CHAPTER 10

                THE OLD-TIME JOURNALISTIC METHODS DON'T WORK HERE


             Some of the old newspaper traditions, of course, we
             maintain.  Our self-righteousness, I can assure you, is
             undiminished.  Our capacity to criticize everybody and
             our imperviousness to criticism ourselves, are still, I
             believe, unmatched by novelists, poets or anybody else.
             -- James Reston, Columbia Journalism Review, 1966


             More is not always better.  We're moving into an era
             when the less we use, the better off we will be.  Is a
             400-pound wife better than a 130-pound wife?  (Ted
             Turner, Principal owner of CNN, in "Notable Quotables"
             from MediaWatch, June 22, 1992 (Vol. Five; No. 13. p.
             2)


             Faulty journalistic practices that arise because of the

        scientific nature of the material are another reason why the

        media disseminates wrong information on population, environment,

        and other topics.  This chapter discusses the nature of these

        ways of journalistic thinking - which seem to be getting worse as

        journalists turn from the traditional topics such as war and

        politics to scientifically-based questions.

             Nelson Bunker Hunt explained the demise of his huge Texas

        oil fortune as follows:  "I thought that we were going to have a

        colossal inflation.  You had government agencies saying the price

        of oil was going to $75 a barrel."

             Someday, newspapers and journalists may be sued for

        malpractice by the likes of Hunt.  Droll lawyers may file suit

        about the CAFE mileage standards on behalf of the auto makers,

        and on behalf of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas for the billions

        they spent on re-design for $3 a gallon airplane gas.

             The legal theory will be: Premise one, if the press had not

        played up the 1970s "energy crisis" and the government forecasts

        as it did, the public would not have been misled about future

        energy prices.  There was an obvious connection between the huge

        rise in stories in the newspapers and television in the 1970's,

        and public belief that there was an energy crisis.  Indeed, at

        times this was the most important problem facing the U. S.,

        according to polls.  Premise two, if journalists had used

        acceptable practices for gathering news, they would not have

        trumpeted forecasts such as the $75 barrel of oil.  Suits will

        follow from the timber industry, advocates for the homeless, and

        a myriad of other outfits that will claim they were harmed by

        erroneous journalistic reports of economic and social change.

             Deans of schools of journalism might be made co-defendants

        for recklessly failing to teach their students the best -- or

        even conventional and well-known -- practices for gathering

        information about such events as natural resource scarcity, and

        also for not teaching that crucial instrument of thought called

        inferential statistics.  At present, they teach nothing but the

        standard reportorial methods of interview, and of adversarial

        threshing of the facts.  These methods serve well for covering

        fires and politics, but fail badly on other stories modern

        reporters cover.

             Consider this typical example from The Washington Post:

             Last month, an Atlanta newspaper columnist named Lewis
             Grizzard came here for a visit.  He wishes he hadn't.
             Reason:  our wondrous, knowledgeable, kind, efficient
             taxi drivers.

             Grizzard took four taxi rides during this stay.  The first
             driver took him to Union Station when he had asked to go to
             National Airport.  The second charged Grizzard $10 to drive
             around in search of a restaurant that they never found.  The
             third ran up $11 looking for the Key Bridge Marriott --
             having started all of 200 yards away, in Georgetown.  The
             fourth couldn't locate a rather well-known local landmark,
             the U. S. Capitol.

             When Grizzard got home, he wrote a column that was more like
             a fragmentation grenade.  Conclusion:  Washington is the
             worst taxi city in the country.

             ...So I thought I would go to Atlanta for a day, take as
             many cabs as I could between my flight in and my flight out,
             and see whether Grizzard's home town cabs were worse than
             ours.

             It wasn't even close. [The author goes on to describe
             nothing but good experiences in Atlanta.]

             Ladies and gentlemen, the loser, and still champion:
             Washington, D.C.  (Bob Levey, The Washington Post, Feb
             16, 1987, p. C17)

        This story relates to restricting the number of taxi licenses in

        Washington, a move that would have major consequences for the

        public.

