Or, Maybe The Audience Is Simply Smarter Than You Are

That is the most interesting and lucid dissection of the conundrum of modern media I have ever read. I couldn't agree more. I have been fascinated by the declining power of the media, and their increasing contempt for the blogosphere and other internet / non conventional sources of news, and more importantly - opinion.

Why do some people study ?

Because they can't do Math !

for you could substitute:

Sociology, Psychology, Pick a "Victim" Studies, GLBT Studies, Social/Environmental "Justice or whatever passes for post secondary education these days.

I'm not an expert in just about any field you can think of - and I know when they're getting it wrong.

The MSM are committing suicide by "willful ignorance". The best and most recent example of this was the Obama campaign. Questions are now being asked "What do we really know about the 25 year void in Barrack Obamas biography?" We certainly know all about Sarah Palins years as the Mayor of Wasilla. The MSM now picks winners and losers and exploits them or ignores them according to their own agenda and ideology. AGW is another ongoing example where the MSM have climbed onboard the ship only to find themselves sinking with it because they have not done due diligence in investigating the facts. So are they incompetent or complicit?

...and people wonder why I don't trust these scumbags.
I can't wait for the last one to go belly up (kinda like your gopher, LOL)

Yes.

Michael Crichton has written on something similar. It was more along of the lines of why we shouldn't trust newspapers in general. Once in a while we'll stumble upon a story in which we have particular expertise. We'll notice some glaring error and think, WTF, this reporter doesn't know what he's talking about. Then we read the next story and think hmmm... good story.

He says we should try to avoid this mindlessness.

I grew up the son of a cop, so I always knew from him when they got it wrong wrt law enforcement. Almost always.

I was a hard rock miner for 5 years, so I always spotted it when they got it wrong when reporting on mining issues. Extremely rare when they got it right.

I have been a sailor for 18 years next month and a non-professional student of Canadian military history for going on 25 years, so I now spot when they get it wrong from that front. Blatchford is about the only one that gets it right.

From those three persepctives I have always known that the press have never understood what it was they were reporting. I had just never seen that concept so well presented as in this post.

"...journalism is perhaps the only profession where the utterly unqualified are given the privilege of writing to a mass audience on topics that they really not ought to."

Perhaps the best single line in the entire narrative.

You wouldn't depend on a surgeon for advice on your car; your grocer for an explaination of sunspots; or the day-care facilitator for information about Iranian nuclear weapons development.

Why do people constantly depend on journalists? Have you ever noticed how often news stories are journalists interviewing journalists, rather than experts?

Kate, I nominate this for your best post ever.

The internet opens up access to professional opinions. The media no longer defines, on our behalf, which opinions are professional.

We are gradually reaching the day where the majority of people will readily question media sources, and truly consider the facts for themselves. As you say, the internet has opened up access to opinions of all sorts of accuracy. The media filters that were once effective, are now ridiculously simple to bypass.

You know this phenomenon is not new. During the Middle Ages the majority of educated people were the clergy of the Catholic Church. Books were scarce and the organization that had the biggest library was the Church. Since the clergy took their cue from Rome, the Pope was able to define the "spheres" mentioned in the essay. Things ofcourse were changing slowly until the invetion of the printing press, which allowed the thinkers to publish their views to the masses (at least those who could read). The advent of the mass media allowed those who controlled the media to define these spheres until now (look at the what happened with Obama). I think what we're seeing now with the internet is merely a continuation of the aforementioned phenomenon. Why do you think Communist governments and like-minded individuals in West are trying the limit the internet?

A. To "protect" us from all the "bad" stuff that's in it; or

B. So that they can influence and dictate what the "spheres" are on any given subject.

At least the Catholic Church decided to stick to the original message of its Founder, get out of the "mind-control" business and allow individuals to make their own choices.

~~favill~~

At Saturday's hate fest there were more than enough MSM cams to film what I did, but they chose not to.

Somebody has to bring you what happened.

Contributor X - Crichton knew what he was talking about.

We should coin a term for this, perhaps someone already has, something along the line of "man in the mirror media epiphany". In other words, when you see what you do, or who you are, as presented by the media you quickly understand how useless the media are!

