Health care lives, but what about health care journalism? The fossil finger writes, not always accurately. News about flus and Free Nature News!
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HEALTHCARELESS NO MORE. An exaggeration, but at least our long national nightmare is over. The federal health care legislation has really truly been adopted. Whew.
Many sources have described what's in the legislation and how it will affect individuals. I'm in the midst of a grueling move across the country, and you can darn well find them on your own.
Note, however, that the legislation means that the self-employed, including freelance science writers, will find it easier to purchase health insurance, and, in some cases, to pay for it. A big, big, BIG change. Thanks to Beryl Benderly for pointing this out on one of the NASW listservs.
Also, take a look at this: It's not a blog, but the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz wrote a long piece exploring how the media, not excluding the serious news media, covered the health care fracas. We do not come off looking good. And by "we" I mean not only science writers, but news consumers too.
Kurtz brushes aside the charge that the media failed to explain the bill:
The conventional wisdom is that the press failed to educate the public about the bill's sweeping changes, leaving much of America confused about just what it contained. That is largely a bum rap, for the media churned out endless reams of data and analysis that were available to anyone who bothered to look.
But he also points out that journalists eventually covered the health care debate like a presidential election, focusing on whose political fortunes were rising and falling day by day. His conclusion:
In the end, the subject may simply have been too dense for the media to fully digest. If you're a high-information person who routinely plows through 2,000-word newspaper articles, you had a reasonably good grasp of the arguments. For a busy electrician who plugs in and out of the news, the jousting and the jargon may have seemed bewildering.
Our stock in trade is explaining dense subjects, so naturally I reject the idea that it can't be done. But it is certainly true that, when the subjects are dense, we need audiences that are willing to do the work of absorbing the material we produce. This is not stuff that fits into sound bites or is clarified by shouting matches and epithets. And it does require that writers evaluate what their sources say rather than just quote them. Will the health care bill really permit the government to set up death panels? Why?
A VERY SIMILAR PROBLEM IN A VERY DIFFERENT FIELD. Is the fossil finger bone from Siberia from a previously undiscovered species of human? Why?
As is often the case (to the despair of the rest of us), Carl Zimmer summarized it best. The lede from his blog, The Loom:
In a cave in Siberia, scientists have found a 40,000-year old pinky bone that could belong to an entirely new species of hominid. Or it may be yet another example of how hard it is to figure where one species stops and another begins-even when one of those species is our own. Big news, perhaps, or ambiguous news.
But there was no ambiguity in the many news stories that declared the pinky to be from a new human species. (And often, as an irritated Charlie Petit at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker pointed out, a human ancestor. Which, since the Pinky Possessor lived at the same time as Homo sap, is impossible.)
I won't repeat the find's details because the posts I describe below do a good job of that. The troubling point for us professionally is that many science writers, even good ones, presented the find as a new human species — although the researchers themselves didn't quite do that, and there are other possibilities.
One, as Zimmer points out, is dalliance between a female ancestor of the fossil and a Neandertal (or human) male resulting in hybrid offspring. (Since this involves sex, and semi-naughty sex at that, it's puzzling that it went unmentioned in news stories.) Another possible explanation, suggested by University of Wisconsin paleoanthropologist John Hawks, is that Neandertals had a wider range than previously thought, and the Pinky Possessor is from a Neandertal branch that has died out.
Hawks's extensive post explores other possibilities too, and speculates that the researchers may actually know more about PP's DNA than they have revealed in the brief new paper. Still, his caveat:
Let me say very clearly: nothing about this sequence requires there to have been an undiscovered hominin species.
At The Atavism, "David" sensibly discusses these same evolutionary possibilities: that the finger bone might represent a new species, or an unknown Neandertal group, or even a Homo erectus remnant. He leans toward the new species idea, but acknowledges freely that may be because a new species would be the coolest explanation. (Exactly the motive I fear drove decisions by science writers — and their editors — to trumpet the find as a definite new species. It's cool, and therefore the most eye-catching explication.) But "David"'s presentation of the other possibilities seems completely fair.
"David" is apparently David Winter, said to be a grad student in evolutionary genetics. This is entirely plausible to me, but it illustrates one of the frustrations of blogs — when they anonymous or, as this one is, somewhat vague about authorship, they make it difficult to evaluate a post.
Here is a situation in which a significant amount of conventional journalism got facts and interpretations wrong, or at least muddled. It fell to blogs to explain, clarify, and lay out an array of possible interpretations. We know from experience that we can trust Hawks and Zimmer to do these things. So far as I can tell on the basis of this single post — he doesn't post often — we can trust "David" too. But he is new to me, and in a world where we seem to be relying increasingly on blogs to interpret events for us, I would like to know more about why he merits attention.
BACK TO THE HEALTH CARE BILL, BRIEFLY. AAAS's Science Insider details 3 research-related provisions in the bill. One in particular is relevant for us: creation of an independent, non-profit institute for comparative effectiveness research. The agency will conduct evidence-based studies comparing treatments against each other to find out which ones actually work. Much stuff to write about will be emerging from this agency. Assuming it comes into existence; it is exceedingly unpopular in some quarters.
NEWS ABOUT FLUS. Andrew Van Dam at Covering Health notes that Fluportal.org has run out of money and will go moribund at the end of this month. The post includes other flu resources for science writers.
At the Los Angeles Times's Booster Shots, Thomas Maugh reports that the H1N1 virus has developed resistance to antivirals more quickly than expected. Uh-oh.
(SOME) INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE EVEN AT PLACES WHERE IT HASN'T BEEN FREE BEFORE. MacMillan, the publishing giant that has historically held the content of its many journals close to its chest, has just declared that the Nature News section is now utterly and completely free. And indeed, in my brief test this appears to be the case.
Including the archives. When I went to the archives, I got this message:
To access our full archive requires subscription or payment. Find out how to get full access on our 'about this site' page. * Subscribe now
I ignored it and was able to get full text of old news articles.
As the Brits say, Brilliant.
