaware of a topic or subject being covered.
The three areas that this can be most clear and common are Religion, Science, and the Military.
RELIGION
"If it isn’t piggybacking on a larger story, religion has almost no shot at all of making it into the news."
Reporters seem almost wholly without understanding of religious matters which can result in some odd reporting and almost clueless stories being printed. Vanity Fair ran a long article about the alleged influence of a part of Christianity on policy decisions in Washington. For this article, the writer sought out some meaty quotes from more noisy and prominent people to support this without understanding really what was being said or how representative these folks were of what Vanity Fair called the “religious right.” While the religious right exists, it is not made up of a uniform bloc of extremist fundamentalists who believe Israel will be the site of a new kingdom on earth that we must work to usher in. There are a few who think this, but they really do not number such a very large amount of Christians, and none of them have any real political power or any influence over policy made by President Bush or his administration, despite frightened opinion pieces at the New York Times.
On the November 7 Meet the Press, host Tim Russert announced: “One Democrat said to me, ‘Are we on the verge of a theocracy, where if you don't agree with the president and evangelical Christians on abortion or on gays, there really is no room for you to practice what you believe in the United States?’” This sort of fear of the unknown and misunderstanding of what reporters consider alien and outside them is due primarily to ignorance and lack of familiarity with religion and Christianity. Although all polls of the US indicate that the nation is very religious, news media organizations are outside this mainstream and lack the professionals to bridge that gap.
In a 1980 survey known as the Lichter-Rothman study, it was discovered that 86 percent of the “media elite” rarely or never attended religious meetings, and that 50 percent claimed no religion at all.
None of the three major networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) have a religion specialist in their news department. Reporters who do religion coverage have no training in religion or background with any religion, which cannot help their understanding of the topic. Where most news departments assign minorities to cover minority issues, religious topics are simply given to who ever will take them.
Martin Pinsky at the Columbia Journalism Review examines the attitude and confusion among religious reporters in an article entitled Among the Evangelicals:
Pressed to identify a single evangelical Christian who is not a national religious leader, a country music star, a politician, or an athlete, many journalists based outside red states would probably flail around like a desperate quiz show contestant — until the name Ned Flanders [from the television show The Simpsons] popped into their minds.
However, Mr Pinsky - a religion writer for the
Los Angeles Times and
Orlando Sentinel since 1985 - goes on with this statement:
Amid the lingering bewilderment in the wake of the presidential election, I can sympathize with those of my colleagues still puzzling over the evangelical enigma. It’s never easy to parachute into an alien environment and file a coherent story eight hours later. As with a Boston journalist covering the Catholic Church or one in Salt Lake City covering the Mormons, reporting about evangelicals while living in the Sunbelt provides the luxury of home-field advantage, as well as the opportunity to return again and again to the subject.
Over time, however, he recognized a problem:
In retrospect, it is clear that I should have been paying closer attention to another, equally important story in my backyard: a little congregation called Saddleback Valley Community Church in southern Orange County, which would grow into one of the nation’s most influential mega-churches. Its pastor, the Reverend Rick Warren, whom I confess I never sought out to interview, developed the motivational concept of the forty-day “Purpose Driven Church” that is today sweeping the nation’s congregations and, in book form, is a fixture on the best-seller lists.
Mr Pinksy finally notes that after moving to Orlando, he says "For the first time in my life, I was living in a sea of believing, faithful Christians, and the cold shock felt like total immersion" and realized his coverage was lacking:
This epiphany — it would be hard to call it anything else, except maybe a revelation — transformed the way I approached my beat. I discarded the traditional way of structuring my stories. No more, “While some wacko evangelical leaders over here say this, these rational secularists and moderate mainliners over there say that,” with an author or academic in the middle tossed in for balance.
Evangelicals were no longer caricatures or abstractions. I learned to interpret their metaphors and read their body language. From personal, day-to-day experience I observed what John Green at the University of Akron has discerned from extensive research: evangelicals were not monolithic nor were they, as The Washington Post infamously characterized them, “poor, uneducated and easy to command.”
In addition to mere lack of familiarity, there is an open hostility toward religion and Christianity in particular. Ted Turner, for example, demonstrated antipathy toward Christianity while in charge of CNN, saying “Christianity is a religion for losers” and according to eyewitnesses:
Ted Turner stunned CNN employees in Washington when he made an anti-Christian remark on Ash Wednesday. Seeing ashes on the forehead of some workers, Turner said, “What are you? A bunch of Jesus freaks? You ought to be working for Fox.”
For the reporter, religion is a confusing issue, as Steven Waldman of Beliefnet puts it, “You are dealing with very squishy, difficult to quantify topics. Do you have a soul? What happens to it? Journalists tend to look for proof of things, and this is one area where proof is harder to come up with.” But familiarity with this issue and the ways people understand their faith and live it would help bridge this gulf and help avoid incompetent or confused coverage by the news media.
SCIENCE
"As an interviewee, I find myself frustrated with the stupidity and irrelevance of most of their questions."
