Fwd: It Ain't Necessarily So: How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality

[Victor Steinbok <Victor.Steinbok@VERIZON.NET>]

I thought this might be of interest (Jimmy K posted the link on
EdNews). The content does not necessarily reflect anything I agree
with or support. In fact, I would largely disagree with much of the
analysis of the data, which is heavily biased (note, for example, the
use of "illegitimate births" as a descriptor of births to unmarried
mothers). However, it does represent a model for analyzing education
data which should be approached in a similar manner.

       VS-)

Book Excerpt:
It Ain't Necessarily So: How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific
Picture of Reality

http://www.stats.org/book.htm


Introduction and Chapter One of

It Ain't Necessarily So:
How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality

by David Murray, Joel Schwartz and S. Robert Lichter

[<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0742510956/stats-20>Buy it]

*Introduction*

Scientific research may at first glance sound specialized or even
forbidding as a topic, but in fact it is research results-of a
remarkable variety, from health news to environmental alarms to the
latest findings on child-rearing practices-that increasingly
construct the public agenda. And acting as a catalyst is the news,
that urgent, insistent, up-to-the-minute breakthrough establishing
how you and your world are doing. But what is news, and how does it
work?

Until we learn the intricacies of media culture and the processes by
which news is made, we are vulnerable to a daily dose of
misunderstanding contained in each morning's headlines. Indeed, we
are at risk of perpetually misdiagnosing our modern world and the
role we play in it. This book not only sets the record straight on an
intriguing variety of contemporary issues but also strengthens and
empowers the news consumer by providing a new and deeper
understanding of the "reality industry" whose product defines our
daily agenda.

The primary goal of this book is to reveal the inner workings-the
choices, judgments, arrangements, spinnings, deletions, and
framings-of the news process as it engages with research-based
portraits of our world. Organized as a series of detailed case
studies of journalistic practice, the book reveals to the news
consumer the process that constructs news about who we are and what
we know about ourselves.

While we correct many surprising misapprehensions that have become
"conventional wisdom," the larger task is that of demystification (or
even disillusioning). We show the news consumer how the magic trick,
as it were, was done: how the lighting was placed, where were the
mirrors, wires, and struts, what sleight-of-hand was employed. Yet
our purpose in demystifying the news is not cynical dismissal.
Rather, we appreciate news as a manufactured, even theatrical,
artifact, as much as it is an engagement with reality. Watching
research results go through the prism of media and get thereby
refracted into multiple colors and shadings is valuable. It doesn't
mean that the process is fraudulent or misleading. But it does reveal
the action of the prism. We can for the first time answer the
question of what can and cannot be known and proclaimed with
confidence.

A book of careful case studies detailing the perilous misadventures
that befall research results as they are transformed into daily
headlines should become a staple of both science education and the
journalism curriculum. Media studies, communications programs,
political science and environmental programs as well as public policy
think tanks will likewise find this book a valuable guide, as will
university public information officers, legal and lobbying domains,
corporate public affairs offices, and the formal institutions of the
scientific community. In short, this book contains cautionary tales
and sound guidance for anyone concerned with the intersection of
science, media, and public policy.

A wider audience of interested parties will benefit from these
arguments as well. This is a book for anyone interested in or
affected by the news. That is, anyone who reads a newspaper, wouldn't
miss the early and late evening broadcasts, catches the talk radio
show, subscribes to a newsweekly, or connects to the Internet, that
constant news stream for the information junky.

*Rationale, Scope, and Aims of This Book*

It is commonly agreed that we stand, as never before, on the brink of
a vast new world of information, with data becoming more and more
immediate as news sources proliferate. Images, numbers, narratives,
charts, charges, and action advice burgeon before our eyes. But can
we handle the flow?

Paradoxically, the more data stream our way, the less meaningful
information we seem to be able to abstract and manage. The situation
has been compared to trying to get a drink of water from a fire
hydrant: the water is there in abundance, but the pressure nearly
takes your head off. So it is with the search for news. The chatter,
reports, analyses, updates, evaluations, commentaries, and digests
that offer to guide us can themselves barely keep their head above
the incoming tide of events and representations.

If raw data only become meaningful information that is usable when
they are processed and organized, categorized and compared, then we
need new management resources for understanding the news. There are
abundant chances for things to go awry. At a minimum, we stand at
risk of missing the significance of some new development. Perhaps
more consequentially, we stand at risk of being actively misled by
misunderstanding. We can come to know or believe some "information"
about ourselves or our world that directly contradicts the real state
of affairs.

Have we misunderstood the latest health report, which led us to eat
precisely the wrong thing? Did we truly comprehend the research
result that transformed our sense of poverty, altered the relations
between the sexes, or heralded an urgent environmental doom? Or have
we understood very clearly what we were told, when unfortunately the
source itself was corrupted, rendering the knowledge we gained about
nature, society, the economy, politics, or even matters of intimacy
entirely erroneous? Surely some of the causes of misunderstanding are
attributable to innocent mistakes. Others, however, may be more
directly intended.

Perhaps we require "gatekeepers" in order to avoid the misdirection,
embarrassment, or improper action that results from our
misapprehension (or our simple incapacity to keep up on "breaking
developments"). These experienced third parties could intervene
between the news consumer and the source. They would monitor,
condense, evaluate, and re-cast information for us, sparing us the
trouble and guiding us past pitfalls. Perhaps the gatekeepers might
even have a "value-added" role, not only transmitting data but
framing its significance and ensuring that we don't miss the "moral
of the story."

Certainly there is a need for such figures in the information
landscape, and when the role is properly played, we are all served
thereby. But reservations and suspicions still lurk. Just how wise is
it to yield control over information upon which we may have to act?
After all, "who shall guard the guardians" is a question that stands
perennially near. How can we be assured that our gatekeepers have
sound judgment, share our values, or even operate in good faith? For
that matter, how do we even know who they are, or just what their
effect might be, once they are cloaked behind the information
curtain? In fact, aren't developments like the Internet, cable news
networks, and alternative publications driven by the quest for more
"immediate" and reliable news untouched by unreliable narrators?

In reality, no news other than that in which we directly participate
can ever really be "immediate"; it cannot come to us in an
"un-mediated" fashion, without passing first through the hands of
another. We must perpetually rely on some mechanism of mediation. Is
there a solution? Perhaps we may supersede the "unseen hand" of the
gatekeeper (or at least complement it) by becoming savvy, empowered
consumers of news, capable of gate-keeping the gatekeepers, as it
were. Or at least knowing when things are going awry, and why.

How well do we understand what we've been told? In the Washington
Post on April 12, 2000, a front-page above-the-fold story (its very
position indicating that the Post intends us to regard this news as
important), follows this headline: "U.S. Plans to Pay for Ills from
Radiation: Government Shifts Policy on Workers at Bomb Plants."

