We all know the media are effed up. Given any event, the reports sent out by all major, and most minor, outlets are generally very out of touch with reality. I’m not saying that the media are entirely to blame. They sell the news that people want to see and read. Never listen to any journalist who ever tells you that they give just the facts. BS. Just the facts won’t sell jack. The simple use of descriptors changes the tone of the piece and can easily make the same facts seem either positive or negative. Writing without descriptors is horrible writing.
All that aside, it seems there is generally some media response to any news input. The engineers in the crowd are probably starting to get the gist of where I am going.
For the non-engineers, I offer up a brief explanation. A lot of work in all kinds of systems involves studying the response of the system to an input. For example, we like to see how a car reacts when you hit bump. We want to know how long it takes for the car to stop bouncing up and down and come back to neutral state.
Continuing with the car example, imagine you are traveling on a flat road and suddenly hit a curb or something that takes you onto a level of roadway that is 2 inches higher than the surface you were just one. As you can imagine from your own in experience in cars, you know that upon hitting the curb, you move up more than 2 inches but eventually settle down. In short, there is some amount of overshoot.
I propose we understand how much overshoot exists in the media. Let’s quantify the situation. For any given news event, can we expect coverage to be 5 or 55% overstated? Who knows? Let’s find out.
For example, I recently read that journalists trying to track down details of the rapes and murders at the Superdome have found zero-evidence of the alleged attacks. Rumormill perhaps?
Also, a recent study sheds some light on the nearly 20 year old tragedy at Chernobyl. At this point, 56 deaths have been confirmed as resulting from the accident. The estimate is that a total of 4,000 deaths will be directly related. In my opinion, if you get 20, 30, 40 years or more after an accident, you’re still doing pretty well. Unfortunately, there are over 1000 square miles that remain uninhabitable as well hundreds of billions of dollars to be spent on fixing the situation. Overall, though, does this really jibe with the stories we grew up with?
So I ponder, where’s my research grant?
Elasticity of Truth? How is this quantifiable? You’d really need to hit ‘record’ on a lot of tivo’s and have an army of grad students parsing and coding overstatements and hyperbole. Then there’s the problem of determining what the baseline is. It would be excellent if you could show a link between something like that and a physical law or property, like spring motion. I have a feeling that if you did that research it would encompass MUCH more than just the news media. There may be similar, more testable things that would verify the principle too, and then you could induct and imply the same to hold for the media.