Update: The first comment is very worth reading, and thinking about.
Journalists should do a better job matching experts to their actual expertise. Agreed. This article is by a law professor. And this also goes for economists. Nobel winners, such as Paul Krugman, are top-shelf experts in narrow aspects, but that does not mean they are more knowledgeable about economic issues in general than a thousand other guys and gals. There is a general store of knowledge that most lawyers have, or most economists, or most physicists, or music professors have. As the article notes, sometimes their most valuable information is that they know the vocabulary and can search out information and identify experts far more quickly than laymen can, and know at least some common pitfalls to avoid.
It does get trickier in other fields. Clergy are usually trained within a denomination, and know a good deal about that, and about how their family tree has looked at things. They may or may not know much about other religions, or other denominations, or particular areas in history. Historians likewise know some broad categories that apply and some good questions to ask, such as whether it is more helpful to look at continuity or change in a particular place, or to ponder whether developments were inevitable or highly dependent on notable individuals, whether social or economic history actually tells us more than wars or successions tell us. They may know little about many times and places in history. Psychologists end up all over the map. They might have extensive general knowledge of the field or very little. Knowing very little about the field in general may not be a bad thing, either. It's a bad thing if CNN is interviewing you as an expert when you aren't anything like that, but it's not terrible if you have particular, difficult niche such as forensic evaluation and you focus on that.
Fitting your description of a "theologian" very loosely, I was a denominational executive in a large non-Catholic denomination. I learned to never speak with a reporter. Early in my career, the few times I did talk to reporters, not only were they so ill-informed they could not ask intelligent question, they were also ill-equipped to understand explanations. Hence, my rule evolved: Never talk to them. Ever. It served me well.
ReplyDeleteAnd because they do not understand the explanation, the printed story bears no resemblance to what you actually meant. In the church story I was involved with, the reporter got the point completely backwards. sharecropper is correct.
ReplyDeleteI see the same sort of thing in science reporting, as you already know.
Several years ago Wired had an article on Venezuela's electricity shortages. It interviewed a Ph.D. professor at Pomona who, to say the least, didn't know what he was talking about. For example, he claimed that Venezuela's electricity shortages were the consequences of economic growth. Problem there is that in Latin America from 1998-2013, only Haiti had a lower per capita increase increase in electricity consumption than Venezuela. The rest of Latin America increased electricity consumption more than Venezuela, but didn't have the electricity supply problems that Venezuela had. Such basic information was beyond the ken of the professor from Pomona College.
ReplyDeleteThat's known as an "thin excuse," not a reason. He either doesn't believe it himself but hopes his audience will fall for it, or the real situation is too painful for a man of his limited courage to contemplate.
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