I guess I deserve the downvotes for coming in hot and opinionated.
In my (admittedly lame) defense, mine literally is an off the cuff comment in a place intended for such.
Your comment demonstrates well what I was (failing) to get at.the project is what it as and where it is. Whether or not that's really interesting is for a science journalist to decision.
It can't be interesting enough to write an article about and not interesting enough to investigate curiously.
It's not that hard to investigate. The people are not hard to reach. The good questions are not that hard to establish.
Why can't we have better? I'm genuinely perplexed.
> Why can't we have better? I'm genuinely perplexed.
If you step back and think of "politics" as "the science of human behaviour" then Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) is still a worthwhile read. *
It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion"
In short, TLDR, mass media (eg: The Economist) tends to take the path of most return (sales, eyeballs) for least effort.
AKA it's much cheaper to be lazy.
They don't have the resources to have experts in every technical domain that sit about and read as many newly released papers as they can in order to pick out the gold for you.
They (and many other such public media newsrooms) skim the press packs sent out by university media teams, by political party media teams, the feeds curated by Reuters, third party summary feeds of stock market news releases, etc.
On the big stories the larger papers can spare the time of gumshoe investigative reporters to dig into the heart of an event as best they can. Specialist public journals (such as, say, New Scientist) will background and go into more of the lesser stories specific to their domain (it's The New York Times of anglosphere science).
But a great deal of the news that you see is first order lazy reporting, it's ideally assembled by reshaping press releases of self serving sources with a few phones calls, but more often than not it is nothing more than entire blocks of PR material 'plagiarized' as written with nary a phone call to fact check the basics.
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* Worthwhile regardless of political party preferences, opinions on Chomsky, whether you thoroughly read the entire book or just skim to get a feel of the thesis and arguments made.
Anyone can write and distribute the good version of this article. Major publication, a nobody-reads-it blog whatever....
If they're practiced at this type of work... It's probably a few days worth of work... Probably spread out over a longer period.
It's possible to do this in a way worth reading and writing. The better version would do well on HN. Where is it? Why do we get this version? Why did economist publish this very?
I don't think HN is being manipulated as an "effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion.""
There's a reading of Chomsky whereby this is at least partially emergent. There's a reading of Chomsky (maybe closer to his intent) where it's all a big conspiracy, with market forces filling the space where a belief in wide-scale collusion is untenable. That is, imo, crossing the line into superstition.
The alternative is thateconomist science writing is an abstract product, like code, like education, like a lot of things. It can suck, or it can be better without conspiracy, or secular prophecy.
I guess I deserve the downvotes for coming in hot and opinionated.
In my (admittedly lame) defense, mine literally is an off the cuff comment in a place intended for such.
Your comment demonstrates well what I was (failing) to get at.the project is what it as and where it is. Whether or not that's really interesting is for a science journalist to decision.
It can't be interesting enough to write an article about and not interesting enough to investigate curiously.
It's not that hard to investigate. The people are not hard to reach. The good questions are not that hard to establish.
Why can't we have better? I'm genuinely perplexed.