The campaign promoting evidence-based medicine (EBM) shares similarities with Joseph Lister's 19th century campaign promoting surgical antisepsis. Both target medical practitioners as their primary clients, and both appeal to these clients in the manner of a public health programme, arguing that their standards are authoritative and relevant, that the clients fail to meet them, and that this failure is a problem that requires the clients to change. Both promote hygienic solutions to the problems that they identify, the problem of microbial pathogens in the case of Lister, and the process of clinical decision making in the case of EBM. Hygienic solutions aim to operationalize standards as case-independent procedures that can be performed as habits, and seek to identify instruments of purification against sources of contamination. EBM's solution is hygienic because it characterizes clinical decision-making behaviour as a source of contamination and because it promotes a general procedure designed to correct it. Comparing the EBM campaign to Lister's helps to explain why some clinicians have had trouble trying to implement EBM as a decision-making procedure in particular cases. EBM promotes a hygienic solution, but unlike Lister, does not confront a well-defined, empirically grounded problem. Some of the difficulties with EBM stem from a mismatch between its hygienic solution and the complexity and case-dependency of clinical decision making.
Readers' objectivity and bias evaluations of news texts were investigated in order to better understand the process by which readers make these kinds of judgments and the evidence on which they base them. Readers were primed to evaluate news texts for objectivity and bias, and their selections and metacommentary were analyzed. Readers detected bias in passages with stance markers, and detected objectivity in those lacking stance markers. In their metacommentary, readers tended to characterize objective texts as lacking purpose, or having a merely descriptive or expository purpose, and biased texts as exhibiting explicit interpretive or argumentative purposes. Unlike studies that locate objectivity or bias in news texts, or test it by asking about the fidelity of texts to their sources, our study examined the evaluations of readers in their interactions with texts. It shows how objectivity and bias evaluations are a multiply determined part of a communication dynamic rather than a fixed quality of a text.
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