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I am so sick of these takes. There are so, so many reasons we want to approve things and journalists apparently don't get any of it fucking hell.
Who pays the price of mistakes? The scientist, and the people reading. When a journalist misrepresents a finding it is frankly likely a benefit to them (sensationalist or simplifying) and a huge cost to us in so many ways - reputation, time, support for funding.
We constantly have so much of what we work on checked by each other, reviewed, approved, discussed further... we are continually passing through approval gates from people qualified to argue a point with us. Heaven forbid we expect that at the end step too?
Are we perfect? Absolutely fucking not. But that's exactly the rationale for trying to catch errors. What -truly- is the fucking point in us going through hell to get work out with independent backing and approval for it to then be blithely misrepresented without checks?
Science is important :) This sounds stupid but it's true. And some science is more important than other science. Scientists who work on topics of public interest or public importance have a responsibility to people to make sure they have the right idea from their work.
You cannot -CANNOT- persuade me into thinking that interviews that pertain to e.g. infectious diseases should just be reported on by whichever journalist was on shift that day without any oversight. I don't give a fuck about your alleged free independence in those contexts.
Take the paper I read today that interrogated whether for gay men, effective ARV therapy is sufficient and adequate alone to prevent HIV transmission.
If you can't see why those authors should want to make sure reporting on that is accurate, I think you're evil and reckless.
If you can't see why those authors should want to make sure reporting on that is accurate, I think you're evil and reckless.
This idea that journalists are capable of covering new papers' findings with a degree of critical insight worthy of being called independent reporting is just such a wildly ego-driven, audacious assessment of ability it's bizarre to me.
I barely trust myself to give a public talk on beekeeping and pesticides with only my own oversight and I have a fucking PhD in beekeeping. So why does someone orders of magnitude less qualified than me think they should write a full article on it without help?
None of this - NONE - is about 'its scary to cede our words' it's absolutely about what we perceive as vastly different professional and moral standards and values and tbh the fact journalists seem to be so aggrieved only fuels my suspicion about where their sentiment comes from
I have a list as long as my arm about how often my experiences with journalists have been huge drains of time and energy, for them to misrepresent findings to the detriment of me and the people I'm ultimately working for.
So, yeah. I want to make sure you've got a photo that looks like the animal I'm talking about. Or that you're getting two pesticide names the right way around. Because I want the readers that my work is for to not be misinformed and consequently kill their livestock :) :) :)
And realistically, I know I care about that danger much much more than the journalist at hand. We deal every day with how difficult small doses of false information are to overcome (looking at you, antivax) and I just truly can't with this style of whining.
Every scientist *wishes* they could cede control of their findings to be distributed well and accurately to people who want to or need to know about it. We would LOVE to have that off duty our plates. The reason we don't is more a comment on y'all...
Also, 'the selling point of journalism is independence' honestly I don't think that's true for science. At all. I think the role of journalism is make findings accessible in all senses (understandable to lay audiences, signposted in relevance, with background, not paywalled)
I don't think most of us think the role of journalism in covering new findings is to add a 'take'- if anything that's kind of laughable? It's to communicate the findings appropriately to that medium's audience.
Those kinds of obvious mismatches in what we're trying to aim for or achieve seem to widely miss journalists, and I get the sense they don't realise, and so get oh-so-righteous.
[I know this was ranty but this topic seems to come up on repeat and it's the same. shit. every. time. and I can't fucking cope with it. Too many hours of mine thanklessly spent on the phone fighting fires that were sparked by some journalist's profit decision]
