Today, I'm going to spend a little time ranting about bad journalism. I have read many a newspaper article which uses the phrase, “Scholars agree” or “Scientists agree”. Allow me to tell you why those are two of the most meaningless phrases in the English language and why you should NEVER use them in any kind of article which you want taken seriously.
1) It is not provable.
Unless you and your army of reporters are prepared to visit every single scholar and every single scientist in the course of history and question them to verify the fact that they agree with a certain statement, you have just submitted a statement that is so completely full of bologna that any editor who publishes it should be fired on the spot for allowing you to submit such meaningless garbage as if it were fact.2) It is not likely.
Think of how hard it is to get two people who were eyewitnesses to an event to agree on exactly what happened and you’ll begin to see my point. For every additional person you add to that mix, the likelihood of getting a consensus goes down. Now consider how many scholars and scientists there are on any given subject matter, and you begin to get the picture of just how unlikely it is that all “scholars agree” or all “scientists agree”.3) It relies upon anonymity
Just because someone has studied something in an academic setting or gotten their degree in chemistry does not guarantee that they are any good at what they do or even that they actually know anything useful. Without knowing the specific scientist or scholar, you can’t know the quality of their studies, the depth of their research, or the reliability of their interpretations of the data. In other words, without knowing who they are, it is impossible to judge whether their opinion or belief about a subject should be something we allow to guide our own.4) It is manipulative.
Most people don’t like standing out from a crowd. They like to believe they are “normal” or whatever passes for normal at the moment. When they read a phrase that states that “scholars agree” or “scientists agree” they are being told that if they don’t agree, they are alone. It conditions them to accept whatever follows that phrase without question.It is also designed to disarm the scientist or scholar who questions the statement, calling into question their own qualifications. The implied challenge is that if you were a “real” scientist or scholar, you would agree with all of the rest of them.
Conclusion: Stop Being Lazy
Stop being lazy. If you want to use consensus of opinion as part of your writing, that's fine, but make sure you cite your sources. Tell me what study was done, what the questions were that were asked, and let me be the judge of whether I trust those sources or not. The job of a journalist isn't to dictate opinion, it's to inform me of the facts so I can develop my own opinions based on facts.
