on newspapers

I’ve long liked to read newspapers, though recently my reading has been online rather than on paper. But I’m starting to wonder why I bother reading them. I became increasingly suspicious of their science reporting several years ago. The suspicion was warranted. I have yet to find a single case where, when I actually bother to go look at the researchers’ own report, it doesn’t turn out that the newspaper (or perhaps the writers of the news release) got something wrong. At best, they’re just misleading thanks to the omission of critical details; at worst, they mangle the data so badly that one wonders whether they’re literate enough to read science journal articles. I suppose I should note that my reading tends to be in the NYTimes. Perhaps it is only our ‘newspaper of record’ that is so appalling in its science reporting. At any rate, until convincingly shown reason to revise my attitudes, I shall not trust any science reporting in newspapers.

But there is still the news. Maybe newspapers can at least get that right. At least the news where liberal or conservative biases don’t override journalistic integrity.

Here’s a quotation from the NYTimes in which they quote President Bush:

In Gleneagles, Mr. Bush drew the comparison between the aims of the summit and the bombers.

“On the other hand, you have people working to alleviate poverty and rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS and ways to have a clean environment and, on the other hand, you have people working to kill people,” he said.

So take your pick: either President Bush is saying that good people work to rid the world of ways to have a clean environment or he again mangled his sentence. Given his reputation, plenty of people, of course, would think either option quite plausible. Here’s one blogger suggesting that the president accidentally got the grammar exactly right, given the administration’s track record on environmental issues.

Except that the NYTimes reporter was the one to mangle things. It turns out that pretty much every news source quoted President Bush differently. This made Mark Liberman over at Language Log suspicious and so he dug up a recording of the statement. Here’s what the President actually said (with normalized morphology and so on):

You’ve got people here who are working to alleviate poverty and help rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS, and they’re working on ways to have a clean environment, and, on the other hand, you have people killing innocent people.

Was the NYTimes deliberately misquoting? No, I doubt it. Rather, this quotation seems to have been about normal in accuracy. Apparently, word error rates of 50% are normal for quotations in newspapers (see here; more here and here)–the example above had an error rate of merely 30%.

So why do I read newspapers?

Sydney