montanajournalism Feature, J-School, Uncategorized

Good Stories, True Stories

I remember measles.  I also remember whooping cough and the final years of the polio epidemic.  That was all part of the bad old days of our boomer childhoods.  Vaccines were part of the medical miracle that took a lot of the anxiety out of being a parent.  Fast forward half a century, and we have a population that is so accustomed to having children grow up without major illnesses that parents avoid those miracle drugs.  Maybe this is a good time to ask: what role did the media play?

If you have spent time with people suffering from autism, you know this condition beggars description.   And it is no surprise that parents’ desperation led to a frantic search for causes and cures.  It was a compelling story, for those of us who covered science in the 1990’s.  But take a look back at that coverage, and you’ll find that vaccine skeptics got a free pass in many stories.

Jon Stewart is not the only “reporter” to turn his stage http://tinyurl.com/o89he77 over to a vaccination crank.  He’s not the only one to let anti-vaccinators and misinformed parents talk about a “scientifically proven” link between vaccines and autism.  In coverage of politics or social trends, it’s fine to use the “some folks say” approach to journalism.  But when it comes to medical reporting and science in general, we need a higher bar.

This is a tough nut to crack because science is so durned slow.  And often the skeptics do turn out to be right.  Remember Galileo?  But they have to wait their turn.  Proving that vaccines did not cause autism took time.  That’s because the scientific method relies on rigor and peer review.   That schedule seldom fits with daily deadline pressures.  But the growth of the anti-vaccine movement shows that journalists need to be just as cautious as our friends in the sciences.  We should not cite baseless suspicions and conspiracy theories without giving the strongest warning signs possible.

Science and journalism have very different methods, but we have the same goal: the truth.  When it comes to science reporting, maybe journalists should let the truth get in the way of a good story

montanajournalism Feature, Opinion

Hebdo and Religion

While the J School was on winter break, our profession suffered a painful assault. There’s been a lot of smart commentary on the attacks in Paris, which did so much more than kill 17 people. For journalists, this atrocity also sparked some serious reflection about the boundary between free speech and protection of religious values.

A number of organizations, including my former employer NPR, have decided not to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. Many said, basically, they are concerned about offending their readers. This is a dangerous line of reasoning. The Constitution does protect religion from interference by government. But by tradition, and by law, we do not grant special protections to any belief system. They are all subject to criticism. I think that’s part of what the folks at “Charlie Hebdo” were, and are, trying to say. If you look at their drawings, you’ll see them skewering rabbis, the Pope and, yes, the Prophet Muhammad. Everyone is fair game.

Many societies do award special status to religious institutions. They ban speech that offends certain religious beliefs. French society does not, and jealously guards its secularism. This is one value American journalists need to uphold as well. When people demand that no one offend their beliefs, they are asking for something that US law does not sanction. Religious groups can shun blasphemers and bar them from their communities, but they cannot demand that society at large refrain from satire or critical remarks.

Journalists refrain from printing certain ideas and images all the time, because of lack of space or because they are trying to set a standard. I’m OK with that. But the Hebdo cartoons are now news—they are the news, and they should not be kept behind a veil in an effort to protect sensitive readers. Religious readers can avert their eyes, they can write letters, they can cancel their subscriptions. That’s the same right that every reader has when they encounter offensive language directed at their government or at their political party. If as a journalist you decide not to print the Hebdo cartoons, I hope you’ll do so because you think they are juvenile, or just hard to understand. But please, don’t hold back because you give special status to religion.

montanajournalism Dean Abramson, J-School, Student

Inside/Outside

As a reporter, I covered higher education for years.  I always felt like I was peering through smoky glass at a strange world.  That world seemed hidebound by rules from another era, encased in proud traditions that made little sense.  Now that I’m inside the ivory tower, the tables are turned, somewhat.

As a reporter, one of my pet peeves was the low success rate at many colleges and universities.  At many schools, only 10 percent of students can be expected to graduate.  I found this fact a shocking waste of talent and money for students, for hard-pressed families, and for the governments that fronted the money for these half-finished degrees.  I pushed administrators hard to explain why they could not improve those numbers.  Many shrugged their shoulders and said, they could only do so much, that student’s lives and lack of preparation simply get in the way of their studies.

Now, I’m a college administrator.   Our university is facing a decline in enrollment, thanks in large part to demographics we cannot control.  At the same time, the state is pressuring us to improve outcomes, just the sort of thing this reporter wanted to see.  But to this college administrator, that laudable goal seems a lot further away.  We know the easiest way to ensure that more students stay in school and graduate is to raise our standards, and recruit students who are better prepared.  Doing that, however, might cut our enrollment, because many students would not have the grades qualify.   So we’d get more money for retention numbers, but then lose it on enrollment.  It turns out, there are only so many ways to squeeze the balloon before it pops.

This is an old story—reporter gets a real job, and learns life ain’t as simple as he thought.  But that doesn’t meant those questions I used to ask were unfair or off base.  Now, it’s my job to help fix the problem, no matter how hard it is.  And I hope some reporter is out there staring at the numbers and putting pressure on people in higher ed—including me—to do a better job.

Dean Larry Abramson