That certainly sounds important, and we learn soon enough that it
will be an expensive policy shift, as well, with costs expected to
exceed 520 million dollars. What are we to make of this circumstance?
Is it an example of justice being done, with nuclear workers who
genuinely suffer from work-related maladies properly being
compensated? Or is this a story of a government capitulating to
pressure politics from a combination of antinuclear activists, trial
attorneys, and needlessly frightened workers who are really about as
healthy as anyone else?

To choose between those alternative scenarios, we need reliable
information, such as how the health circumstances of nuclear workers
compare to those of others in the population. Since the major
radiation-related concern is cancer, it would be helpful to know
something about worker cancer rates. The story did provide some
medical guidance, but only in a single short paragraph. Here is the
information the Post considered both pertinent and sufficient:
"Government-funded medical surveys since 1960 have shown higher rates
of at least one type of cancer-varying from thyroid tumors to
leukemia-at most of the major facilities that produced nuclear
weapons."

But a second look reveals that this statement is actually a candidate
for the least-meaningful health-risk paragraph of the month. Cancer
rates for workers are "higher," assuredly, but higher than what?
Higher than that of the general population? Higher than that of
people of the same age, sex, and background? Higher than workers at
nonnuclear industries? Higher than nuclear-power workers at
facilities that didn't produce weapons? Higher than the Washington
Post thinks that they should be? There is no answer; we are simply
left hanging.

Moreover, what does it mean to say that there are higher rates of "at
least one type of cancer"? There are several types of cancers
mentioned, and apparently the case is that some one of those will be
found higher at some plant (while presumably the others are found at
either the same or even lower rates among the workers). At another
facility a second, separate type of cancer will be found that exceeds
some (as yet unspecified) standard, while the rates of other cancers
(including apparently the first elevated one) are found to be normal,
and so on through the list of "major facilities." What of "minor"
facilities? And why is it "most" and not "all" facilities, if workers
at all facilities faced the same causal conditions? It is not
uncommon to find that incidents of a given disease will be higher at
one place than it is at another, for no more compelling reason than
the law of averages. Why should we expect that all cancers will be
found at rates "lower" (again, than what?) at each of the facilities?

Such a scenario begins to sound like Lake Wobegon, the mythical place
where all children are above average and presumably all workers are
healthier than average. Yet it is not altogether inconceivable that
lower rates for all cancers is what we should expect, since nuclear
plant workers are, surprisingly to some, actually healthier than the
general population, even when it comes to cancer rates.

But the point is that this story, even though it appears in a major
U.S. metropolitan daily and was written by an environmental
journalist who specializes in this theme, fails to tell us any of
these simple but necessary facts. The unwary reader is vulnerable to
accidental (or otherwise) confusion. Was the absence of facts a
result of simple negligence, or were the facts "gate-kept" away, on
the assumption that readers either didn't need to know them or
wouldn't grasp their significance anyway? As it is, the implicit
message of the Post story is "you'll just have to trust our
conclusions, that we're telling you the way it is." We acknowledge
that the Washington Post employs very accomplished science writers,
as competent as those of any American newspaper. What went wrong in
the reporting of nuclear hazards to workers?

The answer to that question takes us down many pathways, which this
book will explore in depth. To begin with, it is worth remembering
the old Russian lament about the two major newspapers under
Communism, Pravda and Isvestia. Pravda is Russian for "truth," and
Isvestia means "news." In the gibe that circulated during the last
days of the Soviet Union, we learned that "Isvestia nye Pravda, y
Pravda nye Isvestia." That is, "The news isn't the truth, and the
truth isn't news." Without charging that our newspapers convey only
propaganda, we can nevertheless learn an important lesson from this
ironic Russian commentary: newspaper reports on scientific research
are constructs, "news," that result from selections and choices about
the facts themselves.

"It's absolutely correct to say that there are objectively occurring
events," says Cole Campbell of the Virginian-Pilot. "Speeches are
made, volcanoes erupt, trees fall. But news is not a scientifically
observable event. News is a choice, an extraction process, saying
that one event is more meaningful than another event. The very act of
saying that means making judgments that are based on values and based
on frames." The news clearly has a relationship to the truth, but it
is never simply equivalent to it. Likewise, that which is
scientifically true is often complex and hedged with qualifications.
Consequently, scientific research may not make for satisfying "news":
it may not attract public attention by (for example) scaring news
consumers about the dangers that confront them.

Michael Schudson, professor of Communications and Sociology at UC San
Diego, wrote in Forbes MediaCritic,

What produces news in this country . . . is a strategic ballet, a
form of political action in itself. But the news as such is a
cultural product. . . . News as a form of culture incorporates
assumptions about what matters, what makes sense, what time and place
we live in, what range of considerations we should take seriously. A
news story is supposed to answer the questions "who, what, when,
where, and why" about its subject. But to understand news as culture
requires asking of news writing what categories of persons count as a
"who," what kinds of things pass for facts or "whats," what geography
and sense of time is inscribed as "where" and "when," and what counts
as an explanation of "why."

While we must attend to the "who, what, when, where, and why" that
affect our daily lives, we must also remember not to treat them as
self-evident "found objects" of our experience. Rather, they are
constructed objects, rendered in a particular place and time, shaped
by particular questions and assumptions, and produced by particular
persons. Coming to a fuller understanding of this process of
construction should not make us cynics or doubters of media
portraits, but lead us to be more savvy and accomplished in making
our own and society's choices.

*The Reality Industry and Its Discontents*

Why are we so often anxious about the state of our world? Do we
encounter dramatic research findings whose significance troubles us
but also perplexes us? Do we suspect that we are in some measure
captive to a largely hidden process that shapes our "conventional
wisdom"? How, we may begin to wonder, did we ever get this particular
though fuzzy picture of our assumed reality?

Everyone is familiar with the observation that the closer we are to
an event that makes the news, the less satisfied we are with the
coverage. Reality observed firsthand is always filled with complexity
and room for doubt, while news coverage tends to present us with
simple and conclusive portraits of what "really" happened. Yet we
tend more readily to accept accounts from outside of our immediate
personal experience.

But what are we to make of events so distant from our daily lives
that any direct grasp of them becomes nearly impossible? When we hear
of global climate change, falling sperm counts, spiraling rates of
violent crime, or threats from emerging infectious diseases, we
discover that our choices are reduced to two-remain in a state of
perpetual bewilderment, or place a measure of trust in those who
convey the accounts.

Unable to gain immediate knowledge, we learn to accept mediated
portrayals of the world around us. And mediation puts us in a bind,
for it allows what journalist Jonathan Rauch has termed the "reality
industry" to take some of our most important decisions hostage. The
reality industry is made up of those people and institutions that
gather, interpret, and transmit to us information that we expect to
be accurate and pertinent to our lives. While we cannot do without
the reality industry, we can perhaps learn to watch their doings with
a bit more skepticism.

We are bombarded daily by news stories that purport to portray the
state of the world. The press and electronic media pass along
accounts that are generated in sites such as university laboratories,
government agencies, and policy think tanks. These accounts, most
commonly based on research findings about phenomena that lie beyond
our personal experience, represent highly specialized knowledge
affecting our personal lives, our society, or the fate of the natural
world. When any one of these sites produces findings, information
begins to flow through a circuit that shapes, prunes, and finally
transmits the resulting picture of reality so that it arrives as
consumable "news." This pathway from institution to headline entails
a regular process of evaluation and decision making that is very
often opaque. The task of our book is to make this process more
transparent.

