Source: Another one: Why do science and health reporters lack backgrounds in their subject? – Social Panic

And another – the Managing Editor of tech publication CNet News has degrees in … creative writing. She also hates cars (her words) and uses swear words in her writing (The F word appears 16 times in this creative writing piece – very professional.) She is unable to find a single positive thing to say about cars. CNet has gone so downhill ever since it was acquired by CBS many years ago. She focuses on the bike fatality rate, unaware that 90% of bike crashes do not involve vehicles.

The problem is those who lack technical, science or math skills are not well prepared to skeptically challenge “expert opinion” of those who they interview for news stories.

As I have no formal training in say, propaganda, I am unqualified to write about this subject on this blog, and I know that. Similarly, I am unqualified to ask questions about public health on another blog I write – I know this because “experts” have criticized others for merely asking questions, nothing that they “the experts” have multiple degrees and years of experience in their field. We should not question them, they said. Yet we openly tolerate reporters/creative writers covering fields about which they have no formal training, and no training at all in the foundations like mathematics, statistics, chemistry, physics, biology and so on.

Almost all science and technology reporters’ backgrounds I check have backgrounds in writing – and rarely have technical backgrounds. I probably will not bother to update this anymore as it seems this is true for nearly all reporters. Their work, as one former editor put it, is they are not reporters but stenographers, “reporting” what they were told by “experts” – with the notion that “experts” are always right. If there’s one thing you should have learned during Covid – it’s that “experts” are often wrong.