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Journalism was always like this when it comes to reporting about research.
I’d say journalism is always like this when it is profit motivated. There are a couple of factors at play. First, you need to publish your article as fast as possible so no one beats you to the scoop and take views away from your piece. Next, you are incentivized to oversimplify everything to ensure your article appeals to as broad an audience as possible. Finally, you are incentivized to write sensationalist titles to attract attention.
The outcome of this gets gnarly fast. People’s first impressions usually color how they forever view the story. For a long time people still believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, even after it was clear that was false. Part of this is psychological, but part of it is that reading the corrections section of the news is boring as hell. I think some of THAT is just human nature of we’re fascinated by the novel, and correcting details isn’t novel. But also some is that publishers don’t want you paying close attention to their fuckups so they bury them. They think it would reduce your trust in them
Next, oversimplifying tends to result in inaccuracies. Its a game of telephone. An expert explains their very best understanding of what’s going on to the journalist, simplifying it because the journalist isn’t an expert and needs to ask questions to grasp the parts that don’t immediately make sense. Depending on the field, even the expert might not have fully solidified their understanding yet. Anyway. The journalist simplifies their understanding of the subject for mass consumption. Generally speaking, the audience can’t ask the journalist follow up questions like how the journalist did with the expert, so we’ve just crossed a territory into which resolving misconceptions is going to be much harder going forward. After that, let’s be real, you’re probably going to summarize stories you heard to your friends creating further layers of simplification.
Finally, let’s be honest with ourselves, we’ve all read an article title, not read the article, and still retained whatever misleading sensationalist title the author wrote.
Or any topic that you know better than the average person.
This is generally what I say about news reporting on any technical topic. Just look at any report on a subject you understand, realise how much they get wrong. Now, assume the same level of accuracy on a subject you don’t understand.
Not just news reporting, but the propagation of information in general, so add in social media and word of mouth in there too. Assume everything you hear or read is wrong, because the majority of info is created from the first peak of a Duning-Kruger chart.
This sort of thing is why I’m so excited for AI journalism, yes it costs jobs but the quality improvement will be drastic as they won’t get burnt out, can “understand” every topic, and can even produce in multiple languages accurately. We won’t have to worry about this anymore as people won’t have to click on one of say 100 articles written to get people to read when they can choose 1 that is actually interesting of 1000.
You’re making a bold assumption that it won’t be used to fill the market with countless clickbait trash as a low cost money making machine
It absolutely will be used to do that, but people can choose where they get their news, so if you put out such a news source people will go to you instead of those sites. This is the good part capitalism.
That already exists… There are good journalist why do u wanna replace them with ai
The media has been trashy for ages. You gotta check out a book from the 70’s called The Mind Managers by Herbert Schiller.
Man when I found out how scientific studies were funded and how much work you had to do to actually understand them after just seeing face value the media throws out I was crestfallen.
Like just how the Koch brothers have funded media projects and twisted the findings ALONE pissed me off to no extent. Everything we are fed has an agenda and it’s horrific.
“Experts say” does not mean that they are experts in the field they are talking about, it also doesn’t mean that any research has been done. It just means that they said it, it might even have been a joke.
