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Is education what journalists do?

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Originally published on May 24th, 2011 at my old blog.

We had a great discussion this afternoon on Twitter, about the way journalists strenuously deny they have an educational role, while everyone else sees them as essential pieces of the educational ecosystem: sources of information and explanation missing from schools, or for information that is too new for older people to have seen in school when they were young. Also as sources of judgement in disputes over facts.

While journalists strongly deny their educational role, as part of their false objectivity and 'savvy', everyone else perceives them as educators - people who should know and then tell, what is true and what is false, who is lying and who is not. People rely, as they cannot be in school all their lives, on the media for continuing education, especially on topics that are new. And people are then disappointed when, as usually happens, journalists fail in that role by indulging in false balance, He-Said-She-Said reporting, passionately avoiding to assign the truth-value to any statement, or self-indulgent enjoyment of their own "skill with words" in place of explaining the facts.


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Fortunately for you all, you do not have to wade through all the tweets to see the entire discussion, as Adrian Ebsary has collected it all using Storify - read the whole thing (keep clicking "Load more" on the bottom of the page until you get to the end):

[View the story "Defining the Journalist's Role: What's the difference (if any) between a journalist and an educator? " on Storify]

As you can see, while there is some snark and oversimplification here and there due to short format, the discussion was pretty interesting and constructive. This is also a demonstration that useful discussions can be had on Twitter.

Whenever someone says "you cannot say anything in 140 characters" I respond with "who ever said that you only have 140 characters?". To their quizzical look, I add "You are not limited to one tweet per lifetime - if you need 14,000 characters, you can write 100 tweets". But, by writing 100 tweets, and making sure that each tweet - not just the collection of 100 - makes sense, has punch to it, and is hard to misunderstand or misquote out of context, one has to write and edit each tweet with great care. Twitter does not allow for sloppy writing!

Picking a theme for a few hours or days, and tweeting a whole lot about it during that period, is usually called 'mindcasting'. But it is even better when a bunch of other people join in and mindcast together - everyone learns something from the experience.

Now read the Storify and, if you have time and energy, respond with an essay on your own blog, as a continuation of the mindcasting process.

And the first responses are in::

Whose Job is Public Science Education?

Are Journalists Educators? Does It Even Matter?