             Now compare this from The American Spectator:

             Anyone who has ever taken a cab from the Atlanta
             airport will be exceedingly reluctant to do so again.
             For years, it has been unusual to find a cab driver at
             Hartsfield [Atlanta] who could speak English, make
             change, or find his way around town.  And the cabs
             themselves were, if anything, worse than the drivers.
             (Geoffrey Norman, "The Hustle and Hypocrisy of Andrew
             Young's Atlanta", The American Spectator, June, 1988,
             p. 24)

             A journalist who takes a few rides in each city cannot

        possibly reach a valid conclusion about whether taxi service is

        worse in Washington, D. C. than in Atlanta.  These stories are

        interesting, but they are dangerous.  True, investigation of

        every question should begin with first-hand observation --

        actually looking inside the horse's mouth to check out the dental

        situation.  But the investigation should not end with first-hand

        investigation in many cases.

             A valid judgment requires a representative sample of rides

        by a representative sample of customers, a sample large enough to

        allow for the considerable variability from ride to ride.

        Especially dangerous to truth is the practice of getting a few

        bad rides by chance, and then generalizing to taxi service as a

        whole.  Scientific discipline, and the sampling techniques that

        are part of it, must be brought to bear.  But that discipline is

        not part of a reporter's armamentarium.

             The representative sample need not be huge or technically

        fancy.  A show of hands in a college class of 200 students in

        each city, asked whether their most recent cab rides were bad,

        provides an acceptable estimate of the proportion of bad rides in

        a city.  The resulting comparison would be valid whereas the

        journalists' method would not.

             The key to avoiding bad inferential practices is knowing

        when the special discipline and techniques of science are

        necessary.  The reporter should know that scientific sampling is

        necessary to get a valid answer about comparative taxi service,

        and interviewing will not suffice in that case, though the

        interview technique is valid for covering a fire.  More

        generally, the journalist must know the characteristics of

        situations that indicate the need for scientific discipline, or

        instead indicate that the reportorial method will suffice.

             The reporter's prayer should be a twist on Marcus Aurelius

        and Alcoholics Anonymous:  Give me the reporter's skill to deal

        effectively with the situation in which the reportorial method is

        appropriate, the courage to eschew the method where it is not

        appropriate, and the wisdom to know which situation is which.

             Scientific discipline is necessary when the chunk of the

        world you wish to understand presents a complex, varied, off-

        again-on-again picture that includes data dispersed over time or

        geography.  Scientific methods are not necessary to describe a

        simple, tight, immediate, local, cause-and-effect pattern.

        Estimating mortality in the country as a whole requires

        scientific census-taking techniques whereas finding out who died

        in a fire does not. Learning the effects of last week's heat wave

        on ice-cream sales needs no special methods, whereas establishing

        whether there has been a rise in the earth's temperature, and

        whether the summer of 1997 was unusual due to the greenhouse

        effect, requires statistical techniques not known even to many

        climatologists. You can see whether there are cockroaches in your

        kitchen without any special equipment, but determining how many

        bacteria there are in the water requires a microscope.

             Or consider whether brushing your teeth horizontally is more

        effective in reducing gum disease than brushing vertically.  The

        important effects do not occur until months or perhaps years

        afterwards, and they may also be very variable from person to

        person.  Only a carefully controlled experiment on two samples of

        subjects chosen randomly from the same population can provide an

        adequate answer.  Theoretical reasoning, and even short-run

        observation of one or even both groups is almost surely

        inadequate to provide a valid answer.

             One simple rule to avoid some atrocious blunders is that a

        few horror stories do not constitute evidence of a nationwide

        trend.  This rule would save a writer from a front-page Wall

        Street Journal article asserting that "Abuse of the Elderly By

        Their Own Children Increases in America" (Feb. 3, 1988).  Such

        stories are often buttressed (as was true in this case) by some

        statistics that seem impressive but that upon examination do not

        provide any evidence for the supposed trend.  (See the third case

        in Chapter 00 re trends in African-American dissatisfaction).

        The article does not contain even a scintilla of evidence for a

        trend, or even an estimate of the amount of such abuse in the

        present.  Nor would an editor of the slightest evidential

        sophistication let pass a piece like this even on the back page,

        and certainly not in column 1, page 1.

             Once in a while there appears an analysis that applies solid

        data and analysis to these pseudo-trends, e.g. "Battered-Truth

        Syndrome:  Hyped Stats on Wife Abuse Only Worsen the Problem"

        (Armin Bfrott, Washington Post, July 31, 1994, C1) and "Debunking

        the 'Day of Dread' for Women" (Ken Ringle, Jan 31, 1993, A1),

        But this is no excuse for the worthless stuff to have appeared in

        the first place - and it is exceedingly rare for the rotten stuff

        to meet its comeuppance in such a debunking article.

