Call for protest of ABC's slamming of interaction research

[Christian Nelson]

In a series of reports on ABC's Good Morning America, titled "You paid
for it," an ABC reporter slammed three NSF-funded projects, two of which
were related to research likely of interest to folks on this list.

Yesterday, they slammed a study of presidential press conferences. The
PI for the study is Steven Clayman, a respected conversation analyst in
the Sociology Dept. at UCLA. Anyone who bothers to look up the award
information on the NSF site (which the reporter clearly didn't) will
discover from Clayman's abstrast that ABC misrepresented his research.
They did so by suggesting that Clayman was only interested in
determining whether press conferences have become more adverserial (for
ABC's report see
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/GoodMorningAmerica/GMA020404Reporter_studies_taxpayer.html).

Anyone who bothers to look at Clayman's previous research or talks to
those who know about it (again, something the reporter clearly didn't
do) will realize that he has much bigger fish to fry, and is not really
interested in testing arm-chair hypotheses so much as describing
significant interactional practices that have gone undescribed
heretofore and only then drawing out the significant implications of his
phenomenon. Finally, in light of Clayman's larger objectives, anyone
looking at the start and end dates of Clayman's grant (Sept. 2001 to
August 2003) will recognize that to judge his research at this point is
premature at best. I'm glad to see that official objections to ABC's
coverage are planned, but I urge all NCA members to let ABC know  (at
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/GoodMorningAmerica/GMA_email_form.html
) that they object to such unfair, not to mention anti-intellectual,
coverage. Not only our profession, but the nation itself can ill-afford
to look the other way when the networks shift from spewing out garbage
to attacking those who attempt to provide the nation with significant
information.

BTW, I only caught the tail end of the coverage of the study on smiles
this morning. It seemed that they must have recut their report pretty
quickly, because they devoted a fair chunk of time to an NSF staffer
noting the importance of the study, and the reporter also suggested why
the study might be important when discussing his piece with GMA host
Elizabeth Vargas. He even suggested that the study might help in
eventually detecting terrorists--certainly something most audience
members would consider valuable. But, while even specifically prompting
these positive comments, Elizabeth Vargas managed to smirk and harrumph
throughout. Apparently, even journalists believe that the audience's
need to feed its anti-intellectualism comes before its need for security
even in the most seemingly perilous of times. (BTW, it's a great example
of verbal and non-verbal signals sending diametrically opposite
messages.)

--Christian Nelson