Who are these experts you’re talking about?
This headline on ScienceDaily caught my eye this morning:
Patients Shouldn’t Navigate Internet Without Physician Guide, Experts Say
I’ve already written and deleted half a dozen smarmy comments. Feel free to insert your own. Some of the headlines I’ve written looked equally dumb once they were published, so I’m not going to throw stones from this glass house. But let’s look at that attribution: Experts say.
A search of Goggle news this morning reveals that within the past week, “experts” were mentioned in 122,943 stories. So we might ask: Who are these “experts,” and how did they get to be that way?
Here are a few of the stories:
Frank Jordans of the AP: Outside experts to review WHO’s swine flu response.
The staff of CTV news in Canada: Gonorrhea risks becoming a superbug, expert warns.
Mike Lillis of The Washington Independent: Medical Experts Highlight Chief Flaw of Dems’ Health Reforms.
Jim Steinberg of the Contra Costa Times: Experts: Health system can handle new insured.
William March of The Tampa Tribune: Experts differ on merits, political impact of McCollum’s health care lawsuit.
From Melly Alazraki of AOL’s DailyFinance.com: Breast Cancer Screening: Why Can’t Experts Agree?
Good question, Melly: Why can’t they agree? If experts are people who really know something, shouldn’t what they know be beyond disagreement?
The experts in the ScienceDaily story (“adapted” from a press release) are Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman, both doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. The story is based on an article they published in the New England Journal of Medicine. They write that the Internet is unique because “previous technologies have been fully under the doctor’s control,” but “the Internet is equally in the hands of patients.”
The story doesn’t say what Groopman (a familiar name to many of us) and Hartzband specialize in. Let’s grant that they have expertise in some area of medicine. What makes them experts on the Internet?
We don’t know. The ScienceDaily story doesn’t say so. Neither does the New England Journal article.
I’m going to go out on a limb: I don’t think they are Internet experts. I come to that conclusion because I am not an expert on the Internet, and I already knew most of what I read in their piece. If I know most of what they know, and I’m not an expert, I’ll make the leap that they aren’t either.
I’m belaboring the point. In science stories, “expert” should be a word like “breakthrough”–as rarely seen as a Perigord truffle. Describe the people you quote in a way that tells the reader something. Save the meaningless “expert” for when you really need it. And you might find out that you never really need it at all.
- Paul Raeburn
Grist: Beth Israel press release.
March 30th, 2010 at 6:10 pm
Good points.
In addition, saying that people shouldn’t get information from the internet in [fill in field of choice] is like saying English shouldn’t change or that electronic technology has gone too far.
Doctors should be concerned about the quality of information patients get from the internet, but a response of “Patients shouldn’t get information from the internet without a doctor’s help…” is, well, stupid.
This quote from the ScienceDaily piece is wonderfully self referential, I think. (In addition it uses that wonderfully ill defined word “wisdom.”)
“But information and knowledge do not equal wisdom, and it is too easy for non-experts to take at face value statements made confidently by voices of authority.
“Physicians are in the best position to weigh information and advise patients …The doctor, in our view, will never be optional.”
BTW, the link in the post doesn’t work. This one does:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100324174047.htm
March 30th, 2010 at 11:33 pm
Stephen,
Thanks for the heads-up on the link; it’s fixed. The quote about the doctor “never being optional” oddly mirrors many discussions in our business about whether the journalist will ever be optional. We all have our fears, I suppose.
Cheers,
Paul
March 31st, 2010 at 9:23 am
Good point Paul, and from you, an expert. If one sees expert in the hed, all of a sudden it seems to bless every source in the story with authority. But sometimes it’s okay. Just because a word gets overused or misused doesn’t strip it of usefulness. Ditto with wise head, veteran, guru, sage, eminence gris, cabal, puppetmaster, sleuth, pasha, elite, grandmaster, wizard, boffin, leader, pioneer, and any other semi-metaphor or similarly imprecise bestowment of legitimacy on a source not immediately in view.
Plus, we all know what the reporters on these stories will say. “I don’t write the headlines.” But if one uses such a word without an immediate specific identifier nearby of who we are talking about – use it again when the names and id’s of these supposedly reliable sources come up.