The Media Marketplace for Garbled Demography (original) (raw)

2004, Population and Development Review

DEMOGRAPHY CAN PRODUCE stories that appeal to mass media journalists, more often in some countries than in others. Yet as for many other fields of scientific research, there are fundamental cultural differences between demographic researchers and journalists, and an equally large divergence in the incentive structures faced by professionals in these two domains. Although hardly desired by either group, these differences in cultural norms and incentives provide a powerful marketplace for garbled demography in the mass media. Another source of garbling is the understandable attraction among journalists toward demographic projections that extend far into the future: 25, 50, 100 years, or even more. Over short time periods, demographic changes are typically small, hence not newsworthy. Major demographic shifts normally take place only over the long term, and it is these that best meet the marketplace tests applied by editors and publishers. Moreover, while large demographic changes of the past sometimes attract attention, those of the long-term future are usually of greater journalistic interest. Meanwhile, demographers routinely caution that long-term demographic projections are far from credible as forecasts. Instead they are entirely products of the assumptions built into them about long-term future trends in fertility, mortality, and migration, trends that are in fact literally unknowable. Demographers warn that long-range projections cannot be interpreted as forecasts and that the range of error involved in such use is likely to be large and to increase with each successive time period. Unfortunately, such caveats are often lost in the sequence of translations from demographic study, to press release, to longer journalistic treatment. Careful demographic studies and reports typically detail the technical complexities of the data and analyses involved, and emphasize the ambiguities and uncertainties of many findings. Yet demographers and their institutions also often aspire to press coverage of their research and reports, hence frequently produce press releases or other simplified summaries of findings, designed for journalists and other nontechnical read