[wam]

Hmm. Stay away from words that carry connotations? That's what words do. Narrative journalism exists because we are storytellers, culturally if not innately.

Producing tools that help analyze and interpret media narratives is a good idea, but it's also a hard problem that doesn't show signs of being eased by crowdsourcing or noun/verb extraction. Fact-checking has already been completely politicized: What's bare fact to one person is obvious bias to another. You can certainly classify bias and hyperbole from your point of view. But even in peer-reviewed scientific publications you find bitter fights over "theory-loaded" paradigm biases.

Alongside this I'd like to know what you think journalists do well?

Edit: For a sociolinguistic perspective, see Lakoff (both of them). On the representation of "fact," Ian Hacking has an excellent book, "Representing and Intervening" which looks at Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, etc.

[kumarski]

Maybe my protest is more against eye-grabbing-headlines than connotation...

Now that you've put it that way, the word journalist might be too broad in its definition. I think there are good and bad journalists with different positive skill sets.

I wrote the blog post after seeing too many scientific topics where journalists were inaccurate. This doesn't represent all journalists.

I think photo and video journalists do a particularly good job of news casting. Sometimes their content becomes described inaccurately. The napalm girl photo of Vietnam is a good example of this.

Thanks for the comment. Just checked out the book.