Do Reporters Actually DO Any Research These Days?
I was watching CNN yesterday and I had to ask the question - do reporters do ANY research anymore? I mean do they drill down into a story to get the facts or do they merely parrot what some high-level official tells them and call it a day?
The comment that spurred the question was made by Christine Romans on Your $$$$$ when she indicated that education was the answer to all of our employment ills and that people in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math) careers were "naming their price." HUH??? They are???? Really???? Have these people talked to any unemployed engineers or scientists lately? Have they seen the conditions under which post-docs in this country work?
The reason I ask is because - well - someone might want to ask someone like me what I think. After all, I'm a Ph.D. with 16 years at the bench. In 2006 I turned in my pipets, hung up my lab coat and never looked back. It wasn't easy. But I saw no way out of the pit of grinding poverty that I was getting into. Visions of my future residence inside a corrugated cardboard box kept flashing before my eyes. The ironic thought of myself as an older woman with no medical coverage after dedicating years to studying disease kept me up nights. Something had to change - and since the jobs situation in science wasn't about to get any better - I had to move on.
Fast forward 5.5 years and the situation is status quo - and perhaps worsening - at least for biomedical scientists. They were paid poorly enough to begin with - but now many have unpaid furloughs - in which they are forced to work for "free" since they still have grant obligations. Further, I've seen way too many unemployed engineers to think that field is faring much better. When the best place to find an American scientist for a discussion on signal transduction cascades in cancerous transformation is in the coffee shop where the barista holds a Ph.D., and the bagger in the supermarket check outline is your best source of information about your computer because he has an M.S. in software engineering - then it is pretty obvious that scientists and engineers aren't exactly writing their own tickets.
Is higher education worth its price?
But this brings us full circle back to the question of education. Education is costly. It is time-consuming - particularly for budding scholars for whom a Ph.D. is a must. In my field, it was taking 15 years of post-graduate training to land a full-time "real job." That's years of NOT building a nest-egg and putting things like having a family on hold. And for what? A $50k a year faculty position in a city like New York? The question is rhetorical - of course not.
The skills that are valued now have little to do with molecular biology which was my stock in trade for many years. Electrical engineering? Surely you jest, Chemists? They have fewer opportunities than molecular biologists. But show them a degree in marketing, an MBA or your license as a series 7 broker - and you CAN write your own ticket.
An example of the Robber Barons stoking fear in the masses:
The talking heads all parrot the same thing. Hell, Thomas Friedman has practically made a career out of telling people that the young should be encouraged to go into one of the STEM fields.
There are those in our society that sneer at "book learnin' " and left-wing intellectuals dominating college campuses and that paranoid group has a stranglehold on our policy in Washington. If our population is so willfully ignorant of things such as global climate change and evolution - then we are in a no-win situation as far as future innovation is concerned. The business community stokes this misplaced anger because for them - the cheaper we are the better it is. They can always outsource us to India if we don't behave.
This lack of respect and mistrust of science combined with an unwillingness to plant the seed money for R&D to drive future discovery and products has killed the STEM fields in our country. The question remains - will it kill our country?
© 2011 - RMG Hicks - http://www.therobberbaroneconomy.com - All rights reserved.
The idea of a student being taught to love learning for the beauty of knowing is anathema to many. This emphasis might produce a reflective, discerning adult which might lead to a more (shudder) liberal inclination. I like your mind. Cletis
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more. Remember Reagan started the anti-intellectualism. TV journalists rely on PR people for most of their stories. Notice that the subjects they talk about are usually punctuated by commentary/interviews with someone who just happens to have written a book about the alarm du jour.
ReplyDeleteHi Cletis - I didn't reply to this comment initially. The difficulty that I see is that people who are ignorant don't know how much they don't know. I guess this comes under the heading of "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Except in this case it is absolute, 100%, willful ignorance.
ReplyDeleteHi Suzanne - Thank you for commenting. I was in college during the 80s. It was still flourishing. More money could be made on the outside of course, but I could still envision an academic life that was comfortable but not fancy. That was upended while I was in graduate school in the late 90s to 2004. Unless you were teaching law or business you were a pauper. I recently read a book called "The Trap" by Daniel Brook. There was an entire chapter of about "intellectuals in the post-academic age."
Agreed that reporters don't do their actual jobs any more. Sometimes Jon Stewart is more accurate than the news. When a comic is a better source of accurate information than the actual news media - its time to be very, very afraid.
[...] Like Thomas Freidman, this man has obviously never interviewed an actual scientist or engineer. Salaries under $40k a year for about a 70 hour work week are the norm for about 6-10 years post-do... Income wise - my colleagues and I resemble the lower middle class/ working poor and we are a [...]
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