Thread by @PhilippMarkolin

It gives me no pleasure to report that many science journalists, including very good ones, seem to still not have learned from history.

A thread about false equivalency reporting and how forced "neutrality" actually gives liars an asymmetric advantage in the information age.
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First, one clarification:
Factual reporting is good and being unbiased is good as well.

But being unbiased does not mean one has to be neutral and give equal weight when reporting about climate opinions given by for example the IPCC versus climate deniers.
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When the IPCC claims "climate change is real" but person X says "all the climate models are wrong", putting both opinions up as equal creates a FALSE EQUIVALENCY

The supposed "neutrality" of just reporting statements from both sides is often just a veneer to cover laziness
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Being unbiased demands of journalists to weight the context (person, evidence, history, reception) of any claim neutrally and then report on the claim in a contextualized fashion.

Refrain from doing that outsources that work to readers, who do not have the time, skill, tools
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and domain expertise of the journalist to properly contextualize each person and their claim, thus inevitable are left to process them as "equally meritorious".

This opens up the possibility of creating a FALSE EQUIVALENCY when the sources are unequal in credibility or merit
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So how would that look correctly:

Unbiased reporting might look something like this:
The IPCC, an organisation made up of renowned climate scientists and independent experts all around the world have said "Climate change is real", a claim that goes hand in hand with decades
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of published literature & is shared by multiple sources I contacted for this article.
In contrast, following a long history of climate denial, person X, who has previously been known to make inaccurate claims, says: "climate models are wrong" without being able to substantiate
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Now why am I telling you this?

It has to do with a recent scienceinsider article about the latest ex-Lancet Origins report & Jeffrey Sachs. science.org/content/articl…

In my opinion, @sciencecohen leaves out critical context that plays into the hands of the already powerful.
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This is a tricky one and I want to stress that I respect @sciencecohen's reporting and by no means see there a generalized issue, but this specific article did rub me wrong.

I will lay out some passages that I think are critical and hopefully people will tell me I am wrong.
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Here is the whole part 🔽
After reading it, my takeaway message was that Sachs is an honest truth seeker who rightfully decided to kick out conflicted scientists so they can make a neutral report without ignoring lab leak, which the other PNAS report systematically ignored.
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Additionally, my takeaway from this passage 🔽 would be that @PeterDaszak is a shady, intransparent character who has a lot to hide and might have caused the pandemic, and "brave truthseeker" Sachs is fighting for the good cause against the odds.

Does that sound "unbiased"?
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Now let's see how the article could have looked with a little bit of contextualization, especially of Sachs, shall we?

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As for the implicit suggestion of shady characters, I am surprised Jeffrey Sachs did not make the list. What else does he have to do? Go full anti-vaxxer by joining RFK on a podcast? Oh wait...

Okay, so I think we all get the point.
Unreflected covering the statements of
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a known liar and political manipulator without contextualizing them runs the danger of creating a false equivalency

But we have to talk about another thing too: Power

The only reason why Sachs gets coverage in the first place is because he has power, not expertise or merit.
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Journalism, especially science journalism, is supposed to be in service of knowledge for the #public good, not in the service of distributing the ideology of the influential and powerful.

It demands extra scrutiny of journalists to contextualize the situation & claims
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for readers, otherwise the #asymmetries of our time will make sure that the influential and powerful, will entrench their worldview and ideology over our fragmented information spheres.

We need accurate information from experts about important topics, how else can we
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as democratic citizens have agency over our lives and decisions that we make?

You don't have to throw biosafety concerns away, these concerns are valid.

But you definitively should throw away Jeffrey Sachs, whose only interest is personal gain and power, not public good

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So yeah, that is my take after reading this article.

I have become quite sensitive to asymmetric & crowd- distortions of our info sphere 🔽, and unfortunately they happen despite our best intentions.
Hope I am not offending Jon, I appreciate his talent.

protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-tw…