What’s Wrong With Broadcast Journalism: One Commentator’s View

From this week’s eSkeptic, Steve Salerno, the author of S.H.A.M.: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (2005) critiques broadcast journalism in a piece called “Journalist-Bites-Reality!: How Broadcast Journalism Is Flawed in Such a Fundamental Way That Its Utility As a Tool For Informing Viewers Is Almost Nil.” Among Mr. Salerno’s complaints–that the mainstream media tend to overstate their cases and that they don’t understand statistics. Here’s an excerpt.

The mythical Red State/Blue State paradigm is just one of the more telling indications of a general disability the media exhibit in working with data. A cluster of random events does not a “disturbing new trend!” make — but that doesn’t stop journalists from finding patterns in happenstance. Take lightning. It kills with an eerie predictability: about 66 Americans every year. Now, lightning could kill those 66 people more or less evenly all spring and summer, or it could, in theory, kill the lot of them on one really scary Sunday in May. But the scary Sunday in May wouldn’t necessarily mean we’re going to have a year in which lightning kills 79,000 people. (No more than if it killed a half-dozen people named Johanssen on that Sunday would it mean that lightning is suddenly targeting Swedes.) Yet you can bet that if any half-dozen people are killed by lightning one Sunday, you’ll soon see a special report along the lines of, LIGHTNING: IS IT OUT TO GET US? We’ve seen this propensity on display with shark attacks, meningitis, last year’s rash of amusement-park fatalities, and any number of other “random event clusters” that occur for no reason anyone can explain.

Journalists overreact to events that fall well within the laws of probability. They treat the fact that something happened as if we never before had any reason to think it could happen — as if it were a brand-new risk with previously unforeseen causation. Did America become more vulnerable on 9/11? Or had it been vulnerable all along? Indeed, it could be argued that America today is far less vulnerable, precisely because of the added vigilance inspired by 9/11. Is that how the media play it? Similarly, a bridge collapse is no reason for journalists to assume in knee-jerk fashion that bridges overall are any less safe than they’ve been for decades. Certainly it’s no reason to jump to the conclusion that the nation’s infrastructure is crumbling, which is how several major news outlets framed the collapse of the Interstate 35W Bridge this past summer. As Freud might put it, sometimes a bridge collapse is just a bridge collapse. Alas, journalism needs its story line.

Read Mr. Salerno’s essay here.