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eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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QotD

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 05:25am on 2010-02-03

"Journalists are taught to believe that truth is made entirely of opinions, and that a fact is just an opinion held by a powerful enough majority. The very principle of science is really hard for them to understand. All they've worked out is that scientists can be used for an appeal to authority, but they have a compulsion to undermine it because it really bothers them that a person can somehow become an authority by some mysterious means other than popularity and/or force." -- [info] ceruleanst, 2010-01-15

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posted by [identity profile] realinterrobang.livejournal.com at 05:42pm on 2010-02-03
That's not at all what journalists are taught (speaking as someone who took some J-school courses as an undergrad), and is the most disgraceful misreading of postmodernism I've ever seen, and I've seen a damn lot of really shitty ones.

The editorial demand for so-called "objectivity" (which, in the newspaper management business is a code word for "not pissing off the advertisers") usually winds up in an editorial policy that balances 10 000 000 scientists against 10 vocal cranks, because were not the cranks represented, they'd complain to the newspaper and the advertisers, and that pisses off the advertisers. Hence, you get a lot of false balance. Not only that, but the (non-academic) popular culture is heavily invested in the idea that the "sensible position" must be halfway between two extremes, and no matter which the issue, "both sides are just as bad," so failing to placate the rubes also pisses off the advertisers.
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