Props for Jay

Jay Rosen is the person best at making sense of modern journalism, especially in America.

He doesn't usually think of science journalism in particular, but his comments are often strikingly on target for our interests as well.

There's an excellent interview with Rosen in The Economist

Some of it reflects on the quandary that someone like Revkin faces:

I do not think journalists should "join the team". They bridle at
that, for good reason. Power-seeking and truth-seeking are different
behaviours, and this is how we distinguish politics from journalism. I
think it does take a certain detachment from your own preferences and
assumptions to be a good reporter. The difficulty is that neutrality
has its limits. Taken too far, it undermines the very project in which
a serious journalist is engaged.

Suppose the forces that want to convince Americans that Barack Obama
is a Muslim or wasn't born in the United States start winning, and
more and more people believe it. This is a defeat for journalism—in
fact, for verification itself. Neutrality and objectivity carry no
instructions for how to react to something like that. They aren't
"wrong", they're just limited. The American press does not know what
to do when neutrality, objectivity, balance and "report both sides"
reach their natural limits. And so journalists tend to deny that there
are such limits. But with this denial they've violated the code of the
truth-teller because these limits are real. See the problem?

Yep.

That's the whole problem in a nutshell, along with the fact that journalists are stunningly blind to the problem.

There is a tradeoff between valid goals: on the one hand, journalistic independence, and on the other, journalistic participation in actually evaluating the truth of competing narratives. On the whole, journalists overvalue independence and undervalue truth. In the limiting case they become utterly useless.

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Portrait of Jay Rosen lifted from the cited Economist piece