"Gattman" wrote in message
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"Matt Barrow" wrote in message
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Unfortunately, I can't disagree. I studied Journalism at OSU under an
two-time Pulizer prize winner who required all J students to have a
science minor because he was tired of hearing about bigfoot, killer
bees, Alar and other cyclical and nonsensical media phenomena. (My
senior thesis was to interpret scientific data on the dietary benefits
of oat fiber versus wheat bran, back when everybody was reporting that
one or the other prevented hear disease. Turns out there's not a
signifcant difference.)

Hell, see what they did with the "Nutrition Pyramid" even as little as a
couple years ago, or the "Eight glasses of water a day" tripe :~)

Exactly. It takes just one newspaper, and then somebody can say
"according to..." It only took one newspaper to report a "UFO crash" at
Roswell, New Mexico to launch a conspiracy theory that continues even now.
The problem is, journalist pay is right there with flight instructors.
You can barely make a living doing it, so they get the young and unworldly
doing much of the gruntwork. The only reason I'm not a newspaper
reporter or editor is because the pay is terrible.

What's unfortunate in this case is that now the Time article can be used
as an information source.

Just a thought: if the pay is so bad, why do so many flock to the
profession?

Now, granted, for many, loving your work is another form of compensation. In
the case of CFI's, there's a love of flying and the lure of flying the "big
iron". But if CFI's applied the same measure of diligence that reporters
seem to, every plane ever built would be a smoldering hulk long ago.

A profession such as reporters, that had repeatedly and vehemently denied
the idea of "objectivity" in reporting (and everything else) is akin to
electricians denying the existence of electricity, or physicists denying the
laws of physics.

As for your OSU professor, did he ever teach rules for objective reporting?
His requirements for study of science was a great start, just as study of
economics and commerce would be for other specialties (forget that clueless
fraud Paul Krugman, who is a prime example of NON-objective reporting). I
take it from your earlier post, he was adamant about honesty and integrity,
but those are, to me, ancillary and secondary.