UN's IPCC withdraws alarmist scenario, local media continues alarmist news

Take a quick look at the most consequential graph of the last two decades, below.

But first, the news: the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Change (i.e., the IPCC, the organisation promoting the Climate Scare) has officially withdrawn the warmist scenario known as RCP8.5.

This (below) is roughly what the IPCC's RCP8.5 predicts:

For context (and contrast(, here's the actual satellite record of temperatures for the last few decades:

So what's this RCP8.5 then? The simple answer is that it's the scaremongering scenario sold to "policymakers" as their "business-as-usual" scenario. Here in New Zealand it's become "their main planning scenario with authorities planning for 'managed retreat,' forced abandonment of settlements, and insurance companies refusing to insure."

As Quico Toro explains, if the RCP8.5 scenario were comparable with models used to design bridges, it would result in bridges designed to take around 250 M1 Abrams tanks all at once. Not just unrealistic, but illusionary. 

The “8.5” in RCP8.5 refers to the amount of added solar energy the atmosphere will trap by 2100—specifically, 8.5 watts per square meter. That’s very high—likely to bring about a shocking 5 degrees of global warming above pre-industrial levels.

RCP8.5 was the kind of climate scenario lurking behind Greta Thunberg’s accusation, in her September 2019 speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, that “we are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” It’s the kind of pathway young people in England were thinking about when they decided they needed to launch “Extinction Rebellion.” It’s been a fundraising bonanza for climate activist groups from Adelaide to Zurich, the main player in every single alarmist climate critique you’ve read in the last 15 years.

And it’s been the default setting for literally thousands of climate science papers—Google Scholar lists more than 30,000 published since 2018 alone. It was from this kind of research that we got lurid papers like “Future of the human climate niche,” where respectable Dutch climate scientists claimed that one in three human beings live in regions that will become unlivable in the next 50 years. It was this kind of research that gave rise to countless breathless headlines about how outdoor labor was about to become impossible across much of the tropical world, and alarmist documentaries claiming the ocean was about to end up without any fish. It was RCP8.5 that turned David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth” into the most read story in the history of New York Magazine, and later propelled the book version to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

The story of RCP8.5 is ultimately the story of what goes wrong when people convinced they are defending “The Science” catastrophically misunderstand how science works, and when politicized activists glom onto legitimate scientific tools and insist on ramming the round peg of probabilistic forecasting into the square hole of fundraising emails.

As we say above, here in New Zealand millions of words have been written based on the RCP8.5 scenario leading to authorities planning for 'managed retreat,' for forced abandonment of settlements, for insurance companies refusing to insure, for governments slowly but surely strangling our production of energy.

In the month since this became news however, there has been precisely ONE mention of RCP8.5's withdrawal in the local media. One.

What does that tell you?

MAGA: "Empathy is out. Assholery is in."

How do you describe the rise of a creature like Trump. Jeffrey Tucker, Robert Bidinotto and Robert Tracinski tracked his early ascent— along with the parallel rise of the alt-right, which simply took the unthinking opposite side, however horrendous, of mainstream issues, without abandoning the collectivism that underpinned them. And the mainstream is still trying to explain MAGAts sufficiently deranged by Trump to follow him so blindly. Doug Muder identifies several "rifts" in American culture that he's lucked into exploiting.

Donald Trump, in my opinion, is not some history-altering mutant, like the Mule in Asimov’s 'Foundation' trilogy. I think of him as an opportunist who exploited rifts in American society and weak spots in American culture. He did not create those rifts and weak spots, and ... they will still be there waiting for their next exploiter. ...

The first rift he identifies is The Rift Between Working and Professional Classes, i.e., between "the people who shower after work and the people who shower before work."

All through Elon Musk’s political ascendancy, I kept wondering: How can working people possibly believe that the richest man in the world is on their side? Similarly, how can people who unload trucks or operate cash registers imagine that Donald Trump, who was born rich and probably never did a day of physical labor in his life, is their voice in government?

The answer to that question is simple: The people who shower after work have gotten so alienated from the people who shower before work that anyone who takes on “the educated elite” seems to be their ally. In the minds of many low-wage workers, the enemy is not the very rich, but rather the merely well-to-do — people with salaries and benefits and the ability to speak the language of bureaucracy and science.

