[0-O-0]

> Approximately 14% of press releases opposing climate action or denying the science behind climate change received major national news coverage, she found, compared to about 7% of press releases with pro-climate action messages.

There might be a very simple explanation: there are significantly more pro-climate change press releases, than anti. Comparing percentages without correcting for that seems to be dishonest.

[netcan]

Covid has really driven home a point to me. As a society, we are statistically illiterate. Politicians and journalists particularly so. Most of our important, newsworthy information today is statistical.

This is a real problem. In the context of public schooling, I think statistics needs to become the primary discipline taught in high school maths. It's more useful to our work life, and (relevant in the context of public schooling) essential to informed citizenship.

Literacy is a pretty close analogy here. The average person is totally ill equipped to to read politically relevant news and form an opinion about it. Often, the person who wrote it is just as ill equipped.

Statistical statements have a tricky form. They seem like a statement of fact. They are, kind of. It's a fact that this researcher measured what she measured. The implication though, that's conjecture, and it may or may not be a good one.

[tomp]

If anything, COVID drove the opposite point for me.

The whole "masks don't work" spiel that the WHO did was statistically legitimate... We really don't have proof (or whatever the medical community considers is "proof" - like double blind large scale trail with less than 5% chance of being false) that masks work. Statistically, we don't know.

But operationally masks have negligible risk and practical burden, while having a huge potential benefit (stopping the pandemic in its tracks), so even if the overall probability of this benefit is low (or at least not necessarily 95+%), it's the correct decision from an executive perspective.

Basically: scientific / statistical opinion: masks aren't proven to work; executive decision: recommending masks has minimal downside and massive potential upside;

[Joeri]

Statistical literacy doesn’t necessarily help. Economists have proven to be “excellent” armchair virologists. They understand the statistics well enough that they think they can give an informed opinion, but because they don’t actually understand viruses and infection their opinions are dangerously uninformed.

Knowing statistics isn’t enough, you also need to know the field those statistics are applied to, because otherwise you can reach statistically sound but inherently meaningless conclusions.

[r00fus]

If I could upvote this twice I would. The basis for our childrens' education is missing statistics and finance/economics.

My kids' school does teaches basic consumer protection and critical thinking "how to spot ads/scams"

Teaching those should be the foundation on which we teach other things.

[dfxm12]

Just like COVID-19, education is also a politicized platform in America. It's not a coincidence that the same politicians who are trying to downplay the global pandemic and effects of the virus are colleagues with, if not the same, politicians that are trying to reduce access to education.

If you agree with the premise of the parent poster that improper education is "a real problem", change towards a more educated citizenship begins in November.

[cagenut]

I call it "functional innumeracy". Our society is stuck at a local-maxima for communicating via headlines and short-conversations where we can only really compress and encode signed-keywords to each other. Meaning like, musk+ or musk-, bitcoin+ or bitcoin-.

If we want to take things to the next level of numerical understanding, where we "graph" all sorts of rates, distributions, curves, crossover and inflection points, etc, then what do we do? Fuck around in a spreadsheet for an hour and screen shot that and upload it to imgur and put the link in here? Comb through google images for something close enough and maybe photoshop some arrows on it?

We need a better communication toolkit than a few hundred bytes of ascii to make it possible for people to introduce a heightened degree of numeracy in everyday conversations and decision making. Image macros and emojis and infographics are pigin attempts to go down this road, but we're not there yet (that i've seen, links if you got 'em).

Imagine you're a journalist right now, you're logged into wordpress, you need to explain the insane disaster of today's GDP report, and you have a deadline of finishing your post before lunch. What do you do?

[taneq]

Statistically and scientifically illiterate, yes. There is this overall belief that one person's opinion, however gained, is equal to another person's opinion, however gained. If one opinion is the result of multiple well designed scientific studies and the other is the result of some late night YouTube indulgement then no, they're not equal.

[throwaway_pdp09]

Upvoted because it's a good point but I think the problem goes deeper. Simply expressed most people will deny or plain block out what they don't want to hear, and education can't cure that. There are plenty of people still denying that covid is of significant risk - and we're right in the middle of it!

[ryathal]

As a society we are increasingly illiterate. Mathematical or statistical knowledge isn't achievable without reading comprehension that is above the average person.

The real problem is we aren't teaching kids to read well enough to have a chance of them establishing a foundation in anything else. Statistics needs a base understanding of arithmetic and algebra (calculus would help a ton but lets be realistic in expectations), it's just even more math the average student won't understand. We need to get the basics actually taught to the point of mastery for most students before adding stretch goals.

[samizdis]

Possibly tangential, so apologies for that, but I am reminded of the "Linda problem"[1], as posed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.

Michael Lewis's book The Undoing Project[2], which in my opinion provides an accessible and informative look into the work of Tversky and Kahneman, is worth a read.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy

[2} https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undoing_Project

[chippy]

I think the explanation about why certain things get more news is in the word "news". News is just that, new. New, interesting, unique, different, something to be talked about.

