IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2020 - 29

Author Information
can present facts without advancing
G. Pascal Zachary is the author of
certain values.
Endless Frontier a biography of
The specter of dueling knowlVannevar Bush, organizer of the
edge domains, or the familiar batManhattan Project, creator of the
tles between "experts," won't vanish
National Science Foundation, and
and could worsen. In Merchants of
the first American presidential sciDoubt, historians of science Naomi
ence adviser. As a working journalOreskes and Erik M. Conway impressively document how, in the
intense debate fifty years
ago over whether and how
cigarette smoking caused
cancer, putatively indepenTo sustain journalism of the sort
dent scientists defended
tobacco companies, delaythat the market barely supports
ing justifiable public-heath
today, public funding is essential.
measures to limit smoking. A similar problem has
arisen with debates over the
ist, Zachary spent 13 years as a
effects of and responses to climate
senior writer at The Wall Street
change.7 Inevitably, just as public
funding of scientists and engineers
Journal, where he authored more
can support shoddy research, so it
than 100 front page articles. He
likely will do the same for flawed
wrote for two years the "Ping" color biased journalism. Literacy and
umn on innovation in The New York
awareness are responses that can
Times and his writings on technololimit this problem.
gy and society have appeared in
The forces of creative destrucWired, the Atlantic, the Chronicle of
tion - forces conspiring to shrink
Higher Education and many other
serious journalism by the day -
publications. He has taught journalwill not relent. That's because di--gital
ism and nonfiction writing at Stanjournalism exacerbates rather
ford University, Arizona State, and
than resolves the central contradicthe University of California.
tion behind the steady commercial
References
decline of our field. Journalism is
[1] N. Lemann, "Can journalism be saved?,"
valuable because journalism is a
New York Rev. Books, Feb. 26, 2020.
public good, not in spite of it. And so
[2] J. Hamilton, All the News that's Fit to
Sell: How the Market Transforms Inforto sustain journalism of the sort that
mation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ.
the market barely supports today -
Press, 2003.
to insure this vital new knowledge
[3] J. Hamilton, Democracy's Detectives:
the Economics of Investigative Journalis widely shared - public funding
ism. Harvard Univ. Press, 2016.
is essentia l. In other rea lms of
[4] C. Ali, "The merits of merit goods: Local
American life, society spends heavjournalism and public policy in an age of
austerity," J. Information Policy, 2016.
ily on creators, scientists, teachers,
[5] R. Smith, "Problems with peer review
and discoverers. With care and conand alternatives," British Medical J., Mar.
science, the U.S. must do the same
12, 1988
[6] N. Oreskes and E.M. Conway, Merfor journalists, with greater intensity,
chants of Doubt: How a Handful of Sciskill, and foresight.

unlike medicine, teaching, law, or
electrical engineering - fields that
through professionalization have
come to have an elaborate system
of gate-keepers. Journalism need
not imitate academia, with its plethora of disciplines and rules, in order
to warrant public funding without
fear or favor. That anyone can be
a journalist should not mean anything goes. Standards matter.
The work of policing also draws
on people of diverse skills and
identities, and few would argue
that policing should be a marketbased activity or that standards
don't matter. In 2020, the socialmedia platform, Twitter, began
to label some of President Donald Trump's tweets as misinformation, a practice that implicitly
embraced the idea that Twitter is
responsible for what goes out on
its platform but which also ignited
controversy about whether imposing editorial standards must be
applied more broadly.
Public funding might also mean
recourse against sub-standard performance - in short, accountability.
The example of the challenges in
curbing poor, and destructive, police
performance dramatically suggests
that accountability can be difficult,
if not impossible, to achieve. The
days of journalists not explaining
or defending their practices to others - and only answering to themselves or their own tribe - would
in theory end with public funding.
But this would probably not be the
case in practice. A whole range of
other shortcomings and disappointments with quality journalism -
from incomplete facts to superficial
analysis to documentable biases
of various kinds - won't automatically go away. There is no easy path
to balancing the demanding debate
between facts and values, and
whether anyone, no less journalists,

SEPTEMBER 2020

7

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants
of Doubt [6].

∕

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

entists Obscured the Truth on Issues
from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change.
Bloomsbury. 2010.


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