Similarly, when it comes to Science issues, the news media is all too often out of its depth. While most reporters have had some science in their schooling, it was not an area of study or interest for most, and few took anything beyond the most basic courses. When confronted with a scientific issue, they often will simply take what the man in the lab coat says at his word (see Credulity below), especially if it fits their ideology. Groups such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest take advantage of this regularly, with studies that seem to indicate something, and the media runs with it like a kid with a great report card running into the house, waving it over his head (again, see credulity below).
Lack of real scientific knowledge most often takes effect by the reporters “jazzing up” a report, or dropping critical qualifiers and information to “sex up” a story. When a scientist tells the press conference something like this:
“it appears with the most recent evidence and computer modeling that a meteor that is big and dense enough to significantly damage the earth may strike within the next 100 years. We believe that if this impact is from a sufficiently massive meteor it could result in climactic change and if it hits a major population area the deaths of millions.”The Headline and story often ends up like this:
“KILLER METEOR TARGETS EARTH, MILLIONS MAY DIE”
Recently at a press conference, Dr Knowitall of the Studying Things Institute said that “a meteor that is big and dense enough to significantly damage the earth" could "result in climactic change" and cause the deaths of millions...
Is this true, at some level? Technically, but it is not what the scientist said. By carefully quoting bits of what he said, disregarding others, and exaggerating some points, the story moves from a minor curiosity to a horribly certain doom. The use of words such as "could" and "may" preserve the reporter's ability to technically avoid putting words in the mouth of the scientist, but the wording is misleading and designed to scare the pants off the reader and sell newspapers.
This sort of scientific ignorance combined with sensationalism is how we get reports on how oat bran that will save your life, then the next year how it will kill you, or that mother’s milk is alternately good and bad for children.
This sort of scientific ignorance can result in minor errors as well as major ones. For example, in Discovery Magazine (volume 26, #3), on page 54 in the article "Drilling San Andreas" by Brad Lemley, we are told that the San Andreas Fault curves up 800 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. The gulf that this fault curves up from is the Gulf of California, between mainland Mexico and Baja California. This was not the only minor but absurd geographical error in the article.
Senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorology Chuck Doswell describes his experience with the news media:
It's easy to see why politicians and other famous people like actors, musicians, and sports stars dislike the media so much. The reporters intrude on your life according to their whims and schedule, they reduce a 2-hour interview to a 5-second soundbite, and act like they're doing you a favor! I had some media person actually tell me once how he was going to make me "famous" by putting me on national TV (after the May 3rd tornado) and was apparently dumbfounded when that didn't impress me.
As an interviewee, I find myself frustrated with the stupidity and irrelevance of most of their questions. I would rather a reporter not have a preconceived notion of what the story should be about ... the story should emerge out of interviews and "research" into the story.
Some reporters have confided to me that their readers (or listeners, or viewers) are too stupid to understand anything that lasts beyond a 5-second "soundbite" or a one-sentence paragraph. What arrogance! To hold your public in contempt at the same time you pretend to serve them!! This also seems to me to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we never give the public anything more than an "MTV"-like presentation, with constantly changing images and rapid-fire "dialog" then that is what they come to expect, naturally. If we take the time to explore a story carefully, deeply, and honestly, the public might react positively. Who knows? No one will, if we don't make an effort to give the public anything more than superficiality!
In a footnote, he brings up a problem with the term "expert" used by reporters:
...if I have learned something from 30 years of scientific work, it is that no one is truly an expert. We're simply being called that by the media to lend credence to their stories.
The desire for a good story and to sell their product can lead news organizations to unethical ends, prompting manipulation of a story, such as in NBC News' infamous rigging of a pickup for a
Dateline story.
The story was meant to show how dangerous a GM pickup was due to side-mounted gas tanks for extended range, but the stubborn truck refused to explode like the news report said it would. So they hooked up explosives on the side of the truck to expedite matters. To make sure, they put an ill-fitting off-model gas cap on the tank to encourage it to leak better. The truck did erupt into flames as the producers desired, and the story was ran. To this day it is not possible to get a production pickup truck with "sidesaddle" gas tanks, despite the fact that the report all but proved it was not going to explode.
MILITARY
The military is largely an area of curiosity and confusion for the press. An institution primarily designed to “kill people and break things” is a shocking thing to the mindset of most journalists, who by their admission signed up for their job to change the world and make it a better place.Some reporters, such as Christiane Amanpour are openly hostile toward the military (especially the US military), but even when reporters are not, they are unfamiliar with military history, virtues, goals, and procedures.
In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Coalition of the Willing was joined with “imbedded” reporters who moved with and got to know the soldiers.This was an attempt by the US government to address this lack of familiarity and even hostility, and for a time it worked.The result was better coverage and a deeper understanding of the events and efforts, as well as a recognition that soldiers were pretty good guys.
