[icelancer]

>> In contrast, other newspaper topics like politics, sports, business, etc. are often literal reporting of what people do

This comment should be preserved for all time and cited in the Gell-Mann Effect entry. Do you really think physics is infinitely more complicated than finance or politics?

[mattkrause]

I'm not sure about that specifically, but reporting on politics is much closer to the paper's core competency.

The paper runs articles on politics every single day. The characters and issues don't change too quickly: Quimby was the mayor last week; next week, he'll be the same mayor, dogged by the same scandals and trying to enact the same politics too. A lot of the facts are easy to check, if someone cared to do so. The reporters may have a background in political science or history, or something somewhat related.

In contrast, the science section is pretty small. Maybe it runs once a week and has one or two main reporters, who cover everything from Astronomy to Zoology. No one has a background in all of that, and many reporters don't have a technical background at all. You can try to fact check it, but the experts themselves don't always agree and it's hard to tell whether Dr. So-and-So is really an expert on the topic anyway.

And, despite all that, the science reporting I see does a pretty good job. One of my papers got a bit of media coverage, and pretty much everyone got the broad strokes right. One place made me sound a little too exuberant about the immediate ramifications; another made me sound a bit too negative, but neither was egregiously bad.

[umeshunni]

> reporting on politics is much closer to the paper's core competency.

And despite this, most of the media got the two of the most significant political happenings of the last 5 years (US elections and Brexit) completely wrong.

[verall]

Comments like this are great.

By saying "most of media gets it wrong" without any examples, everyone agrees, and noone needs to think about what the media said or what happened at all. Everyone reading can be right and everyone else can be wrong at the same time.

Less snarkily - what media narrative are you referencing specifically? What do you believe occured instead? There was much media covering many angles on both of these issues.

[mattkrause]

I agree that they incorrectly predicted future events, but no one should be able to that with absolute certainty. Past events are, of course, much easier to report accurately.

[untog]

What does "got wrong" mean in this context, though? People said the media got those things wrong because they said "90% chance Clinton wins" and Trump won. But that's why they said 90%, not 100%. It feels as though the concept of probabilities is either misunderstood or willfully ignored to score points.