How accurate is the transmission of information, and how much may we
trust in the conclusions? Recent criticism of the media suggests that
our trust may be misplaced and that some features of the reality
industry are obscuring our perception. Thus it is high time for a
behind-the-curtains look at the vital process by which knowledge of
"the way things are" is created and brought home. By uncovering and
analyzing the process by which knowledge is made, transformed, and
delivered to our attention, we aim to forearm the news consumer. What
we will discover by examining specific cases of research reports gone
awry are the potential missteps in the passage of events to our
attention, missteps involving simple error, honest misunderstandings,
subtle spin, or outright mendacity at virtually any stage in the
process that daily drives our personal decisions and our public
policy.

How can we as citizens judge responsibly when we are so dependent
upon the fidelity of transmission from the laboratory or government
agency to our morning headlines? Consumers of knowledge,
understandably enough, demand clarity and certainty. And their
understanding of events feeds back into public policy, since
government officials quickly learn to respond to research findings
with a certainty that may be unwarranted. As the recent mad cow
disease episode in Great Britain showed, confusion and conflicting
statements of risk prove disastrous not only to herds of cattle but
to herds of politicians as well.

The press has heeded our demands, and it tends to provide us with
reports that are dramatic and unlikely to be hedged with doubt or
complexity. We want answers to our questions, and it is in the
interest of journalists to give them to us. The more stark and
unexpected the findings, of course, the more compelling they seem.
And the more the findings are dressed up with the appearance of
certainty, the more fidelity we imagine we are getting. Statistics,
percentages, graphs, and enumerations accompany the stories we regard
as reliable, adding concrete elements to conclusions that are more
often carved in mere newsprint than in stone.

The research community, however, operates by a different set of rules
than do journalists. For researchers, certainty is often an illusion,
since knowledge is developing and liable to change with tomorrow's
results. In the mind of scientists, "reality" is held inside a frame
of contingency, an expectation that every number and conclusion is
provisional. Scientists know perfectly well that many difficulties
condition their findings and cause them to hedge their conclusions;
they are well aware just how hard it is to count in the most
elementary way many of the things that they study.

When they publicize their research, however, their findings are still
a long way from the consumer's breakfast table. Research must cross
many barriers on its way to the morning's headlines. Advocacy groups
consciously shape and prune the results. Government agencies put
political pressure on the interpretations. And journalists bring to
bear not only their professional interests but also their sometimes
limited scientific capacities. At every step in the transmission
process, room for error increases.

We will examine in detail how the uncertain and shifting world of
research becomes congealed into the various firm, though often
premature, convictions of conventional wisdom. Do we really know what
we think we know? To find out, we will analyze media reports and
portrayals of research affecting our lives, comparing the results to
the actual findings themselves.

Writing a book about news is a perilous venture, since it is
assuredly out of date from the start of the first paragraph. Yet
there are compensations for standing back from the process and not
being overwhelmed by the swirl of today's events. News is that which
is novel, the events that "just happened." But news is also a process
perpetually in the making. Nothing is as stale as yesterday's
newspaper; but on the other hand, tomorrow's headlines will almost
certainly be constructed according to the same recipe as today's-and
will make not a few of the same errors.

We believe that by examining specific cases in depth one can acquire
enough of an understanding of the news process to become a forewarned
and forearmed news consumer. By grasping the general lessons found in
this examination, tomorrow's stories need not be so surprising. Just
as important, our hope is that misleading, alarmist, or partial
accounts will lose some of their power to cloud or lead astray the
necessary judgments of public policy.

Scientific findings of all kinds comprise a topic of huge scope. It
should therefore be obvious that an analysis of the totality of
scientific reports would be an impossibly broad undertaking.
Accordingly, we have limited the scope of our enterprise in a number
of ways.

First, our quarry is any information generated by scientific
investigation that seeks to affect or has an impact upon a
public-policy outcome (court decisions and liability awards,
regulatory initiatives, the development of programs addressing
perceived social ills, the setting of government research agendas),
where that impact is substantially energized by media attention to
the findings. That is, all three components (research generated,
media attention to the data, policy engagement with the findings)
have to come together in order for us to consider the scientific
claims to be appropriate grist for our mill. We principally examine
media coverage of studies of health and statistical accounts of the
state of society, since the science that drives public policy mostly
deals with these two domains. Research in these areas also purports
to be relevant to our common experience, hence to be more accessible
and pertinent to the educated public that must grapple with its
claims.

Our examination of scientific research is also narrowed because it
particularly concerns questions of measurement. We consistently ask
how we know what we think we know-or what we are told by experts and
the headlines-about the extent of various problems that confront us.
That is, we examine the methodological bases for various quantitative
portraits of the world that are offered for our consumption.

Just as we have limited ourselves to assessing particular types of
scientific reports, we have also restricted our focus on the media
that transmit the findings. We attend most carefully, though not
exclusively, to print media, principally concerning ourselves with
news accounts in major newspapers and magazines. This decision is
partly a function of the difficulty of analyzing electronic media
such as television, radio, and increasingly the Internet. The
presence of a dominant visual component in most electronic media
necessitates an enormously complex method of capturing and analyzing
content, a problem that is minimized with respect to print media. But
more importantly, we believe that the print media still retain a more
definitive standing in public policy circles and even in society at
large. Published news in the newspaper is still regarded as more
authoritative and is therefore more commonly cited by policy figures
than are broadcast news accounts or even television science specials.
A comprehensive treatment detailing how all of science is covered by
all of the media must remain a task for another day-but at least we
have made an important start.

Another necessary disclosure on our part involves our own status as
examiners. Though all three of us have had extensive training in the
social sciences and are current or former university professors (two
of us, Lichter and Schwartz, have doctorates in political science,
while Murray holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology), and while each of
us has had varying degrees of exposure and training in science in the
strictest sense, none of us is a graduate-trained expert in
laboratory sciences-either physical or biological-or a medical
doctor. By the same token, none of us is a working journalist (though
again, each of us has undertaken either an intensive study of
journalism in its cultural and institutional practices, or served in
journalistic capacities, writing and editing news accounts).

These characteristics are admittedly limitations on our vision, but
we believe that they also endow us with a certain virtue, that of
interested and observant outsiders, able to perceive and question the
practices and assumptions of both science and journalism from an
objective position that is sometimes referred to as the "immaculate
perception." We have chosen to adopt as a deliberate stance a
perspective on scientific andjournalistic practices and institutions
that is most appropriately termed ethnographic.

