The past few weeks seem to have seen laments for the decline of journalism and obituaries for old media reaching a critical mass. BoraZ has kindly collected a few dozen so that I don’t have to.

Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been reading Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, and because Davies did the last Skeptics in the Pub, that I have been noticing that the decline of newspapers is reaching this critical stage. Davies is a Guardian investigative journalist, and he’s breaking the rules by telling us just what a state the media is in. Flat Earth News, written two years ago, before the American newspapers started going bankrupt, and British newspapers shed half their workforce, documents the many multiplicative flaws in the system of news gathering, reporting, and dissemination which cause journalists to churn out the crap the passes for newspapers these days.

Davies’ conclusion is that journalism — a noble profession of bright people — has, largely as a cost-cutting measure, been reduced tochurnalism . Instead of spending a week researching a story in great depth and telling us the important facts that we didn’t know, journalists have been reduced to rewriting a dozen wire stories and press releases each day. Journalists no longer have the time, the background knowledge, or the luxury of specialisation, required to find out whether the words they are writing bear any resemblance to reality. Nor do they have the time to establish what conflicts of interest of their sources have and whether they are hiding things — instead, the words can be reported as he-said/she-said, and the report can technically never be wrong.

Indeed, the media and public relationships industry have evolved a sophisticated mutualistic relationship. Newspapers could not fill their papers without press release writers doing all their research (and even choosing their words) for them, and in return, interested parties get their side of the story, or their product, prominently placed in the story.

M’colleague suggested that this thesis sounded a little like a conspiracy theory. I, however, am generally convinced. I am convinced because I have seen it work so many times in the field that I am familiar with — science and medicine. I have seen how the British tabloid (and even broadsheet) newspapers build their oncological ontological database from poorly written press releases. I have seen how interested parties both in industry and pressure groups place their doubt or certainty in news stories about the environment. I’ve seen the basic failure of fact-checking as elementary mistakes in press releases about newly published journal papers are faithfully replaced in all papers. I’ve even seen my own words from Wikipedia appear in The Metro‘s obituary of John Peel. And I’ve seen how successfully our own side has fought back on the media’s own terms, when Sense About Science press released their detox dossier in the slow news week after Christmas.

Flat Earth News provides the overarching explanatory theory for why so much of the news media is, to quote a comment on Friday’s Ryanair-toilets “news story” publicity stunt, “such a great lorry load of cock.” Science bloggers like a good whinge about a bad science or medicine story in the paper, but the problem is much greater than just a few humanities graduates trying to write about science. That skepticism you apply when reading the science stories needs to apply to the politics, foreign events, business, and everything else besides, because the authors of those items know no more about their subject than the humanities graduates covering science do about theirs.

Journalists can cry that democracy is not possible without them; but there’s nothing empowering about a media that churns back the press releases of government departments and military agencies. There is nothing empowering in the Daily Mail.

Journalists all over the city are this week reporting that the congestion charge has not reduced air pollution problems in central London, and that’s a fact, proven by science.  (As far as I know, the CCharge was never about air pollution — the clue’s in the name. But it’s potentially an interesting thing to look at all the same.  I can invent in my head plausible hypotheses for why it would improve air quality, and why it wouldn’t, but both would be useless without evidence either way.)

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

1. Wikipedia avoids weasel words. It attributes statements to their sources, rather than to “some people say”. Can you imagine a newspaper surviving five minutes with such a policy?
2. When somebody hoaxes Wikipedia, the article quickly gets investigated and deleted within three weeks (and yet this case is held up as an example of Wikipedia’s unreliability). When somebody hoaxes the mainstream media, they carry on credulously reprinting the press releases five years later.
3. Wikipedia has a policy against plagiarising newspapers. Judging from the amount of times I’ve blurted “hey — I wrote that!”, while reading The Metro on the tube*, the reverse policy doesn’t apply.
4. You can correct mistakes in Wikipedia. You cannot correct mistakes in the Daily Telegraph, even if you were the subject expert quoted in the item.
5. Wikipedia is not about to go bankrupt.

Add your own in the comments.

(Inspired by Bora.)

* actually, I don’t read the metro on the tube. not since the incident with the john peel obituary.

You would think though that such a fact, with all of the resources of the tabloid media and interested industry lobbies behind it, would have some readily available evidence to support it.  You would think that all these petrolhead websites would be falling over themselves to present the data showing off our great national achievement scandal.

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

Why would a headline writer, having glanced at a boring but reasonable article about saving money, think to write “driving’s never cost more”?  Where did they get that idea from?

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

The Department for Communities and Local Government put these words in a press release and today 221 national and local newspaper journalists* copypasted them into their newspapers, noticing nothing nonsensical in their conjunction.  Great job, The Media.