Actual billionaires like Musk or Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg are so distant that it’s hard to feel personally threatened by them. But your brother-in-law the psychologist or your cousin who got an engineering degree — you know they look down on you. Whenever they deign to discuss national affairs with you at all, it’s in that parent-to-child you-don’t-really-understand tone of voice. And let’s not even mention your daughter who comes home from college with a social justice agenda. Everything you think is wrong, and she can’t even explain why without using long words you’ve never heard before. Somebody with a college degree is telling you what to do every minute of your day, and yet you’re supposed to be the one who has “privilege”.

The tension has been building for a long time, but it really boiled over for you during the pandemic. You couldn’t go to work, your kids couldn’t go to school, you couldn’t go to football games or even to church — and why exactly? Because “experts” like Anthony Fauci were “protecting” you from viruses too small to see. (They could see them, but you couldn’t. Nothing you could see interested anybody.) Then there were masks you had to wear and shots you had to get, but nobody could explain exactly what they did. Would they keep you from getting the disease or transmitting it to other people? Not exactly. If you questioned why you had to do all this, all they could do was trot out statistics and point to numbers. And if you’ve learned anything from your lifetime of experience dealing with educated people, it’s that they can make numbers say whatever they want. The “experts” speak maths and you don’t, so you just have to do what they say.

Can we say we haven't seen that same thing here? 

In his 2012 book 'The Twilight of the Elites,' Chris Hayes outlined the ways that the expert class has become self-serving. In theory, the expert class is comprised of winners in a competitive meritocracy. But in practice, educated professionals have found ways to tip the balance in their children’s favor. Also, the experts did not do a good job running the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, and they failed to foresee the economic crisis of 2008. When they did notice it, they responded badly: Bankers got bailed out while many ordinary people lost their homes. ... 

On the public-trust side, people have been too willing to believe conspiracy theories about perfectly legitimate things like the Covid vaccine [and to applaud the appointment of an anti-vaccine loony to the job of Health Secretary]. Trump’s slashing of funding for science and research is a long-term disaster for America, and his war against top universities like Harvard and Columbia destroys one of the major advantages the US has on the rest of the world. But many cheer when revenge is taken on the so-called experts they think look down on them.

There are many genuine reasons to mistrust the people we see so frequently wheeled out by media and government as so-called experts. But you'd be a fool to abandon trust in genuine expertise—or to place that trust instead in know-nothing figureheads like a Trump or a Bannon or (closer to home) to a Winston, Tamaki or the like. 

The next rift he identifies however opens up in this era of Post-Truth Politics. Muder calls it Truth Decay, that realisation that in the marketplace of ideas, truth no longer matters. Post-modernism has won. The mainstream media's peddling opinion has betrayed their prior responsibility to just report the facts — both science and media have been corrupted by government money — and now reality is biting back in the form of a loss of public trust.

And now too many public figures neither know nor care. About anything. And certainly not about facts. Only a short while ago a Libertarian presidential candidate with unusually decent momentum was drummed out of the campaign by not knowing "What's Aleppo?" No, a Republican senator can confuse “gazpacho” with “Gestapo” and no-one blinks an eye.

Along with the lost of trust in experts and the inability of American society to agree on a basic set of facts, we are plagued by a loss of depth in our public discussions. It’s not just that Americans don’t know or understand things, it’s that they’ve lost the sense that there are things to know or understand. College professors report that students don’t know how to read entire books any more. And we all have run into people who think they are experts on a complex subject (like climate change or MRNA vaccines) because they watched a YouTube video.

Levels of superficiality that once would have gotten someone drummed out of politics — [like a Defence Secretary's inability to answer a straight question, or the Attorney General's ignorance of the separation of powers, or the president's complete incomprehension of the Constitution he had sworn only weeks before to defend and protect] — are now everyday events.