As interested outsiders, we are able to function as anthropologists
do in approaching a foreign culture-in this case, two cultures (media
and science) and their engagement with one another and the wider
society. While the cultures are in some sense sufficiently alien to
us that we can step back and ask about their fundamentals, they are
also cultures whose language and behaviors are sufficiently familiar
to us that we can operate as semi-natives. We claim for ourselves the
status of outsider observers whose position is in a sense privileged.
Our contention is that we are able to convey to an audience of
readers, who are also outsiders who might benefit from ethnographic
reports, an "account from the field" of great utility.

We present, then, a book about science and how it is made, one that
is especially concerned with the complexities of measurement. Our
reports focus on such things as the measuring and reporting of crime
statistics, AIDS deaths, breast cancer risk, causes of infant
mortality, and potential nuclear disaster. Our effort is to teach a
few principles of data gathering and to encourage a healthy
skepticism that accompanies clear thinking and engagement with the
evidence.

But this is also a book about journalism and how it is made. Our
strong belief is that the best way to explain journalism is to focus
on its choices and predilections. As the editor and media critic
James Fallows has written, "The simplest daily reminder that the news
is the result of countless judgment calls, rather than some abstract
truth, is a comparison of the front page of the Wall Street Journal
with that of almost any other major newspaper. The 'news' that
dominates four-fifths of most front pages is confined, in the
Journal, to two little columns of news summary." In keeping with that
spirit, what we present here are concrete examples of the media's
doings. We argue that journalism can best be grasped through a
careful examination of cases, concrete and specific stories that can
be made to yield general understandings when they are compiled,
digested, and evaluated.

The book is divided into three sections, devoted to the ambiguity of
news, the ambiguity of measurement, and the ambiguity of explanation.
Arrayed under each are accounts of specific research findings: how
they were generated and came to public attention; how journalists
received, parsed, selected, and conveyed them; and how they could
have been portrayed differently while still being faithful to the
same facts. Each chapter has three overriding goals: to educate
readers about specific controversies regarding data; about specific
choices in the newsmaking process; and about general principles of
measurement, data, and the likelihood of evidentiary claims. It is
our hope that these case studies will generate a broader
understanding of facts and arguments that can make readers more
discerning consumers of the news. It is time to begin our inquiry.



**Chapter One**

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that
AIDS deaths increased in 1994, that story was covered by the New York
Times-as it should have been. But two months later, the CDC announced
that the number of AIDS diagnoses fell in 1995. An interesting and
important piece of news, you might think, yet the Times effectively
ignored it.

In April 1996 the federal government released figures from the
National Criminal Victimization Survey (NCVS) showing that violent
crime dropped slightly between 1993 and 1994 and that sexual assaults
and rapes declined by an impressive 13 percent. That story, however,
received almost no news coverage. But in October 1996, when the FBI's
Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) showed that violent crime had dropped by
4 percent between 1994 and 1995, the story made front-page news-even
though the UCR's figures are generally thought to be less reliable
than those of the NCVS.

A Federal Reserve study showing that minority applicants for
mortgages fared worse than white applicants was big news in the
summer of 1995, but in the same month Federal Reserve figures
pointing to a 55 percent increase in mortgages for black applicants
were mostly ignored.

In May 1996 the media appropriately alerted readers to a World Health
Organization (WHO) report calling attention to a worldwide resurgence
of familiar infectious diseases like tuberculosis. But in the same
month, the media failed to cover data released by the CDC showing
that tuberculosis cases had declined to an all-time low in the United
States. In the fall of 1996 front-page stories were devoted to a
report from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) that
showed a decline in illegitimate births in 1995. Only a few months
earlier, though, the media ignored an NCHS finding that illegitimate
births had reached an all-time high in 1994.

As these examples illustrate, some stories make it into the
newspapers, while others don't-and it's not always because the
stories that make it are inherently more newsworthy. If a story isn't
covered, is it "news"? Almost by definition, no, just as some
philosophers like to argue that a tree falling in the forest doesn't
make a sound unless someone is nearby to hear it. News, in this view,
is what appears in the newspapers.

But even if uncovered stories aren't news, one can still argue that
they should have been news. Not, of course, from the standpoint of
the occurrences themselves; we don't mean to attribute human feelings
to uncovered data, imagining them conversing with other data that do
make it into the newspapers, insisting (as Marlon Brando does in On
the Waterfront) that "I coulda been a contender." Instead, of course,
we adopt the standpoint of news consumers when we say that some
stories should have been covered, even if they weren't. Often news
consumers would be better informed if they learned of research
findings that go unreported even in our best and most comprehensive
papers.

Uncovered potential news stories are reminiscent of the nursery rhyme
about the "little man who wasn't there": "Last night I met upon the
stair/ A little man who wasn't there/ He wasn't there again today/
Oh, how I wish he'd go away." Our purpose is to account for the
phenomenon of the little (and sometimes big) story that wasn't there,
because it escaped the attention of reporters.

Why don't we learn about some developments, even though they seem to
be of genuine importance? To answer this question, we'll begin by
looking at individual stories. Our procedure here will necessarily
differ from what it is elsewhere in our examination of what's right
and what's wrong with news coverage. We can't examine nonexistent
coverage, but we will explain the importance of the various ignored
research findings and document the fact that they were ignored. So as
to set a standard of newsworthiness that in our view was met by the
uncovered story, in each case we'll pair an uncovered story with a
related (and not obviously more significant) story that did receive
media attention.

*An Untold AIDS Story*

In February 1996 the New York Times appropriately and responsibly
reported the CDC's finding that in 1994 deaths from AIDS had
increased by 9 percent from the previous year; AIDS actually became
the leading cause of death among American women aged twenty-five to
forty-four. As the article explained (summarizing the views of CDC
scientist John Ward), "death rates for AIDS [are] only one way to
measure the epidemic. Another measure is the number of people in
which AIDS has been diagnosed. . . . The measure that gives the most
up-to-date measure [sic] of the continuing spread of H.I.V. is the
number of new infections" that have not yet developed into full-blown
AIDS.

Among these various AIDS statistics, death totals in effect track the
epidemic's past; AIDS deaths provide a coda to tragedies that may
have occurred ten or fifteen years earlier, when individuals first
were infected with the virus that until recently was thought to lead
inexorably to their doom. Diagnoses of AIDS and reports of HIV
infections, on the other hand, track the epidemic's future: HIV
infections become AIDS diagnoses, and AIDS diagnoses (it was
believed, before the promising development of anti-AIDS drug
"cocktails") culminate in AIDS deaths. In principle the number of HIV
infections offers a better guide to the future than the number of
AIDS diagnoses, but in practice the number of new infections is
harder to pin down (since all AIDS diagnoses, but not all reports of
HIV infections, must be reported to the CDC).

All of this is to say that the yearly total of new AIDS diagnoses is
an important statistic: it enables us to judge whether or not the
disease is likely to do even more damage in the future. For that
reason, the CDC's news about 1995 AIDS diagnoses was surprisingly
encouraging: in April 1996-two months after releasing the information
about AIDS deaths-the CDC reported that the number of AIDS diagnoses
had fallen 7 percent between 1994 and 1995 and that diagnoses of AIDS
in children had dropped by 23 percent. The CDC learned of 79,897
people who were diagnosed with AIDS in 1994 (including 1,034
children), whereas the number fell to 74,180 in 1995 (including only
800 children).

