[. . .] the second issue is how people find out about stuff. We exist in a blizzard of information, and stuff goes missing: as we saw recently, research shows that people don’t even hear about retractions of outright fraudulent work. Publishing a follow-up in the same venue that made an initial claim is one way of addressing this problem (and when the journal Science rejected the replication paper, even they said “your results would be better received and appreciated by the audience of the journal where the Daryl Bem research was published”).
The same can be said for the New York Times, who ran a nice long piece on the original precognition finding, New Scientist who covered it twice, the Guardian who joined in online, the Telegraph who wrote about it three times over, New York Magazine, and so on.
It’s hard to picture many of these outlets giving equal prominence to the new negative findings that are now emerging, in the same way that newspapers so often fail to return to a debunked scare, or a not-guilty verdict after reporting the juicy witness statements.
All the most interesting problems around information today are about structure: how to cope with the overload, and find sense in the data. For some eyecatching precognition research, this stuff probably doesn’t matter. What’s interesting is that the information architectures of medicine, academia and popular culture are all broken in the exact same way.
Ben Goldacre, “I foresee that nobody will do anything about this problem”, Bad Science, 2011-04-23
April 23, 2011
QotD: The debunking problem in media
1 Comment
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I think that this is a great topic! I think to our current media and the stories that they run when it comes to politics and how, no matter how outrageous the initial story is they can run it up like it is the gospel truth, with a small disclaimer near the end telling the reader that this is pure speculation. Once the speculation turns out to be unfounded there is never a retraction on the original story, or if there is a retraction, it is only in the single media organ that started the flood, and never in the subsequent organs that repost it.
Case in point, the Guergis PEI meltdown that wasn’t. How many stories were there after the original story? How many stories followed where the video was actually observed and the original story couldn’t hold up to scrutiny. And finally, how many people only quote the original story and never the follow up items that debunk the entire original story?
The media SHOULD have an obligation to do some fact checking, and perhaps even hold onto a story for a little longer to make sure they are not ruining someone’s reputation.
Comment by Dwayne — April 23, 2011 @ 17:02