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Title: It Ain't Necessarily So: How the Media Remake Our Picture of Reality by David Murray, Joel Schwartz, S. Robert Lichter ISBN: 0-14-200146-5 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.42 (19 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Your Check Is In the Mail
Comment: This is one of the most-used lies in the English language, and these authors demonstrate that another often-used whopper is "Studies Show That..." This book is a well-balanced and sensible expose of junk science and the misuse of "facts," especially by researchers and the mass media. But the authors do not claim anti-corporate bias as the only possible explanation. They show how the demands of journalists' jobs give them incentives to be lazy, careless, and all too quick to hype dramatic bad news in place of good news that isn't so interesting. Many actual facts are cited to prove the authors' points. One of the points they make by logical argument rather than factual proof, however, may be the most important of all: the intolerable smear that a researcher's "corporate funding" (which is often very tenuous, exercising little or no actual control over the researcher's activities) automatically invalidates his research! This tactic is often used today (as can be seen in one of the reviews below), but the only honest approach is to question a researcher's FINDINGS, not his MOTIVES. After all, as the authors point out, journalists (and certainly political activists) have their own agendas that give them strong incentives to fudge the truth; and the fact that their motivation is not pecuniary matters little to the only important question: how much truth is in what they say. Also, many researchers DO have a sort of vested interest of their own: they know that if their studies "prove" that a pressing problem exists, they'll get more funding to do further studies, so they won't actually have to go out and WORK for a living! Not surprisingly, their "studies" tend to find terrible problems everywhere. One gets the impression that there are so many new, horrendous health hazards now that a person would have to be lucky to reach old age. So why are people living longer and longer, if there are so many health dangers lurking everywhere? Read this excellent book and you won't be so quick to believe that all the junk science hype that's being quoted everywhere actually proves what it claims to prove.
Rating: 4
Summary: For victims of misleading media stories
Comment: Don't believe what you read in the popular press or hear on the media - that's the lesson affirmed by the authors. They review a gaggle of cases where the reportage of some issue or event was obviously filtered, through intent or incompetance, to fit the story the author wanted to state.
Rabid liberals who don't realize how far left the media has seemed to come will view this book as a subtle right-wing treatise. However, these are people who, like their reactionary counterparts, internally filter out anything that doesn't fit into their own paradigm, and they are better ignored. Nothing will help people who are too tilted in either direction, but this is not a reason to dismiss important work.
In all, this should be required reading for every newspaper and television reporter and editor and journalism student, not to mention every adult who wants to think independantly.
Rating: 1
Summary: It Ain't Necessarily Worth Reading
Comment: This book is not riddled with factual errors, but information is presented in an extrememly misleading way. For instance, in its treatment of climate change, a long section (pp. 49-52) criticizes the media for reporting a story on the northward range shift of a California butterfly. "One swallow does not a summer make," the authors state, and argue that the media should not jump on a story like this in association with climate change because it reports information from just one butterfly species. This sounds reasonable, but there is a problem.
The book ignores a study that was published only a year after the original butterfly report, in 1999, by the same author in the same journal. This second study reported that in a total of 35 butterfly species examined, 63% showed a poleward shift (indicative of climate change) while only 3% shifted toward the equator. (Parmesan, C, N et al. Poleward shift of butterfly species? ranges associated with regional warming. Nature 399:579-583) Since this study was published 3 years before my 2002 edition of "It Ain't Necessarily So" these authors have had ample time to update their discussion of this issue. That they have not would indicate that they are incompetent, inattentive, or biased, none of which flatters their overall reliability.
In a wider sense, the butterfly range shift is one of the most innocuous issues the media could have possibly addressed regarding climate change. As a instructor in environmental science at the University of California, I am well-read in both the primary scientific literature on climate change and the media's coverage of climate change, and overall I'd argue that the media has failed to raise sufficient awareness regarding the dangers of climate change, which by any scientific consensus will dominate human affairs in a very detrimental way for years to come.
The butterfly example is symptomatic of most of the book. A political agenda is suggested instead of mere incompetence by the authors' affiliations. One author, Joel Schwartz, is a fellow at the Hudson Institute, which PR Watch ... says has an "agenda of (its) own: debunking global warming, extinction reports, and other issues that paint an unflattering issue of their corporate sponsors."
Another author, Robert Lichter, is president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA), which PR Watch calls "a deeply hypocritical organization that pretends to be objective, empirical, and impartial when in fact it is a right-wing organization with a permanent agenda of hostility to environmentalists and consumer advocates."
The book is not bad in the sense that most of us think of the word; rather, it is bad in a calculated and negligent fashion, pushing what can only be interpreted as an agenda that matches that of the groups that employ its authors. If you want insight into how the media covers critical issues, you won't find it here.
Matthew Orr, PhD
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Title: Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists by Joel Best ISBN: 0520219783 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 07 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Junk Science Judo: Self-Defense Against Health Scares & Scams by Steven Milloy ISBN: 1930865120 Publisher: Cato Institute Pub. Date: 01 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff, Irving Geis ISBN: 0393310728 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 September, 1993 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America by Cynthia Crossen ISBN: 0684815567 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos ISBN: 038548254X Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 01 April, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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