PICK A subject, any subject. Who is the world's leading expert? And how do you know?
Universities are well supplied with people who've spent years studying their particular fields, sometimes rather obscure ones -- "the mating habits of the green frog in the Brazilian rain forest," as a university president, once put it. And naturally, they often like to have their expertise acknowledged. But questions arise: How, and by whom, is that expertise to be measured?
On the front page last week, a Cavalier Daily story implicitly got that question wrong. It said, citing no sources, that a certain professor from California was "at the forefront" of her area of psychology. When a news report makes a statement without attribution, the implication is that the reporter knows the statement to be true.
But determining who is at the forefront of any area of research is a matter of judgment, requiring at least some knowledge of the field. And there is no reason to believe that a Cavalier Daily reporter is in a position to make that judgment.
Moreover, it is what we generally call a matter of opinion. It's an evaluation not only of the work of the person being described as a leader, but of the work of other researchers in the same field. Saying someone is "at the forefront" instead of "involved" adds no meaning unless it means that at least some others working in the same field are not at its forefront.
It could be, of course, that in this case the reporter's opinion was itself an expert opinion. Perhaps she knows the relevant field of study well. Perhaps she scrutinized all the research in order to form an educated judgment. I haven't inquired, because it doesn't matter: Even if she is an expert, it's not her job as a reporter for the news section to offer her opinion of research in psychology, and certainly not without providing evidence to support it. For similar reasons, I haven't tried to determine whether this researcher really is "at the forefront" of her field.
In a way, of course, reporters always have to make judgments about who knows things. Without such judgments, they could not decide whom to quote. If you want an expert to put some development in context -- for example, to say just how exciting or routine some new discovery is -- you've got to decide whom to ask, and for that matter how many to ask.
And that doesn't just apply to questions that call for expert judgment. Reporters may have to figure out, for example, whether an eyewitness is sufficiently credible to quote. Or they may have to determine, in a story about an institution of student self-governance, whether a source's account of how the process works is reliable.
Yet in these cases, reporters do not ordinarily include their assessments of the sources' reliability in their stories. Rather, they state the facts from which the reader can make such an assessment. For example, they will not usually say, "Joe Jones said the next step in the process would be a trial, and Jones is an expert on the honor system." Instead, they will tell us that Jones is, for example, chair of the Honor Committee, or that he has been an honor advisor for two years. Readers can infer from such a description that Jones knows of what he speaks.
To avoid making such judgments for the reader in stories involving academic experts is not very difficult. One can say, for example, that a certain professor has published articles or books on a certain topic, that she runs a lab or center dealing with it, or that she has won a certain award. These kinds of credentials establish quite nicely that the professor is qualified to comment as an expert on the topic.
They do not, of course, establish that the professor is the greatest expert. If anything, they remind us that others may have similar credentials: a person is "a" professor of psychology, not "the" professor, for example. And that's a good thing, especially in fields where there is a lot of debate. To say that one person is the leader in the field at least suggests that the field is moving in the direction she has identified, when other people with credible credentials may be moving in quite a different direction. Either direction may be right, and either may become dominant -- but a news story is not a forum for a reporter to endorse one direction or the other. If the reporter thinks there's reason to include an opinion about where a particular professor ranks in his field, it should be the opinion of some expert or group of experts, and the expert or group should be identified.
Alexander R. Cohen is The Cavalier Daily's ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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