citation, original sources, and the sad state of mainstream media
By anders pearson 18 Oct 2003
a few days ago, the prime minister of malaysia gave a speech to an islamic summit conference. some of his remarks were reported in the media and <a href=”http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=139-10162003”>condemned as anti-semetic</a>. Mahathir and others <a href=”http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v3/news.php?id=24433”>countered</a> that the quotes being thrown around were taken wildly out of context. passionate debate ensued about how to properly interpret his remarks. what has surprised me is how no news agency has done the obvious and linked to a complete transcript of the speech. it would seem to me that if one party is complaining that there words were taken out of context, that the obvious way to resolve the dispute is to let people judge for themselves. but go ahead and look. i spent a lot of time digging and haven’t been able to find any western mainstream media coverage that makes any attempt to link to the original transcript.
zarinaat this point, i could care less whether or not the speech was anti-semitic or not. go read it and decide for yourself. most people are smart enough to figure it out without biased journalists telling them how to think.
i was surprised that such an obvious thing wasn’t done, but i shouldn’t have been. i’m optimistic against my better judgement. for some reason, i keep expecting mainstream journalists to actually demonstrate some integrity every once in a while but i know it will never happen.
my current beef with mainstream journalism is the complete lack of anything resembling an academic citation standard.
most of us have had it drilled into our heads since we first started writing research papers in high school that we have to cite our sources and provide a bibliography. having spent the last few years working in academia, i’ve developed a deep appreciation for the mindset behind this. the main impetus behind academic citation is to build a useful body of knowledge. if someone is researching subject X and comes across your paper on the topic, they can go further and read the same sources that you read if they need a deeper understanding. it also grounds research and keeps everything honest. you can’t just assert something to be a fact without being able to back it up and expect to be taken seriously (in theory at least). science takes this idea one step further; not only do you need to cite everything, but your experiments need to be repeatable or your results will be ignored. mathematics takes it to the logical extreme and requires that everything be <em>provable</em>. essentially, the burden of proof in academia is on the author. they must go to pains to show that their facts are solid.
journalism seems to have nothing like this. if a reporter is making something up, the burden of proof is on the public to show that they’re full of shit. when a journalist quotes the president’s speech, you never see a bibliography at the end of the article pointing to where you can find a transcript of the whole speech.
i don’t really expect this out of print or television news. but news websites have no excuse. it essentially costs nothing to post complete transcripts online, or at least link to them. (all congressional hearings have online transcripts thanks to the <a href=”http://www.fnsg.com/“>FNS</a>).
the web makes citation simple. since so many people get their news online now, imagine how great it would be if everyone had access to the same original source material that the journalists access. people could actually start forming their own opinions without being spoonfed by the media. it just pisses me off that so much of the potential of online journalism is completely wasted.