Having already made trouble for Fareed Zakaria, the furtive bloggers @crushingbort and @blippoblappo have trained their sights on a bigger target, Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell, who they say "has made a name for himself peddling social theories that attempt to explain our world in simple-to-understand and incorrect ways." More from Poynter's Andrew Beaujon and Lloyd Grove at the Daily Beast. Followup.
Issues in science writing
A new study from Cardiff University in Wales traces exaggeration in health news to the press releases that accompany them, but lays as much blame on the scientists who approve the press releases as the press officers who write them. Also see: BMJ editorial by Ben Goldacre, plus commentary from James Hamblin, Virginia Hughes, Steve Connor, and Mark Henderson.
"American Hustle" won multiple Oscar nominations for a story of which it advised, "Some of this actually happened." Now, longtime New Yorker science writer Paul Brodeur is suing its makers for libel over a scene that, he alleges, misquotes him: "Jennifer Lawrence's character Roslyn tells her husband, Irving, played by Christian Bale, that microwaves take the nutrition out of food," Austin Siegemund-Broka writes. "'I read it in an article. Look, by Paul Brodeur.'"
Harvard's Steven Pinker argues that "bogus" rules about grammar are the enemy of good writing, and sometimes of good government as well, as when Chief Justice John Roberts "administered the oath of office to Barack Obama in January, 2009, and un-split a verb in the oath of office. He’s a famous stickler. He almost precipitated a constitutional crisis because it wasn’t clear whether the administration of the oath of office was legitimate in its transfer of power."
Are journalists soon going to need expensive permits to take pictures in wilderness areas? Coverage of a pending U.S. Forest Service regulation made it sound that way, Jonathan Peters writes in CJR: "Cue the outrage. And indeed, there are some genuinely concerning elements of the Forest Service rules. But the situation isn’t exactly as it seemed at first, either." Peters analyzes the issue's coverage and how the Forest Service itself contributed to the confusion.
Kent Anderson uses a recent Yellowstone story to illustrate what happens when news bypasses the mainstream filters via social media. An inaccurate seismometer reading set off a deluge of end-of-the-world stories focusing on the nation's first national park: "Again and again, science gets distorted when it hits the public mainstream," Anderson writes. "This is partially because when people hear facts, they impose whatever story they prefer to make sense of them."
Max Bothwell may be a leading expert on a pervasive algae known as "rock snot," but when a Canadian Press reporter asked for an interview with the government fisheries scientist, the request went down the rabbit hole of government bureaucracy. In the end, there were "110 pages of emails to and from 16 different federal government communications operatives," but no interview. One page hinted at the reason: "Blooms are the result of global climate change factors."
Jennifer Weeks recounts a century of science writing in a Chemical Heritage Magazine article that traces how a formerly "low-profile" beat became a target for well-funded and well-planned attacks: "For more than 50 years industries have pushed back hard against unfavorable coverage, while the explosion of digital journalism starting in the mid-1990s has turned up the volume, creating an online culture where extreme opinions often drown out thoughtful conversation."
Inside Climate News won a Pulitzer for its environmental reporting, but that award doesn't seem to matter to the Environmental Protection Agency. Lisa Song and Jim Morris write about the refusal of top EPA officials to speak on the record: "Our problems with the EPA are not unusual. Earlier this month, 38 journalism and communications organizations wrote a joint letter to President Obama urging him to put 'an end to this restraint on communication in federal agencies.'"
Plenty, Alberto Cairo writes for Nieman Lab: "At first, the current popularity of the new wave of data journalism seemed to be a good antidote to the epidemic of hardball punditry and tomfriedmanism that has plagued the news for ages," Cairo writes, before accusing Vox and FIveThirtyEight of sins such as "Gladwellism — deriving grand theories from a handful of undersubstantiated studies" and misuse of proxy variables. More from Derrick Harris.