Ramblemuse Touch Points

On the Twitter side, I’ve wandered into the discussion about the inaccuracies and damage to public understanding resulting from ‘he said, she said’ journalism. This is most simply defined as journalism in which both sides of a ‘public debate’ are quoted without regard to their actual expertise and scientific accuracy.

Back in 2004, Chris Mooney brought up this issue in an article in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR). More recently, NYU professor Jay Rosen has been actively criticizing ‘he said, she said’ journalism in his Twitter feed and posting to his Press Think blog.

On the climate side of the house, Andrew Revkin recently wrote an article for the NY Times noting that one fossil fuel connected ‘denier’ organization ignored its own climate experts in claiming lack of a basis for anthropogenic climate change. In his Attytood blog, Will Bunch ties part of the damage the deniers were able to accomplish back to ‘he said, she said’ journalism.

Such sloppy journalism leaves it up to the readers to sort out the relative merits of the quoted ‘experts’. Many don’t have the background or the contacts. Good science writing, good health care writing, moves this expertise verification upstream to the journalist.