             (A nice example of the beam and the mote:  A wonderful

        article by columnist Steve Twomey in the Washington Post (July 6,

        1995, B1) takes politicians to task for basing pieces of

        legislation on a few anecdotes heard from constituents. Yet big-

        time journalists make a living on stories that invariably begin

        with an anecdote - as did Twomey's own excellent story!)

             When immediate observation is insufficient, and when experts

        and libraries do not yield the answers you need, one must turn to

        scientifically-disciplined research.  And when I say "must" I

        mean that failure to use scientifically-sound methods means

        fooling yourself into potential difficulty, or fooling others

        with results that will be fraudulent at best and disastrous at

        worst.  Please note, however, that "scientific" does not mean

        experimental.  Astronomy and population censuses are two

        important examples of scientific enterprises that do not use

        experimentation.  Experiments have great advantages when they are

        feasible, but when they are not feasible other methods are

        usually available.

             The failure to use scientifically-sound methods is an

        increasing affliction upon the public as newspapers and

        television become more important influences upon us, and as we

        increasingly attend to events outside of our own immediate

        surroundings where we can check the situation for ourselves.  The

        public is systematically misled about such issues as the extent

        of welfare abuse by immigrants, the dangers of nuclear plants and

        nuclear waste, and trends in the availability of natural

        resources and the cleanliness of our environment, because

        journalists apply to these issues the same techniques that work

        well in covering warehouse fires and trials of corrupt

        politicians. But these non-scientific techniques systematically

        provide unsound answers to the more global questions.

              Nowadays newspapers recognize that scientific polling

        methods are required for useful forecasts about the outcomes of

        elections; gathering opinion the old way in bars and barber shops

        is not enough.  But in too many other cases, journalists still

        barge ahead without the necessary scientific techniques.

             The plain fact is that journalists arrogate to themselves

        the role of identifying and explaining phenomena that are beyond

        the powers of the human mind to achieve without the systematic

        procedures of science.  In his autobiography, James (Scotty)

        Reston described how he came to the point of leaving the New York

        Times if he was not allowed to go beyond the reporting of facts.

        "We were, I constantly insisted, telling the reader what happened

        but not why"  (1991, p. 121).  To their credit, "The editors

        conceded that more explanation was necessary as the nation became

        more involved in world affairs, but feared, with some reason,

        that this might dilute and even corrupt the news columns with

        opinion" (p. 124).

             Reston won his battle with his bosses, and he suggests that

        that opened the doors to others also doing what one Washington

        Post columnist William Raspberry calls "spotting trends" (Nov. 4,

        1994, p. A25).  This then spawns what Washington Post media

        columnist Richard Harwood calls "The Trend Explosion Industry"

        (August 1, 1994, p. A21) debunking the trends that others "spot"

        but using the same techniques - unaided thought.  Other

        commentators speculate that the presence of journalists having

        graduate degrees rather than high school diplomas, thereby

        thinking themselves more advanced thinkers than simply reporters

        of the facts, contributes to this "trend" (which I blushingly

        admit may rest on factual foundations not much more solid than

        those I criticize).

             An acquaintance with scientific discipline would also

        develop a journalistic nose for unlikely conclusions.  The front

        page of the Washington Post headlines "Blacks' Life Expectancy

        Drops", and continues:  "Some officials attributed part of the

        problem to economic policies of the Reagan administration"

        (December 15, 1988).  Most people who have had a course in

        social-scientific research would guess that a drop for two years

        in such a statistic is just a temporary reversal in the long-run

        trend.  And they would know that such a broad phenomenon does not

        change direction as a result of a few changes in one presidential

        administration.

             There are two possible explanations for the misleading

        headlines and the unsound theorizing:  1) ignorance, and 2)

        larceny.  In the absence of evidence for fraud, perhaps we should

        assume that ignorance is the culprit.  Yes, it may seem

        inconsistent that journalists can at the same time be remarkably

        skeptical of people's motives and so credulous about non-facts

        and non-trends in social science.  But anyone - and there were

        many, including stories on page one - who can tell the public

        with a straight face that the rate of wife abuse increases

        sharply on the day of the Super Bowl game surely has the judgment

        of a child who believes in Santa Claus.

