{"id":15404,"date":"2012-06-10T00:03:53","date_gmt":"2012-06-10T05:03:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=15404"},"modified":"2012-06-07T12:09:02","modified_gmt":"2012-06-07T17:09:02","slug":"qotd-journalism-in-theory-and-in-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/06\/10\/qotd-journalism-in-theory-and-in-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Journalism, in theory and practice"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>In the same way that many children naively assume adults are infallible, I grew up with the fantasy that anything in print must be true. This created some logical conundrums in the supermarket checkout aisle, where I\u2019d see the <em>Weekly World News<\/em> and wonder, \u201cBut if aliens <em>haven\u2019t<\/em> abducted Elvis, <em>how can they print it?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I mean, if journalists don\u2019t hold themselves to standards of accuracy, why would they take the trouble to print an Errata column for the few minutiae they happened to miss? \u201cIn last week\u2019s issue,\u201d such a column would say, \u201cwe mistakenly identified the smiling man in the photograph as Nathan Daniels of Ballwin, Missouri. In fact, while he is indeed Nathan Daniels of Ballwin, Missouri, what we called a smile is more of a tempered grin. We sincerely regret the error.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If that\u2019s the kind of error a newspaper regrets \u2014 and <em>sincerely<\/em>, no less \u2014 surely the major facts behind any story are watertight.<\/p>\n<p>But the Errata are a trick, and not even a new trick. I use the same trick to ingratiate myself to my wife when I realize I\u2019ve neglected to do something important for our 1-year-old daughter. \u201cI remembered her shoes and socks,\u201d I\u2019ll say, \u201cbut I couldn\u2019t find the pink sippy cup, so I brought the green sippy cup.\u201d By apologizing for this lesser transgression, I\u2019m hoping my wife won\u2019t notice that I\u2019ve forgotten to arrange for our daughter to wear pants.<\/p>\n<p>Adam Ruben, <a href=\"http:\/\/sciencecareers.sciencemag.org\/career_magazine\/previous_issues\/articles\/2012_05_25\/caredit.a1200058\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The Unwritten Rules of Journalism&#8221;, <em>Science<\/em><\/a>, 2012-05-25<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the same way that many children naively assume adults are infallible, I grew up with the fantasy that anything in print must be true. This created some logical conundrums in the supermarket checkout aisle, where I\u2019d see the Weekly World News and wonder, \u201cBut if aliens haven\u2019t abducted Elvis, how can they print it?\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,28,41],"tags":[86,213],"class_list":["post-15404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-media","category-quotations","tag-criticism","tag-newspapers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-40s","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15404"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15406,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15404\/revisions\/15406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}