4 ms·

But bad information or misinformation can't be debunked instantly, nor will they able to be. If we require that, we will have an unstable system. Therefor, we h

• MBCook 4y ago
  news consumers should be the last line of defense. Not the first. If the police tell the media they shot someone in a robbery it gets reported. It’s reasonable to assume that’s not fake. If police say they shot 5,700 people during a robbery at a McDonalds this morning, no one would report that uncritically. They’d look for some kind of confirmation because the story is so far out there. That’s what I expect of science reporting. At least the most basic cursory check. I’m not asking for the media to duplicate studies themselves. But blindly reporting what someone tells you uncritically is likely to lead to obvious mistakes like this.
  • throwaway5752 4y ago
    Yes, but this isn't "science reporting". It's a single site, the Scottish Sunday Post, that reported on a single pre-print paper with a small data set from a single research group on a boat doing some sampling and analysis in the Caribbean. "Science reporting" is not analogous to "the police" since the police are a single entity. Let's leave aside, as we know from recent tragedies, that we know the police lie in the media frequently. But by the same standard, this is a problem of the general public confusing random publications in a Scottish newspaper as science reporting. Let me know when this happens in Nature. I don't think the science desks at the BBC or the NYTimes would have even published this, either. Those are the science media. Calling this science reporting is a category error.