12 ms·

Here is a link to the actual journal article on the study, since the NYTimes omitted it for some reason (currently free to access): http://onlinelibrary.wiley.

• cle 11y ago
  It constantly frustrates me how news articles never cite research articles, they always just mention "a study" and the author, leaving me to fumble around for 10 minutes to find the actual study. Does anyone know why this is SOP?
  • debacle 11y ago
    Because most news organizations are not rigorous and care more about clicks than journalism.
  • kragen 11y ago
    Because journalism is a systematically dishonest profession populated largely by people who do not want their readers to be able to catch their mistakes and do not want to give credit to the researchers who made the discovery that earned the clicks for the news article. They care about entertaining, not informing; the truth or falsehood of what they are writing is irrelevant to them, except as a constraint that might impede the telling of a sensational story (all else being equal, a story is more sensational if it is true than if it is fiction). Like PageRank-hungry SEO scum, they will only name sources if they think some of that the source's credibility will rub off on their article, never vice versa.
    • mapleoin 11y ago
      What a refreshingly cynical argument!
      • kragen 11y ago
        It's just a guess.
      • secstate 11y ago
        Cynical, yes. Accurate, unfortunately so. I worked for a small weekly paper for a number of years. Weeklies are still very community oriented and immune to many of the diseases that afflict large city dailies or national news outlets. Still, if you aren't selling advertising, you aren't in business, and advertisers don't want to see their ad next to something that either offends sensibilities or bores the hell out of readers. You can wish it weren't so, or call it cynical, but that IS the reason they don't add a link to the source in the article. God help us all if people clicked away from the site, learned more about the topic than the reporter, or had the piece go over their head.
        • kragen 11y ago
          (Edit: I misread your "unfortunately so" as "unfortunately no" and I was super confused.) I find your comment disheartening because I was kind of hoping that I was guessing wrong. Can I still hope that things are not quite as bad at the NY Times as at local weeklies?
    • solidpy 11y ago
      My local newspaper's website never links to outside pages, always to previous articles within the site. I assume it is to prevent readers to go wander off.
      • salgernon 11y ago
        I was going to link to a piece Dave Winer wrote on scripting news some years ago: http://www.scripting.com/2005/12/12.html#howToMakeMoneyOnTheInternetVersion3 http://www.scripting.com/2005/12/12.html#howToMakeMoneyOnThe... Where he talks about encouraging outgoing traffic. But one of the more interesting links in that post has gone "evil-dark" (expired, taken by squatters, endless unclosable javascript "your iOS app is inf1ected!!1one! Call us to fix it! Have your credit card ready!" So by your newspaper linking only to itself, it could be that they actually hope to avoid this dead link behavior. (Although it would be better that it was a self link that went to a vetted link repository.) I'm really not a web guy, so I'm surprised that this problem hasn't been solved for most content management systems.
  • JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    Because they are now competing with blogs for readership.
    • JamesBarney 11y ago
      In my experience blogs are usually much better about citing studies than newspapers.
  • superuser2 11y ago
    Most readers are not on university networks and so would not be able to read the study anyway, except in rare cases of open access journals.
    • obstacle1 11y ago
      So what? Whether or not you give someone credit for their work or provide evidence for a claim you make is not contingent on your audience's having immediate access to the fulltext of your source. If the source exists, you cite it, and link to it -- period.
      • Jemmeh 11y ago
        It's not about the audience not having access. It's that the reporter is getting access without having ever paid for it. (Pirating, reading from another article, etc)
        • obstacle1 11y ago
          Nobody could ever prove how the author accessed it. It just isn't even an issue, legally or otherwise. Setting aside the fact that it is a non-issue, in any case many news agencies have various DB subscriptions, most public libraries have DB access, most universities have 'reader' accounts which grant access to these DBs for like $100 a year, etc. Any reporter who wants to access an article legitimately can easily do so. Else, they really do not belong in the profession of journalism, which relies on practitioners being resourceful and researching things in order to convey accurate information to others.
          • Jemmeh 11y ago
            Shoot. I could have sworn this thread was nested under Balgair's comment about journals that charge $70 per paper. I must have misread something.
    • toufka 11y ago
      So only cite open access articles (like this one). It'd certainly be a win for the public.
  • Balgair 11y ago
    It might be correlated to journals that charge $70.00 per paper. If the NYT publishes a story citing a journal, the journal may go back, see that the NYT never actually bought the paper and a journalist just got a copy from somewhere, and then try to sue the NYT. The 'study' may be a weasel word that is used to avoid this outcome. And yes, over one article this is frivolous, but if the journal waits a few years and amasses 100 instances where this happened, then the NYT may actually go to court.
    • nommm-nommm 11y ago
      How so? Borrowing material from the library is a "thing" as far as I know. I don't think you have to own a copy of something to write about it. That would be insane.
    • albertsun 11y ago
      That's definitely not the case... Journals provide news outlets with complimentary copies of papers specifically so that they can be written about. Often, but not always, they're even provided in advance of official publication.
      • Balgair 11y ago
        Ahhh, so it is laziness then. I should have known, never assume conspiracy when idiocy will do.
  • frandroid 11y ago
    Because news organizations are still operating under a newsprint paradigm where citations are considered a waste of ink. Like I'm not saying they actually still think about column inches, but that's how this became standard and people are still just following the standard. This is actually a good litmus test to see if a news organization has moved to the online-first mindset or not.