Thus the CDC offered on-the-whole encouraging news, indicating that
the horrific toll taken by AIDS promised to decrease in years to
come. And particularly because so much of the news about AIDS over
the years has been so grim, one might have thought that newspapers
would eagerly seize on the small glimmer of encouragement offered by
the CDC as evidence that things were finally becoming less dire. In
the months preceding the first successes of the promising drugs known
as protease blockers, an "AIDS-is-becoming-less-bad-than-you-think"
story would really have been new-and should really have been news.

But it wasn't, at least as far as the Washington Post and the New
York Times were concerned. To be more precise, the Post and the Times
chose to treat the story as local (and discouraging) news, rather
than national (and somewhat encouraging) news. The Post ignored the
story in its news columns but published an editorial focusing on the
fact that the District of Columbia has a higher proportion of AIDS
cases than any state. The editorial also argued that the CDC figures
don't "necessarily mean the disease is on the wane," because "the
definition of AIDS was changed in 1994," when "many more cases were
moved from HIV-positive status to full-blown AIDS. The number of
'new' cases reported that year included thousands that wouldn't have
been counted at that stage under the old guidelines," which means
that the perceived "drop" in the 1995 numbers is "exaggerated."

Thus the Post attempted to explain on its editorial page why it
failed to cover this particular bit of basically encouraging AIDS
news. But the explanation happens to be wrong: the CDC's redefinition
of AIDS took place in 1993 (when the number of AIDS diagnoses surged
to 105,828) rather than 1994. Consequently, the 74,180 AIDS diagnoses
in 1995 are in every respect comparable to (and represent a genuine
decline from) the 79,897 AIDS diagnoses in 1994.

The Times, by contrast, did not attempt to explain away the
encouraging CDC report; it simply ignored what was encouraging about
it. The report was covered by the Times metropolitan desk, for which
the only relevant news was that Jersey City, New Jersey, had attained
the "grim distinction" of being "second only to Washington in numbers
of AIDS cases per 100,000 population." Almost in spite of itself,
however, the Times story (which was all of eighty-four words)
conveyed to the attentive reader that even for Jersey City the news
was not unrelievedly "grim." The Times noted that "Jersey City's rate
in 1995 was 138.1 cases [per 100,000 people], down from 148.7 in
1994." Thus the Jersey City rate declined by 7.1 percent, which
almost exactly replicates the decline in the national rate. The
decline in the national rate went unmentioned in both the Post and
the Times.

As we have argued elsewhere, the media's coverage of AIDS has tended
(to reverse the words of songwriter Johnny Mercer) to "accentuate the
negative" and "eliminate the positive." As a result, many inherently
newsworthy findings about AIDS have not in fact become actual news.

*What's Not Reported Can Be Criminal*

In October 1996 the Washington Post published a front-page story
documenting an encouraging drop in the nation's crime rate. The UCR,
the FBI's survey of crimes reported to almost all American
law-enforcement agencies, showed that violent crime fell 4 percent
between 1994 and 1995; crime overall dropped to its lowest level in a
decade.

In some ways the attention given to the release of the UCR data was
surprising. To begin with, as the Post article pointed out, the drop
in serious crime had already been documented back in May, when
preliminary data from the UCR were first made available. The
preliminary data had not been covered by the Post but did receive
attention in, for example, the Chicago Tribune. More than five months
before the Post article appeared, Tribune readers learned that crime
had fallen for the fourth straight year in 1995, with particularly
impressive drops in the number of murders, robberies, and rapes. In
that respect, the Post accorded front-page status to something that
was arguably not "new" but instead a confirmation of what was already
"old."

The attention lavished on the UCR is also surprising because the
report isn't thought to give a particularly accurate reading of
America's crime problem: the UCR counts only crimes that are reported
to the police (and then reported by the police to the FBI), while
many crimes are committed but never reported to the police. With good
reason, the FBI's count of rapes in particular is thought to be
unreliable, since we know that a great many rape victims never report
the crime to the police. To be sure, the UCR may offer useful
information about the crime rate's trend, since its limitations are
the same, year in and year out; nevertheless, its data aren't
considered all that reliable.

For this reason, the government's more accurate survey of crime is
thought to be the NCVS, which surveys a large and representative
sample of ordinary Americans to get a sense of the total amount of
crime, both reported and unreported. NCVS findings (admittedly for
1994 rather than 1995) were released in April 1996. Although they
offered data that are thought to be more informative, data that
actually track the UCR numbers reasonably closely, they received
virtually no media attention.

The NCVS offered only slightly less encouraging news about our crime
problem. The rate of violent crime dropped slightly between 1993 and
1994, falling from 51.3 to 50.8 victimizations per thousand people, a
decrease of 1 percent. The rate of property crime dropped
substantially, going from 322.1 to 307.6 victimizations per thousand
people, a decrease of 5 percent.

But the one arguably big piece of news in the NCVS was ignored by the
media. As we will see in our discussion of surveys in chapter 6, the
NCVS was substantially redesigned in 1992, with the aim of obtaining
a more accurate count of the total number of rapes, attempted rapes,
and other sexual assaults. Between 1993 and 1994, the survey showed,
the victimization rates for rape and attempted rape held steady-but
the rate for other sexual assaults plummeted by 38 percent. As a
result, the combined rate for all sexual assaults fell by 13 percent.

On the face of it, this would seem to be very big news. In our
subsequent discussion of surveys we see that the media
attentively-and appropriately-covered the redesign of the NCVS,
emphasizing that the survey was now likely to be able to count
incidents of sexual violence against women more accurately. But in
only the second year of the redesigned survey, its findings received
next to no attention, even though the supposedly more accurate count
showed that sexual violence against women had declined significantly.

The NCVS findings should have been big news, then. Amid a mass of
contentions that an epidemic of sexual violence was being directed
against American women, a survey that feminists had rightly hailed
for its improved capacity to detect such violence had uncovered a
notable decline. Again, if "news" is understood to be what is
unexpected, the NCVS findings on sexual assaults should undeniably
have been news. But they weren't. The NCVS results were wholly
ignored by the New York Times and the Washington Post; to our
knowledge they were covered most extensively in a ninety-four-word
report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Thus a report that should have
been big news turned out to be no news.

*Do Minorities Get Mortgages?*

In 1985 the New York Times paid great attention to a study conducted
by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, which found disparities in
the treatment of minority and white applicants for mortgages. Among
those with bad credit ratings, 90 percent of the white
applicants-versus only 81 percent of the minority applicants-received
mortgages. The Times placed its 902-word story on the first page of
the business section-even though the study was little more than a
rehash of 1992 research carried out by the Federal Reserve Bank of
Boston. Because the Chicago study was derivative (and because it
didn't address criticisms leveled at the Boston study), reporter
David Andrew Price of Investor's Business Daily has argued that "the
Chicago Fed study really didn't warrant press coverage."
Nevertheless, it got it.

