Opinion and fact: ministerial expertise, cancers, cars and climate

Responsibility

While it is gratifying to see there is a professional news media in addition to an active online commentary and blogosphere criticising the improper use of statistics, the ridiculous reliance on fifty year-old research and opinionated nonsense about climate, it remains that elected leaders, non-elected opinion-leaders and the "big players" in public debate have responsibilities not just for the information they reiterate, but for the ways in which it is communicated, the frameworks through which it becomes interpretable and the manner in which it affects audiences, readers and listeners.

Ignorance is not a lack of information, but is actively cultivated by a public sphere of communication represented through spectacle, hype, opinion and spin without a grounding in (or respect for) the slow, steady, painstaking research that produces expertise-which is not at all to say that expertise is necessary 'right', truthful or infallible. Just better.

Whether it is through political election, notoriety or status, those who come to be large-scale opinion leaders have not only the resources to help combat ignorance by drawing on expertise and research, but also have the responsibility to do so by disavowing the systems and types of speech that cultivate it.