Samizdata

Most magazines and newspapers employ “fact checkers”, whose job it is supposedly to ensure that the content of articles is accurate and truthful. The nasty little secret however, is that the purpose of such people is not so much to ensure that the readers of the magazine receive articles that are accurate, but to protect the editors and owners of the magazine from libel law. Therefore, a lot of the time what is actually checked is the accuracy of human sources rather than the accuracy of facts and the internal consistency of articles. If an article says that “Joe Bloggs said that the moon is made of blue cheese” then it is likely to be checked that Joe Bloggs actually said this. If it is merely stated that “The moon is made of blue cheese” then this is less likely to be checked. After all, the moon is unlikely to sue.

As a consequence of this, one finds a great many factual errors in the general media, particularly about scientific and technical information. And one finds dreadful innumeracy – which is a shame given the fact that a basic knowledge of the modern world is pretty much impossible without a decent understanding of the workings of the modern world and a basic understanding of the modern world.

However, this varies by publication, or course. In the British media, The Guardian is far better at getting factual information on technical subjects right than any other paper with the possible exception of the BBC. The Times and Telegraph are worse, and in the electronic media the BBC is usually dreadful. (This wasn’t always so. There used to be a strong pro-enlightenment wing of the BBC, but the decline of this is just one general symptom in the moonbat ascendancy in the BBC that has happened in recent decades).

In any event, an example. Last week I had a long flight in front of me, and as a consequence I grabbed a couple of magazines to get me through the flight. The July/August edition of Foreign Affairs had series of articles entitled “The Next Pandemic”, which considered the possibilities as to what might happen if the world faced an outbreak of a new, nasty, influenza strain. Foreign Affairs is the trade journal of a certain kind of pompous, overly statist Washington D.C. Policy wonk. In any event, it is read by what in D.C terms are “serious” people. I find this slightly distasteful, but I have a certain morbid fascination for the subject of contagious diseases and ways of coping with them, so I bought the magazine.

The lead article in the section (and one of the others) was written by Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: : The Collapse of Global Public Health”. I have read the first of these books but not the second. I found it interesting in that it gave lots of historical information that I was not previously aware of, but I found its central argument – that standards of public health in the world is in decline and a consequence we are newly vulnerable to emerging diseases – to be unconvincing. I particularly disagree with the semi-stated corollary that the solution is the expenditure of vast amounts of public money. Certainly there are places in the world where standards of public health have declined (eg in British and Canadian public hospitals) but in a global sense sanitation has never been better, and global best practice (ie that of the United States) has clearly improved. On top of this we are in the midst of a biotechnology revolution of astonishing speed. Fifty years ago biology was largely taxonomy and medicine was largely “Try this and see if it work”, whereas today we have real understanding of how biological systems works and how diseases work, and as a consequence a much more basic understanding of how to attack them. → Continue reading: And you believe I should take you seriously?

…I am shocked, shocked! No, not really.

Kudos to Scott Burgess for breaking the story that the Guardian has hired Dilpazier Aslam, a supporter of a global Islamic Caliphate, to write for them, regardless of his association with Khilafah.com and Hizb Ut Tahrir. Presumably whoever hired him at the Guardian knew all about his views as all it takes is typing “Dilpazier Aslam” into Google and then pressing Search to discover what he writes.

It is really no different than if the Telegraph has hired a white English neo-fascist supporter as a ‘trainee journalist’ and invited that person to report on a riot in which Jews were attacked, even though the internet was full of articles by that person calling for violence against people based purely upon their ethnicity (say, Jews, for example). But then of course we all know that when the Guardian hires someone who has called for exactly that, well, it is just that they are being ‘inclusive’.

The silence on this issue from the Guardian itself has the making of a rather good story in and of itself. You would have thought a newspaper which was as aware of new media and blogging would realise that they do not get to pick and choose which stories are newsworthy anymore, particularly when they are the story. Even that fount of MSM idiotarianism The Independent has run with this one.

And this story could just run and run. Pass it on.

Overheard on Newsnight last night, from the anchor-lady person, presiding over a discussion of the recent travails of the US mainstream media. It was in connection with the Valerie Plame story, whatever exactly that is. I have not been following that, and I missed the beginning of the Newsnight report about it.

Anyway, here is what Ms. Paxman said about the US mainstream media, word for word:

The reputation of the reputable media has sunk to a new low.

This is what I love about the BBC. They have their biases, of course they do. But they also genuinely try to report the truth.

