The Media Marketplace for Garbled Demography

Bibliographic Data

ID5147444
AuthorsMichael S Teitelbaum (Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume30
Issue2
Pages317-327
Publication date2004-06-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePopulation and Development Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0098-7921 • E-ISSN: 1728-4457
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1728-4457.2004.015_1.x
OpenAlexW2040348018
LanguageEN
Citations received16

Differences in cultural norms and incentives provide a powerful marketplace for garbled demography in the mass media. Journalists are attracted to expectation of dramatic shifts in politically and socially controversial domains that can result from long-term population projections. Demographers routinely caution against interpreting such projections as forecasts, and emphasize the complexities and uncertainties of demographic analyses. Yet such caveats are often lost in the sequence of translations from demographic study, to press release, to journalistic treatment. In addition, advocacy groups often interpret such stories to serve their own interests, while headlines and article titles designed for general readerships are another source of miscommunication about demographic studies. Two recent cases offer object lessons of how careful demographic analyses addressing politically controversial trends can suffer from such confusions: media coverage of the 1997 National Research Council report entitled The New Americans, and the 2000 report by the United Nations Population Division entitled Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations? The essay suggests procedural changes that might moderate the level of garbled reporting and commentary that commonly characterize coverage of such studies in the mass media

Economics · Incentive · Mass media · Object (grammar) · Political science · Population · Sociology · Computer Science · Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences · Demography · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics

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