An accepted truth like "climate change is real" isn't really that new today. Page 10: "Another professor agrees with the professor from last week who talked about this topic, read more on page 56." A protest turned riot about climate change is news. Crackpot theories are also new and news worthy.

The entire premise that the news is impartial and should cover issues statistically equally is utterly at odds with the core principle of what the news actually is.

The news is not information and never has been. It's telling stories about the world.

[imtringued]

Most climate change news is always the same "eat your veggies" style reporting. We need x,y,z and we have time until current date + 30 years [0]. There is also the opposite. "Wind power and grid expansion permits have started piling up for the third year in a row". Not exactly exciting. There is also the yearly CO2 tax article and people always respond "I hate taxes". Usually the only exciting times are when the government decides to change things up.

[0] worst cases keep getting worse but the amount of work stays the same, if you tell people we have 12 years left to reach the old temperature goal they'll just give up and call you a doomsayer

[handol]

> Crackpot theories are also new and news worthy.

Only when the crackpots have wealthy benefactors.

[WarOnPrivacy]

>The news is not information and never has been.

Assuming that's true then perhaps we need more journalism & less news.

Journalism here being performance of those duties implied by the 1st Amendment's Freedom Of The Press clause.

[take_a_breath]

In fact, i think that is the entire point. Our media is built on clicks and eyeballs. Promoting the idea of legitimate "debate" in the science helps drive more clicks and eyeballs. It's the same things media does with politics.

[acqq]

It's in The very Fine Article:

"While just 10% of the press releases Wetts found featured anti-climate action messaging, those rarer releases were twice as likely to get coverage as pro-climate action press releases"

"Wetts said the results seem to support the popular opinion that mainstream news organizations often mislead readers by giving equal weight to two sides of an argument, even when one side isn’t as widely believed or lacks scientific evidence."

[valvar]

I know this is beside your point, but the following part of the last sentence stung my eyes somewhat:

>even when one side isn’t as widely believed or lacks scientific evidence

This is not how ``Science'' is supposed to work. While the comparison is in all likelihood not accurate in this case (I happen to think that the establishment is usually right, and that it is mostly right when it comes to the subject of climate change), it is very reminiscent of the classic example of how the establishment viewed Gallileo's objections to the geocentric model of the universe. Science is advanced by adversity, and especially by figuring out what should be done when parts of mainstream theories are falsified or challenged. Science is not advanced by eliminating everything that disagrees with the establishment. The establishment are all very excellent scientists, but science (should) never really become ``established''. I think perhaps the most important reason for why the currently mainstream climate models are actually so strong is that it has been necessary to overcome a lot of adversity.

[ojbyrne]

Isn’t this just the nature of news? Common events are not news, uncommon ones are. So news is always going to give more coverage to the less common theory.

[Aunche]

10% of anti-climate action messaging isn't causing ~30% of people being opposed to taking measures against climate change. It's the other way around.

[reaperducer]

news organizations often mislead readers by giving equal weight to two sides of an argument, even when one side isn’t as widely believed or lacks scientific evidence.

News organizations used to filter out the cranks. Some still do, but more have buckled to the pressure to shove out metric assloads of low-quality content in order to satiate people who only get their news by scrolling. (It's called "feeding the beast.")

And those that still do filter out the low-quality garbage are attacked on social media for being left-wing or right-wing, or whatever wing the social media megaphones decide is bad at that particular nanosecond.

[taneq]

> there are significantly more pro-climate change press releases, than anti

This was my immediate thought. There have got to be at least twice as many "climate-change-is-happening"[1] articles as "climate-change-isn't-happening" articles, given the current indications that climate change has, in fact, happened and continues to do so.

[1] I can't bring myself to call it 'pro climate change' or 'anti climate change' because it's about whether it's happening, not whether I think it should.

[csallen]

How would that explain things? If there were significantly more pro-climate action press releases than anti-, you'd expect to see similar a proportion of coverage, not the opposite. A better explanation is that the news likes to focus on rare, novel, and/or controversial statements.

It's also worth noting that the article doesn't seem to differentiate between positive and negative coverage. So anti-climate action press releases might be receiving significantly more negative coverage.

[cptnapalm]

The old explanation that "dog bites man" is not news, but "man bites dog" is. I do wonder what the effect is when the news on a topic is all "man bites dog". Does an appreciable percentage of readers begin thinking that "man bites dog" is so incredibly common now that something must be done and that "dog bites man" is just a myth?

[TheOperator]

I wouldn't call it dishonest but it is important context. "Study says same thing as consensus" doesn't garner clicks. I think the broader issue is how much the news is tilted towards focusing on contrarian viewpoints.

[jellicle]

If there are 100 press releases that say "earth is round" and 10 press releases that say "earth is flat", how many of each should be publicized by your local newspaper?

[boomlinde]

I don't think it's dishonest. I expect editorial responsibility, and lack thereof discredits the publication.

[bzb3]

This entire debate is about dishonesty. It is like supporters of football teams at this point.