Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: fourth estate

  • Good journalism is still around

    This morning, a trusted scientist called my attention to a tweet thread by Jordan Fischer listing the many good stories journalists in the US had done that had improved the lives of people. The scientist then tagged me, presumably to respond to his request for someone to compose a similar thread of stories that journalists in India had produced to similar effect – but which he also suggested could push back against the low credibility Indian journalists had among the people who had abhorrent names (you know which ones) for our ilk.

    The two of us had a short exchange during which I wrote an extended reply on my Notes app and shared a screenshot of it, to save me the trouble of threading it out. I’m pasting this reply below.

    I’m glad Jordan did that thread but … I’m yet to see a reasoned rebuttal to the activities of journalists that makes moral as well as logical sense, and that’s why I’m reluctant to have to explain myself in response to such requests (to publish a thread of things journalism has done right, etc.).

    For example, I’ve had an uncle watch the news on TV every night for a month and not once ask why channel X was freely showing a man being murdered or beaten unconscious or why channel Y was making ludicrous (to me) claims about a vaccine’s safety based on studies of mice – but he would take umbrage at every single report by The Wire, if only to ask, “Is this really true? Are you guys sure you’re not making this up?” This is not reasoned opposition to how different journalists are doing their jobs, leave alone journalism as an enterprise.

    Beyond the level of taking exception to individual pieces, I’m yet to meet a person who, for example, has questions about why it’s not good for journalists to submit to external regulation or how different business models affect editorial decisions. It’s always been about how “irresponsible” we are to criticise the government at every turn, with a clear and widening divide between groups of people who are often pro-Hindutva and people who are not that the law of large numbers simply doesn’t explain. This is clearly, if only to me, not about journalism. It’s a contest of views, missing the point though it does, about the role and responsibility of every enterprise that claims to serve the people in a nationalist country.

    And those who think journalists ought not to speak truth to power, but help expand the scope of such power – that’s when we become “press******s”. (I’m as averse as any journalist to use this term; I invoke it here to be clear about the sort of thinking I associate with it.) We don’t seem to become “press******s” when we pillory the Gandhi family for their dynastic politics, but we seem to do when we investigate corruption in the BJP. We don’t seem to become “press******s” when we pull up the West Bengal government for its incompetent response to the COVID-19 crisis, but we seem to do when we turn our attention to the ‘Gujarat model’ and its effects on public healthcare.

    This doesn’t seem like it’s about what journalists are or aren’t doing but about what journalism stands in the way of. It’s about people undermining journalism for personal gains. And power is personal. It’s a personal choice to call journalists foul names because it’s a personal choice to decide which lines are okay to cross en route to whatever goals the utterer has in mind.

  • The journalist as expert

    I recently turned down some requests for interviews because the topics of discussion in each case indicated that I would be treated as a scientist, not a science journalist (something that happened shortly after the Balakot airstrikes and the ASAT test as well). I suspect science and more so health journalists are being seen as important sources of information at this crucial time for four reasons (in increasing order of importance, at least as I see it):

    1. We often have the latest information – This is largely self-explanatory except for the fact that since we discover a lot of information first-hand, often from researchers to whom the context in which the information is valid may be obvious but who may not communicate that, we also have a great responsibility to properly contextualise what we know before dissemination. Many of us do, many of us don’t, but either way both groups come across as being informed to their respective audiences.

    2. We’re “temporary experts”.

    3. We’re open to conversations when others aren’t – I can think of a dozen experts who could replace me in the interviews I described and do a better job of communicating the science and more importantly the uncertainty. However, a dozen isn’t a lot, and journalists and any other organisations committed to spreading awareness are going to be hard-pressed to find new voices. At this time, science/health journalists could be seen as stand-in experts: we’re up-to-date, we’re (largely) well-versed with the most common issues, and unlike so many experts we’re often willing to talk.

    4. It would seem journalists are the only members of society who are synthesising different schools of thought, types of knowledge and stories of ground realities into an emergent whole. This is a crucial role and, to be honest, I was quite surprised no one else is doing this – until I realised the problem. Our scholastic and academic systems may have disincentivised such holism, choosing instead to pursue more and more specialised and siloised paths. But even then the government should be bringing together different pieces of the big picture, and putting them together to design multifaceted policies and inventions, but isn’t doing so. So journalists could be seen as the only people who are.

    Now, given these reasons, is treating journalists as experts so bad?

    It’s really not, actually. Journalism deserves more than to be perceived as an adjacent enterprise – something that attaches itself on to a mature substrate of knowledge instead of being part of the substrate itself. There are some journalists who have insightfully combined, say, what they know about scientific publishing with what they know about research funding to glimpse a bigger picture still out of reach of many scientists. There is certainly a body of knowledge that cannot be derived from the first principles of each of its components alone, and which journalists are uniquely privileged to discover. I also know of a few journalists who are better committed to evidence and civic duty than many scientists, in turn producing knowledge of greater value. Finally, insofar as knowledge is also produced through the deliberate opposition of diverse perspectives, journalists contribute every time they report on a preprint paper, bringing together multiple independent experts – sometimes from different fields – to comment on the paper’s merits and demerits.

    But there are some issues on the flip side. For example, not all knowledge is emergent in this way, and more importantly journalists make for poor experts on average when what we don’t know is as important as what we know. And when lives are at stake, anyone who is being invited to participate in an interview, panel discussion or whatever should consider – even if the interviewer hasn’t – whether what they say could cause harm, and if they can withstand any social pressure to not be seen to be ignorant and say “I don’t know” when warranted. And even then, there can be very different implications depending on whether it’s a journalist or an expert saying “I don’t know”.

    Even more importantly, journalists need to be recognised in their own right, instead of being hauled into the limelight as quasi-experts instead of as people who practice a craft of their own. This may seem like a minor issue of perception but it’s important to maintain the distinction between the fourth estate and other enterprises lest journalism’s own responsibilities become subsumed by those of the people and organisations journalists write about or – worse yet – lest they are offset by demands that society has been unable to meet in other ways. If a virologist can’t be found for an interview, a journalist is a barely suitable replacement, except if the conversation is going to be sharply focused on specific issues the journalist is very familiar with, but even then it’s not the perfect solution.

    If a virologist or a holist (as in the specific way mentioned above) can’t be found, the ideal way forward would be to look harder for another virologist or holist, and in doing so come up against the unique challenges to accessing expertise in India. In this regard, if journalists volunteer themselves as substitutes, they risk making excuses for a problem they actually needed to be highlighting.