  • cookiecaper 11y ago
    It makes it harder for the reader to find mistakes and harder for the paper to sensationalize. It diminishes the ability to use a study as either commercial or political propaganda (which is not to say the studies themselves aren't commercial or political propaganda in the first place). Media outlets want viewership more than anything else and the way to get and keep viewership is to tell people what they want to hear. It's why media outlets always have a consistent "slant"; MSNBC people watch MSNBC because it aligns more directly with their worldview than Fox News, and vice-versa. There is minimal tolerance within the audience for a host or pundit that appears to disagree on important factors. You'll never see Bill 'O Reilly and Rachel Maddow on the same network, because that network would not have any viewers; conservatives want their conservative beliefs reinforced, liberals want their liberal beliefs reinforced, and both will only consume media that performs that function. Most people are not open to having their beliefs challenged even slightly. All that said, I do find such articles often do state the university and/or the professors that were involved in the study or studies. Some of it may just be convention established before hyperlinks existed, though in many cases, the actual study is not publicly accessible.
    • wutbrodo 11y ago
      Joe Scarborough has a 95% lifetime rating from the American conservative Union, and he's on msnbc. Your statements are a lot more universal than the evidence supports and there are plenty of people who don't run for the hills if their network of choice has a diversity of viewpoints.
      • cookiecaper 11y ago
        Personal POV doesn't have to align with what you spend your day spouting on TV. "Morning Joe" is a different type of program than the primetime "rage pundits" and Scarborough is one of MSNBC's more moderate hosts, but he still spends his day pandering to MSNBC's core audience. Bias goes much deeper than the words that do or don't come out of a host's mouth; the networks sets the agenda, frames the debate, and procures the guests that will cater to their primary viewership target, and Scarborough passively rides the gravy train. Anchors are performers more than anything, putting on the show that the network has paid them to put on. What politician is going to turn down the opportunity to have his face in front of tens of thousands of viewers for 2 hours every day, even if it means he has to play nice with the other side? If there were plenty of people who wanted a "diversity of viewpoints", you'd see this in the marketplace. Could you point out one place where this is actually true? Even NPR, which has a much smaller profit motive and thus should be less concerned with viewership and more concerned with integrity, panders constantly to its audience and refrains from creating a "diversity of viewpoints". How often do you hear a fair story on NPR about what the conservatives perceive as problems with abortion or same-sex marriage (meaning, a story that doesn't reduce these, either the beliefs and or the believers, to a gross caricature)? Never, because it would make NPR's listener base really mad, because they don't agree that there are problems with those things. Very few, if any, news outlets are neutral. They pander to their audience's beliefs and they set the dialogue by choosing the stories to give airtime and feed to the base. Even the "neutral stories" are framed to push a specific viewpoint. They usually go like this: open up with a brief, slanted statement of events. Call someone who supports your POV and ask for their comment. Spend 2 minutes making their argument and bringing it in. About 75% through, put on a 1 or 2 sentence clip from the other side that basically amounts to "we disagree because bad reason x" (bad reason provided either by editing the clip or selecting a bad rep of opposite viewpoint), and then follow it up with another comment from the first person, the person whose argument and authority you spent the first 74% of the story establishing, that says "Well, bad reason x is just ridiculous". Then sign off. I guarantee you 90% of TV and radio news stories that discuss a news event in a supposedly "neutral" way approximate that pattern. They do it because they're trying to reinforce the beliefs that they believe will make them more money.
  • dredmorbius 11y ago
    The New York Times is especially guilty of this, the more so in its health and science reporting. I noted and specifically called out, IIRC, the LA Times for specifically referencing and linking a source. The Times needs to get with the times.
  • Bud 11y ago
    I noticed nobody in the thread seems to be pointing this out, so I'll do it: Scientific research articles are very often behind a paywall. So citing them wouldn't really give the reader much more information.
• annnnd 11y ago
  Also, this very important piece of title is omitted: "...with obesity and metabolic syndrome". Sugar is getting too much bad press already (along with meat, white bread and computer games). Nothing is just black & white. </rant>
  • graeme 11y ago
    That completely changes the story. The HN title should be edited.
    • annnnd 11y ago
      Exactly. Also: "...comparable percentages of protein, fat, and carbohydrate as their self-reported diet". Self-reported? That must be really reliable, let's just skip control group... The problem is that the HN title is sensationalistic without merit.
      • wutbrodo 11y ago
        Self reported is unfortunately very common in nutritional studies, for obvious reasons. I don't think it makes sense to dismiss a single study for having the same flaws as most others, as opposed to the general recognition that nutritional science findings are baseline less robust.
        • annnnd 11y ago
          I wouldn't cut them so much slack. The study is either reliable or it isn't. And it wouldn't take them much more effort to make the results significant in some way. In this case, I think that just giving these children the self-reported diet would yield massive effects on their health, sugar or no sugar. I am quite sure children with obesity problems don't know their real diet - not because they are dishonest, but because we (as people) are very efficient at hiding the uncomfortable truths from ourselves.
  • roymurdock 11y ago
    Title should be: "Substitution of starch for added sugars improves health of children suffering from obesity, metabolic syndrome, and high habitual added sugar consumption." But then it seems slightly less groundbreaking.
• plonh 11y ago
  Newspapers usually don't cite their sources because they don't want to drive traffic away or get their facts proven wrong. Subarine PR and native ads are where sources get cited.