Everyone that I know who has ever dealt with the media find it an eye-opening experience. Not only are:
1) the preparations (i.e. research) by the journalist missing or sloppy,
2)their data gathering (whether by interview, google, etc) is ad-hoc and follows no clear process/pattern, and
3) summary and presentation usually show that the reporter didn't understand the topic at all.

Now, I know editors and managers get involved in the final "approved" version of events, and perhaps its a case of catch 22, but come on, to remain a journalist these days you either have to believe the manipulations being done or be heavily into S&M. I suspect it's a nice mix of both.

Kate, your sum-up in your post is a Milestone !!

Google is your friend. Crumbling authority. Lazy, stupid or both. Environment altered forever.

Especially the 'connected highly trained and knowledgeable people'. The essence of sda. The reason for being. And it works because of a very capable host !!

And this phrase also sums up my take for the past three decades; ” Sometimes the people the press thinks of as deviant types are closer to the sphere of consensus than the journalists who are classifying those same people as “fringe.” (I run into it everyday)

It is, IMO, the very reason WK spent so much time and effort slandering sda and others early on. He knew what side his bread was buttered on. The biggest advantage a corrupt, control-freak LPC has, a compliant media, was starting to vaporize. Atomized by the keystrokes of $300 computers that most citizens have acquired.

I don't agree that the media as a whole are simply lazy stupid or both (although they may have those attributes as well).

What has become apparent is that they are willfully and knowingly spreading missinformation and dissinformation, and that despite a large and growing number of the populace is now aware of this (due to the reasons outlined in the article), that instead of stopping, or correcting, they are amplifying the lies and missinformation.

That tells me that the media is producing exactly what it intends to produce, and is aware of what it is producing and why it is producing it.

Simply calling them lazy or stupid lets them off the hook for actions and intentions that are far more nefarious than that.

Years ago, and occasionally today, I worked in a public arena that would attract local, and sometimes national, media attention. Reporters and/or talking heads would show up to interview us or get the story. We'd talk, and I'd always end the interview with "I'd appreciate reviewing the story for factual accuracy before it goes to press". As memory serves, only one junior scribe, a young woman with her eye on the prize actually ran her story by me. The rest just said, "probably not".

And we always spent the next few days having to re-explain our program to a now wider audience who had gotten off on the wrong foot with us because of the misreporting. It got to the point that we would simply refuse interviews or access to certain media or reporters who simply refused to report it right. We'd happily tell other media that we had done that too :)

One of the big things that has changed, is that a story now never dies. It used to have a life cycle - reporters would know that once what they wrote became yesterday's news, it, and its content would die in a few days, and few would accurately remember what it was about in any case. They could write just about anything and in fairly short time, most would forget about it.

That doesn't happen anymore. EVERY story has legs long enough to outlive both the journalist and the topic, thanks to electronics and the internet.

As a consequence, spin becomes much more damaging and dangerous and accuracy infinitely more important. The presence or lack of either can alter history in ways no one could have foreseen two decades ago.

It also means that vigilance concerning both spin and accuracy has never been more critical. We have entered the age of "Madison Avenue" on steroids, where the impact of megaspin can readily overwhelm one's ability to filter it, notwithstanding the availability of the internet for research. While "Google is your friend" is presently important, both Google and the most fragile of sources, Wikipedia, have been caught filtering the data flow.

Paradoxically, while the "Truth is Out There" and the internet is writ large, the absence of an honest media makes finding it even more difficult then before. We are firmly embedded in the Age of Truthiness, whether we want to be or not, and we are slowly all becoming Truthers, where belief in something is sufficient authority to accept its validity. This what the MSM has done to itself, and to us collectively.

*
c'mon kate... stop being such a downer... and just "follow that star" to bethlehem...

"Ms. Sadu, 47, hasn't planned any entertainment for the 10-hour trip, so as not to
interrupt spontaneous expressions of inaugural glee."

gotta feel the love, man.

*

Corporate MSM have been information gatekeepers and manipulators of public opinion for many decades if not centuries.

The wilful blindness of Canadian MSM to the Chretien / Martin era of governing malfeasance and corruption is the single reason that corruption was able to survive and even flourish.

Corrupt corporately owned Canadian MSM!!

The internet has blown that cozy corrupt relationship to hell, for the betterment of humans.

