Also common in news. There’s an old saying along the lines of “everyone trusts the news until they talk about your job.” Basically, the news is focused on getting info out quickly. Every station is rushing to be the first to break a story. So the people writing the teleprompter usually only have a few minutes (at best) to research anything before it goes live in front of the anchor. This means that you’re only ever going to get the most surface level info, even when the talking heads claim to be doing deep dives on a topic. It also means they’re going to be misleading or blatantly wrong a lot of the time, because they’re basically just parroting the top google result regardless of accuracy.
One of my academic areas of expertise way back in the day (late '80s and early '90s) were the so-called "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Out of Africa" hypotheses. The absolute mangling of this shit by journalists even at the time was migraine-inducing and it's gotten much worse in the decades since then. It hasn't helped that subsequent generations of scholars have mangled the whole deal even worse. The only advice I can offer people is that if the article (scholastic or popular) contains the word "Neanderthal" anywhere, just toss it.
I love that this mirrors the experience of experts on social media like reddit, which was used for training chatgpt...
Also common in news. There’s an old saying along the lines of “everyone trusts the news until they talk about your job.” Basically, the news is focused on getting info out quickly. Every station is rushing to be the first to break a story. So the people writing the teleprompter usually only have a few minutes (at best) to research anything before it goes live in front of the anchor. This means that you’re only ever going to get the most surface level info, even when the talking heads claim to be doing deep dives on a topic. It also means they’re going to be misleading or blatantly wrong a lot of the time, because they’re basically just parroting the top google result regardless of accuracy.
One of my academic areas of expertise way back in the day (late '80s and early '90s) were the so-called "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Out of Africa" hypotheses. The absolute mangling of this shit by journalists even at the time was migraine-inducing and it's gotten much worse in the decades since then. It hasn't helped that subsequent generations of scholars have mangled the whole deal even worse. The only advice I can offer people is that if the article (scholastic or popular) contains the word "Neanderthal" anywhere, just toss it.
Science journalism in a nutshell.
Credit to Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal