Learning for Journalists

[forsyth]

Since I was bitching out lots of journalists in an earlier post, I thought I'd try and help the problem. Here's a list of things all journalistic students should be exposed to, from Mark Kleiman. There's also links in the entry I linked there to a bunch of important books any journalist should read. Honestly, most people would probably benefit from them too.

Here's the list of concepts, with handy wikipedia links for some.

* Institutional culture
* Regression toward the mean
* Moral hazard
* Expected value (of an uncertain outcome)
* Present value (of a stream of gains and losses over time)
* Statistical control
* Correlation v. causation
* Benefit-cost analysis and willingness-to-pay
* Cost-effectiveness
* Separation of powers
* Mill's "harm principle"
* Rent-seeking
* Opportunity cost
* Cognitive dissonance
* Milgram experiment

About half of these would be solved by making them take a basic level economics course.

Comments

[leticia.livejournal.com]

Ah, the good old 'harm' principle. Which fails to take into account that many things can be harmful to self and others - such as recreational drug use and prostitution - even though some would argue that they're 'victimless'. *rantmode disengaged*

That article sounds like it was written by a libertarian apologist. Since it fails to explain that acutally, the libertarian agenda tends to involve doing away with the laws that DO deal with things everyone agrees are harm. AFter all, everyone has a gun, so no one will misbehave! Damn mad dreamers.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

Well, go ahead and change it, that's what wikipedia's about. I do admit I didn't read the articles all the way through, just made sure they were the right basic article. It's still something journalists should know about, since their job requires them to be generalists and interpret things and put them in comprehensible ways for everybody else to understand.

And I'm certainly not going to defend the looniness of the Libretarian party, because they are mostly nuts.