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

What is it with Channel 4 and the examination of excretions? During How Toxic Are Your Kids (C4, Thurs 8pm) I had to check the television guide to make sure that Armando Iannucci (The Day Today, Brass Eye) wasn’t the producer. Apparently, this is episode two of two, and I’m so disappointed that I missed the first episode. The programme opens with presenter, Sarah Beeny, telling us that “on an average day alone, I’m exposed to over a thousand chemicals.” This is episode two: we’re onto the advanced level stuff. A token ounce of sense — “… natural chemicals (some good and some bad)” — is voice-overed in at one point, but mostly, “chemical” is a synonym for “toxin” and “natural” is a synonym for “healthy”. Indeed, the disclaimer comes after telling us that “prior to the 1950s, we only used natural chemicals.” There’s no evidence for this obviously nonsensical statement, but it’s a fact.

As is standard for mid-evening television “journalism”, we meet some wonderful characters. It’s so much easier to talk to some ordinary people — who are all very willing to play along, in return for their fifteen minutes — than to do some research, or find out some facts. There is the Scottish woman whose interior decoration mimics a neoclassical museum, and who has a selection of air fresheners in every room. “Some people might think it’s a bit excessive,” she tells us. The voice-over comes in with the fact that people who use air fresheners are more likely to suffer regularly from headaches, but the science behind this fact is never explained: do the chemicals in the air fresheners cause the headaches, or are headaches another symptom of the psychoses that these people are clearly suffering from? Journalists these days are so thorough in their investigating that they conduct studies and experiments. The data point in this experiment is a teenage girl who has her make-up and shampoo taken away, in return for some “natural” products. “Everyone’s looking at me like, ‘she’s so ugly’.” No, dear, they’re looking at you like, “look at that girl being exploited by that film crew.” This is a scientific experiment, remember, and so an objective measure for results is required, and since it’s Channel 4, it has to involve analysing waste. But this crew is amateur: they stop at urine, rather going the whole Gillian McKeith. Then there’s the family that won’t eat any cooked food. “Don’t you ever just think, ‘oh, I really want some soup right now’?” Wow, yeah, soup. That’s exactly what I’d miss most if I gave up cooked food.

Pick a light-factual television programme from the archives and it should be possible to date it to within five years of its production merely by looking at the graphics. Graphics go through fashions, influenced by the latest technology. This one makes wonderful use of the virtual studio to create an amusing series of split screen scenes, for example. Either they just had so much to say and so little time that they had to resort to having two streams of information running at the same time, or it was simply the case that the presenter (left) was just so bored by what the scientist (right) was telling us that she had given up and was putting on her make-up instead. Another ubiquitous gimmick is to deliberately make the picture look bad. Bad picture quality is a way of immediately telling us “this is an informal ‘diary’ scene”: they’re the quality you’d get from cheap cameras of the variety one would use for home videos, or outside broadcasts from a cash strapped production company. Except they’re not. Cheap cameras have moved on since the early 1990s, but apparently, our expectations of picture quality haven’t kept up.

Everyone knows that alongside spectroscopic analysis of bodily productions, the way to do research is to conduct surveys. To the street! We get a montage of the people, who, after telling us that they never read the shampoo ingredients label (no shit, really?), all tell us that what they really want is more “natural”, “pure”, “essential oils” and “organic”. “It says 100% pure, therefore I know everything in there is going to be beneficial to me.” The presenter tells us: “nature is powerful stuff.” Yeah. As powerfully capable of harming us as synthetic chemicals. Still, it’s no good just telling us how bad chemicals are, clearly there is a demand for alternatives! “Although the levels of these chemicals aren’t considered dangerous, I’m going to see if I can reduce them.” And so, we get Aloe Vera for breakfast, and salt & lemon juice toothpaste. This is not science, it’s not journalism, and it’s not consumer advocacy. It’s classic infotainment. If Channel Four News is The Guardian of the television medium, the mid-evening slot is the Daily Mail. It’s not just health scares; it’s health scares with “kids” in the headline.

This is an archival re-post of something written last summer on the old blog.

Any Questions, one half of BBC Radio 4′s weekly foray into the realm of mindless US-style talk radio bigotry, this week invited a panel of historians, novelists, and journalists to share their poorly considered thoughts on current affairs with the nation. A question regarding the situation in Iran was asked, and after ten minutes of the panelists tediously repeating what they had read that week from real foreign affairs experts, somebody mentioned twitter. I’ll pass on wordsmith Will Self’s clumsy attempt at a joke (“the only circumstances in which I would twitter is if a songbird flew into my mouth”), which somehow prompted screeches of delight from the audience of children and mental subnormals, and go straight to the comments of Rod Liddle.

