The journalist as amateur scientist

Paul Romer has talked about two types of discourse, one political and one scientific. He uses that distinction to critique aspects of current practice among economists. I want to do the same for journalism.

Political discourse involves taking sides, and promoting things that your side favours. It is like a school debate: you consider only evidence that favours the point of view you want to promote. Scientific discourse involves considering each piece of evidence on its merits. You do not aim to promote, but assess and come to a conclusion based on the evidence. That does not prevent the scientist arguing a case, but their argument is based on considering all the relevant evidence. There are no sides that are always right or invariably wrong.

Of course, any scientist makes choices about what evidence is relevant, and this will be influenced by existing theories. Ideally the theory you prefer can be changed by new evidence, but scientists being only humans can sometimes be reluctant to accept evidence that contradicts long held theories. But there are always younger scientists looking for new ideas to make their name. The scientific method works in time, which is why we are where we are today.

My argument is that journalists should be like amateur scientists. Amateur because part of their work will involve seeking out expertise rather than starting from scratch, and they do not have the time or resources to investigate each story as a scientist might. A term frequently used is ‘investigative journalist’, but that normally means someone who has weeks to work on one story. Instead I’m talking about journalists who only have a day. The key point is that they should not search for evidence that fits the story they wanted to write before doing any research, but allow the evidence to shape the story.

For example, suppose the story is about EU immigrants and benefits. What a journalist should note is that unemployment among EU immigrants is lower than natives. What a journalist who wants to write a story that makes immigrants look bad might do is say that the number of EU immigrants without a job make up a city the size of Bristol. This combines selection of evidence (where is the equivalent figure for natives is not reported) with simple deception: most people conflate ‘without a job’ with ‘unemployed’, rather than being people happy looking after children, for example.

If this all strikes you as obvious, at least to journalists working in broadsheet newspapers, the example above is taken from the Telegraph, and the post in which I discuss it contains a tweet from a Times economics editor saying that all journalists (and yours truly) take a stance and select facts that supports this stance.

There is actually a third type of journalism, which you could call acrobatic discourse, because it is always looking for balance. It is sometimes called ‘shape of the earth: sides differ’ journalism. Its merit is that it appears not to take sides, but as this extended name is meant to demonstrate, it is certainly not scientific. It is the kind of journalism that says the claim that £350 million a week goes to Brussels and could be spent on the NHS is ‘contested’, rather than simply untrue. In that sense, it can be uninformative and misleading, whereas scientific reporting is informative and is not misleading. Here is a twitter thread from Eric Umansky on a particularly bad example from the New York Times. Of course acrobatic journalism is easier and keeps the journalist out of trouble.

One of the side effects of acrobatic journalism is that it typically defines the two sides it wishes to balance. It therefore tends to be consensus journalism, where the consensus is defined by the politicians on either side. To see why this is problematic you just need to look at how Brexit is discussed and reported by the BBC since the referendum.

I began writing this post during the debate surrounding Nick Robinson’s Steve Hewlett Memorial Lecture. It is certainly strange for that debate to focus on outfits like The Canary, rather than the elephants in the room that produce political journalism to millions every day, who also tend to criticise the BBC whenever they get the opportunity. Yet the copy from these newspapers, and not The Canary, is regularly discussed by the broadcast media. The emergence of left social media journalism is a result of the consensus defining by-product of acrobatic journalism, which for a year or more defined the other side as the PLP rather than the Labour leadership.

I suspect many journalists would say that my idea of them being an amateur scientist is just impractical in this day and age, when they have so little time and resources. But what I have in mind (journalism as amateur scientists) is not very different from what journalists on the Financial Times do day in and day out. Chris Cook is an example of a journalist working in the broadcast media who does the same. But it is wrong to blame individual journalists for being more acrobatic than scientific, because the institutions they work for often demand it.

Nick Robinson’s lecture is much more nuanced and interesting that the subsequent media discussion would suggest. For example he identifies the problem with the way Facebook selects news that is discussed in more detail by Zeynep Tufekci in this TED talk. But there are two elephants in the room that he fails to discuss: the role of the increasingly politicised right wing press I have already mentioned, and the conflict between scientific and acrobatic journalism, both of which he praises without addressing the conflicts between them. [1]

[1] There is a clear example of this in the comments he recalls making on the Brexit debate just before the vote. He proudly says he called the £350 million claim untrue, but he then adds

“I did, incidentally, also say that the Remain claim that every household in Britain would be £4,300 a year better off was misleading and impossible to verify.”

