Not more BS, just more BS detectors (bloggers - take a bow)

On Language Log Mark Liberman writes on the Sunday Times gay sheep article. It's a very good post, and I want to share only a couple of points from it - I exhort you to read the whole thing.

on balance, it doesn't seem likely to me that their Times article was "a deliberate political hit job". Rather, it seems to have been one of the modern "bible stories" that are published so often these days in the guise of science journalism.

You start with a grabby narrative with mythic resonances -- here it's one about scientists using neurosurgery and hormone injections into the brain to "cure" homosexuality, testing their techniques by cruel experimentation on cute little sheep. This can come from a publicist's press release, or a story circulating on the dinner-party circuit, or an author on a book tour, or a catchy tale from anywhere at all -- this one seems to have come from the PETA web site and from the anger of Martina Navratilova and other gay-right activists at what they perceived as anti-gay science. (According to Michael Grew, "Gay sheep experiments outrage campaigners", Pink News 1/2/2007, Navratilova wrote a letter of protest to Roselli's university in November.)

Then you add journalists and editors eager to create some buzz. The fairy tale about fixing gay rams with brain surgery is definitely buzz-worthy, sure to rile up the anti-vivisectionists and the gay rights activists, and maybe the religious right too. Does it have any correspondence whatsoever to the facts of the world or even to the claims of the research? Who cares? Not the reporters or their editors, apparently. So they bang it out in the form that's appropriate for their medium, and we're off.

But it's important to note that these people are not lying, exactly. They simply don't care one way or another about what the facts are, and this shifts their work out of the category of lies and into the category for which Harry Frankfurt has suggested the technical term bullshit

...

But my own guess is that the desire to create a buzz, regardless of the facts, has always been strong among journalists, and is only kept in check by a concern to avoid a high probability of significant damage to individual and corporate reputations -- or bank accounts. As Tim Jackson recently observed on the BBC's World Service,

The only time that a- that a journalist, whether it's television or radio or newspaper uh tends to actually be subjected to really detailed scrutiny of what he or she is doing is if there's a court case. But I believe in a growing trend this ultimate nightmare is actually going to become an everyday reality for journalists around the world. The oddity is, and what I think what the newspapers fail to grasp, is that something has changed in the world of journalism.

Indeed. Thanks to the democratization of media by the internet, a much larger fraction of journalistic bullshit is effectively challenged in the court of public opinion.

In other words: it's not that there's more bullshit, there's just more bullshit detection.

That's us: that's the blogosphere.

No wonder the MSM hates us.

Take a bow, all. And keep it up. Otherwise, Mark's pessimism about the future of society ("But there's still a cumulative effect on public opinion. A generation of young intellectuals is gradually learning the lesson that everything they read and hear is likely to be bullshit, even when it comes from sources like The Sunday Times or CBS News.") will be founded.