Faulty Study Left Uncorrected

It's hard to admit you made a mistake. Daniel Klein, an economics professor at George Mason University, can tell you that, but he can also tell you how to move past it. Klein wrote an opinion column over a year ago saying that liberals score much lower than conservatives on a test over basic economics, according to his newest study. He published his column in the Wall Street Journal, which headlined: "Are You Smarter than a Fifth-Grader? Self-indentified liberals and Democrats do badly on questions of basic economics".
Klein later took a second look at his data and concluded that his questions were loaded, or followed what he termed the "myside bias"- human's tendency to judge an argument based off of how closely it fits to their standard political views. Klein recently recanted his earlier findings and published the new results- but not in the Wall Street Journal. The Columbia Journalism Review emailed Klein asking why the new column appeared in the Atlantic instead of WSJ, and he responded that they had "declined the idea of a follow-up".

But shouldn't that be considered irresponsible journalism? The well-respected journal now has full knowledge that it ran an erroneous article, and the author is stepping up of his own free will to correct his past mistake. For the Wall Street Journal to decline the corrections is a loss of responsibility to their readers, some of which will never see the corrections simply because they don't read the Atlantic. The editors need to swallow their pride and put their reader's needs first.

Photo credit/creativecommons.org

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Non-journalists going journalist.

To be or not to be...a journalistic company? A recent article posed this question to some of the largest corporations in the world. Sam Diaz, a technology and business blogger, begun to explore the role and responsibility that that these Internet companies now hold in our society in one of his latest posts.

The decision of being a committed journalistic resource has began to take on greater importance because of the increasing role in daily life that these companies now hold. Diaz cites specifically Facebook, Google and twitter when he mentions journalistic credibility and responsibility. It is an extremely important matter to examine when so many use these outlets to facilitate their hunger for news.

Each of these corporations have their own ranking and ratings systems that allow users to consume and comment on material that is most important to them, and also what has received the most attention. It is the latter, however, that leads to the issue of when do these social media sites become more than just a facilitator of thoughts? They are now contributing to the news of the world, and although some say they are simply displaying it, others are willing to accept the challenge to do so with more of a quality, journalistic approach.

Diaz ends his article by asking the reader if these companies should strive to do more to preserve journalist standards, or if it even matters? Simply from the few short weeks I have had in my reporting class, I can answer with a resounding yes. They should do all they can to protect the integrity of the information their sites are contributing to news consumption everyday to help the populations of the world stay involved and connected. Another yes to the second question of if it matters. It is similar to the social responsibility we all have to own each day, and these are standards that must be set in place in order to have any chance of complying to them every day.

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