Re: Issues


"Joe Felsenstein" <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:db0slg$1q8q$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> In article <dapr3b$2fmt$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> Larry Moran <lamoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >On Sat, 9 Jul 2005 09:17:44 -0400 (EDT),
> >> "Larry Moran" <lamoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> >>> Who asked these questions?
> >>> Kindergarten students?
> >>
> >> Science journalists. Who have apparently been trained to pretend
> >> they are talking to kindergarten students, even in a magazine
> >> read only by serious researchers and AAAS members.
> >
> >This is really sad. Many of the questions are stupid. They reflect
> >a profound misunderstanding of the field. It looks like science
> >journalists are guilty of believing their own hype.
> >
> >I expected better from Science and from AAAS.
>
> Having met some science journalists, I'd go easy on them. They often are
> people who have PhD degrees but decided on journalism rather than active
> science. However they are under a lot of deadline pressure and can't take
> time to really understand areas, and of course most of the areas they
> report on are outside of their original area of competence.

Don't underestimate the issue of word-count pressure either. I recently
tried to generate my own list of issues and/or re-work the wording of
some of the issues on the list-of-one-hundred. I quickly saw that I
couldn't say what I wanted to say within the two-to-three-line limit
that the journalists had adhered to. My way out was simple. I wrote
to a four-to-six line limit. And I increased the level of jargon. The
Science journalists didn't have those options.

Also, regarding "hype", it must be noted that journalists don't become
excited by hyped-up papers in secondary journals. They become excited
by hyped up papers in Science, Nature, PNAS, NE JM, Lancet, etc. It is
not the job of the journalists to remove the hype from these papers
before publication. It is the job of editors and reviewers (since the
authors cannot be expected to moderate their own self-aggrandizement).


.

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