Reporting Archaeology in the Post-Truth Era
December 13, 2016 10:28 AM   Subscribe

2016 was an epic year for failures of archaeology. This was the year of the ‘Nazi gold train’, the ‘Mayan city’ discovered by a kid using Google Earth, whatever the fuck Semir Osmanagić said about a stone sphere, and ‘Nefertiti’s Tomb’... But the problem is not that we don’t have enough fact-checkers... “The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
posted by ursus_comiter (14 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
For a bit of relief, check out "Finding North America's lost medieval city" from Annalee Newitz this morning, with real people doing science.
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:34 AM on December 13, 2016 [12 favorites]


Given that the "Nazi gold train" dig was led by amateur treasure hunters, calling it a "failure of archaeology" seems like stretch.
posted by ryanshepard at 10:47 AM on December 13, 2016 [3 favorites]


Geez - that's a disappointment. I'd forgotten all about that Nefertiti's Tomb story.
posted by lagomorphius at 11:20 AM on December 13, 2016


One of my Metafilter low points was creating an FPP about the Mayan City Kid story.

Which I thought was legit.
posted by clawsoon at 11:45 AM on December 13, 2016 [3 favorites]


Nah, they just want to find a B-17 with Captain America onboard.
posted by wenestvedt at 11:52 AM on December 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


They said irony was dead after 9/11. I'm not so sure factual inaccuracy is the fault of the epoch we're living in.
posted by clockzero at 12:07 PM on December 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


Shouldn't an archaeologist know better than to say that breathless reporting of hoaxes is a recent phenomenon?
posted by klanawa at 12:27 PM on December 13, 2016 [4 favorites]


Factual inaccuracy has been an issue in modern journalism since the the 24-hour news cycle.
According to former journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, 24-hour news creates ferocious competition among media organizations for audience share. This, coupled with the profit demand of their corporate ownership, has led to a decline in journalistic standards. In their book Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media, they write that "the press has moved toward sensationalism, entertainment, and opinion" and away from traditional values of verification, proportion, relevance, depth, and quality of interpretation. They fear these values will be replaced by a "journalism of assertion" which de-emphasizes whether a claim is valid and encourages putting a claim into the arena of public discussion as quickly as possible.
Their book (Amazon link) was published in 1999, and the Journalists' Best Work section (Google books preview of The American Journalist in the 21st Century: U.S. News People at the Dawn of a New Millennium - Amazon) notes that journalism shifted in the 1990s, first with cable stations and then the changes continued with online news.

We've been living in a "post fact" world (again) going on two decades now, about a hundred years since the term Yellow Journalism was first coined. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we'll pull out of this Sales (or Pageviews) Above Truth as quickly as some publications did a hundred years ago.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:34 PM on December 13, 2016 [3 favorites]


the new measure of value for too many news organisations is virality rather than truth or quality

This is exactly what I remarked upon in a recent post about a pop-science article on linguistics.

Good science reporting demands nuance, but click-driven business models punish it, because nuance doesn't lend itself to easily digestible statements of amazing fact.

Actually learning is work, and means reading things that maybe aren't as amazing as the skeleton of the Mona Lisa being discovered, or about the Himba not being able to tell the difference between blue and green. But learning isn't why people read and pass on these kinds of stories; they do so because they're entertaining. It's really that simple.

The author is being optimistic when she says "it is fuelled by fans – people who are hungry to read about new discoveries and scientific techniques." These stories aren't generally shared by science buffs, but people who saw something on their feed and went NEAT.

I don't know how responsible science reporting is supposed to compete with that. We can pressure professional outfits like the Guardian to be more responsible, but they have massive financial pressures in the other direction. We can't make the truth as interesting as the lies because the truth is, by its nature, more conditional and complicated.

Many scientists do make an effort to do outreach, which I think they don't get enough credit for. I know this very well from linguistics; many professional linguists run blogs, write popular books, write articles and opinion columns, talk to journalists (when they bother to contact us), and even have radio shows. There are many of us trying to get good quality information out there. But we can't compete with THE TOP TEN WEIRDEST LANGUAGES or whatever other viral article it is this time.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 12:38 PM on December 13, 2016 [9 favorites]


Social media has so taken over as the news delivery system that popularly "liked" or shared stories are almost inevitably picked up for regular news feeds no matter how worthwhile they are. It's a total abdication of even the pretense of responsibility towards being journalists to allow these nothing stories to gain air time over real news. I wish instead of simply re-airing that "heartwarming" video everyone shared, or some sensational almost certain falsehood, they spend that same time debunking what's being shared and making people feel foolish for having believed it and passed it on. But then that would probably just get even more people to turn off the news preferring fantasies of miracle cures and mermaid castles to anything that might make them feel bad or make them have to reflect on their own lives and actions.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:10 PM on December 13, 2016


Yeah, most of this stuff is off my radar, but I work with an Egyptologist who was skeptical, but hopeful, about the whole Nefertiti thing. She's told me before that Egyptian archaeology conferences used to be a nightmare because there would inevitably be a handful of kooks with some self-published thing about gateways to other dimensions and so on (apparently they've been better since they started being more strict about who could present papers). But then you have people with apparently decent credentials (like a PhD in Egyptian archaeology) promoting their own headline-grabbing PR stunts. I think I've heard about this effect in other sciences, where you're sort of expected to come up with something that will grab headlines. Relatively few people care if you find a West African cosmogram in a 17th century Native American site, so you have to find some new, exciting thing (because IFL Science!!).

That said, just as an aside, I read a lot of historical newspapers, and there is an awful lot of crowd pleasing bullshit in those, too. "The Little Boy Who Found His Mother," "An Anonymous Letter From an American Patriot Abroad" and so on. Not saying things were worse back then, or even half as bad, but it's interesting to see the roots, I guess, of what dominates the news today.
posted by teponaztli at 3:00 PM on December 13, 2016 [5 favorites]


Not just archaeology... I had heard from an older relative that LBJ was ruthless and hard-nosed enough to make J. Edgar Hoover come to heel, especially for Civil Rights cases. I went to reasearch if this was so, and how it that all played out.

Twelve pages of conspiracy theories on the JFK and MLK assassinations later and there is no bottom. It's fake news all the way down, with locked wiki pages containing nothing of interest scattered in, and a healthy dose of racism and racism apologia.

Google has a real fucking problem, here. They are actively undermining democracy, whether they intended it or not.

Google Delenda Est.
posted by Slap*Happy at 5:10 PM on December 13, 2016 [3 favorites]


That said, just as an aside, I read a lot of historical newspapers, and there is an awful lot of crowd pleasing bullshit in those, too.

I doubt the ratio of good journalism to sensationalist bullshit has changed as much as most people think. However, the sheer volume of news being produced and shared makes it much harder for news consumers to figure out which is which.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:21 PM on December 13, 2016 [3 favorites]


The whole use of "X has gone viral" in news ledes from supposedly journalistic organizations just turns me off. If the news is that X is popular, then that's not news in my book. (But then I've always been a rabid anti-populist.)

If there's any news value to a story other than the fact that it's "gone viral", FFS please put that in the lede and save me wasting my time.

Besides which, Katsuwamushi, you must certainly know that Japanese is the No. 1 weirdest language from a purely linguistic outlook.
posted by oheso at 5:47 AM on December 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


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