John Lott often gets trotted out as an expert because he has a degree in economics and is author of several books, including one called More Guns, Less Crime. He is a contributor to The National Review and Fox News. On his blog he expresses a dismissive attitude toward scientists who are concerned about global warming and ozone loss.
It was painful for me to watch CNN’s Soledad O’Brien flail and appear increasingly distraught as Lott listed questionable factoids suggesting gun laws kill people. See the interview here. Why wasn’t she prepared to challenge his specific statements about guns saving lives and gun-free zones posing a danger? At the very least she should have had another expert guest ready to take on his statements.
NPR’s Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan didn’t lose his composure while interviewing Lott. But Conan's challenges seemed weak. He was unable to directly refute Lott’s authoritative sounding statistics and factoids. Listen to that one here.
I spoke yesterday with Penn social scientist Susan Sorenson, who sent me several journal articles from Science and the New England Journal of Medicine. Those articles had data connecting more guns to more death. This may seem obvious but such studies are important for checking the John Lotts of the world. The articles went back to 1999. According to Sorenson, the CDC used to fund gun studies until the NRA lobbied Congress to cut off the money.
There are cases where it’s legitimate to interview all kinds of people. It’s not necessarily false balance as long as false or mistaken claims are held up to scrutiny and all the bunk debunked. When I wrote my evolution column there were many instances when I delved into the world of creationism to find out who creationists were, what they believed, what they wanted and how they were planning to go about getting it. That’s not the same as letting them weigh in as experts in any area of science.
But in these shows featuring Lott, false balance would have been an improvement. Lott got the floor and nobody adequately challenged him onhis facts, even though there's plenty of evidence out there to refute him.
In this world of intense competition for clicks and ratings, people like Sorenson who go around saying guns kill people can get drowned out. Her statements may be backed by studies published in Science and NEJM but her view is too sensible to go viral in today’s attention-grabbing world. Readers and viewers click the counterintuitive – the stuff that sounds crazy. So anyone with an advanced degree and a far-fetched idea has a good chance for media stardom. Whether there’s any truth to the weird idea seems beside the point.
This post backs up what fellow Tracker Paul Raeburn said several days ago when he urged science reporters to get involved in the coverage of Sandy Hook and its implications. Part of the problem with the Lott interviews was that they were done by generalists. Here they are dealing with an issue that might be handled much better by a good science writer – one with some experience questioning "experts" bearing misleading information.
This just in: Media Matters Post that Soledad O'Brien should have read before she talked to Lott.
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