Rod Liddle, left-of-centre columnist for right-of-centre newsmagazine Spectator and former editor of Radio 4′s flagship Today Programme, joked about the use of twitter by celebrities and politicians being all about what they ate in the restaurant last night (oh, by the way, Rod, I’ve got 2008 on the phone — they said something about wanting their joke back?). Even if that were true, so what? I’ve never read the Spectator, but I learn from their website that if it were my wish to do so, I could enjoy such features and columns as boring woman has lunch — sorry, splendid lunch; some guy gets his hair cut; and painfully arsenumbingly pointless woman pours her heart out over the uniquely middle class problem of “how to start a letter to your sponsored child”. My God, Spectator, don’t you realise? I don’t care. I don’t care about these irksome morons, I don’t care about their lunch, their haircut, or their sponsored child, and I don’t know why you’re telling us about them. You have taken three retards, stapled them together, and are asking people to pay £3 to read this crap.

For God’s sake, traditional media, take a step back and look at what you’re doing. You look ridiculous. Radio 4 is broadcasting Anne Widdecombe’s considered views on designer shoes, and you wonder why we’re all off reading the science minister’s twitter feed? You don’t see the connection between the Spectator‘s bizarre dogmatic belief that the raving troll Melanie Philips somehow has something worth printing, and our mass defection to the blogs of professors? Channel 4 broadcasts Rod Liddle’s spectacularly moronic comments on atheism and eugenics, and you still don’t get why we’ve all gone to watch YouTube and TED talks?

Of course there are some tedious twitterers. Of course there are plenty of people who couldn’t give a crap about my thoughts, or the thoughts of those bloggers and twitterers that I follow religiously. And of course there are plenty of people who, like me, could not care less what Rod Liddle thinks about anything, let alone the catalogue of topics that he mistakenly thinks he is qualified to comment on. This is the nature of broadcast media, and it always has been. And that is not a problem. It doesn’t matter if I am not interested in somebody’s restaurant-related tweets, because I can ignore them. It doesn’t matter if somebody blogs on a topic that I do not care for, because I can scroll on past. It doesn’t matter if Channel 4 makes poorly-researched documentaries , because I can switch channel. It doesn’t matter if my newspaper prints columns on haircuts and sponsored children, because I don’t have to read those if I don’t want to. Just because something is published in a broadcast medium, does not mean that you are the target audience, and the author is seeking your approval. The difference, as I’m sure you will have noticed, is that if nobody wants to read my tweet or blog post, I will have wasted the few seconds or minutes I put into crafting it. If nobody reads your column or listens to your radio programme, your publisher goes bankrupt and you loose your house.

One comment made on twitter is not going to change the situation in Iran. Nor is a comment made by a novelist on Any Questions. The difference is that the twitterers are aware of these facts. ]]> http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/2010/06/broadcast/feed/ 0 http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/2010/05/soft-targets/ http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/2010/05/soft-targets/#comments Mon, 31 May 2010 22:48:19 +0000 Joe http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/?p=87 Continue reading →]]> Christina Odone reviewed Bill Maher’s film Religulous on Radio 4′s Front Row (start: 9m).

“He gets some very good replies from some terribly soft targets.” She’s thinking particularly of creationist-sympathising US Senator Mark Pryor (D-AK).

She goes on, “… but the most revealing moment is when Maher faces down a priest at the Vatican and says, ‘what about hell, what about sin, what about, you know, the evils of temptation?’, and the priest says: ‘yeah, what about them?’ and kinda shrugs off this simplistic attitude that Mayer has.”

And that’s the problem with the film: Maher is attacking “the wrong target.” What on earth attracts Maher to the simplistic belief of Mark Pryor, a mere everyday US Senator over the sophisticated religion of everyone’s favourite heavyweight Latinist Father Reginald Foster? What has Pryor got to offer the world? What influence does he have over anything? Who cares if some boring politician in the upper chamber of the legislature of some great world superpower might be sympathetic towards ridiculous religious views? What matters is that Vatican astronomer Father GeorgeCoyne softly dismisses those ridiculous religious views as being no longer relevant to the modern church. I mean, do try to keep up, atheists.

And I mean, so what if some soft target like The Pope makes some sort of batshit insane remark about condoms that defies basic anatomy and psychology, spits in the face of everyone who gives a crap about basic standards of truth-telling, and adds further insult the injury of millions of devastated lives? Why attack a soft target like him? What harm could his remarks possibly do?

This is a repost for archival of an item first published on the old blog a year ago.