Shooting Stats: Good Journalism debunks bad journalism and sloppy science

[akarguy]

This is an interesting article about how one research team did not completely summaize how they surveyed youth about exposure to gun violence, and another research team cherry picked and altered terminology to support their agenda. The Washington Post then ran with study #2 misquoting and furthing a deception that 1 out of 24 kids had witnessed gun violence. Wait till you read what the original question asked in study #1 was. Amazing what a little bit of research and curiosity (and ethics) can produce.

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/...g-one-unintentionally-misinformed-public-guns

 

[hso]

Two problems that you might help us with.

We can't read the article without signing up or dropping ad blocks so it would be helpful to provide a snip out of the Dallas piece showing the most relevant text.

Explain what we can do to help fight this sort of bias. Do we need to write letters to the editor exposing this falsehood as the readers in Dallas did for the News. Do we forward these distorted articles to journalism ethics groups that would expose the ethical failures? Do we send them on to the various fact checkers, WaPo's own fact checkers have burned the paper before for their errors? What can we do to help fight these lies?

 

[JohnKSa]

Here are the relevant quotes:

According to Finkelhor, the actual question the researchers asked was, “At any time in (your child’s/your) life, (was your child/were you) in any place in real life where (he/she/you) could see or hear people being shot, bombs going off, or street riots?”
...
Finkelhor said he understood why “exposure to shooting” might have misled the CDC-UT researchers even though his team provided the underlying question in the appendices. Linda Dahlberg, a CDC violence prevention researcher and co-author of the study featured in The Post and this newspaper, said her team didn’t notice anything indicating the statistic covered other things.​

Sounds like a combination of things. The original researchers were careless about how they reported their results and the CDC researchers who quoted it didn't bother to check the actual question asked although that information was provided.

 

[hso]

Confirmation Bias or just not being thorough.

This is a great example we can use to cast doubt on these sorts of articles.

 

[badkarmamib]

This is the usual tactic of anyone wanting to prove something: find your argument, then find evidence that supports your claim. Dismiss anything that doesn't fit your profile. Unfortunately, one can always find a study to "prove" anything, and most people don't know any better, have no cares to verify what they read, or WANT it to be true so they follow along.