But the media paid much less attention to a second set of Fed
findings, released the same week, that was arguably more
illuminating. Between 1993 and 1994, the Fed found, home loans to
black applicants rose by an impressive 55 percent; loans to Hispanics
went up 42 percent. Native Americans received 24 percent more loans,
and loans to Asians rose some 19 percent. Trailing the pack were
white mortgage recipients, whose numbers rose by 16 percent.

These encouraging findings were covered most extensively in the Wall
Street Journal. They were not wholly ignored by the Times, but it is
fair to say that the Times coverage was far less extensive than that
accorded the Chicago study: the 215-word story appeared on page 6 of
the business section. Of greater importance, the Times story made the
good news sound more like bad news. It led by announcing that "black
and Hispanic mortgage applicants remain much more likely than white
applicants to be turned down for loans to buy homes but the gap is
narrowing." The fact that loans to black applicants "soared" by 54.7
percent was treated as an afterthought, relegated to the third
paragraph of the four-paragraph story.

The Times coverage evidently presupposed that the continued (although
lessening) disparity in the rates at which minority and white
applicants received mortgages was more important than the sharp rise
in the number of loans awarded to minority applicants. The Times
seemed to explain away the increase in loans to blacks, noting that
"more applications were filed" by black applicants.

The alternate view, though, is that the disparities in denial rates
are not very meaningful; as the Journal article pointed out,
denial-rate disparities "don't take into account such factors as
disparities in net worth, assets or credit history." If, as seems
likely, white applicants have higher net worth and more assets, the
disparities hardly indicate that minority applicants are treated
worse than white applicants with comparable qualifications.

But the larger point was made by economist Lawrence Lindsey, at that
time one of the seven governors of the Federal Reserve Board.
Speaking in September 1995, Lindsey complained that the dramatic
increase in home loans to minorities was "the great underreported
news story of the summer." He argued that the 54.7 percent increase
in loans to black applicants was "a staggering, or at least a
newsworthy, economic statistic"-and that, unlike the disparities in
rejection rates, it received virtually no attention from newspapers.
Lindsey observed that the media had never refrained from "printing
negative stories" about the obstacles faced by minority mortgage
applicants-so he wondered why many media outlets ignored or played
down the good news represented by the huge increase in home loans to
blacks.

In short, the increase in loans to minority applicants was not
obviously less newsworthy than the disparate treatment of white and
minority applicants, yet the latter story received far more attention
from the press.

All Quiet on the Tuberculosis (News) Front

In May 1996 the WHO published its annual report, which highlighted
grave difficulties in the worldwide battle against infectious
diseases-a battle that had seemed easily winnable a generation
earlier. The report spoke of "ominous trends on all fronts."

This report was undeniably newsworthy, and it received extensive
attention from the press. The advent of AIDS and the danger posed by
an outbreak of Ebola in Africa had focused popular attention on the
threat of infectious diseases. Additionally, an influential article
in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) had pointed
to a large upsurge in American deaths from infectious diseases since
1980. The WHO report added an important international perspective to
buttress the concerns.

Nevertheless, coverage of the report may have been a bit unbalanced
by a tilt toward the negative. Consider, for example, the story
published in [New York] Newsday, written by Laurie Garrett. In her
Newsday article Garrett correctly declared that "a host of diseases
that were once thought controllable are now taking record tolls
worldwide-including tuberculosis, malaria and cholera." But she went
on to argue that several diseases once thought almost eradicated in
the United States had "surged, notably tuberculosis." The story
appeared on May 20, 1996. Exactly ten days earlier, the CDC published
a report showing that in 1995 reported TB cases were at the "lowest
rate" ever, "since national surveillance began in 1953." In short,
Garrett's claim makes sense only if you think there are downward
surges.

Lest it seem that we are unfairly picking on Garrett, we note that
she stands at the top of her profession: she has served as president
of the National Association of Science Writers and is the author of a
massive and well-received study of infectious diseases, The Coming
Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. But
despite her deserved eminence, Garrett did not cover the CDC report
on tuberculosis. Nor did almost anyone else. In fact, as far as we
can tell the only report of the CDC's encouraging findings appeared
in the Orange County Register.

In this case we do not argue that the CDC tuberculosis study was more
important than or even as important as the WHO report. Still, the
fact remains that the WHO report basically did nothing but confirm a
sense of pessimism about infectious diseases that was already, and in
some respects justly, widespread. The CDC report, on the other hand,
had all the makings of a great contrarian story. Amidst all the
lamentations about the unchecked resurgence of infectious diseases,
here was striking evidence that at least one notable infectious
disease was very much under control-at least in the United States,
the country of greatest interest for almost all American newspaper
readers. If ever there was a "man bites dog" story, this would seem
to be it. Imagine the headline: TB Is Not To Be: Tuberculosis Cases
Way Down. Yet the story received almost no attention anywhere in the
United States.

*When Are Illegitimate Births Legitimate News?*

In October 1996 the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)
issued data showing that the rate of births to unwed mothers had
declined in 1995-the first decline after almost two decades of
consecutive rises. The rate dropped by 4 percent, falling from 46.9
births per thousand unmarried women in 1994 to 44.9 in 1995.

This finding was treated as big news, as indeed it should have been.
It made the front page of papers like the New York Times and the Los
Angeles Times. Analysts offered competing explanations for the
encouraging news. Perhaps predictably, President Clinton tried to
take credit in his weekly radio address, mentioning a 1996 executive
order that required young mothers to stay in school or live with
their parents so as to receive welfare benefits. It is hard to see
how that order could have affected women who did or did not become
pregnant in 1994 and early 1995. Liberals said the drop proved that
sex education was resulting in increased use of birth control, while
conservatives took it as a sign of increasing sexual abstinence among
the young and unwed.

Whatever else was responsible for the downturn, the good news also
resulted in part from a methodological improvement. As the New York
Times reported, "About half of the decline in the out-of-wedlock
birth rate stemmed from changes in reporting births in California, so
that children whose parents had different surnames were no longer
automatically considered to have been born out of wedlock."

Less than four months earlier, the NCHS produced a second set of
natality findings, which pertained to 1994. Though these findings
were also of great interest, they were ignored by newspapers,
surfacing only when policy analyst Charles Murray called attention to
them in an article in the Weekly Standard. As Murray noted, "in 1994
the percentage of children born out of wedlock logged its largest
one-year increase since national figures have been kept. The new
figure, 32.6 percent, was up from 31.0 percent in 1993. . . . The
percentage of black births out of wedlock passed 70 percent, marking
the largest increase since 1973." Yet no newspaper whatsoever covered
this alarming story; instead, newspapers covering the 1994 findings
reported a drop in the birth rate for teenagers.

The first decline in illegitimate births in twenty years was (and
should have been) a huge story. Still, the twentieth consecutive rise
in illegitimacy should have been big news as well, especially since,
as Murray argued in his Weekly Standard piece, there was every reason
to predict a downturn. The illegitimacy ratio (especially among
blacks) was already so high in 1993 that there seemed to be little
room for further increases. In addition, a consensus had finally
developed, among liberals as well as conservatives, blacks as well as
whites, that illegitimacy was wrong; it was not unreasonable to
expect that this would have some impact on the behavior of the man
and woman in the street (and between the sheets).

