"Why Is Most Journalism About IQ So Bad?"

Russell T. Warne on midwit journalists over-confidently opining on IQ.

From Quillette:

Why Is Most Journalism About IQ So Bad?

It is easy to create a negative image of intelligence research because most people know very little about the topic. But distorting intelligence research does a disservice to the field’s hard-working scientists and the general public.

Russell T. Warne

30 Oct 2024 · 13 min read

… In August, the Atlantic published an essay by staff writer Ali Breland titled, “The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed with Race and IQ,” which fretted that “right-wing gatekeepers are shrouding [their] bigotry in a cloak of objectivity and pseudoscientific justification.” That essay was approvingly linked by a contributor to the Free Press the following month in an essay titled, “Pseudo-Scholars and the Rise of the Barbarian Right.” Three days after the Atlantic essay appeared, Lithub ran an essay titled, “On the Dark History and Ongoing Ableist Legacy of the IQ Test.”

Some other recent examples include the Guardian’s “Florida university to host extremist [i.e., me] after DeSantis-led lurch to right.”

An illuminating example was Tyler Austin Harper’s review in The Atlantic of Richard Hanania’s 2023 book.