So the MAGAts have captured the low ground. For now. They've become the swamp. But in the absence of any coherent programme, all they have is pissing off their opponents. Making liberals cry. Essentially, at the end of the rot, what we are left with is this: Empathy is out. Assholery is in. Basically, when the rubber of MAGAt policies hit the road, they're intended to hit someone. "The cruelty is the point. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry. If people you don’t like are made poorer, weaker, or sicker — well, good! Nothing tastes sweeter than liberal tears."

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

And that was all just Trump's first term! It's already got much worse.

It’s hard to look at any list of recent Trump administration actions without concluding that these people are trying to be assholes. It’s not an accident. It’s not a side effect of something else. The assholery is the point.

In the absence of anything else of positive substance, that's really all there is.

Pretty sure they're failing on the first reqirement too.

"Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility. ... 

    "Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff [and to-the-point] podcasts, inaccurate [and accurate] social media posts and other unverified [and verified ]news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions [and also end them, and sow the harmony of that undefeated champion]. The Washington Post and the New York Times [and our own mainstream media] win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves." 

~ Jeff Bezos from his op-ed 'The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media'

 

It's the new unimproved, coerced Public Interest Journalism Fund

"The skirmishing continues between the mainstream media and Google (along with other major platforms) about the [so-called] Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill (or should that be the Coerced and Compelled News Media Subsidy Bill). ...
    "[W]hen the Bill was reported back from the Select Committee, the recommendation was that it go no further. Minister Goldsmith ignored that advice and decided to go ahead with the Bill, much to the consternation of the large digital platforms and the undisguised glee of the [to-be subsidised] mainstream media. ...
    "Google ... [has] been transparent with the Government that ... if the Bill is enacted Google will remove itself from the playing field and will hide [New Zealand] news stories from search results. ... Google would also discontinue its current voluntary agreements through which it partners with and provides some financial support to news publishers
    "[T]he [so-called] Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill is coercive in nature. It compels platforms to negotiate with mainstream media for a means of payment for linking to or aggregating their content. If agreement cannot be reached a regulator steps in and determines what payment should be made. Failure to comply attracts civil penalties.
    "This is neither fair – in that it is compelled and is backed by coercion and the power of the State – nor is it bargaining in that in the final analysis a regulator may fix a payment by diktat. ... [A 'tax' to pay a coerced media subsidy.]
    "[T]here is a solution ... but it lies in existing law, rather than in the creation of a new regulatory bureaucracy backed by a Bill the name of which is in direct contradiction to what it proposes to do. ... [T]he Platforms are ... “free-riding” on the content created by mainstream media ... directly or indirectly without the permission of the 'owner' of that content. Basically that amounts to copyright infringement and the Copyright Act 1993 provides for remedies for infringement as well as a licensing structure that enables a centralised body to administer payment of licensing fees for use of material. APRA for example looks after payments for the music industry. ...
    "The problem for mainstream media, if it insists on proceeding to support the [Bill] is that it will shoot itself in the foot. Whether they like it or not, most of mainstream media traffic is generated through platforms such as Facebook or Google. Should the platforms leave the news aggregation space, traffic to dedicated mainstream media sites will diminish and advertisers will be less likely to place content where the eyeballs seeing it are diminishing. If the [so-called] Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill is enacted, it may well be a Pyrrhic victory for media."

~ David Harvey from his post 'Google vs Media'

NZ Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill: "The better underlying question seems to be why anyone thinks there's a problem here to be solved."

"David Harvey reports that AI scraping could wind up being part of the revised NZ Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. ....
    "He [writes at length about] technical elements on whether the definitions work and whatnot.
    "The better underlying question seems to be why anyone thinks there's a problem here to be solved.
    "It's simple for a website to restrict against scraping. It would similarly be simple for a news site to licence its content for AI training, if anyone wanted to pay them enough to allow it. There is no obvious reason government needs to be involved in any of this."

~ Eric Crampton from his post 'Fun antitrust application'

"The suggestion is that the loss of Newshub and associated jobs is tantamount to the Last Trumpet. It is not."