For these reasons, the decline that did not occur in 1994 should have
been newsworthy. Just as it was significant when the dog in a
Sherlock Holmes story did not bark during a nighttime intrusion, it's
generally noteworthy when predictable things don't take place. Thus
the continued rise in the illegitimacy ratio in 1994 should have made
headlines; instead it didn't even make it into the newspapers.

Journalistic Pessimism?

How can we make sense of the fact that some stories become news,
while others that are often intrinsically of equal interest don't?
Our five case studies don't offer anything like an exhaustive-or
statistically representative-sample. Still, it may be helpful to
begin by comparing the stories that made the news with those that
didn't. Crudely categorizing the stories as either optimistic or
pessimistic, we can say that in three instances (AIDS, mortgages, and
tuberculosis) pessimistic news was covered and optimistic news
ignored (or, in the case of mortgages, downplayed). In one instance
(crime), optimistic news was covered and more or less equally
optimistic news ignored. In the final example (illegitimacy),
optimistic news was covered and pessimistic news ignored. These
findings appear to suggest at least a modest bias in favor of bad
news. Because there is no reason to believe that our sample is
representative, the bias that we detect here could safely be
ignored-except for the fact that many other observers agree that
there is indeed a media bias in favor of bad news.

That view was advanced forcefully in 1984 by columnist Ben
Wattenberg, in a book entitled The Good News Is the Bad News Is
Wrong. Wattenberg argued that a great many statistical indicators
pointing to improvements in Americans' lives-as manifested in things
like better health, increased life expectancy, cleaner air and water,
greater prosperity, and decreased poverty-were unknown to an
unreasonably pessimistic American public, because they had mostly
been ignored by the unreasonably pessimistic American media. As he
put it (in words that apply to our enterprise as well), "sooner or
later [readers would] have to make a choice" whether to believe the
"media-or [the] data."

Wattenberg notes that judgments about what is newsworthy often
reflect three invalid criteria: "1. Bad news [e.g., 'the
carcinogen-of-the-month'] is big news; 2. Good news [e.g., the
dramatic increase in American life expectancy] is no news; 3. Good
news is bad news [e.g., this 1983 New York Times headline: Longer
Lives Seen as Threat to Nation's Budget]."

For our purposes, of course, the question is why bad news might tend
to be emphasized. Wattenberg points to four causes. He argues first
that there is a "commercial negative tilt" to the news, in that bad
news appeals to readers and viewers: "Bad news is exciting: scandal,
war, murder."

Secondly, he spoke of a "left-of-center tilt in the news-gathering
establishment." Most reporters at the most prestigious newspapers are
politically liberal, and contemporary liberals "believe that
accentuating the negative will let . . . others see the problems and
this . . . will engender further progress." He denied, though, that
any journalistic tilt toward the left was "typically a conscious
decision," emphasizing instead that "we all see reality through a
filter." For liberal journalists, what tends to make it through the
filter is "a set of severe problems, subject to solution through
aroused concern, often through the instrumentality of government."

In addition, Wattenberg hypothesized that there is an "adversarial
tilt to the media," in that "journalists are, almost by definition,
antistatus quo," dedicated to criticizing "a corrupt, dissembling,
and heartless establishment." Lastly, he spoke of the
self-righteousness of reporters who "believe that only their vigilant
eyes can keep the nation from international adventurism, political
skullduggery, and corporate corruption."

Wattenberg's observations about the proclivities of the press are
provocative, and they may help account for the stories that did and
didn't make the news in some of the case studies that we've looked
at. Still, if journalists are pessimists, they are also
professionals. Why would they ignore potentially big stories that are
worthy of coverage (and might also advance their careers)? To answer
this question, we need to look at some other factors.

The "Template" Theory

Wall Street Journal Atlanta bureau chief Amanda Bennett offers a
compelling theory to account for what does and doesn't make it into
the press. She contends that only stories conforming to a governing
"template" tend to appear-the template being "what editors and other
people who are not on the ground have decided is The Story." Bennett
derived her theory from her experience covering China. Prior to the
Tiananmen Square uprising, she argues, the received wisdom governing
editorial news judgments about China was that The Story was positive:
"Editors only wanted good stories about happy little children,
beaming peasants, friendly people. They didn't want to hear about
businessmen who were getting hassled or beaten up." Thus the template
was that post-Mao China was a good country that was getting better.
So stories inconsistent with that widely shared premise did not often
or easily make it into the papers, even though (actually, because)
they challenged the conventional wisdom. After Tiananmen Square, on
the other hand, the template was reversed. "Now it was impossible to
get a story in that said anything good about China. All anyone wanted
to hear about was human rights abuses. And again the reporters who
were actually there were complaining."

In other words, in theory "Man bites dog" is news, and "Dog bites
man" is not. In practice, however, it often works just the other way.
If you are a reporter who assumes that it is dogs who bite men, you
will tend to be skeptical of a story that has a man biting a dog: you
will question it, you will demand corroboration, you will want to
talk to sources who deny that men bite dogs. Often you (or your
likeminded editor) will end up killing the story. Initially we tend
to disbelieve things that are inconsistent with the way in which we
see the world; as Wattenberg's filter image suggests, often we do not
even see them at all.

Bennett's "template" theory helps account for many of the news
judgments that earlier puzzled us. If the template is that AIDS is a
catastrophic illness causing stupendous damage (and AIDS was and
still is a catastrophic illness causing stupendous damage), one will
tend to gloss over evidence suggesting that it may be abating rather
than worsening. If the presupposition is that AIDS can only get
worse, news to the contrary (like the CDC report of a 1995 decline in
AIDS diagnoses) will simply be ignored, or, as in the case of the
Washington Post editorial, explained away.

Templates can also explain the nonappearance of stories on the
tuberculosis decline and the decrease in sexual assaults and the
de-emphasis on the story of the increase in mortgages going to
minorities. If the template is that infectious diseases, sexual
assaults, and mortgage discrimination each pose severe (and possibly
worsening) problems, evidence to the contrary will often be ignored
or rejected. This is the case even though, again, the media are
ostensibly and sincerely interested in telling us news stories that
teach us something new-not simply those confirming what we may
perhaps wrongly think we already know.

Still, we are left with the interesting exception of the nonreport of
the 1994 illegitimacy numbers and the contrasting front-page emphasis
accorded the 1995 illegitimacy numbers. Pessimism can't explain that
contrast, since good news was trumpeted and bad news ignored. It's
not clear that any sort of obvious template would explain the
decision, either. Furthermore, it seems too simpleminded to suggest
that liberal journalists (anxious to avoid seeming to "blame the
victim" by calling attention to yet another increase in black
illegitimacy) engaged in some sort of cover-up to hide the bad news
in the 1994 numbers. What else can have been going on?

