Electric Josh

Tuesday, February 05, 2002

I stumbled across J. D. Lasica's site, which is fun reading for someone like me who dislikes lousy news coverage as much as me.

A giant pile of people over on the Common for the Patriots rally. It's cold, but it's a beautiful day to gather in a crowd and scream again. This could be the year!

The local TV news in Boston is really bad. If your life's goal were to embarrass yourself, then you could choose no better career than Boston local news. The one-hour newscast we just watched started with 35 or 40 minutes of Super Bowl coverage. Vapid, grinning women with neither interest in sports nor contact with the area. No player interviews. Then there was a five-minute ad for a book; we even discovered the publisher's name. Interviews with people about breakfast cereal (moral: "Eat real vegetables instead of fortified health bars"). Five minutes of murders and stuff. More Super Bowl stuff.

At least there's the Globe sports section.

Now, to be fair, many websites are horrible about reporting things, too. Slashdot, which is good about keeping the nerds and zealots who read it up to date on a lot of things, it's bad at describing science news. It's not really the editors' fault; they report on interesting things and then throw the story over to the discussion that follows. It's there that things go awry. The vast majority of posts claiming knowledge of the subject are embarrassingly incorrect. Scientists, by and large, don't bother to post correct explanations of the underlying science, so it falls to other half-educated posters to explain what's happening. The occasional post containing a good explanation and a bibliography drawn from the scientific literature usually gets ignored by moderators as too long and complicated. It's a symptom of a more widespread (and therefore much more serious) problem faced by the broader society... #