"[Playwright] Eugene O’Neill said that by using the title 'Mourning Becomes Electra,' he sought to convey 'that mourning befits Electra; it becomes Electra to mourn; it is her fate; black is becoming to her and it is the colour that becomes her destiny.'
    "Newshub went off the air on Friday 5 July 2024. This was reckoned to be a sad day. Sad because a mainstream media platform was no longer being supported by its owners. Particularly sad for those who lost their jobs. In fact the outpouring of grief on that front has been repetitive to the point of banality. ...
    "I have always wondered at the media’s fascination with itself. It is, as [one commentator] suggests, 'an unedifying orgy of self-aggrandisement as Newshub journalists and broadcasters very publicly and ostentatiously mourn the imminent loss of their jobs…..
    "The suggestion is that the loss of Newshub and associated jobs is tantamount to the Last Trumpet. It is not. The Newshub closure represents a certain inevitability that those who worked for it have failed to recognise or understand. [Ironic for an organisation allegedly reporting the news.]
    "The communications landscape has changed utterly. ... Their self-absorbed narrative [has not.] ...[L]ike Elektra’s, [it remains] one of grief."

~ David Harvey from his post 'Mourning Becomes the Media'

" 'The Government is taking immediate action to support New Zealand’s media and content production sector.' This is both an unprincipled and a stupid decision."

"'The Government is taking immediate action to support New Zealand’s media and content production sectors, while it develops a long-term reform programme, Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith says.' ...
    "This is both an unprincipled and a stupid decision. I can handle principled stupid decisions and even unprincipled smart decisions but this is neither.
    "It is unprincipled because it is forcing successful companies in one industry (social networks and search engines) to fund failing companies in another industry (media). The only rationale for this is that Google and Meta have money and Stuff doesn’t. Will we see Netflix levied money to fund home video rental stores? Will we see Foodstuffs levied money to find Whitcoulls?
    "It is also a very stupid decision. ... The Government is going to pass a law to fund a media that will oppose almost everything that supporters of the Government believe in.
    "Even worse, it will set up a structural incentive for the media to become even more left leaning. ... [to] insist the levy be doubled ... [to] create an institutional bias in favour of the parties that will benefit media the most."

~ David Farrar from his post 'Stupid Government backing Willie’s bill'

"Relations between journalist media and government should always be bad and never on any account should be allowed to get better."

What is the ideal relationship between government and media? Editor, interviewer and media owner Andrew Neil tells the UK Parliamentary Inquiry that "Relations between journalist media and government should always be bad and never on any account should be allowed to get better." How should government help struggling media organisations? "You should stay the hell out," he tells them.

Q: Looking forward over the next few years, how interventionist do you think government should be in supporting the news sector, if at all, and what do you think would constitute government overreach?

Andrew Neil: You should stay the hell out of it. You do not know anything about it. You are only trouble. We are not on your side; you are not on our side. We are different. Relations between journalist media and government should always be bad and never on any account should be allowed to get better. I do not want any of your help. I have rebuilt the Spectator without any help from anybody here or any Government or any tax incentives or any intervention. You cannot even keep the streets safe at night. The Scottish Government cannot build two bog-standard ferries. This Parliament cannot build a single high-speed line, so stay out of news. You are just trouble. We do not want any help. I just do not want you to interfere. I do not want your tax subsidies; I do not want your help. I want you just to concentrate. I am a Jeffersonian. The Government should concentrate on doing what only government can do and do it well. We have government that concentrates on doing far too much, all of which it does badly. Please. We have gone through a major industrial upheaval, a major technological revolution, and we have come through the other side. We have lost people by the wayside. At times it has seemed like the Bataan Death March, but we have come through and we now know what we are doing and we just want to be allowed to get on with it. ...

Q: Should there be any support, public sector support, for local journalism, for local news?]

Andrew Neil: ... I would not overdo how great local news was. ... All these local newspapers depended on local government for advertising. They were not fearless seekers of truth, uncovering local government corruption and wrongdoing. That was done by the national papers which were not beholden to them, so I would not romanticise that. I think there are alternative forms growing up. Quite a lot of concerned citizens now produce blogs that are excellent commentaries and insights into what is happening in local government and they have big followings. Almost a kind of citizen journalism is the way for local journalism to go. I am more worried about regional newspapers ... I think that is a bigger problem but how you resolve that I have no idea. Sometimes things just change and you cannot replicate what happened before. The idea that government should subsidise local journalism fills me with horror because he who pays the piper in the end always calls the tune.

