I hope they’re about as good as their jobs as doctors, dentists, plumbers, but there are are fair number of those who are mildly or grossly incompetent, and I would submit that numbers are likely similar.
Well, when it comes to particularly health and science writing, journalists can be excellent at their job…but they’re largely acting as little more than stenographers for PR departments at research institutions. Not many people know or accept this…even when given a heads-up.
See, if I were looking to get insight on, say, a latest film that was being released and looked to the NYT’s movie critic for a review (I’m not a film buff, BTW, so this is hypothetical) I would expect that critic to have seen the film in its entirety. I wouldn’t expect the review to be based solely on watching a two minute trailer. That’s how thinking goes, right. Similarly with cars…the auto correspondent should at least have driven around the block a couple of times.
This isn’t the case with health and science reporting. Quite the reverse. Science By Press Release is a longstanding problem (I was late-to-the-party way back in about 2003) and, in all fairness, the journalists don’t bear full responsibility. In the push for recognition and grant funding, researchers themselves are almost equally at fault and don’t seem to be at all circumspect when it comes to overselling their work…which they all surely must be aware is going to be presented to the public in the form of banner headlines announcing the latest new discovery that upsets “established science”. Oftentimes, a publication based on preliminary data that never gets reproduced or, worse yet…gets retracted.
P.S…here’s but one article on the topic that former regulars on the old H&N board have become very familiar with over the years…
It’s easy to dismiss this sort of thing if you don’t know or have confidence in one particular news outlet but, at the very least, it does a disservice to folk who are interested in a given topic and can in some cases become a big publc health problem (think Andrew Wakefield, Peter Duesberg etc)