Their biases mostly impinge by determining which truths they go after in the first place, and who they then have commenting on them (to discuss this matter they had Daniel Ellsberg balanced by a guy from the New York Times), rather than in the form of pure lying. After all, when the BBC features some grotesque report put out by some grotesque gang of health fascists, or some such, rather than proper news, it is true that the health fascists did indeed say whatever it was they said. It was stupid and repellent, but they did say it, just as the BBC said they said it.

The BBC prejudice is that the mainstream US media are indeed the reputable media, and that all those pyjama-clad right wing nasties sitting at their nasty computers agreeing with President Bush are disreputable. Yet these same pyjama wearers are the ones who have caused the reputation of those same reputable media to sink to a new low. That was the story here. So, that is what popped out of her mouth.

This is definitely different to living in the USSR and I greatly prefer it to that, not least because it is so much more entertaining.

I am a news-junkie, so facing this morning without the Today programme on the BBC is a gruelling prospect. For BBC staff are on strike, so most live news programmes are not running today.

I was highly amused, however, that the first replacement programme on Radio 4 at six o’clock (when Today is due to start) was an In Business documentary on podcasting. Can this be entirely coincidental?

“There’s plenty of competition out there, boys. And it’s free.” Is the pretty clear message.

There can surely be no more conclusive evidence of market success than the trademark name of a particular company becoming the commonly used verb to describe the activity for which said company provides its products. Have you ‘googled’ anyone today? Have you ever been ‘googled’ yourself?

As someone who ‘googles’ on pretty much a daily basis, I can find no material fault with this richly-deserved and glowing tribute in the UK Times:

Google is the modern Oracle, the all-knowing mechanical sage we consult to find, if not the answers to life’s questions, then at least a comfortable, reasonably priced hotel in Torquay. But is Google God?

I cannot recall such a mystical (and, for some, blasphemous) suggestion ever crossing my mind but, like the author, I am only too ready to wax lyrical about the benefits of Google’s simple and effective information gathering machine.

Google may have all the answers but, unlike God, lots of Google’s answers tend to be wrong, loopy postings from lonely people typing late at night in their underwear. Google moves in mysterious ways all right, but some of those ways are downright weird.

To whom could he possibly be referring? → Continue reading: Stick to what you don’t know

The Economist (the link, alas, leads to their premium content) has an interesting little article about fake news – ‘news’ broadcasts put out by the government via local television networks. Bogus reporting (or, more kindly, a video equivalent of issuing a press release) they call it:

The televised interview with John Walters, the White House drug tsar, ran on hundreeds of local stations before the 2004 Super Bowl. “Many parents admit they’re still not taking the drug [marijuana] seriously,” explained the news anchor. “Mike Morris has more.” It ended with the usual sign-off: “This is Mke Morris reporting.” It looked like a new report, and quaked like a news report. but it was not one. The segment had been produced by Mr Walters’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. The apparently independent Mr Morris was on contract to the government.

As the Economist points out the government should not be in the business of advocacy, but it may use public money to provide information. The question is which is which? Regardless of the formality of the decision and which watchdog or arm of the administration has the final say about the legality of such “news management”, the issue here is transparency. Both the government agency and the news programmes should identify the originator of the material they are running.

The most interesting point of the article is not even that – it is highlighting that this administration does not think that the press has “a check-and-balance function” and that this is a fundamental change of attitude compared with previous administrations and makes this one’s use of fake news different.

If there is nothing special about the press, then there is nothing special about what it does. News can be anything – including dress-up government video footage. And anyone can provide it, including the White House, which through local networks, can become a news distributor in its own right. Given the proliferation of media outlets and the eroding of boundaries between news, comment and punditry, someone will use government provided information as news. In short, the traditional notion that the media play a special role in informing people is breaking down.

The conclusion is one that many bloggers have been trying to break to the traditional media and journalists.

Behind all this lies a shift in the balance of power in the new business. Power is moving away from old-fashioned networks and newspapers; it is swinging towards, on the one hand, smaller news providers (in the case of blogs, towards individuals) and, on the other, to the institutions of government, which have got into the business of providing news more or less directly. Eventually, perhaps, the new world of blogs will provide as much public scrutiny as newspapers and broadcasters once did.

For myself, I am not too worried about “covert propaganda” in government broadcasts provided there is an individual somewhere in the process who will simply blog about it on his blog…