No one should be surprised to see all governments coralling and coercing the internet back into their chokehold.
Dumbing down the populace will be job #1 on all governments front burners.

The problem with journalism is journalism was never a profession. It's a job.

When it was treated as just a job, when you wanted a story on science you'd hire a scientist who wrote well. Now you'd hire a useless, skills-challenged English major who wouldn't know the slightest thing about what they were writing about and would substitute their agenda in place of facts.

It is rare for the dominant entities in any industry to lead on the path to new innovative ways. IBM (and all the other computer giants of the seventies), for example, failed to lead the way to the desktop computing era. Microsoft is floundering in its attempt to be an internet leader. Kodak is desperately trying to find a way to be viable in the age of digital photography.

The innovators are unconstrained in the ways of the established.

So yes, I also vote for change and die.

As a youngster I too always though about this phenomenon. I would see lots of errors in areas which I had a long interest in and wonder if they make a mistakes here how about on stuff I have no knowledge of? This clouded my judgement of the MSM before I even noticed there liberal mindedness.

The problem isn't that they are stupid. They just seem stupid to us because we think their job is to report the news, when they view their job as political activist.

The problem with the title "journalist" is that journals are where your ideas go. Reporters report, journalists comment. It used to be that you had to earn the right to comment in a newspaper or on TV, now ever new reporter fresh out of whatever "little red schoolhouse" they graduated sets to work immediately righting all of the wrongs identified in their indoctrination.

A minor defence of journalism and community newspapers. They are not all lazy, or incompetent, and they have time and resources. (I know, I know: time+resources /= accurate). I've read tenditious and wretched bile spill from the screens of bloggers, dashed off in fits of delusional pique. And the modified, voluntary wiki model Kate is advocating for is not without its pitfalls.

No newspaper can afford a board of experts in every field an so mistakes are made, add in deadlines, and issues with sources (people with secrets and proprietary info can be weird)and you get what you get. Journalists are well aware of the problems, academia has tried to solve the problem with fairy tale journalistic standards. If you are expecting perfection I have some real estate I would like to talk to you about. Professional peer review journals have slates of experts with months/years away deadlines, and the wrong editor can slant a journal in ways utterly invisible to the general public's eye and never mentioned by the profession due to social threat of ostracism (think the NEJM two years ago).
The notion that the journalists are wrong more than they are right seems to assume the facts are always clear, their proponents always truthful and the opinions solidified.
I've presented board approved budgets to Executive Directors of charities and been told the numbers on the page have no bearing on the reality the charity is facing...and it gets worse from there.

I like my profession - I worked for a warm community paper - and I like blogs, and since I went marginal part time freelance to be home with my very large family of small kids several years ago, I am blessed to have an hour or so a day to enjoy the wonderful world of online news and blogs - and dash off the occassional unedited reply while my boys finish their oatmeal.

I'm not saying that newspapers aren't wrong, but I am saying that in my experience they aren't malicious partisans. You are welcome to gripe about the hacks, and when you are done cleaning up the newsroom with your flawless bullsh*** detectors and awesome labour law free firing powers - can you tell off the rude emergency room nurse, smarten up the postal clerk, make the bridge engineer a little less arrogant, and tell the grade three teacher to teach, not propagandize. Thanks for that- I knew you could help out, it will be lovely to live in a world without hospitals, mail, bridges or schools. I know those are all public institutions, so just fix the clueless help in the container aisle at Canadian Tire and I will be impressed.

Feel free to bash big media,while you are at it stop patronizing their largest advetisers, like GMC... oh wait.
Vote with your mouse and read free news. I hope the industry does change, and become lean, mean and ALWAYS correct, just please click on the online ads, because Kate can't take time off to sit in on a Wheat Board meeting. Kate is rare in her dedication and even she has an organization of volunteers.

Ah, this must be that change we can believe in everyone's been calling for.

I've told this story before on SDA, but with this post I can't resist telling it again.

To make it short: I was born and grew up in Africa, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe to be precise. Living there I saw first hand what Mugabe was doing, even in the early days, and what he did to my parents, their life savings, and so forth. Saw what happened to the university. Saw what happened to the blacks. Knew friends who were killed by Mugabe's thugs. Saw it all.

