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> I don't bother with science reporting at all, for example. I hear about anything worth noticing on HN or similar channels and then I read the actual scientifi
by wutbrodo 6y ago
> I don't bother with science reporting at all, for example. I hear about anything worth noticing on HN or similar channels and then I read the actual scientific paper should I care to, rather than some journalist's half-baked summary thereof.
It's utterly shocking how often news articles summarize a paper incorrectly in some central, significant way. It's gotten to the point that, as you say, reading the paper and the comments on a sufficiently informed forum is my baseline for getting information about science one might care about. That's obviously a lot of work, so you can't do it for everything, but the second-place option is to accept that you're not informed about the topic and don't consider it worth informing yourself about. Reading science reporting is often literally worse than not being informed on the topic at all.
- thu2111 6y agoPart of this is not the journalists fault, though. Or it is, but only in the sense that they should be more adversarial. Very often when I read bad journalism, it's based on a bad academic paper in which the university press or even the paper's abstract has lied about what's actually inside it. To fix this would require journalists to both read and understand the contents of every paper they base a report on. Arguably they need to do that, but, I don't believe that's ever been the standard used before. They generally don't expect "respectable" people like academics, institutional spokespeople etc to flat out lie to them even though it keeps happening.