Writing which is not just carelessly wrong but willfully wrong.

From Apoorva Mandavilli is a terrible science reporter working at the New York Times by Vinay Prasad.  The subheading is A brief catalog of her errors.  

Prasad has an axe to grind but he is not wrong.  But he is dealing with a central issue of our new, more distributed and uncontrolled epistemic environment that has resulted from a relatively free internet in combination with universal access vis smartphones.  

Among the jungle of writers, whom can we trust on what subjects and to what extent?  

We have to each consciously construct and cultivate our own chosen epistemic ecosystem in a way that we did not necessarily do in the past.  

This is not a bad thing, merely novel and challenging.

You end up with a whole range of constituent profiles.  There are those who know a lot about a little.  Those who know a little about a lot.  Those who are safely reliable in discerning (and communicating) facts and those who are daring but less reliable in anticipating emerging patterns of truth.  There are those who are linguistically glib and rhetorically convincing versus those who are prosaic, indeed boring, but usefully true.  

Everywhere on each continuum and every mix among all the continua.  

And out there in the internet jungle you have the hosts of mainstream media pundits, the legions of Substack writers, myriad bloggers, the serious commenters and the snarky commenters.  How do you keep track of who is who.  Who is epistemically useful under what conditions.

Its a lot of cerebral work.  So much that no one person can keep track of it all and we end up with impressions.  

I have often thought it might be interesting to crowd source some sort of running list of indictments and triumphs among writers and thinkers.  Who is reliably and usefully true and who is prone to a pattern of gaffs and errors.

In these posts, I routinely rail against the seeming pervasiveness of both innumeracy and advocacy among our current crop of reporters.  Just the facts is an alien concept.  It is all opinion unanchored in empirical reality and unconstrained by contextual knowledge.  Everything seems to be about how they imagine the world ought to be.  

Prasad is, in this column creating the sort of profile of a particular writer.  The old New York Times Science writer John Tierney was both broad in his interests and deep in fundamental knowledge.  You can safely randomly read just about anything of his and learn something.  You might not always agree with his argument but you can understand why he makes the argument he does.

I cannot think of any particular New York Times journalist that comes anywhere close to him now.  I think there is one but I don't recall his name.  And then there are all the rest.  A nameless crowd of journalists who reliably produce drivel which is recognizable as drivel on first reading.  Either rehashed press release journalism or poorly written column inches with little reason, logic, empiricism, or numeracy.  

Mandavilli is one such.  Once mentioned by Prasad, I do recognize her writing but would not have been able to name her.  Her work is what you glance over and immediately recognize as non- or negative value-adding and simply ignore other than to register that there are people out there who will believe anything.  

Prasad provides seven specific errors.   I am sure the candidate list was far more extensive.  

In effect, it is a journalistic rap sheet.  Instead of a Record of Arrests and Prosecutions, it is a journalist's Record of Atrocious Propaganda.  Writing which is not just carelessly wrong but willfully wrong.