A Halfling has commentary and a lengthier excerpt.

"Our entire system of government lives on the basis of a dying industry."

"Our entire system of government lives on the basis of a dying industry. A system of representative government depends on an informed citizenry, and this in turn depends on institutions that bring them reliable information. When those institutions collapse and radically shrink, we can’t expect our system of government to just go on functioning, and this is behind some of the current dysfunction you see in our system....
    "You can say that the old 'mainstream media' was biased and deserves whatever happens to it. I wouldn’t, because for all its bias, I have always depended on the real reporting that is done by that media. The world is a big place, and a lot of things are happening in it. We need large institutions capable of reliably gathering and disseminating that information.
    "Moreover, the factors causing the collapse of the news media had nothing to do with its bias ... and they are making partisan bias worse. ...
    "People are increasingly getting their news from social media platforms such as Facebook or the platform formerly known as Twitter. But social media tends to be segmented by preexisting partisan loyalties; the algorithms feed us what fits our biases. Social media also tends to be dominated by political obsessives and fanatics, who post far more content than regular people.
    "So instead of news presented in a balanced way to a wide audience, social media feeds us whatever entrenches and exaggerates our existing loyalties....
    "...[T]his has been one of the big disappointments of the past few decades... Criticising 'the media' was a large and lively genre on the right, to which I have made my own contributions over the years. But when the right got the chance to build its own media institutions, it started out proclaiming itself 'fair and balanced' and ended up building a system of crude partisan propaganda. ... The complaint [from the right] that the mainstream media is biased turned out just to be a complaint that it’s not biased towards [their team]."

~ Robert Tracinski from his thinkpieces 'The Dying Industry on Which Our System Lives' and 'The Collapse of Media Leaves Us Flying Blind'

How many journalists understand the 'Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect'?

"Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. ...
    "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."
    "That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."

~ author Michael Crichton, from his 2002 talk 'Why Speculate?'

"Lately journalists have been behaving more like lawyers, marshalling evidence in favour of their own view and ignoring anything that doesn’t help their argument."

"Traditionally, science reporting was mostly descriptive—writers strove to explain new discoveries in a particular field. The new style of science journalism takes the form of advocacy—writers seek to nudge readers toward a politically approved opinion.
    “'Lately journalists have been behaving more like lawyers,' [Michael] Shermer says, 'marshalling evidence in favour of their own view and ignoring anything that doesn’t help their argument.' This isn’t just the case in science journalism, of course...."

~ James Meigs from his article 'Unscientific American'

A fast track to cronyism [updated]

 

The media has been slow to pick up on this National-led government's new policy to help out struggling media organisations.

The policy is to announce, and string out, a steady stream of announcements of blatant knuckle-dragging cronyism, primary among them that Fast-Track Approvals Bill, whose invited-applicant list will be an ongoing gift to every media organisation looking for a colourful headline.

And no on top of that, just to drive home the message, is this weekend's gift to television personality and National Party fund-raiser Paula Bennett of the position of highly-paid chair of Pharmac — in the very week they announce a $1.8 billion increase in the unaccountable bureaucracy's budget to $6.3 billion. Her qualifications for the role? In the absence of a single one of any relevance, one would have to speculate it was her record fund-raising and chasing of donors to the National Party at the last election.

And speaking of donors ....  even the worst resourced newsroom should be able to turn out a veritable assembly line's worth of regular feature articles highlighting which party donors have been favoured with which fast-track approval by three ministers of questionable morals and fitness doling them out like largesse at a corrupt king's court.

As I said a few days ago, it's not a "fast track" for you or me or that small renovation you've been putting off for years as just too damned complicated to contemplate — it's a fast track for cronies and for government bulldozers.

How about we all get the benefit a fast track for our projects, little and large, instead of being tangled up in years of the red tape governments festoon around us while cronies enjoy all the fruits of political favouritism?

In the meantime at least, let's watch the media take advantage of the Government's gift. It should be one that promises to keep giving long after the Public Interest Journalism Fund gives out ...

