<
At 01:05 PM 4/20/00 -0400, Enrique Diaz-Alvarez wrote:
>It's surpassed by their monumental ignorance. You'd think they'd pick
up
>*something* at Columbia J-school, if only by osmosis. Apparently, it is
>considered normal for a US foreign correspondent not to know the
language of
>the country they are assigned to. How do you report on a country where
you
>can't watch TV, read the papers, listen to the radio or talk to 97% of
the
>population?
But that is not just personal, but institutional as well. Foreign language illiteracy aside - a common problem among US-ers indeed - journalists who consistently submit stories rejected by the editors as "unsuitable" often find themselves re-assigned or even sacked. As Doug aptly observed, journalism is institutionalized idiocy rather than just low IQ of the reporters - albeit that is often the case prehaps as a result of self-selection, as obedient morons have a better chance of survival in the media environament than smart cookies.
The Nation's report a few months (?) ago on NYT science reporter Gina
Kolata is a case in point. It is not that much that she cannot
understand
what she is reporting, but she deliberately does a hatchet job to make
the
story fit the NYT party line.
>
I'm sorry I missed that article. It was
What's Wrong with the New York Times's Science Reporting? Why Gina Kolata is no Walter Sullivan. Mark Dowie in The Nation Jul 6 1998.
Kolata aroused my curiosity since she screwed up a couple of stories in _Science_ in the late 70s. The worst as I remember was her misrepresentation of Katchyan's Result (so-called) as a breakthrough solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem. It took several months for the mathematicians and the computer scientists to get her overly dramatic "breakthru" reporting straightened out.
IMO, she reports science as if it were infotainment, whereas real science is kind of boring (to a lay audience), incremental work.
Perhaps her approach is what made her attractive to the NY Times.
John K. Taber