All of these examples upset me to various degrees since I feel like it is evidence that people—even writers and the scientists they are quoting—are unable to think critically and message coherently about issues.
That’s a funny sentence. You yourself blame scientists with whom you didn’t interact at all based on the way they got quoted without critically asking yourself whether your behavior makes sense.
If a journalist quotes a scientist the process might be: Journalists picks up the phone and calls the scientists. They talk 15 minutes about the issue. Then the journalist who thinks that it’s his job to quote an authority picks one sentence of that interview that fits into the narrative the journalist wants to tell. It’s quite possible that the scientists even didn’t say that sentence “word for word”.
It’s also quite possible that you spend more time investigating the issue in detail then some of the journalists you read.
My limited experience with journalists supports this—when they speak with you, they often already have the outline of the story ready (the nearest existing cliche); they only need a few words they can take out of context and used them to support their bottom line. You can try to educate them, but they don’t really listen to you to learn about the topic, they listen to catch some nice keywords.
That’s a funny sentence. You yourself blame scientists with whom you didn’t interact at all based on the way they got quoted without critically asking yourself whether your behavior makes sense.
If a journalist quotes a scientist the process might be: Journalists picks up the phone and calls the scientists. They talk 15 minutes about the issue. Then the journalist who thinks that it’s his job to quote an authority picks one sentence of that interview that fits into the narrative the journalist wants to tell. It’s quite possible that the scientists even didn’t say that sentence “word for word”.
It’s also quite possible that you spend more time investigating the issue in detail then some of the journalists you read.
My limited experience with journalists supports this—when they speak with you, they often already have the outline of the story ready (the nearest existing cliche); they only need a few words they can take out of context and used them to support their bottom line. You can try to educate them, but they don’t really listen to you to learn about the topic, they listen to catch some nice keywords.