When we came to Canada I always remember how shocked I was to see supposed prestigious papers like the New York Times and the Globe and Mail, getting the story of Zimbabwe so wrong, intentionally leaving out critical facts, and failing to make any mention of those who suffered. It was a horrid distortion of the truth, executed without any shame by the media.

And the teachers in the schools I attended believed everything they read (except for one or two wonderful teachers who were wiser than that, and who I will always remember), and they too spouted the same lies and falsehoods, believing them to be truth because the media said so.

It made me livid.

So for me it is incredibly satisfying to see the old media suffer, and frankly I hope they all go to hell. They have NOT in general been a force for truth in the world. In fact, they have been rather evil.

For this reason I will always support blogs like Kate's. It's a simple question of loving freedom and truth, and I will stand on the side of freedom and truth every time.

I find it ironic that Rosen isn't too bad in defining the process, but thinks that the disenfranchised being empowered by the Net are the radical left while he lives in the fairy world of the MSM being part of the "media-working-for-government alliance that's been Bush's lapdog" crap.

I wonder if he thinks the Sphere of Deviance includes Judeo-Christian social conservatives; small government conservatives and libertarians; and, say, Sarah Palin, or if he views those groups as being truly beyond the pale and quite-rightly ignored or debased as deviants by the MSM? Hmm. I wonder what someone who thinks that Atrios or Glenn Greenwald are the cutting edge of the peoples' revolution against the Establishment or who thinks that getting an Evangelical leader on a political talk show where he's mocked and subjected to the Third Degree is somehow part of the Establishment controlling what the debate is thinks about conservative and libertarian blogs? Not too much, I'm sure.

Part of the issue is that most journalists don't even recognize their own bias. They see the world only through their own lens and report accordingly. You will often see it show up when they do something like write "The Fraser Institute, the far right, bla bla", and on the other hand write "the policy think tank, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives".

And besides, many journalists are certainly not the sharpest tools in the shed and are easily tricked and bamboozled depending on their own biases.

Having met a number of journalists, I would say they are not a bright bunch, that's for sure...and to have them filter information for me to try to formulate my decisions about events is nauseating at times.

Ward makes a good point.

During the last decade, the Media seems to have pulled-out-all-the-stops in trying and counter the Internet. It became more willful, deliberate in spewing out the, even obvious, garbage. AGW being the prime example.

A desperate, last attempt to control by fear mongering ? As mentioned before - church libraries.

TJ....maybe the Globe and Mail and the NYT can pay off their debts with the $100 BILLION dollar bank notes that Zimbabwe had been distributing! Of course when they were issued, you could only buy 3 eggs with them, but it might be a wake up call for the Mugabe apologists at those papers.

"Why do you think Communist governments and like-minded individuals in West are trying the limit the internet?"

Leave out "communist" and you are spot on.

"I am saying that in my experience they aren't malicious partisans."

Just ask Sarah Palin.

Kate and Mike S!

I just checked and it's +273 at Buttonville Airport! It's a record!

Deniers! ;o)

I'm not sure now, but it might have been Richard Feynman that nailed down the phenomenon that when we read something in the paper in our own area of expertise, we always find it maddeningly inaccurate -- but then we turn the page and read something else like it's Gospel. Except one day, the light bulb goes on and you say to yourself, "hey, if I can't trust them when they write about stuff I know, how do I trust them when they write about this?"

More people seem to be having that moment.

John Luft

100 billion dollar notes are so yesterday.

Now they're introducing the 500 billion dollar note.

Bobbi,
Your post drips with a sense of entitlement to define the world as we percieve it. That day is over, sorry. This line is particularly funny:

"I've read tenditious and wretched bile spill from the screens of bloggers, dashed off in fits of delusional pique."

It reminds me of the post yesterday where somebody said they were considering a Smart Car because it was "better than their '86 Astro van" Bloggers don't keep other points of view from being heard, newspaper groupthink does.

Back in 1969 I met a 'journalist' who had recently come back from spending a month in Cambodia. He had written a book on the current political situation in the country, which had just been published. I asked him if he had managed, while he was there, to talk to anyone in the Khmer Rouge. He replied 'What's the Khmer Rouge?' And he considered himself an 'expert' on Cambodia.

