A few days ago I quoted an editor who works for Rupert Murdoch as saying that journalists care too much about impressing their colleagues and winning prizes and not enough about helping readers. Here is Walter Pincus, a Washington Post reporter, saying the same thing:
Editors have paid more attention to what gains them prestige among their journalistic peers than on subjects more related to the everyday lives of readers. For example, education affects everyone, yet I cannot name an outstanding American journalist on this subject.
I quote this to support the Veblenian view I’ve expressed many times on this blog — that scientists would rather do what gains them prestige among their peers than what helps the rest of us, who support most science. I think it’s hard to understand the success of my self-experimentation (e.g., new ways of losing weight) until you understand this aspect of science. I was successful partly because my motivation was different.
This isn’t a statement about scientists. It’s a statement about all identifiable groups everywhere. It arises from the Iron Law of Institutions, which notes that people will almost always act to raise their standing within their immedate organization even where such action interferes with the goals of the organization.
I’m not sure journalism is a good example of peer prestige driving decisions, and I’m really not sure that education is a good example of it:
1. Most papers are very customer-driven and less peer-driven. They don’t include big sports sections, or comics, or offer Sudoku, for their peers. They include them because readers like them. They also do a lot to try to keep their advertisers happy. Scientists may be different because their customers and peers are often the same, or at least in the same group. (I’m guessing this about scientists.)
2. Papers probably don’t do more education reporting for very good reasons. First, few readers care enough to buy a paper based on education reporting, whether local or national. Second, big papers are deeply constrained by what it is publicly permissible to discuss about eduction. My own view is that 90% of the education debate today is about pretending that the biggest difference between good and bad schools is NOT the qualities of the students who go there. A big city newspaper cannot ever come out and agree with that, so it must always report some version of “x students are doing poorly; therefore we must not be doing/spending enough to support x students.” I’m probably happy that they don’t do more of that than they already do.
3. The journalists and editors who are peer-centered are probably looking for Pulitizer bait stories. But I’d bet that’s a small part of budgets and focus.
“Second, big papers are deeply constrained by what it is publicly permissible to discuss about eduction. My own view is that 90% of the education debate today is about pretending that the biggest difference between good and bad schools is NOT the qualities of the students who go there.”
This is a good point. Also, because the US is multiracial, there is also the large Black-White (and Black-Asian, and to a lesser extent White-Asian) average IQ score differences lurking in the background. I.e., the reason Black inner-city schools do so poorly is partly because the Blacks at them have low average IQs. But you can’t say that. Rather, the whole debate is about how to remove differences in educational outcomes, but those are of course largely correlated with differences in IQs.
“Scientists may be different because their customers and peers are the same.” Only if you don’t think science should benefit those who pay for it.
Tom and Anthony, Pincus had other examples.
This desire for peer-praise is a very human condition.
I work with web designers on large, e-commerce projects and often see them design such that their peers would approve, when they should designing for conversion from visitors into buyers.
“People everywhere enjoy making their messages sound more complicated than necessary. In all professions, people enjoy using language to convey the feeling, ‘my field is so complex ordinary mortals could never understand it.’ Children establish superiority over peers with pig Latin. Lawyers do it with gobbledygook, truck drivers with citizens’ band jargon, and scientists (and educators) with the language of grantsmanship. […] Many perfectly honorable people write in heavy language because it is an ego trip; they are writing to impress, not to express.”
–Albert Joseph, Quarterly Review of Doublespeak, July, 1981
Seth, I meant that you are more likely to be right about scientists than Pincus is to be right about journalists. Complaints like Pincus’ have been made for years, but journalism has always gotten much more independent feedback from large numbers of non-journalist users (readers and advertisers) than scientists do from large numbers of non-scientist users.
Pincus’ complaints and his examples in the ungated excerpt (education, food, subprime mortgages) are weak. Each of these subject could be customer/reader focused. But I think Pincus is thinking of something different. He wants the paper to push for social change at the government level with exposes of bad systems in need of better and bigger regulation.
If you were an editor, you would probably commission articles on what individual readers should do differently with their own food, education, and finances. If Pincus was an editor, he would want stories that would encourage Congress to review/fund government programs, etc….
So I think you’re misreading Pincus’ complaint as being similar to yours.
If anyone found a non-gated link, please post it.
A washington post reporter can’t name an education reporter? Jay Matthews is probably the best in the businesss https://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/