So today at work I was interviewed in very cursory, mostly linguistically compatible fashion by a journalist from a Korean financial news outfit. He came in and asked a few questions (some via an interpreter) about what we were doing, and took a couple of pictures with a small digital camera. Trying to find out what one of our investors was spending their money on. One of our head scientists was guiding the reporter and his interpreter around the office, so I felt considerably less nervous about the situation than I might otherwise have. But still, at one point he seemed to have the idea that only about 80% of the numbers we crunch are correct (it's much closer to 100%). At another point he started asking really specific questions about whose sales data we were analyzing, and what was in the data. He wrote down a bunch of details (names of people in the room, sorts of quantities that we were calculating, etc.) and seemed like a very nice man.
But oh man, nobody could possibly have gotten a very good idea of what was happening in that room based on such a quick exchange. Worse, getting the facts exactly wrong is a lot harder than just gathering random, irrelevant information. I used to be thrilled when my physics students would come up with exactly the wrong answer; it meant that they understood the problem in question, but had made a simple, easily correctible transposition error somewhere, or messed up a minus sign or some other nearly trivial thing. Since this reporter was (I assume) a talented reporter he probably got the right information, but given the small amount of time he spent following up questions and asking our scientist for guidance he can't possibly have gathered solely correct information; which suggests our third, unpleasant possibility...
In high school once this one kid published a pamphlet-like "underground student paper" complete with bad teenage poetry, well-rendered but baffling political cartoons, and assorted diatribes. One such rant was a note-from-the-editor type of thing about the first amendment; how printing the seven dirty words (bemused warning: link points to dirty words) was perfectly okay, despite being frowned upon by what passed for official school policy. The school's principal and others of his ilk, upon learning that written material that might offend the freshmen (14-year-olds!) was being circulated, immediately swept lockers and backpacks for copies of the dread material, thereby embarrassing themselves through overreaction. At any rate, a committee was formed in the aftermath to do something about what had happened; the committee was to contain two teachers and two students, one of each elected by the rest of his peers and the other of each appointed by the opposite group's peers. The teachers appointed me.
We had several reasonably productive meetings in which we two students explained to the two teachers that not one member of the student body would be offended by printed versions of some of the milder vulgarities that they heard and spoke on (at least) a daily basis, and that very few kids would probably have even noticed the essay to begin with had it not been for the overreactive forced depublication. The teachers already knew this. The two teachers explained to us two students that they were forced into a position of having to be obnoxiously defensive about this sort of thing, lest they get sued by some idiot parent who hadn't bothered to explain to their high schooler that people curse sometimes and that such cursing is protected by the first amendment, if not in almost all situations then certainly not in essays about the first amendment. The four of us all basically understood.
A couple of days later a reporter called me at home (I was a junior at the time) from the local paper asking me questions about what had happened in the student-teacher meeting we'd had. I explained the students' position and the teachers' position, we had a nice chat about the high school and such; she was very nice. Several days later, my dad told me that he and the reporter had been chatting (they were acquaintances anyway, or something) and that she was still alarmed at how casual my attitude was toward censorship; how, she thought, could this kid not be upset by this over-the-top act of censorship. Dad was similarly concerned. So I managed to convince him that I was, in fact, on the other side of the fence, and that I was not only unimpressed with the school's overbearing police tactics but also annoyed at the misguided attempt to censor what I read. How the hell did I manage to convey the opposite information to a professional journalist? I remain convinced that the problem is that the conversation was short, and that I probably ended the conversation early because I was an idiot kid and wanted to go watch Monty Python on MTV or something.
Nothing ever really happened at school. The guy who had published the underground paper was headed for private school the next year anyway, and people ended up mostly forgetting about the whole incident. A few weeks later the local paper printed a short (page one?) article about the affair, which---by then, thankfully---contained nothing about me. The whole situation would have made a great subject for essays for college applications...not sure why I didn't write about it. Alas.