Category: Public Perceptions

Finding A Place For Al Jazeera

Public Perceptions, State of Journalism

Chaos has erupted in Egypt this week as protests calling for the removal of the president Hosni Mubarak turned violent. I do not mean to say that the conflict is as simple as pro or anti government groups, I know it is a complex issue. But as a disclaimer, I’m not a political writer, or an international relations writer.

The reason I bring up the conflict in Egypt is because I read a very interesting opinion piece on Al Jazeera English: US viewers seek Al Jazeera Coverage which says that the conflict in Egypt has led to a considerable increase in the number of people from the United States choosing to get their news from Al Jazeera. I think Al Jazeera is a very interesting curveball for the broadcast news industry that we should be watching.  
The article and comments section make the case that other news outlets (MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS) have done a poor job of covering Egypt, while Al Jazeera has excelled. The claim that American coverage is lacking is convincing. More people seem to know that Anderson Cooper, Christiane Amanpour, and Katie Couric were attacked by the protesters than they know about the causes of the conflict (myself included). 
For those who are unfamiliar, Al Jazeera is the dominant news outlet (television and internet) in the middle east, and is popular all over the world. Except here. Cable providers in the United States have largely chosen not to pick up Al Jazeera. Some say this is because the audience isn’t interested in Al Jazeera and the cable companies would lose money. Some say that Al Jazeera has been blacklisted for being sympathetic to terrorists. 
But for those who want it, Al Jazeera can be streamed live online which gives many Americans access even if it is not a choice on the television. Al Jazeera has dominated coverage of the situation in Egypt for several reasons, namely because they were already there and they know how to operate in the country. 
I visited the headquarters of Al Jazeera English in Washington D.C. with a college group in 2009. They actually let us in the control room during a live broadcast, and gave us what I consider to be a lot of access to their newsroom. The opinion piece I mentioned above is definitely something to think critically about, and consider the points for and against broadcasting Al Jazeera in the United States. 
The comments section on the article brings up some really great points about how Al Jazeera is seizing the opportunity to play up the “discrimination” against them by American viewers and also how Al Jazeera is a legitimate news source that Americans deserve access to. Internet is good but Americans get their news from the TV, and until Al Jazeera is given a channel the network just isn’t going to take hold in the United States.
Check out Al Jazeera’s coverage and let me know what you think. I’ll be watching to see if the situation in Egypt gives Al Jazeera the momentum it needs for a cable provider in the US to pick up the network. 

From Novelist to Lepidopterist

New Research, Public Perceptions, Science History, Science Policy

My first encounter with Vladimir Nabokov was in my high school AP English class. My teacher Mr. Kaplow (author of Me and Orson Welles, which fun fact: is a movie starring High School Musical’s Zac Efron) kept a movie poster of Lolita (based on Nabokov’s most well known novel) hanging on the classroom wall.

I next encountered Nabokov while working through my undergraduate English major. Due to his Russian roots, Nabokov fit nicely into the course materials for my international literature class. I read his memoir Speak, Memory which talks a lot about Nabokov’s interest in lepidoptery, the study of butterflies.

Karner Blue Butterfly. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

I bring up Nabokov and his butterfly hobby because I just read an article on Nabokov’s scientific theories in the New York Times.  Nabokov’s theories were dismissed by lepidopterists during his lifetime,  but genetic analysis has shown that he was exactly right about the origin of a group of butterflies known as the Polyommatus blues. Nabokov theorized that the butterflies had originated in Asia and come to the United States in waves, but in the 1960’s and 1970’s no one took him seriously.

Researchers at Harvard University (where Nabokov was curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology) decided to do a genetic analysis on the butterflies to test Nabokov’s 30-year-old theory. The results showed that Nabokov was right all along, Polyommatus blues are genetically linked to butterflies in Asia. Genetic analysis has also been used to validate Nabokov’s hypothesis that Karner Blue Butterflies are a distinct species.

By this point you might be wondering why it matters that this long dead Russian novelist has been vindicated as a legitimate scientist by new technological advances, so I’ll get to my point. Nabokov is an example of how members of the scientific community can be quick to dismiss the work of anyone who isn’t an expert.

If we hold anyone who does scientific research to the same standard of peer review (analysis by other scientists, and the ability to replicate a study or experiment and get the same results as the original researcher) then even people who don’t have their doctorate in a specific science can still contribute new knowledge.

Please note that I’m not advocating that any quack with a theory should be taken seriously by the scientific community. But if promising research or theories are developed by people who might not call science their profession, their value should still be evaluated.

Revising Taxonomy

Conservation, Genetics, New Research, Public Perceptions, Science History

Very few people in the United States give a damn about the Egyptian Jackal. While I have nothing to offer as proof of this, I stand by my hunch that this specific canid isn’t high on the list of most popular animals, because really, who has even heard of it before? (I hadn’t until today…)

Golden Jackal. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Why then should people care that genomic analysis has revealed that the Egyptian Jackal is actually a wolf, not a jackal at all? Well, because even if you don’t find the power of genomic analysis fascinating (like I do) this revision of current taxonomy (the classification of species based on how they are related to each other) is a great example of how science is a fluid thing that continually changes as new things are discovered. I think that understanding how even accepted scientific information can change is a hurdle that many people have to clear before they can really start to follow science in the news.

For years, the Egyptian Jackal (Canis aureus lupaster) was believed to be a subspecies of the Golden Jackal (both species that call parts of Africa home.) Researchers from the University of Oslo (Norway) noticed physiological differences (ie: differences in the way it looked) between Egyptian Jackals and other Golden Jackals, which led them to pursue a genetic analysis.

