NOTE: my tolerance for where this is going may be higher than that of CT readers generally.

Thx for the reference to Krugman. It’s the one I remembered but couldn’t find it so I ended up quoting a somewhat less succinct version that I could source. Now I’ve got the quote I want.

Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, “Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth.”

Responsible journalism requires at least a cursory effort to determine the facts of the matter.

Here Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne discuss how this he said-she said practice has been exploited by evolution denialists. They say, “evolution is wrong”. Then when scientists say, “no, it isn’t”, they say, “see, there’s a controversy. You must teach (and report) both sides.”

Of course this couldn’t happen in other contexts… could it?

Even worse is when “he said, she said” journalists call a public official, senior adviser etc etc with a prepackaged “he said” sort of comment that they want the person to say. Rather thanasking a penetrating question displaying knowledge of the subject matterthe journalist sets up a sentence along the lines of senior government officials say X in relation to Y.