Prescription for Journalists: Less Time Studying Twitter, More Time Studying Math

MIT Press Reader ^ | December 24, 2019 | John P. Wihbey

[karpov]

You hear a lot of heated claims and baseless generalities these days about what’s wrong with the news media. What’s seldom heard is what the underlying data indicate about true problem areas and where journalists need to improve.

News reporting requires doing a lot things well, but two crucial elements are being independent of political (or other) interests and knowing one’s subject well enough to select what’s important for the public.

I am a media scholar and former journalist. In my research for my book “The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World,” I tried to quantify certain aspects of these two dimensions of news media.

While the overall evidence shows journalists to be ethical in their practice and fair and public-spirited in their mission, I found some troubling signs in my research.

The first question I looked at was whether journalists were partisan. That would affect their stories by making them biased and therefore less trustworthy.

Research in general continues to show news media have left- and right-leaning partisan slants, although the degree depends on the outlet and subject in question.

But one novel aspect to consider in our hyper-polarized, social media-driven age is the relationship between journalists’ work and their online social networks, in particular Twitter, where reporters and editors spend a lot of time these days.

Is partisanship visible not just in the reporting of stories, but elsewhere, in the social networks that journalists inhabit?

As part of a 2018 study with my colleagues Kenny Joseph of the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and David Lazer at Northeastern University, we analyzed partisanship across more than 300,000 news articles produced by 644 journalists at 25 different U.S. news outlets.

[karpov]

"Learn to code" in R (a statistical programming language) would also be good advice. Many journalists would not be journalists if they were good at math and programming and could earn more money with those skills.

[dfwgator]

Being good in Math, allows to have a better “BS detector”, which is crucial for going through life.

[BobL]

“While the overall evidence shows journalists to be ethical in their practice and fair and public-spirited in their mission...”

Thanks for posting, but I couldn’t get beyond the above.

[FreedomPoster]

I have commented here for years that innumeracy is rampant among the journalist class.

[FreedomPoster]

Here’s a post I found easily from 2016 on the topic:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3474092/posts?page=11#11

[neverevergiveup]

The biggest problem with journalism is encapsulated in this comment, from the author, about the essential functions of a journalist: "knowing one’s subject well enough to select what’s important for the public."

Journalists have no responsibility, nor any professional right to determine what news is 'important' and what news should be reported to the public. That's essentially data editing, and it leads to data bias. In science, this approach destroys scientific credibility, and is one of the reasons climate scientists have been criticized.

[The people have spoken]

My most annoying example: When some statistic is 5 times what it was, journalists will invariably write that it has increased 500%. The correct figure is 400%.

[pas]

“Even if President Donald Trump’s criticism of the media is usually bombastic and misguided”

So you did not make it to this point. Interesting they are talking about bias and throw that out there.

[BuffaloJack]

The whole education system is broke.
They don’t teach classical math anymore.
And they replaced history, geography and civics with social studies (what the hell is social studies? it sounds like an opportunity for socialism indoctrination).