             Perhaps the sinning journalists are at the stage of

        purveyors of snake-oil and similar remedies for such ailments as

        cancer and diabetes as of 1905.  When asked if their "goods"

        really worked they offered justifications such as that the

        customers at least got hope for their money.  Most of these

        purveyors surely lacked any knowledge of the type of scientific

        experiment necessary to validate their remedies; many of the

        sellers as well as their customers relied on anecdotes of cures,

        just as journalists rely on anecdotes as "proof" of the existence

        of the trends they write about.

             It is natural enough that those unschooled in science should

        not understand how difficult it is to establish the simplest of

        facts.  Decades of research by hundreds of skilled atmosphere

        scientists have not been able to establish whether the globe is

        warming or cooling or just oscillating right now.  Despite vast

        sums spent to collect data on crimes, the current trends in

        violations still are hard to pin down. How difficult must it be,

        then, to determine whether or not there is a "backlash" trend in

        race or gender relations or something similarly complicated.

             Journalists defend their standard practices on the grounds

        that they enlist experts to thrash out the scientific questions.

        The theory is that an adversary process like that of the courts

        winnows out the truth.  Even at its best, however, an adversary

        process has grave shortcomings in scientific matters.  And the

        adversary process as practiced by journalists is not nearly as

        good as the process in courts.

             It is ironic that journalists are often critical of the jury

        system's ability to deal with technical questions, but they are

        confident of their own ability to do so.  For this to be true, a

        lone journalist would require more judgment than a panel of

        twelve jurors, because the jury has major advantages not

        available to journalists.

             The journalist must pick his/her own experts.  Even with the

        best will, he/she less resources to do this well than do the two

        sides in a legal dispute.  Picking experts requires expertise,

        and considerable effort to dig into a new field.  The

        journalist's rolodex method is simply an accumulation of

        celebrity experts -- a celebrity being a person well known for

        being well known -- and often the celebrity expert expresses

        views out of step with, and repugnant to, the celebrity's entire

        profession.  The egregious case of Lester Brown versus the

        consensus of agricultural economists is a case in point.

             The journalist has less incentive to pick the best experts

        than do the sides in a court case who seek to find the most

        effective advocates for their sides.  Indeed, the most effective

        advocates for the two sides can make a newspaper story seem

        inconclusive, which no journalist wants.  Newsweek headlines

        "More Bad News for the Planet" (March 28, 1988, p. 63).  An

        expert who maintains that on balance there is more good news for

        the planet than bad news is hardly welcome at the funeral feast.

        And there is no check on the journalist picking experts in such

        fashion that the overall impression left is the one the

        journalist favors.

             In court there are rules that apply equally to the two

        sides' experts, giving equal opportunity to both.  But a

        journalist makes the rules and applies them at the same time, a

        process that journalists themselves would criticize in any other

        venue.  And the journalist elicits the experts' views with one-

        on-one interviews, without the bracing effect of cross-

        examination by other experts.

             Perhaps most infuriating to the experts themselves,

        journalists often consider themselves qualified to render summary

        judgments in matters where there is controversy rather than

        consensus among the experts.  The serene arrogance of such

        practices will pass without further comment.

             The heart of the jury system is that the individual jurors

        have no personal stake in the outcome.  But journalists do have a

        built-in bias -- a bias for the slant that is more newsworthy.

        This bias must affect the choice of experts, and the choice of

        what to quote from the experts.  So for this reason, too, the

        combat method for ascertaining truth does not protect journalists

        from the hazards of writing stories about events that require

        scientific discipline without exerting that discipline oneself.

             Was it Hegel who said that the only lesson of history is

        that we forget all history?  One of the few negative general

        trends in a world where most things are getting better is our

        greater propensity to disregard history with each successive

        decade and improvement in communications, along with an increase

        in the volume of printed material available.  For example, the

        average age of articles cited in scientific research  nowadays is

        less now than it was in earlier times, simply because there are

        more articles being written by more scientists now.  This means

        that great work of the past gets forgotten sooner in favor of

        trivial recent work.

             Perhaps for this reason, and perhaps also because of the

        occupational focus on "news," journalists often devote much

        attention to recent changes that may be only blips running

        against long-run changes.  For example, every few years there is

        a spate of news stories about how the food situation is getting

        worse, when in fact there is only a temporary reversal.  Or a

        single hot summer is viewed as portending major climatic

        changes.

