The Media play a pivotal role in determining how and why research influences public opinion with regard to policy. Political scientists Shanto Inyengar and Donald Kinder have shown through experimental research involving televised news how the presentation of news stories can have a powerful impact on what Americans think about issues.¹ Prominent columns and articles, especially in the big East Coast papers, influence political behavior among the policy and political elites and offer signals about elite thought and opinion on key issues. The debates about the research on school choice illustrate the broader challenges the media face when translating research for public consumption.

At a superficial level, school choice is a relatively easy debate for the media to cover. It can be simplified into arguments for and against vouchers, charter schools, and altering the definition of "public" schooling, and these arguments are often boiled down to an easy framework of "public" versus "private." Likewise, the question of increases in test scores fits readily into a debate about whether school choice is "working" or not. While such framing greatly oversimplifies the issues, it nonetheless drives much of the coverage precisely because it offers easy contrasts.

Yet research usually offers nuance rather than stark contrasts, and the intersection between school choice research and journalism brings to the surface a key tension between social science and journalism more generally: their different tolerance for and approaches to handling "error" with regard to how definitive findings are. This is not to say that journalists are cavalier about error. On the contrary, most publications employ elaborate fact-checking and editing procedures. But, in addition to its reliance on formal, replicable methods of inquiry to answer questions, social science often parts ways with journalism in its approach to error.

There are two kinds of error in social science research: saying something is true when in fact it is false, or saying something is false when in fact it is true. The bias within social science is toward making the latter mistake, known more formally as a Type II error. In other words, when in doubt, favor the non-finding over the finding. Conversely, the natural bias in journalism is toward the Type I error, reaching the conclusion that something is true (publishing the story) even if it later turns out to be false. Put another way, while both fields prize accuracy, journalists are necessarily more concerned with the time-bound nature of news and events and so prize timeliness over certainty. …

Read the entire article in the January 2008 issue of Phi Delta Kappan.

Endnote
1. Shanto Inyengar and Donald R. Kinder, News That Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).