I would hold the MSM responsible for a large part of finance mess we are currently in. By not researching and properly informing people of dangers of certain investments they lead the masses down the garden path. Other examples of MSM spreading false truths are the verbitium they spread about commodity prices. Take for example oil prices, they hyped the price up last summer by reporting every little hositlity, storm, breakdown and crack prediction, to the point where the price fell like a rock. Now they are doing it again saying crap like the fighting in Gaza is responsible for the retail price to go up while the wholesale price is still falling.
Lets face it, they have completely sold out, I have a hard time trusting them on a simply thing like the date.

Katie - what an excellent article. I am going to forward it to the stations I dislike the most, CTV and CBC. Maybe to CNN and BBC next.

Great post. I worked for the Feds so I felt like a life preserver that never got tossed.
By the way, that is one eclectic survey of occupations. I damn near feel inadequate but then I remember WK and Jack Layton read it too.

I am a reader and nothing made me more content that relaxing with a good book, newspaper or magazine. Then something changed - writers spent far more time lecturing and less time entertaining, informing changed into instructing. The more self-righteous the old-media became, the less I read. I tired of feeling irritated and insulted by their constant preaching. They took all the fun out of reading. Thankfully the Internet restored the pleasure of reading, learning and communicating.

Traditionally, the MSM has been the conduit of information, and therefore, the shapers of "reality". Control the information, and you control the reality.

The business model of the MSM has been to leverage that ownership of the information conduit. It's not really a complicated model, newspapers did it, television did it, and now the Internet does it: offer content for low cost that bring bums and eyeballs. This bond of attraction provides the opportunity to sell. To the world of commerce, it sells demand creation. To the political world, it sells this "reality", and therefore is instrumental in delivering political power, as politics reduces as the election of proxies that will change "reality" in ways perceived to be positive.

The blogosphere, quite simply, has allowed the masses to finally grasp the quality of the information they have been receiving from the MSM. It's now clear that the quality is low, either by commission, or omission. Commission: spinning politically to deliver power. Omission: ignorant journalists.

A final offering of the MSM is fame, which can be leveraged by the recipient in many ways. Usually, to become filthy rich by offering questionable products or services. Case in point: Ms. Spears.

In short, the offerings of the blogosphere allow one to establish, for oneself, the quality of information being received.

The days of the MSM shaping reality, and making money off that, are dwindling.

It's really not much different than the transition from horsepower to the internal combustion engine. People began to see the internal combustion engine was a better offering, across a range of value perceptions.

The MSM is all twisted up in its own internal logic, just like Detroit was in the 70's. That's a death spiral for any business.

Shaken nailed it !!

The US temperatures are reported in °F.
Canadian temperatures are reported in °C.
-36°C = ~-33°F - by coincidence not that much off (both are damned cold, but the piece made no reference to the different measuring systems)

Three years ago when I first discovered this blog (the first blog I had ever visited from a mention made on either Adler or Rutherford) the comment on the sidebar

"Why this blog?
Until this moment
I have been forced
to listen while media
and politicians alike
have told me
"what Canadians think".
In all that time they
never once asked.

This is just the voice
of an ordinary Canadian
yelling back at the radio -
"You don't speak for me."

THAT was when everything changed and I realized that I could have a voice.

It still yell at the radio and the TV - but then I go onto one of the blogs and find out I am not alone.

Thanks Kate!

Jet said,

"The US temperatures are reported in °F.
Canadian temperatures are reported in °C.
-36°C = ~-33°F - by coincidence not that much off (both are damned cold, but the piece made no reference to the different measuring systems)"

That is not nearly as alarming as the fact that Winnepeg is now is Saskatchewan. Who knew that Brad Wall had imperialistitc tendencies.

Posted by: Frenchie77 at January 13, 2009 11:31 AM

"Contributor X - Crichton knew what he was talking about.

We should coin a term for this, perhaps someone already has, something along the line of "man in the mirror media epiphany". "

Well, there's a well known cognitive bias (i.e., possessed by all humans) called confirmation bias.

It basically posits that we reject/ignore/dismiss evidence contrary to our existing beliefs and seek/believe/ evidence that conforms to our existing beliefs. So in this instance, reading an article in which you know the reporter is an ignorant ass clown (valid evidence) is ignored. But every other story to which you are not an expert is then viewed (incorrectly) as another piece of evidence that the media are A-OK.

