When new research about guns comes out, the breathless media can't wait to tell us everything the so-called researchers found. We've outlined the issues with the research before. Several times before. Even recently.
But the research isn't the only problem.
One massive issue is that the media simply doesn't challenge any of it. Sure, it would be easy to chalk it all up to anti-gun sentiment, but I can't. There's a lot more going on than just the fact that these supposed reporters just don't like guns.
It's because we already know they're too lazy to be curious.
In 2015, a man named John Bohannon conducted an experiment. Well, he arguably conducted two. One measured various things in a group of people who were given a small amount of dark chocolate every day. He found they lost a little bit of weight, so he published his findings and sent out a press release to various science reporters when the publication came out.
But that wasn't the real experiment. The real experiment was to see just how science journalists handled the news, and they did not cover their profession in glory, let me tell ya.
“Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine (“Why You Must Eat Chocolate Daily,” page 128). Not only does chocolate accelerate weight loss, the study found, but it leads to healthier cholesterol levels and overall increased well-being. The Bild story quotes the study’s lead author, Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D., research director of the Institute of Diet and Health: “The best part is you can buy chocolate everywhere.”
I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I’m a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it’s in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That’s nothing more than a website.
Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.
Here’s how we did it.
Not a single publication actually did any real work trying to examine this study. None of the science journalists looked at the research to see that it had a remarkably small sample size, or that they weren't looking for anything in particular and just grabbed whatever looked best, which does interesting things.
As Bohannon puts it.
Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a “statistically significant” result. Our study included 18 different measurements—weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.—from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.
And the media ran with it. It was everywhere. Many of you might actually remember the reports, because it was sensational enough that every outlet seemed to want to run it.
These were science journalists, ostensibly the ones who should know what they were looking at, and only one seemed to sniff enough to come close to uncovering the hoax.
What does this have to do with guns?
Well, one thing I like to think I'm pretty good at is at least partially debunking studies as they come out. If I can't examine the methodology, I question that and accept it as grounds to discredit the findings in and of itself, but I look at everything I can, and with gun research, I find a lot of the kind of things Bohannon was complaining about the reporters missing.
And again, this was with science journalists, who should be the ones who know how to read research.
Your rank-and-file reporter covering current events or the link is completely ill-equipped to know what they're looking at beyond a press release. If they do their jobs halfway decently, they get comments from people not associated with the gun control group, but most don't even bother with that.
This becomes a problem, though, because when these reporters do their reports on the study, they're not getting anything but unvarnished bias, even if they're genuinely trying to be neutral themselves.
They don't know what questions to ask, even if they wanted to, in order to show that the study isn't exactly definitive science.
That's why even RAND notes that something like 99 percent of the research on guns is so completely terrible as to be useless, but the media keeps fawning over every new "report" as if it matters. RAND isn't the NRA. Quite the opposite, actually, and they're telling everyone these studies are garbage.
Meanwhile, the media just keeps being as uncurious as they can be, despite being in a job where curiosity is an asset.
They're not all biased. A lot of them are just too lazy to actually do anything but rewrite the presser like they're doing original reporting, yet offering nothing new.
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