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Journalism

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

-- Michael Crichton

One of my favorite genres in the prestige press is the Self-Refuting Article. These are articles that contain all the facts necessary to undermine the premise of the piece, but reporters, editors, and readers all conspire together in an act of collective stupidity to Not Get the Joke

-- Steve Sailer

We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government.

Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off. Indeed, maybe the most important thing happening in the world today is something that we almost never cover: a stunning decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease.

One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years. Another 29 percent believed that the proportion had remained roughly the same. That’s 95 percent of Americans — who are utterly wrong. In fact, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty hasn’t doubled or remained the same. It has fallen by more than half, from 35 percent in 1993 to 14 percent in 2011 (the most recent year for which figures are available from the World Bank).

When 95 percent of Americans are completely unaware of a transformation of this magnitude, that reflects a flaw in how we journalists cover the world

-- Nicholas Kristof


Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

-- George Orwell

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.

Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

Only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.

-- Julian Assange, The non-linear effects of leaks on unjust systems of governance

Free speech exists in the west only for those who don't say anything important. As soon as you say something important you end up in Julian's shoes.

-- rorykoehler

Skewing

You absolutely should ignore mass shootings. Paranoia about terrorism has created the NSA and TSA, and all sorts of other nonsense. People watching airplane crashes on the news think that airplanes are incredibly dangerous and drive instead.

The raw numbers are important. People are actually surprised when you give them statistics like how rare murders actually are, or how rare shark attacks are, etc. That wouldn't be surprising if people already had an accurate model of the world. We should strive to inform people, not misinform them further. Knowing about the risk of auto accidents is far more important to the average person than knowing about the details of mass shootings.

The news actively misinforms people about risks. It creates irrational fears and behaviors.

-- Houshalter

It always fascinates me how much my world view and the world view of those around me is based on the exceptional and not the mundane. The news outlets report the news assuming that the audience knows what's normal. When the news is used to become informed about the world many people come away with a skewed impression of reality. I am of the opinion that people would be better served by news reports that provide context to explain why the news is in fact news.

Here's some context I find interesting:

According to the CDC:

Americans murdered per year: 16,121
Americans killed in car accidents per year: 33,804
Americans killed by smoking related diseases per year: 480,000

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/index.htm

-- mninm

There is a decent documentary that watches a few teams respond to "Gun Violence" (1). It was basically a tour of people shooting themselves or their family. A bizarre left turn into mental health questions and responsibilities. It is clear that, of ~33k gun deaths (2) - most are suicides. Meanwhile, homicide is almost non-exisitant (3) - but it is all i see on the news :(

1) http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/requiem-for-the-dead-american-spring-2014

2) "11,208 homicides (3.5 per 100,000); 21,175 suicides; 505 deaths due to accidental/negligent discharge of a firearm; and 2818 deaths due to firearms-use with "undetermined" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States

3) http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-16/fbi-us-homicide-rate-51-year-low

-- ransom1538

Noise

The critical error in your logic is to believe that “the news” is news. It just isn’t. By and large, it’s noise, which you either have time for in your life, or you do not.

-- quesera

Every couple of years I hear about this. Then it gets forgotten, and re-invented. Each time it never manifests into a real product. That reminds me, I think we're about due for another rehash of the "Voyager leaves the solar system" article, anyone? Or another segment on the local news where they say "Scientist find [wine|beer|cheese|coffee|nuts|fat|red meat] [good|bad|healthy] for you" article.

-- delbel

Almost everyone can “get away with being uninformed,” because current events have no bearing on most people’s lives most of the time. I can name one hundred things that I could learn in twenty minutes which would be more useful to me than reading the morning paper.

If something is actually interesting, then news sources which I have meticulously populated with interesting things — my RSS feed and my friends — will help find it. A politician giving another speech is not interesting. Another instance of a crime is not interesting. An editorial by a non-expert on something complicated is not interesting.

-- mquander

If you did not know Barack Obama was the president of the United States, would your life be affected?

For me, the answer is no. You?

-- Oo Nwoye

Clickbait

If the headline asks a question, try answering 'no'. Is This the True Face of Britain's Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means 'don't bother reading this bit'.

-- Andrew Marr

The role of a headline isn't, no matter what tabloids might suggest, to convince people to read an article; the role of a headline is to help readers decide if they want to read the article, and imprecision serves no purpose there.

-- Colin Percival

There's a special place in Hell for people who write clickbait headlines alluding to something and then hide the answer deep in a long, long, meandering document.

-- raldi

Social Media

I found that when I let mainstream news go and tried to stay informed via social media, blogs, and Reddit, I felt informed.

Then I got a Kindle and tried a mainstream newspaper subscription.

I quickly noticed that the newspaper often disagreed with what I’d “learn” from Reddit and blogs, and upon further investigation the newspaper was almost always correct. Apparently the Reddit circle jerk is not as good at news as professional journalists.

-- tzs

RSS

RSS is the Great Web Leveller. It spites your fancy CSS hacks, it's disgusted by your insane javascript, and it will piss all over your "mobile-optimized" crap. No semantic markup == no party; because markup is for robots, and RSS parsers are very stubborn robots that can see through web-hipster bullshit like Superman through walls.

The only real sin of RSS (beyond the holy wars and format bikeshedding and committee madness and and and...) is that it's too honest a format. It's a format for stuff that matters, for content that deserves to be read; it's too pure to survive in a world of content silos, stalking analytics and inaccessible material-designs.

-- toyg