> Journalists should report what is true, not what Tom, Dick or Harry said.
Especially they should not give 33% plausibility to Tom, 33% to Dick and 33% to Harry. Which is what they typically do, and call that "professional journalism."
If Tom represents 95% of scientists and Dick and Harry the fringe 5% also financed by (let say) tobacco industry or oil corporations, or Boeing, or those paid by the CIA, they should not even mention Dick and Harry in the same article (or TV a show), especially not in anything worth a major headline. They should appear with the smallest possible note in some smallest possible corner and with the title like "oil corporations paid these persons to support them again."
Sadly, but that sounds like a dream. The world would be very different then.
What you describe here is a deeply problematic fallacy and in fact what journalists already do. They are very, very far from your hypothetical "33% to Tom, 33% to Dick, 33% to Harry" scenario and it's one of the factors that undermines trust in journalism.
What actually happens is this:
1. Journalists have a story they want to write. They probably already decided what the message is going to be, but let's be generous and assume they didn't.
2. They consult a rolodex of, almost exclusively, government funded academics. This is true even if the story they're writing is about activity or science that takes place only in the private sector and for which the academics in question have no actual experience. They may consult two or three grant funded academics if they want their story to seem especially robust. If they give the private sector a chance to reply at all (often not) they will cite one or two sentences of a brief phone call in which the person being talked to doesn't know what they're trying to defend themselves against and is probably just confused. It's not a real interview with an actual in-house expert.
3. This story is then published as "Experts say, ..." even if what the chosen experts say flatly contradicts common sense or things that can be checked with 10 minutes and a search engine.
4. Readers comment below the line, pointing out the flaws in the story. If a specific company is involved, they may do a blog post explaining their side of the story which the journalists will either completely ignore, or if they think they can get away with it, selectively quote one or two sentences in a misleading way.
Industrial scientists/engineers are sometimes assumed to be inherently evil and untrustworthy. But the whole idea that journalists are untrusted because they very rarely quote people in industry is a saw of the left; it's not true, which is why the examples given always seem so curiously weird and out of date. Tobacco industry? when was the last time you even read a newspaper article about them? Oil corporations? Those firms that have spent the last 15 years rebranding themselves as energy companies because they now make solar panels too?
There's a lot of really good analysis of the trouble journalism has got itself in for, and a significant part of the blame is laid at the feet of journalists uncritically reporting anything academics say as the Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth, when in fact they routinely contradict each other, make up statistics, report obvious common sense as "findings", are hugely over-confident in their own predictive abilities, mis-use statistics and so on.
A good book to read on the topic is "Wrong" by David Freedman:
He's a former journalist and so has direct experience of this problem. He cites many examples where expert testimony caused misleading or wrong stories to be published, but IIRC none of them involved corporate scientists. Mostly academics like nutritionists, psychologists and so on.
Claiming that the misinterpretation of science happened only in the distant past is intentional attempt to obscure the real problem.
There is objective truth and it is far from what some people with a lot of money peddle as the truth and what gets replicated across the media. And the media definitely don't cover what effectively advertising campaigns are as such -- paid disinformation for the benefits of some specific corporations or interest groups.
It's funny, we're not even really disagreeing with each other. The difference is I don't see government (academia) as sources of funding any different to a corporation: both sources create an incentive to huge bias, spreading of disinformation and other problems. But too many people and especially journalists like to pretend that getting your money from government grants magically makes those problems disappear. They're willing to criticise work by corporate scientists who may have an incentive to find a certain outcome, but not academics who have just as strong or even stronger incentives to find certain outcomes.
I suspect it comes from academic propaganda about 'free thought', being able to pursue any line of questioning they desire, etc. It's obviously not true. Academics find it impossible to reach a simple conclusion that's reached all the time in the corporate world: "we don't know the answer and cannot know anytime soon".
Especially they should not give 33% plausibility to Tom, 33% to Dick and 33% to Harry. Which is what they typically do, and call that "professional journalism."
If Tom represents 95% of scientists and Dick and Harry the fringe 5% also financed by (let say) tobacco industry or oil corporations, or Boeing, or those paid by the CIA, they should not even mention Dick and Harry in the same article (or TV a show), especially not in anything worth a major headline. They should appear with the smallest possible note in some smallest possible corner and with the title like "oil corporations paid these persons to support them again."
Sadly, but that sounds like a dream. The world would be very different then.