This is acrobatic journalism at its worse. Yes, the BBC did think the £4,300 figure was ‘misleading’, but only because they did not talk to an economist who would have told you it was not. It shows a failure to be a good amateur scientist. But worse that that, this clumsy attempt at balance puts the central claim of the Remain campaign in the same bracket as £350 million a week lie, which it certainly is not.

Avoiding political discourse

When PoliticsHome interviewed me about what the Blanchflower review of monetary policy might come up with (which will not report for some time), I couldn’t help but end with a plea.

“My biggest fear is that some people may try and put their political spin on anything we recommend, even when those recommendations come from an analysis of the technical academic literature. When I accepted an invitation to be on Labour's Economic Advisory Council, one or two people did suggest that this would damage my reputation as an economist. Given that being a member placed no restrictions on what I could do or say in public, or any obligation to support party policy, I thought it was an extraordinary accusation to make. Can you imagine a medic being told that they had damaged their reputation by advising policy makers about medical research?”

I used the example of medical research for reasons outlined here, and because I like comparing economists to medics.

As the economist Paul Romer has noted (see also here), political discourse is not like scientific discourse, and it is a problem when academics sometimes adopt a political way of thinking in their day job. In political discourse it is critical whose side you are on. If you are on one side anything that favours or helps the other side is presumed wrong. So when I agreed to be on Labour's Economic Advisory Council (EAC), many of those that were opposed to Corbyn’s leadership naturally assumed that I must be a Corbyn supporter. When I said that if George Osborne set up an equivalent of the EAC and invited me I would agree, and that I had indeed given advice to his Treasury and his advisors, the accusations changed from being the enemy to aiding and abetting the enemy. [1]

We were aiding the enemy because I and other EAC members are ‘providing legitimacy’ to the new leadership: we are being used for our reputations. And sure enough, here is John McDonnell doing exactly that in a recent speech:

“We’ve enshrined these commitments in our Fiscal Credibility Rule, drawn up with help from the world-leading economists on our Economic Advisory Council.”

Except that is exactly what happened: I gave a paper at the first EAC on what I thought the fiscal rule should be, it was discussed there, McDonnell’s team then developed it internally, discussed their version of it with Labour’s shadow cabinet and the rule was made public.

Labour’s new fiscal rule, as far as I know, is the first fiscal rule that sensibly responds to the possibility that monetary policy can run out of reliable ammunition (QE is much less reliable than fiscal policy), and I hope that sets an example that others will follow. [2] I also think politicians should get credit for listening to economists and adopting sensible rules or creating useful institutions. That is exactly what Gordon Brown did in 1997/8, and what George Osborne did in 2010 in establishing the OBR.

In my view the EAC is a useful innovation in economic policy making, because the link between academic economics and policy has become weaker in recent years for various reasons. The EAC is unusual in part because it makes the politician who set it up vulnerable. Any member of the EAC can, if they wish, publicly criticise Labour policy and get additional media coverage as a result of EAC membership. And academics being ideas people rather than political people might be particularly prone to do that. That is a level of vulnerability that many politicians would avoid. (See this for example.) That is one reason why it is misguided to suggest that we should have given our advice in private rather than through a public body like the EAC.

Some who are enmeshed in political discourse say that policies are two a penny and can be put in place in an instant: it is only leadership and winning that matters. I suspect much the same is true for many (not all) political commentators, who often see policies as simply weapons to attract voters. As Gaby Hinsliff remarks, many political commentators have a bias to those they see as winners. But I don’t want a world where academics only give policy advice to politicians who they support or who they think will win. It politicises economics, and that can damage the credibility of the subject.

Because academic economists, or academics of any kind, give advice on their policy area to politicians should never have to mean that those academics support those politicians. People enmeshed in political discourse find it hard to understand that, but I refuse to accommodate them. My job is economic policy, and I while I will do what I can to try and get politicians to adopt policies based on sound economics, those means do not include adopting a political discourse.

[1] For the record, no one in the Labour Party from 2010 onwards asked me for my advice on any occasion. This was despite (or maybe because of) everything that I wrote opposing George Osborne’s austerity policies and defending the Labour government's fiscal policy on my blog (which started at the end of 2011). Had they done so, I would have gladly given it.

[2] Those who might be tempted to see the zero lower bound knockout as just a 'loophole', you just betray your mediamacro mindset. Those tempted to say anyone on the left would have adopted this type of rule, go read some MMT.