Notes from The Media and Politics Frontier

As mentioned earlier, I am attending (gate-crashing)  a program on politics and the media at the 2011 25th Anniversary Schedule - Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. (As I write at table in the hal, Clay Shirky is pacing the hall, talking to himself, getting ready for his lunchtime speech.)

Xeni Jardin interviewed Miles O'Brien on science in the media. O'Brien, formerly of CNN until they jettisoned their science department, talked about the difficulty that we as a nation have in teaching about science. The mainstream media, fulfilling that circle, limits its science coverage because it seems that people aren't interested. There was a lot more about a lot more. You can find the recorded sessions at Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy - Home Page

The audience discussion came around to several themes:

• I'm an old-school journalist and I don't understand what you're talking about.


• What about quality?


• Where are the editors?


• Where are the authorities?

I offered a few themes that I've used before:

• The web offers a large-scale version of what we would otherwise call peer review. Instead of a dozen reviewers taking a month to read an article, you can get 100s of people giving you feedback in minutes. The scale is fast and large and solid.


• This is an evolving model that's only a few years old. It wasn't designed as such; we're building as we go along. As a result, we can't expect the level of maturity or completeness that traditional news or science publication companies have had (and have decimated).


• The stuff is personal and people react as such. When there was news about prostate screen or mammograms, people read the reports and reacted as if their lives depended on it. Science becomes real.

More later.