The Potential Impact of Unrestricted Web Publishing

The online edition of the September 19, 2013 issue of Time magazine caught my attention with an article entitled “Your Cat is 95% Tiger.”  The cited source for that Time article is a September 18, 2013 online article by The Christian Science Monitor.  The Christian Science Monitor version of the story, entitled “House cats and tigers share 95.6 percent of DNA, study reveals” is more detailed than the Time version.  The Christian Science Monitor cites its source to be an article written by Tia Ghose for LiveScience magazine. The title of the LiveScience story was “Evolution of a Predator: How Big Cats Became Carnivores.”  In looking at the different versions of the article thus far, it seemed to me that there was something missing.  Perhaps the very original story wasn’t just comparing Tigger’s relatives to those of Morris.   When I thought the last stop in checking cited sources was going to be LiveScience, I found that I was wrong.  LiveScience credits the original work to the online journal Nature Communications. 

In evaluating the cited sources I would consider each credible.  Most impressive was the original study by Nature Communications entitled “The tiger genome and comparative analysis with lion and snow leopard genomes.”  The Nature Communications article was posted in a way to deliberately demonstrate its credibility.  It includes a link about the authors and their affiliations with zoos, biomedical facilities, genomics and genetics institutions, conservancies, and more.  The authors’ qualifications, credentials and connections to the subject are easy to obtain and verify, as they are provided at the end of the article.  Throughout the article, there are cross-referenced footnotes with hyperlinks to navigate easily to their specific placement in the article.  I was quickly able to research one of the collaborators on the tiger project, and other studies easily accessible and of similar subject matter. I didn’t see any noticeable bias, and found the following statement at the end of the article:  “The authors declare no competing financial interests” (Nature Communications 2013).  The website is up-to-date, including an October 8 Press Release.  Overall, Nature Communications seems to be a very credible source.

The potential impact of unrestricted web publishing regarding this article could go in unexpected directions.  The goal of the study was to address endangered subspecies of tigers in an effort to prevent extinction. Out of context, a reader could easily misconstrue some of the facts. For example, the Nature Communications article includes a Venn diagram outlining shared gene clusters.  I could see a tabloid picking the simplest piece and declaring “Cat Boy found in Korea—details from Nature Communications inside” as a plausible article based on one part of the original article. Another piece that could wreak distress—but certainly sell newspapers--could be presenting just a single fact that four subspecies of tiger subspecies have gone extinct in the wild in the past century. There are efforts in place to re-build their populations in controlled environments. Instead of real science, misconveyed information can lead to a misinformed audience if sources aren’t vetted or if knowledge of a subject doesn’t exist to question the information relayed.  

I consider Time and The Christian Science Monitor to be credible.  However, both distributors chose to present the story ala carte—an effort, no doubt, to target an audience specific to their publications. More than likely, Time and The Christian Science Monitor consider their readership less interested in the science component, more interested in the pet element.  Changing the title and limiting content to meet their needs didn’t compromise any of the facts.  They did cite sources properly, so backtracking was do-able. The LiveScience version was less pet-centered, and more science-centered in its discussion of genes and breeding.  Therefore, I consider there to be a risk involved, even among credible sources, as to what happens to information they publish as it evolves through mass media.  In addition, I wonder how many original authors find humor, or dismay, in how their publications look as they are distributed through mass media.

Sources:

The Christian Science Monitor:  http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0918/House-cats-and-tigers-share-95.6-percent-of-DNA-study-reveals/%28page%29/2

LiveScience:  http://www.livescience.com/39695-tiger-lion-leopard-genome-sequenced.html

Nature Communications journal: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130917/ncomms3433/full/ncomms3433.html

Time magazine: http://science.time.com/2013/09/19/your-cat-is-95-tiger/#ixzz2hAj5kp9A