A few days ago I pondered the ethical dimensions of breastfeeding given a recent article trumpeting its astounding benefits for infants and mothers. Those ethical considerations took as given that the claims trumpeting in the article were more or less true.
Today, I want to point you to an examination of those very claims by Rebecca Goldin (Director of Research, Statistical Assessment Service, Assistant Professor, Mathematical Sciences at George Mason University), Emer Smyth (Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at Univ. of Pennsylvania), and Andrea Foulkes (Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst). Will it surprise you that the data don’t seem to support the conclusion that breastmilk has miraculous powers?
Category Archives: Journalism
Being ethical — and being prudent — with pseudonymous blogging.
I’m following up on my earlier post in the wake of the outing of dKos blogger Armando. At Majikthise, Lindsay Beyerstein had posted an interesting discussion of the issues around pseudonymous blogging, and whether it might sometimes be ethical to reveal the secret identity of a pseudonymous blogger. She raises lots of interesting issues about whether blogging is properly regarded as a species of journalism, and how the ethics of blogging might be related to the journalistic ethics of the “old media”. As well, Armando turns up in the comments to disagree with Lindsay’s analysis of the issues.
My read is that the disagreement between Armando and Lindsay arises from a conflation of a number of distinct questions:
- Are bloggers journalists, or are they something else?
- If bloggers are not journalists, what are their ethical obligations (e.g., to their readers)? Do they have a duty to disclose potential conflicts of interest?
- Do journalists have a duty to protect the secret identity of a blogger who wishes to blog pseudonymously?
- Does a blogger who wishes to blog pseudonymously have a right to have his or her secret identity protected (by journalists, bloggers, and others)?
There seem to be some important theoretical details to work out here, such as whether bloggers are journalists, and whether the ethics of blogging are different from traditional journalistic ethics. As well, though, there are important questions about what sorts of policies are prudent for a blogger who wishes to blog pseudonymously — regardless of the ethical obligations relevant others might have in the situation.
Maybe Newsweek isn’t the best place to get your social science.
Hey, do you remember that oft cited Newsweek article from 1986 that proclaimed that the chances of a 40-year-old single, white, college educated woman getting married were less than her chances of getting killed in an act of terrorism? It turns out it was wrong. From a recent retraction of that article:
Twenty years later, the situation looks far brighter. Those odds-she’ll-marry statistics turned out to be too pessimistic: today it appears that about 90 percent of baby-boomer men and women either have married or will marry, a ratio that’s well in line with historical averages. And the days when half of all women would marry by 20, as they did in 1960, only look more anachronistic. At least 14 percent of women born between 1955 and 1964 married after the age of 30. Today the median age for a first marriage–25 for women, 27 for men–is higher than ever before.
Journalism, science, politics, and choosing sides.
In a post last week, I was trying to work out whether science journalism can do something more for us than just delivering press releases from the scientists. Specifically, I suggested that journalists with a reasonable understanding of scientific methodology could do some work to assess the credibility of the research described in the press releases, as well as the credibility of the scientists issuing those press releases.
Although the post was concerned with the general question of whether science journalism can do this bit of evaluative work for a lay audience that, by and large, is both rusty on the basics of scientific methodology and at least a little scared of thinking hard about technical issues, it was prompted by the particular strategy Chris Mooney set forth for his reporting in The Republican War on Science, and by Steve Fuller’s critique of that in his essay for the Crooked Timber seminar on Chris’s book. And, in a comment on my post, Steve Fuller brings us back to the question of the particular strategy Chris was using, and of the sorts of standards to which journalistic work guided by this strategy ought to be held. I think this is a fair question, but it brings us into the turbulent waters at the confluence of science and politics, where journalism may go beyond presenting an objective picture of the terrain and may exhort us to choose a side.
So you might want to grab a life-jacket before we begin.
Evaluating scientific credibility (or, do we have to take the scientists’ word for it?)
In response to my first entry on Steve Fuller’s essay on Chris Mooney‘s book, The Republican War on Science, Bill Hooker posted this incisive comment:
Fuller seems to be suggesting that there is no good way to determine which scientists in the debate are most credible — it all comes down to deciding who to trust.
I think this misses an important piece of how scientific disputes are actually adjudicated. In the end, what makes a side in a scientific debate credible is not a matter of institutional power or commanding personality. Rather, it comes down to methodology and evidence.
So, in other words, deciding who to trust means being able to evaluate the data for yourself, which — according to the pullquote above — Mooney suggests a journalist should not do. (Right here would be a good place to admit I haven’t read TWoS.)
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been reading Chris Mooney about as long as he’s had a blog, and I have a lot of respect for him. He’s a welcome exception to the rule that science writers don’t understand the science. I think, however, that in this case he’s wrong, both about what he should do and what he does do. It seems clear to me that he does understand the science, and does evaluate the facts for himself. I don’t, frankly, see how one can approach a scientific controversy by any other method than reference to the data. To me, “what makes it science is the epistemology” means RTFdata.
This is a question that bears closer examination: If I’m not able to directly evaluate the data, does that mean I have no good way to evaluate the credibility of the scientist pointing to the data to make a claim?
Using unethical means to expose unethical conduct.
An interesting piece of the Korean stem cell fiasco that escaped my notice the first time around is that the Korean investigative television program, “PD Notebook,” that exposed the faking of photographs for the now-discredited Science article did so using techniques that violated journalistic ethics.
Take a moment to let that sink in.
Here’s a lab that is reporting what looks to be great success with cutting edge scientific research. Then Choi Seung Ho, producer of “PD Notebook,” gets an anonymous email from someone who claims to be a member of Hwang Woo-suk’s laboratory, claiming that Hwang faked data in the Science paper. A good investigative journalist wants to get to the bottom of this to find out whether the stunningly successful research group really is stunningly successful or whether its fame rests on a pile of falsified data.
So, you have to talk to some of Hwang’s co-workers, right? The question of journalistic ethics turns on how you talk to them. Here’s what James Brooke writes (in the International Herald Tribune):