Sequencing the Egyptian Jackal’s genome has shown that it is a closer evolutionary relative to wolves found in India and the Himalayas (even to the United States’ Grey Wolf) than to Golden Jackals. Revising the taxonomy could have important impacts on conservation efforts. If Canis aureus lupaster (now renamed the African Wolf — and the only wolf now known to live in Africa) is a distinct species, an evaluation needs to be done to see how many members of this species there are, to determine if it is endangered.

I like this story because its a great example of how scientists are constantly revising accepted information the more they learn. However, I think when you tell people that science is constantly changing it is important to distinguish between making a revision and being flat out wrong. Scientists weren’t just wrong in their taxonomy. The Egyptian Jackal/African Wolf is a canid, so that part of the taxonomy was and still is correct. The genetic analysis enabled research to put the species into an even more specific category.

So when we say that science changes, we mean that it gets more specific and thus more accurate. But that doesn’t mean that the scientists who came before had everything all wrong. Often when scientists revise information their predecessors/colleagues were close, but didn’t have the necessary tools to learn enough to get things exactly right. There is always more that scientists can learn, and as they do, they fine tune, which is the case with the Jackal/Wolf taxonomy.

For more on the Jackal/Wolf revision, the research paper was published in PLoS One.

Can Journalists Be Celebrities?

Public Perceptions, State of Journalism

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the distinction between television news personalities, and print/internet journalists. I feel pretty strongly that being a TV news anchor, doesn’t necessarily make you a journalist. But then what does make someone a journalist?

With the “sudden” departure of liberal commentator Keith Olbermann from MSNBC’s program Countdown last week, I think the issue of journalists as television personalities, and ultimately as celebrities has been brought into the spotlight. Olbermann has been in trouble with the network for donating to liberal political campaigns, which would be a big no-no for a journalist because it would be a clear violation of the need to be unbiased. But Olbermann has never been unbiased. He has always made his affiliations clear, so does the fundamental journalistic quality of trying to be fair go out the window? If we don’t hold him to journalistic standards, does he then become nothing more than just a television star?
Where do we draw the line between Matt Lauer and Anderson Cooper? Are they both journalists? Are neither of them journalists? How does being on television make someone different from a print journalist? How many print journalists do you know by name? If I had to guess, I’d say not that many. I ask these questions because I think there are important distinctions between journalists that people need to be aware of. But at the same time, I’m not sure that I can quantify what it is that makes or discounts someone from being a journalist. 
When I think about television journalism, I automatically think that Anderson Cooper is more legitimate than your typical nightly news anchor. But is this just a reflection of the way he is displayed on TV? Is he really a journalist in the sense that he develops stories, cultivates sources, does the digging and background research necessary to make a story? Or does he send an intern off to do the real journalism and then just read the cue cards? I certainly don’t know how Cooper operates, but I think its important to consider why he seems so much more like a journalist than the people who read the news every night on television. 
Print journalists are rarely as recognizable as television personalities. Does that make print journalism more legitimate? For whatever reason, I feel a bias against people on television. If someone wants to be a television star, I don’t consider that the same as wanting to be a journalist. But why can’t a journalist also be a television star? What is it about TV that somehow cheapens what may very well be outstanding journalism?
Perhaps it is nothing more than the difference between an editorial and an article. But then why do the people who read the news on television (which would count as articles) not seem like journalists, when someone like Cooper who can easily cross into the realm of editorial seems legitimate? Especially when the Olbermann’s of the world, who are clearly editorialists, have so obviously crossed the line between journalist and television talking head. 
I’m not sure. But as I figure out what kind of journalist I want to be, and how I want to direct my career, it is definitely something that I’m thinking about. 
Some background on the Olbermann/MSNBC split:

To Test, Or Not To Test: A Regulatory Question

Genetics, Public Perceptions, Sequencing

My internship with BioTechniques dumped me headfirst into the world of genome sequencing. One of the hottest (and by that I mean most talked about, funded, and hyped up) biotechnology fields, genome sequencing has a lot of power. The media loves genome sequencing because it attracts a lot of public interest, so its no wonder the technology is a headline maker.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, genome sequencing is a process by which a machine takes a sample of your DNA (from saliva or blood) and “reads” it by identifying the nucleotide bases (Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, or Thymine) that make up your personal DNA sequence. By comparing this sequence to the human draft sequence (a previously “read” and studied human DNA strand) researchers can tell if anything in your DNA sequence is out of place, indicating a chance for genetic disease.

I tried looking into personal genome sequencing companies for an article for my J800 class last semester. While I did come up with an article eventually, I decided not to pitch it on the grounds that none of the personal genome sequencing companies would make a representative available to talk to me, therefore my article was slightly off kilter. Apparently, no one wants to bother with helping a student, and if you don’t have a definite place to publish you just aren’t important enough for the corporate world to give a damn.

But, I still find personal genomics incredibly interesting, which is why the New York Times article Heavy Doses of DNA Data, With Few Side Effects caught my eye. The article takes a look at research from the Scripps Translational Science Institute that shows that people who pay money to have their genome analyzed often did nothing with the data, and even when the results indicated a higher risk for disease people didn’t feel any extra anxiety.

The results are interesting because they go against what you would think the common reaction to obtaining your genetic data would be. There has been controversy about public access to genetic information on the grounds that people won’t understand it and will thus act rashly or misunderstand their results. The new research shows that most people either didn’t do anything with the information they obtained, or consulted a medical professional before acting.

The new research doesn’t close the door on the issues surrounding personal genomics by any means. The idea that the technology and service should be regulated, and by who, and how strictly are all still prominent concerns. However, the study could serve to help policy makers decide how to regulate the industry.