On Journalist Science

Among many consequences of covid-19, the rise and fall of Citizen Science has been one of the more amusing ones to watch. It has fallen from grace significantly since its 2020 peak, when everyone was an expert on cloth versus surgical versus N95 masks and “did their on research” on which one was best for them. As with any progressive idea, it soon became adopted by the other end of the American political spectrum who “did their own research” on vaccines and genomic integration of mRNA. So it goes.

Another type of science also thrived during covid-19 but unlike the Citizen sort it is now stronger than ever. It began with daily updates on covid-19 incidence and mortality, usually from the same source, when every Twitter user became an expert on data visualization and every media outlet had a “data journalist” job posting. It now continues with a daily stream of (predominantly) opinions presented as hard facts, backed by pretty graphs above and a list of sources below. I speak of course of Journalist Science.

Before I go into why — spoiler alert — I don’t think Journalist Science is a net positive, a disclaimer: I like and respect many “data reporter”-type people, the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch probably most of all. FT has a clear and known bias toward capitalism and markets, which makes it one the most legible sources of news around; it is in fact the only newspaper I subscribe to. And I’ve linked to Burn-Murdoch’s reports many times, even on this blog. His covid-19 charts, small multiples in particular, were the peak of data visualization and deserved to be included in Edward Tufte’s latest book. So when looking for examples of why Journalist Science is bad, I will use the Financial Times as the prime example: not because they are particularly bad but because they are one of the best newspapers around, and even they don’t get it right.

This article and the reaction to it is what got me to question the concept. It was about the diverging political paths of kids these days: girls becoming every more liberal, boys turning more and more conservative, in four “developed” countries (South Korea, US, Germany and the UK). On the day it came out, two of my friends who don’t know each other thought something was fishy, and both linked to an act of Citizen Science attempting to debunk it. The attempt failed, not through any fault of the citizen doing it but because the original sources were opaque, and the ways in which they were combined were unclear.

Before the pandemic, most data visualization exercises had a single source: a Gallup poll, a think tank’s projection, or just a CIA Factbook piece of miscellany. Covid-19 seems to have eased data journalists into looking at more than one source, combining them into the same graph, correcting for this or that anomaly that is bound to occur in any large data gathering exercise, all in order to perform a feat that is impossible to distinguish from actual science and in fact is proper science by any reasonable definition. This drift from painting pretty pictures to doing research proceeded over months and years, with each change explained in a footnote, and with the public familiar enough with the numbers that any particular graph did not need special introduction.

By the time covid became old news, the drift was complete: data journalists became data scientists in everything but the name, with an editor instead of a PI and retweets, likes and view counts instead of citations. As problematic as academic research is — and look no further than this very blog for a few thoughts on the rot — Journalist Science is even worse and let me count a few of the ways how:

1. It does not provide its methods in sufficient detail to be reproducible;
2. It is driven by editorial policy, making it even more prone to publication bias than Academic Science;
3. Said editorial policy picks topics to which the readership will be receptive, leading to high degree of confirmation bias;
4. Unlike academic publications and pre-prints, there is minimal to no cross-talk with other researchers, making any one publication a “dead-end” for anyone interested in the topic.

Two things absent from my list of problems are lack of peer review and lack of statistician input, the first because we don’t really need it, the second because we do but I see no evidence that journalists are any worse at statistics than doctors, molecular biologists, psychologists, or anyone else writing research papers who isn’t an actual statistician.

So how to fix this? A good start would be to publish the actual work of science you did, either as a preprint or as a full-blown academic publication — thought that would be overkill. This is the approach taken by Nassim Taleb: if you have something scientific to say, write a paper instead of a Twitter thread. BioRxiv and medRxiv are two well-respected depositories accepting papers of any length, but outlets like the FT produce enough research that they may as well have a preprint server of their own. This would ensure that at least some amount of rigor was given to the methodology, and would enable dialogue.

Less likely would be for newspapers to pre-register their studies, or at least name the Journalist Science articles that were considered but turned down. Least likely? Have the data journalists dedicate their considerable knowledge and talent to describe, enlighten and criticize the body of scientific work that’s already there, or alternatively dedicate themselves full to science and call themselves scientists. The uncomfortable middle ground that Journalist Science straddles is contributing greatly to the reputational decline of both of its components.

The DC Mayor is not looking good at all this week. Writing about the crime in DC, I may have hinted, several times, that it’s the District Council’s bad lawmaking which led to the great crime wave of 2023. Well, a pseudononymous but (a bit too) well-informed Substack writer has recently outlined why that just isn’t so: most of the responsibility falls on the executive branch, that is to say the Mayor and her office. Ineffective council members are but convenient scape goats. Go figure.

I wish King Charles the best in light of his cancer diagnosis. Reading some of the old coverage of his health issues I noticed that both of his parents had “old age” listed as the cause of death. Any certifying MD that tried to pull that over here would have had the paperwork returned in an instant.

🌎 The Washington Post: “Watch the Earth breathe for one year”. No, seriously, watch it. One of the best works of data art I’ve seen, beautiful and scary.

Here is something to warm your heart: a story about Lily Gladstone and the Blackfeet Nation in The Washington Post. Makes me want to see Killers of the Flower Moon this weekend, but from what I’ve heard the movie is, alas, far from heartwarming.

This morning’s Financial Times has the headline of the week: “Ben & Jerry’s calls for permanent ceasefire in Gaza”. Straight, serious, factual, and comically absurd.

The Washington Post has your weekend reading covered: “He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable”.

The faded photos tell the story of how the Fritz family helped him turn the living room of their modest split-level ranch on Hybla Road in Richmond’s North Chesterfield neighborhood into something of a concert hall — an environment precisely engineered for the one-of-a-kind acoustic majesty he craved. In one snapshot, his three daughters hold up new siding for their expanding home. In another, his two boys pose next to the massive speaker shells. There’s the man of the house himself, a compact guy with slicked-back hair and a thin goatee, on the floor making adjustments to the system. He later estimated he spent $1 million on his mission, a number that did not begin to reflect the wear and tear on the household, the hidden costs of his children’s unpaid labor.

So it goes…

🏀 And the award for the most poetic basketball headline goest to The Washington Post: “Wizards cast hopeful look into mirror of future, see Thunder looking back”.

At least they are only the second-worst team in the NBA this season, topped only by the worst-ever team in the league’s history.

The Washington Post reports another wave of covid is coming to America. Well, it certainly came to our household. And much like the first time around, I got it days after a vaccine — just my luck. At least this time it’s only 3 days of sore throat and runny nose, and not a full week of high fevers.

Today’s Washington Post has a good write-up on how genetic engineering of the near-extinct American chestnut tree to make it more resistant to infection went wrong:

After he enlisted the help of Ek Han Tan, a geneticist at the University of Maine, to analyze the chestnut’s genome, they made their discovery this fall: The plants they were working on were, in fact, not Darling 58 trees.

Instead, they found they were working with a different chestnut line — called the Darling 54 — where the gene was inserted in another chromosome entirely, potentially corrupting one of the tree’s existing genes.

…

In a phone interview, Newhouse, the SUNY ESF director, acknowledged the mix-up but said he wasn’t sure what transpired.

“As far as exactly how it happened, we don’t know,” he said. “It must have been a label swap between these two trees that we were working with at the same time” in or around 2016.

The brilliant minds who think engineering mosquitos is a good idea can’t foresee that even a seemingly innocuous clerical error can lead to disaster, never mind the second-order effects to nature if your project succeeds. Whoever’s read Taleb’s Incerto (or some of his tweets) knows better.