p.s. here is a bit of my correspondence with CHE:
I asked them:
Does the CHE article meet your standards for journalism? Does it violate principles of journalistic norms, such as “don’t cite dubious sources” or “check your sources”? It is *this* issue which I believe deserves comment and response.
I would argue, as I did in the letter, that a journal with no academic process transmits its dubious status to all its articles. Therefore, it is not good journalistic practice to rely on articles from such sources. If CHE agrees, I would urge you to flag, amend, or retract the article for falling below CHE’s standards for quality. If CHE disagrees, I’d like to know why (e.g. perhaps CHE journalists are sufficiently astute to judge the scientific quality of an article regardless of its context).
And CHE editor Lawrence Biemiller replied:
I’m not the final arbiter of our journalistic standards, but my gut feeling—as a 32-year employee of the paper—is that yes, this article meets our standards. It reports accurately on credible research of interest to our readers. The fact that this research was published in a journal of questionable integrity may mean it’s time for a follow-up article on predatory journals, but I don’t myself accept your blanket guilt-by-assocation approach. As our earlier article on such journals noted, legitimate, well-intentioned scholars are being taken in by these journals, but I don’t think that means we have to ignore all their research. I know Dan and his editor, Sara Hebel, have talked over your points and don’t see that this article requires the retraction you sought.
As for not quoting dubious sources, any journalist tries to do that, but it’s a slippery slope. I myself have been having trouble believing anything that has come out of the mouth of the Speaker of the House of Representatives about the fiscal cliff, but I have a number of friends who are equally suspicious—far more suspicious, actually—of anything they believe the president has said about guns. So where does that leave us?
—Lawrence Biemiller
