Hacker News Reader

Comment by pacman001 | Hacker News Reader

Every single time (some 4 times in my past life) when I’m familiar with/close to the background story of something that played out in the news I come to the same conclusion: news doesn’t report the facts. I’m in Western Europe, btw. I advise to run this experiment yourself.

View on HN

No journalist will ever have the expertise required to accurately report scientific results.

Instead we need to help average people understand that when the news says "Scientists say drinking red wine is healthy!" that No actual scientist ever said that!

Instead, the journalist writing the segment cribbed notes from the University's PR page about the study, which was also written by someone with zero science background, and in fact almost always has a marketing background.

Oh, and those PR releases are outright stating false things that the actual scientific paper doesn't even discuss like half the time.

And now you have decades of people insisting that nutrition science is awful, even though nobody in academia or science is saying any of the things the average person thinks they have.

I think science journalists often have some science background, and university press releases are in my experience collaborations between the scientist and the PR person.

You might like the BBC's Science in action https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002vsnb/episodes/downloads - the presenter Roland Pease has a scientific background and each episode he interviews the actual researchers on several interesting findings/publications for that week.

Another name for a similar but slightly more pernicious problem is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: "the phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

That's the problem when you have people responsible for news having the business model of ad-sposored entertainment and not fact reporting.

The conclusion I’m coming to is that this, too, is an exponent of an inherent weakness: we like to be told stories. As children we like to be told stories and this remains. We now have a complete spectrum of story-telling: science fiction, fiction, non-fiction, …, and news. News reporting itself is a continuum, with tabloid gossip on one side and political coverage on the other. We have so much stories to choose from.

In Western Europe a lot of the media isn't ad-sponsored.

Just "bad-sponsored"

I live in France, and saying that 90% of the media are ad-sponsored is a conservative estimate.

So I don't know which part of western Europe you're talking about, but it clearly doesn't apply to all of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com