Commentary : Communicating Science

Overlook Journalists, cognition, and the presentation News workers, how folks think, and TV shows of an epidemiologic study: Cognitive about a study of illness: The way we think can processes can inform an understanding of shape our understanding of news work. In this newswork. In this case study, the authors case study, the writers look at the growing examine a growing literature relating body of thought linking the mind’s workings cognitive theories to newsmaking and then to news making and overlay their apply some of the principles in that literature understanding on the way news workers to media coverage of EPA-mandated handled stories about the new gasoline that reformulated gasoline in Milwaukee, the EPA said must be used in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In an analysis of how local Wisconsin. In a look at how TV news in Milwaukee television news presented an Milwaukee broadcast a study about illness epidemiologic study answering health answering grumbling about health linked to complaints associated with the gasoline the new gasoline, the writers find many kinds additive, the authors find a number of of thinking going on, markedly those with cognitive processes at work, especially slanting and mistakes. Last, the writers mull those involving bias and error. Finally, the over the meaning of such forthcomings for authors consider implications of such news making. (Note that there are no modern processes for newsmaking Anglo-Saxon/Danish words for case study, stories, and gasoline [i.e., chaotic air]. Shortening television to TV is a typical folkway of Anglicizing a Latinate term. The letters of the alphabet, except perhaps J, are Anglo-Saxon/Danish in origin.) The difference in the emotional connotation of Anglo-Saxon/Danish words and Norman words can be used with great rhetorical effect: When in 1940, Winston Churchill wished to appeal to the hearts and minds of the English-speaking people it is probably no accident that he did so with the plain bareness for which Old English is noted: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” In this celebrated passage, only surrender is foreign—Norman-French. (McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil 1986, 62)