             The charges made here also are made by media critics.  The

        Washington Post ombudsman takes aim at "The clever aside, the

        smart conclusion, the delicious characterization" 9July 12, 1992,

        p. C6). Reston does so in the headnote to this chapter.  The note

        that is new here, I believe, is the emphasis on the role of

        science rather than on chiding malefactors about their character

        and skills. It is not moral improvement that we should focus on,

        I believe, but rather structural change to provide proper

        incentives for accurate journalism in fields that require

        scientific evidence.

             One wonders:  How can journalists have the confidence to

        convert their curbstone opinions into authoritative-seeming

        newspaper stories?  One bulwark is their belief that they know

        more than do others.  This is reflected in the lament that the

        public is "Ignorant, Apathetic and Smug"  (Richard Cohen,

        Washington Post, Feb 2, 1996, p. A19), based on old-chestnut poll

        results that large percentages of the public do not know the

        names of various public officials.  "The Washington Post recently

        published a poll that would lead you to believe that America is

        ... the dumbest nation on earth... They do not take the time to

        know the names of their U.S. senators... only 24 percent of

        Americans can name them both... For the nation... it is a

        calamity".

             That's as self-serving comment as one can imagine.  The

        journalist's game is politics and the news, so it is not

        surprising that people who work at other trades don't score well

        at this one.  And more public interest in the subject means more

        papers sold and more importance attached to columnists.  But

        where is the evidence that time spent reading the newspapers is

        more valuable to anyone than time spent reading computer manuals

        or poetry?  This is just one more unsupported effusion.  Nobel-

        laureate Herbert Simon writes in his autobiography that he reads

        no newspaper at all.  Columnist Cohen says that "Such blather

        ignorance ought to be condemned".  Sure, and teenagers consider

        their parents terminally ignorant because they don't know the

        names of the top-ten hit songs.

             What forces will make for improvement in the quality of the

        "news" we read about topics requiring scientific discipline to

        understand them well?  I cannot forecast the causes or course of

        such improvement; only time will tell.  The Pure Food and Drug

        Act of 1906 [check} saved the public from some of snake-oil

        excesses, and later legislation improved the situation even more,

        though the movement may now have gone too far.  But we cannot

        expect or hope that legislation will improve the truth level in

        journalism about social-scientific topics; the solution might be

        worse than the problem even if it could ever be adopted.  And in

        the absence of legislation, progress will be slow because nothing

        on the horizon promises to help much.  Yes, editors more

        knowledgeable about social science might help.  In-house

        scientific ombudsmen might help, or a board of outside social-

        science ombudsmen serving for short periods, perhaps in rotation.

        It is doubtful that the courts can help; who would sue whom on

        alleging what harms done?  But one or another improvement must

        eventually come, as it came with adulterated foods and false

        drugs.

        A Disclaimer

             Nothing said here is intended to deny that an important

        cause of unsound journalism about the environment, resources, and

        population is due to ordinary run-of-the-mine incompetence, the

        continuation of which is enabled by the lack of scrutiny and

        sanctions from outside the press.  The press prides itself on

        being "watchdogs", keeping an eye on such institutions as the

        police and politicians, and "holding their feet to the fire".

        But who polices the press watchers?  Who is watching the

        watchdogs?  Who is keeping their feet to the fire?  No one,

        because there are no effective institutions to do so.  Journalism

        reviews are mostly toothless in this regard, and do not reach the

        broad public.  Ombudsmen cannot humanly forget who pays their

        salaries, which side of the bread the butter is on, and few

        humans are brave enough to bit the hands that feed them.  And

        assuredly newspapers and television channels do not do the

        policing themselves, except on the rarest of occasions.  The

        corrections column corrects the spelling of people's names and

        the like; does it ever say that the paper had a story completely

        wrong? When was the last time you read in the press that someone

        had been fired for writing an unsound story.  And the old-boys'

        and old-girls' club rules that prohibit newspapers from

        trumpeting other papers' mistakes enables miscreants from paying

        for their mistakes and peccadilloes.

             Once again, the explanation of poor performance is the

        incentive structure. It therefore is foolish to blame

        individuals.  One must try to think of ways to improve the

        structure.  To point this out is not press-bashing; it is the

        ordinary economics of management.


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