My epiphany came when I first read Crichton's piece and later when I learned about the various cognitive biases (just for fun).

And, by the way, learning about cognitive biases for me was really not fun at all. It just made me use much more hedging language in real life and in writing and then ask people to defend their claims with more rigor. Which makes me seem like a dick. I mean, maybe I was a dick anyway, who knows?

quite possibly your best work ever Kate. I really like shaken's take as well. It should be required reading for all in the MSM and journo students - I'm going to forward it to my circle ASAP.

I would add that the second group that is in the process of losing a large part of its prestige and position in society is teachers at all levels. My ten-year old's access to google and wiki etc. has her teacher on her toes for fear of being made a fool yet again for saying something that isn't true and being called on it. I'm sure medical doctors are under similar pressures.

I think that advertising effectiveness drives all. Do advertisers crave audiences of trenchant critical thinkers to rip their ads to shreds? No, they want the impressionable, the intellectually pliable. Who are these people? Are they conservative? Who would want to sell a "nothing down, we will give your $5000 for your trade, even if you push it in" car deal to a critical thinker who would see right through it? No, the Obama voter is who the advertisers want. Somebody who believes Obama when he says "We're not broke! Look at all of these credit cards." Advertisers want eyeballs that hear rhetoric and think they are hearing logic. Even the most hard headed businessman heading the largest capitalist enterprise is more interested in selling products to impressionable viewers who are likely to change their mind based on advertising than in presenting their personal views.

We are doomed to a corrupt, non democratic, govt and a dollar that is going to make the Mexican Peso look like a reserve currency.

The MSM could redeem themselves and stop their death spiral easily by just collecting the facts, all of the facts with no deliberate omissions or distortions in a timely manner to the best of their ability at a central location and then let the public interpret and debate their efforts in a community forum. It looks like I've defined blogging which is what the compromised future of journalism is going to have to morph into if they want to survive.

Besides learning the craft of stylizing "the product" and too little time on ethics and critical thinking skills, please tell me what value is J-school? Like general education degrees it's a place for dumbed down generalists that cover topics and subjects they are too often out of their element to do. 90% of the utterances of the MSM on this economic crisis are stupid, useless and a waste of time.

Bobbi, no offense, but, it's really a stretch to place the bloated amount of today's useless journalism in the same league as "hospitals, mail, bridges or schools" as a social necessity.

For many years I worked as a Paramedic in a larger metropolitan area. I have intimate information on various events that were reported in the various media. During those 10+ years I never found a news organization that got it more than 50% right. I think that the errors come from four issues; bias, laziness, ignorance, and workload.

There was a time when I used to think that you should not ascribe to malice what could be easily explained by stupidity. However, I no longer use that rule when dealing with journalists. Their bias and issue advocacy has tainted much of their coverage to the point that their sacred trust is evaporated never to be seen again. Unfortunately, this leaves them as the boy that cried wolf ignored when something important does happen.

Often times the effort required to get it right and to seek balance is something they just don't want to do. This probably extends from the bias in that they already know what they want and why spend the time to confirm it? This is intellectual laziness, and should not be tolerated by the editors. But, since the editors are in group think mode with the reporters it is not only tolerated but encouraged.

When you have a person with a bachelor's degree who cannot understand basic math, statistics, science, or technology you should not be surprised at what you get. To hear a journalist not ask a person who is getting free limitless energy the basic questions such as how much energy to you put in to what you get out? Also, if this is a scientific theory, what results would falsify it? Or, even better why is the temperature going down when CO2 is still rising? Since journalism schools do not require significant science or math courses in their curriculum, we will probably never see a resolution on this issue.

The last issue of workload is not a problem of the reporter's making but of the organization. Many of these people are overworked and thus the quality degrades. Since the editors do not care if quality sufferers and the approved bias has been covered then it must be good enough to print.

So maybe I should change my statement to: "Never ascribe to malice what can be best explained to overworked, uneducated, sloppy, group think reporting."

Talking about coaxial spheres is cool. Providing a recipe for drawing a two dimensional visual aid not so much.

The various MSM foibles that insult us daily have a simple explanation. About 95% of the participants suffer from compulsions rather than talent.