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7. How Research Reaches the Public Ear: Old Media and New
- Russell Sage Foundation
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Chapter 7 How Research Reaches the Public Ear: Old Media and New I definitely had the sense talking to reporters that they didn’t want to report nuance about this; they wanted to report fraud or this guy’s picking a fight with a giant or something. I mean, they wanted a story. [R18] [Reporters] want sort of these pithy, succinct statements that again are usually gross simplifications of the truth and they will try to get you to say something like that so that they can write it down. And they want balance. But the thing is they don’t want balance from you. [R8] Ambiguity doesn’t sell newspapers. [A3] Education is as polarized as any issue (intelligence, the war, religion, etc.) these days. And the tougher the truth, the stronger the spin. [J2] Other things were happening on August 16, 2004, the day before the New York Times ran its front page story on the AFT charter school report. Here is a sampling of the stories the Times ran deeper in the paper on August 17. On page 10, it reported that an American journalist had been kidnapped, at gunpoint, in Iraq.1 On page 14, it revealed that the Times had gotten access to an email in which a senior officer for the Central Intelligence Agency bitingly attacked the agency and the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks for “a failure to punish ‘’bureaucratic cowards’’ in the intelligence agencies.”2 On page 18, it reported on a new scientific study that found that if the use of fossil fuel continued at its present pace, summertime high temperatures could increase by 15 degrees in some inland California cities, “putting their climate on par with that of Death Valley now.” In cities like Los Angeles, it found, 177 the number of days of extreme heat could increase by four to eight times. It projected that heat-related deaths in Los Angeles, which it said averaged 165 annually during the 1990s, could double or triple under the moderate scenario and grow as much as seven times under the harsher one.3 Front-page placement, in the upper part of the page—what newspaper journalists refer to as “above the fold”—is not easy to come by. “This is not an easy sell,” one journalist reflected in discussing the Times decision to run the AFT story on its front page. Reporters refer to their pages as real estate. This is the most expensive. You know, Central Park West, Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Fifth Avenue real estate in the business. Front page of the New York Times. It is like going through a condo board. You have to really, really sell that story. You have to really convince the board that you deserve this condo, that you deserve this real estate. So somebody either did a great selling job or a whole lot of people fell in line. I mean this is not something that [only] a few people get to decide. [J1] Other major newspapers devoted their front pages that day to stories that had nothing to do with the charter school study.4 Even after the story was broken and even after it sparked a sharp response, The Wall Street Journal for instance, did not cover it as a news story. It did on August 18, however, include an op-ed piece on page A10 titled “Dog Eats AFT Homework,” in which Paul Peterson and two younger political scientists from Harvard (one being one of Peterson’s students) argued that “the AFT’s report tells us hardly anything about the relative effectiveness of charter schools” and suggested instead that the real story should be the finding, regarded as favorable to charter schools, that rather than creaming, charters are serving high proportions of the nation ’s neediest students. What determines whether and how news media report on policyrelevant research? And what, if any, difference does it make in shaping the contours of public understanding and discourse? Is the important issue in the AFT charter school study case the study itself? Do the critical issues have more to do with the way the study was communicated to attentive citizens and policy elites? Is this a cautionary tale about the danger to democracy when a few key media can dictate public discourse based on their judgment and their understanding, both of which may be flawed? Are the researchers who complain about media coverage just shifting blame for a polarization process...