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Samizdata quote of the day

One of the biggest eye-openers you can have is seeing a story in the press which you have personal knowledge of…

Of course, it could be that you just got unlucky and that all the other stories out there are 100% bang on, deadly accurate.

But that seems rather unlikely, doesn’t it?

6000 ruminates on false media prophesies of doom regarding the organisation of the soccer World Cup in his native South Africa.

13 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • Andrew Zalotocky

    OT but FYI Brian, “www.brianmicklethwait.com” is currently giving a “database error” message (current = 17/07 19:51 in the UK).

  • Andrew Z

    I think all is well now.

  • Daveon

    To be fair to the media in this case, I don’t know a single ex-pat South African, not to mention a fairly high percentage of my in-laws who are still residents who didn’t think it would be a total SNAFU from start to finish.

    The impression I’ve had from conversations with the inlaws is that this has come as something of a pleasant surprise for most people.

    Yes, the issues about Crime and Security (the only issues that frankly were likely to be a challenge IMO) turned out to be unfounded. But we’ve enough ex-pat friends who left because of the security situation to know that there was good reason to be worried, especially with the Soweto and Jo’burg venues.

    Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Rustenburg etc… are pretty safe places relatively speaking. Durban can be variable, but isn’t remotely as scary as Jo’burg can be.

    Mrs On was veritably amazed that the police and organisers pulled it off.

    More power to them.

  • Every single thing about the World Cup from the politicians in attendance (and naturally given VIP treatment) to the caste like allocation of team-by-birth along with the taxation based funding model stinks. I reject the entire exercise along with the values upon which it is premised completely.

  • Laird

    Of course the sex workers were disappointed, despite widespread media predictions to the contrary. Presumably the ones in Brazil will fare better in 2014.

  • the other rob

    I’m sure that there is a term for the way one tuts over the inaccuracies in a newspaper story one has knowledge of, then turns the page and takes at face value the other, equally flawed, stories.

    Sadly I can’t, for the life of me, remember it…

  • John B

    It was a successful event by most accounts but it seems there was a lot of crime you did not and do not hear about.
    It’s not just the media that is fixed, these days.

  • Tom

    Two thoughts:

    Daveon is right. It wasn’t some big stretch to question South Africa’s readiness for the World Cup. The meme didn’t come out of thin air. It was based on very real concerns voiced by real people — including FIFA itself, which as recently as a year ago was still contemplating moving the event to the United States.

    And isn’t it possible that the media coverage is the VERY REASON things worked out OK in the end? That’s what those stories amounted to, after all: warnings, alerts, vigilance, whatever you want to call it. And to that end, it seems quite likely they did their job.

  • My eye-opener moment happened in Croatia in 1992 when I read reports in the Western Media about a violent but, in the over all scheme of things, minor incident in Croatia…perhaps even trivial to anyone not directly involved or their next of kin.

    I had witnessed more of less the whole thing personally and the reports I read were about as about accurate as a Mel Gibson movie about Scottish and English history. Indeed I would not be surprised if the piece of crap who first filed the story (and whom other just parroted) even left the comfort of the Esplanade Hotel in Zagreb the entire day he filed the report.

    When I saw the accounts reappear in source after source over the next day, often verbatim, and I knew for a fact it was a complete inversion of the facts, I went through a process that was incredulity followed days later by a deep anger of the soul that never really went away. Eye opening indeed.

  • Tom

    @the other rob

    There is indeed a phrase for it….
    The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

    That’s part of a much larger and quite interesting speech Mr. Crichton gave, and which is unfortunately no longer available on his website.

  • having been personally interviewed a few times, and having seen the results in the daily fishwrap, I can say that there is NO point in the local paper as a source of information. i was misquoted or taken out of context every time someone else wrote the article. obviously when I was writing my own stuff in a weekly column then everything was my words except for the stupid headlines they gave my columns…which were in themselves occasionally misleading because the headline writer valued cleverness over accuracy.
    given that local news reporters can’t get local news right, what is the likelihood that international news is going to reflect anything remotely resembling truth?
    (hint -negative numbers come into play here……)

  • Tedd

    An early lesson for me was when I worked in the nuclear safety department for a power utility. There was a very minor incident involving a cracked fuel channel in one of our reactors. One of the major, local dailies assigned 16 reporters to the story for two weeks.

    The utility had a PBX for the head office, so all the head office phone numbers started with the same three digits. The reporters called random numbers starting with those three digits, “interviewed” whoever answered the phone, and filed stories with quotes from those interviews described as “inside source” or “anonymous source.” They “interviewed” receptionists, janitors, secretaries — anybody who was foolish enough to stay on the line with them.

    Eventually, they got hold of an engineering study on the fatigue life of the fuel channels, completely misrepresented its contents, and described it as a “secret report that had not been submitted to the government.” They had obtained their copy of the report from the public information centre in the lobby of the head office building, for a two dollar fee.

  • the other rob

    Tom – thanks, that is exactly what I was thinking of.