Over time the imbedding has lessened and now is virtually unused due to expense, a lack of real interest, and an admitted fear that reporters were getting too chummy with the soldiers, something that reminds me of Stalin sending soldiers who had too much contact with allied troops to reeducation camps. Their crime? Becoming too “westernized.”
According to the Reporters On The Ground Conference (PDF warning),
In addition to the boot camps, many reporters were given the opportunity to spend time with military units training in the U.S. prior to going off to war. This allowed the reporters and military to build trust in each other and to get familiar with each other’s terminology and routines. It also allowed the news organizations and reporters the opportunity to test their new equipment, techniques, and procedures for reporting in what would be a fluid, hectic environment.
In Progressive Magazine, Robert Jensen, criticized the Embedded Media Program, complaining tha embedded reporters identified too closely with their military subjects.
The Rand Corporation echoed this position:
Some believe that the embedded press system can lead reporters to lose their objectivity because they identify too closely with the soldiers with whom they are embedded.
In previous wars, this was considered a benefit, a positive result rather than a source of concern. But the modern media often considers the military a potential enemy. Christian Amanpour,
who said this about Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq:
The war in Iraq has basically turned out to be a disaster. And journalists have paid for it, paid for the privilege of witnessing and reporting that, and so have many, many other people who have been here.
Wuzzadem enjoyed poking fun at Ms Amanpour by showing how she might have reported on other military actions
over the years, but she has done enough to make her position clear. She is hardly alone in this attitude, which makes reporting on the military problematic for such reporters. The best example of this antipathy recently is the tragedy at Haditha, in which the news media - ready to believe the worst out of soldiers - leapt on a story that is turning out to be almost certainly a hoax. Why did it turn out this way? Credulity.
CREDULITY
“That implicit credulity is the mark of a feeble mind will not be disputed.”
Related to Sloth and Incompetence is Credulity, the tendency to believe things without critical thought or examination. A Credulous person is one that will take someone at their word, will believe something because it’s written down, and will not question whether it is accurate, plausible, or even truthful.Credulity in reporting all too often can take the form of a tendency to believe something because it fits a presupposition or ideological position.
If you start out with the assumption that Democratic politicians care about the little guy and Republican ones are for big business, then a story that portrays this is going to seem more plausible without needing deeper examination. This may very well be true, or it may not. But a credulous reporter who holds this position is less likely to examine or challenge a story that fits in neatly with his worldview.
Walter Olson wrote about credulity in the media in 1993 shortly after NBC Dateline's embarrassing episode with the pickup gas tank. Mr Olson points out that event was far from the first or only such example. In a 1986 story, CBS ran a story in which:
An Audi was shown taking off like a bolt without a foot on the accelerator -- seeming proof that the vehicle could display a malignant will of its own. Ed Bradley told viewers that, according to a safety expert named William Rosenbluth, "unusually high transmission pressure could build up on certain model Audis causing the throttle to open up . . . . Again, watch the pedal go down by itself."
Frightening stuff, eh? "What the viewers couldn't watch," wrote Peter Huber in 1992's "Galileo's Revenge," "was where the 'unusually high transmission pressure' had come from. It had come from a bottle. Rosenbluth had drilled a hole in the Audi transmission," through which he'd pumped in air or fluid at high pressure. (CBS still defends its segment.)
In the infamous
Dateline truck story, the producers relied on an "expert" named Byron Bloch:
he's a frequent network consultant on auto safety -- "a combination of source, field producer and technical adviser for ABC-TV in its auto safety coverage," reports Autoweek, which notes that he's assisted seven ABC segments on auto safety hazards, three of them since 1990.
When not doing paid media consulting, Bloch is perhaps the single best-known hired expert witness in injury lawsuits against automakers. He doesn't challenge reports that he lacks formal training in auto safety or engineering, and he acknowledged in a 1980 case that his resume' listed a degree he didn't have. Still, he's appeared in court to testify about alleged defects not just in cars but in products ranging from coffee pots to railroad cars. He also offers $ 400-per-person seminars for trial lawyers, promising the scoop on such topics as "Key Graphic Exhibits for Trial."
NBC relied on another expert for their initial defense of the story, a man named Bruce Enz:
Enz, of The Institute for Safety Analysis, turns out to be another frequent expert testifier against GM -- and indeed against every major car maker in the U.S. market. He's not an engineer either, nor, he says, are any of the 25 staff members of his institute, which is a for-profit organization.
Then there's Ben Kelley, another frequent witness, who has boasted that NBC used Enz's group "at our suggestion." Kelley himself has enjoyed success providing crash-test footage to TV producers. When CBS's "Street Stories" questioned the reliability of safety belts last fall, it relied heavily on Kelley's Maryland-based Institute for Injury Reduction, which the show blandly described as an "auto safety consumer group." Marion Blakey, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, flayed the resulting coverage as "factually inaccurate."
Over at Protein Wisdom, Jeff G. linked to a site that does face recognition software (via Femeniste blog). The program scans your picture and suggests various possible celebrities that you look like.![[technorati icon]](http://img439.imageshack.us/img439/6169/techicon0vf.jpg)
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