Press-Release Journalism

In fact, almost certainly, reporters did not tell us about the 1994
rise in illegitimacy because they did not realize that it had taken
place. The NCHS press release accompanying the statistics on 1994
births emphasized the drop in teenage births-which, not all that
surprisingly, turned out to be the focus of the newspaper coverage.
The rise in illegitimate births was not mentioned until the second
page of the press release, and only in a four-line paragraph, which
said no more than that "in 1994, nearly one out of three births were
to unmarried women."

In short, reporters did not tell the illegitimacy story because the
NCHS chose not to highlight it-a decision that itself raises
interesting questions. Still, the startling dimensions of the news
about illegitimacy would have been apparent to journalists who
examined the tables of the NCHS report, but not those who relied on
the press release. Unfortunately, no reporter seems to have waded
through the tables and realized the implications of the data; anyone
who did would have had a nice scoop.

A similar story could be told about all of our other "no news"
stories. The CDC did not emphasize the possible significance of the
1995 drop in reported AIDS cases or the continued decline in
tuberculosis; the numbers were by no means hidden, but reporters
would still have had to figure out for themselves why both bits of
data would have been newsworthy. The Bureau of Justice Statistics
(BJS) did not highlight the dramatic decline in sexual assaults shown
by the 1994 NCVS-perhaps because the BJS itself was unsure how to
make sense of the sharp decline in a statistic that began to be
compiled only in 1992. And the Federal Reserve report on 1994
mortgages (unseen by us) was presumably also matter-of-fact in tone;
we doubt that it trumpeted the importance of its findings. In other
words, journalists can easily fail to understand the significance of
data when that significance is not pointed out to them by the
researchers who compile and issue the data. And they might be
particularly likely to miss the significance when the data challenge
an unquestioned template.

By contrast, in the cases when news stories were written, the
significance of the data was abundantly clear to journalists or did
not need to be made clear. For perfectly understandable political
reasons, the Clinton administration took pains to publicize the 1995
declines in crime and illegitimacy. The WHO report on infectious
diseases was clearly designed to arouse concern and succeeded in
doing so. The Chicago Fed study on lending disparities and the CDC
study of AIDS deaths were seen as newsworthy, we suspect, because
they neatly fit a reigning template.

This discussion is meant to offer what high school teachers often
call "an explanation, not an excuse." In our view, the causes that
we've identified help explain why reporting is sometimes less good
than one would wish; but better reporting is still what we should
hope for and expect.

Coming to Terms with the News That Is Not There

Of what use is it for a news consumer to know that there may be
important news that is not there? In one sense, it's not at all
useful. Elsewhere we are able to offer suggestions that may alert you
to reasons for doubting the authenticity and importance of some of
the news that is there. But by definition we can offer no suggestions
for how to read nonexistent news stories.

In another sense, though, it is useful to be aware of the news that
is not there. First, it's important to realize that even the best
newspaper imaginable could not possibly offer anything like an
accurate reproduction and distillation of reality. "News" is not an
altogether objective reality; instead, it is brought to you through
the subjective decisions of reporters and editors who necessarily
have blind spots, because they are only human and therefore fallible.
Even with the best will in the world, they would tell us some things
that are false or unimportant, and they would fail to tell us of
other things that are both true and important. Being aware of the
category of news that is not there helps drive home that
all-important lesson.

In some sense everyone knows what we've just said, but like many
things that everyone knows, it's too often taken for granted; its
importance is too seldom acknowledged. Consider, for example, the
claim with which Walter Cronkite used to conclude his news
broadcasts: "And that's the way it is." But it wasn't, and it
couldn't have been; reality simply can't be reproduced in a half-hour
newscast. Nor, by the same token, can the New York Times possibly
convey "all the news that's fit to print." If it did, each issue (and
not just the Sunday edition) would resemble a tome that made War and
Peace look like a minimalist short story.

News that is not there exists, because the news is brought to us by
people who make choices. Some of their choices, inevitably, are
better than others. In the jargon of the contemporary academy, the
news is "socially constructed" by the reporters and editors who
produce the papers. This realization does lead to a practical
recommendation. Because news is the product of editorial and
reportorial decisions, you're more likely to encounter news that does
not make it into one paper if you read others as well. Thus the news
that was barely there in the New York Times about the increase in
mortgages to minorities received far better coverage in the Wall
Street Journal. In some cases, as we have seen, the news that is not
there is literally nowhere (or in only one or two places); but in
others, your odds of finding it increase when you cast your net more
widely.

It's not generally realized how greatly newspapers-even the prestige
newspapers-differ from one another. The size of that difference was
established in an interesting experiment conducted some years ago by
David Shaw, the media critic of the Los Angeles Times. Over a
five-month period Shaw looked at the front page of the Los Angeles
Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Sixty percent of
the time, he discovered, the three front pages had no more than one
or two of their eight or ten stories in common. Shaw concluded that
the American press is anything but a monolith: to speak of "'The
Press'-as if it were a single, mammoth, national newspaper with more
than 1,700 slightly varying regional editions-is a glaring
misconception."

Instead, Shaw argued, even the three prestige papers offer their
readers disparate representations of the world. The news coverage in
paper A will not resemble that found in paper B, because editors and
journalists inevitably have "different, even conflicting, views of
the same information." Stories will appear in one paper but not in
another, because they "are the product of individual initiative by
one reporter or one newspaper. Or a newspaper may decide not to play
a given story . . . because the competition already had it. Or
because a reporter did so poor a job on it that his editors do not
deem it worthy. . . . Or because a reporter, or the paper, did not
have access to the story."

The news is a result of subjective decisions, so one paper's version
of "the news" may well have little to do with another's. "There is no
blueprint, no grand design, no formula or quota; just different
editors-all human, all capable of error-viewing the world through the
prisms of their different life experiences and making decisions on a
daily basis for different readerships in different historical,
cultural, and geographical contexts."

Our focus on uncovered news stories has pointed to uniformities among
journalists-reigning templates, a widespread bias toward negative
news, a general overreliance on press releases. Those cautions remain
important. But at the same time, it is worth remembering that
newspapers and journalists also differ among themselves. Some news
that is not there appears nowhere, but other stories are treated in
one paper though not in another. In still other cases, different
stories, revealing biases of different sorts, will appear in
different papers; comparing them may give a perceptive reader a
better grasp of what's going on than would any single story taken in
isolation.

Thus news that is not there presents the news consumer with a problem
that isn't always soluble. But simple awareness of the problem is
important in itself. And the problem can often at least be mitigated
by consuming news from several different sources.

--
Did you like what you read? Then
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0742510956/stats-20>buy a
copy of It Ain't Necessarily So.
--
Return to <http://www.stats.org/index.html>STATS

The Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), a nonprofit nonpartisan
organization, examines the way that scientific, quantitative, and
social research is presented by the media and works with journalists
to help them convey this material more accurately and effectively.

The Statistical Assessment Service (STATS)
2100 L St. NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20037
(202) 223-3193
FAX: (202) 872-4014

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