The vaccine’s story is motivated by the ‘it’s to protect the children” appeal, which is not really and argument at all – yet extremely vulnerable to hysteria – right, center, AND left. The right appeals to kids on abortion and teaching about sex in the schools; MADD appeals to both sides (although, increasingly to thee Left), in clamping down on demon rum – er, alcohol; and childhood vaccines, seem to move those on especially on the Left.

IT is too easy to ‘prove’ any argument involving excess a by citing issues that depend on “protecting the children.” Remember the Alar scare involving apples, with actress Meryl Streep (a Fenton Com’s con), chemophobia and bogus claims of cancer threat? And the child sex abuse hysteria of the 1980s, capturing well-intentioned professionals on thee Left as well as Puritan anti-sex cretins on the Right? Just too easy….

You need a better illustrative example to support your argument. Offhand, I don’t know what it might be, just that is ain’t this one.

I haven’t really seen anyone make the case that science bloggers should replace a major newspaper science reporter. If newspapers are having trouble, surely it’s their fault, not the fault of the bloggers.

Heck, one can easily argue that the media nowadays is nothing but a bunch of sycophants (pandering to one side or another), so I don’t really know how much of a loss it actually is to see newspapers go by the wayside.

The times have changed … newspapers must adapt. Fancy that.

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=n77vpc09f12gqgzxh012w79mmtf4t6rh

Despite all the current hand wringing about the dire state of the newspaper industry — well-warranted hand wringing, I might add — we are actually in the midst of a Golden Age for news consumers. Can anyone seriously argue that this isn’t a magnificent time for readers who can surf the net, use search engines, and go to news aggregators to access the best stories from countless sources around the world — stories that are up-to-the-minute, not rolled out once a day?

It is also from the pages of her Huffington Post that I found the repetition of a Belfast News story on the mass suicide of 1500 farmers in India. The only problem is that the event never happened. Still that story was picked up, referenced and made argued about throughout progressive sites in the US. My own comments were here.

What are missing are those who can do first generation reporting, who have some degree of institutional knowledge and who have the integrity to remain free of the false neutrality of “he-said, she-said” reportage. Even when I do find such first generation journalism, it is not often in main stream media or even on the major blog sites. If comes from dedicated individuals with small audiences who want to get the truth in front of a few people who just might be able to use it, like Lloyd G. Carter – a 20-year career UPI reporter who now has a different day job but who has continued to write and speak about water and agriculture issues in Fresno, CA for another 15 years. He doesn’t have a big audience.

Hell, I would research more and write more if there were a way for me to monetize that effort. Instead, I end up finding the Lloyd G. Carter’s and trust them.

The question still remains how much did the newspaper science reporter achieve. We don’t know, do we? It seems there are a lot of people 40 to 60 years old who are scientifically illiterate. Weren’t they the generation who read newspapers in your “Golden Age” of scientific reporting to general audiences? Were the newspapers also preaching to the converted?

As far as the point of this post, I have often thought as well that the opinions you see in science blogging are from those sorts of people who, if there were no internet, would tend to sit down and have conversations about science. Those people would include the highly trained, but would also include the highly interested. So, in a sense, you are not just preaching to the choir, but I imagine you are missing the uninterested and those who SHOULD be interested…

It is also incredibly easy to find loads of information on the internet that supports any pre-conceived notion one may have (unfounded or otherwise). That info is often just “sciencey” enough to be dangerous.