UPDATE: Yes, of course, businesses need to be able to build. And so do you and I —and for too long we've been stymied in trying to build. But this isn't help for you and me — and when National and Shane Jones promise to "help business" that invariably ends up meaning "help particular businessmen." Just as it does here.

It all started going wrong when they started calling themselves 'journalists' instead of reporters.

It's not like it's my job to fix the failing media's many problems, but here's where I reckon the problems started — and they were always about more than just disruptive technology ...

Here's my more detailed advice, which I first offered way back in 2009 (back when blogging was the latest next-big-thing):

Deborah Hill-Cone suggests in today's Business Herald that "bitter bloggers" who lambast the mainstream media for its manifest failings are duty bound to solve old media's problems for them, i.e., to shed some light on "how the [mainstream] media might turn a buck so we [the royal "we"?] can fund quality journalism." Ironically, her column is not online, so her audience have to rely on bloggers to retype it all for her, but here's her main beef, that 

"all this old versus new media aggro is just a distraction from the fact that neither [bloggers nor] Rupert Murdoch . . . have an answer for the future of journalism." 

Well, it's not like I'm duty bound to solve all the problems for the profession of journalism (there's more than enough problems in my own profession of architecture, thanks very much), but here's a simple enough solution for the old media to adopt -- so simple that even a journalist might understand.  Here it is:: 

            Recognise the division of labour, boys and girls, and just report the news!

We, the bloggers, can get on with commenting on the news, since that's what we do best; and you get on with finding and reporting the news, since that's what you're supposed to do best. In other words: 

• don't editorialise; 
• don't pontificate; 
• don't ask how people feel, ask instead what they saw; 
• don't report events as if people are outraged, just report the events themselves;
• don't report what everyone knows is transparent science fiction; report real science fact instead;
• don't report what "celebrities" do as if it matters a damn;
• don't report puff pieces about actors/musicians/writers as if they're not just puff-pieces for their new film/album/book; 
• don't report what everyone knows is just spin -- report instead what's being spun, and the news that someone is spinning, and who; 
• don't assume the whole world has the same values as your friends; 
• don't just rewrite press releases as if they were news; 
• and don't create the news yourself.
• In short, just report the news. All of it. Report it as if the truth actually mattered. 

Your role model in this new endeavour should not be Woman's Day, which your front pages and the Six O'Clock News more and more resemble, but the classic private detective whose motto should be hung over your desk in copperplate lettering: "Just the facts, ma'am." 

This week offers the perfect example of why people are switching off the mainstream. With 400,000 Americans taking up pro-freedom signs against their government, the mainstream media has either pretended they don't exist -- preferring instead to focus on the tough issues like the new White House dog -- or tried to suggest that all the protesters are insane. Meanwhile, the issue of the week in New Zealand, according to every news report every time I switch on the local media, is the latest in the Tony Veitch saga -— giving numb-nut so-called journalists the opportunity to interview each other over how well they did (or didn't) handle the story, and Mark Sainsbury and John Campbell the chance to wring their hands over the courage/bravery/pluckiness [delete one] of the two protagonists. 

No wonder no one can take mainstream "journalism" seriously any more. Instead of Philip Marlowe, we have to endure endless re-runs of Barbara Cartland. 

 

Reporting news, or manufacturing propaganda?

"If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly."

~ Thomas Sowell, from his 2012 column 'Mixing news and propaganda' [hat tip Thomas Sowell quotes]

"Substitute advocacy for objectivity, and the result is propaganda." And John Campbell.

JOHN CAMPBELL IS SAID to be a journalist. What we used to call a reporter.

Over at The Halfling's blog, he critiques John Cambell's view "that journalism is not an objective craft but a subjective one and that, in the final analysis, objectivity is impossible." What we used to call: an excuse for bad reporting. 

Beneath Campbell's essay-length excuse, writes The Halfling, "there is a very strong element or subtext of post-modernist critical theory." Campbell, he says, "equates 'truth' with story-telling rather than ascertaining truth from an empirical and evidence based examination. ... He then sweepingly and without any evidential foundation suggests that objectivity is a myth."

Campbell's self-contradictory assertion (asserting relativism as an absolute truth) at once dismisses every reporter who risk their lives in pursuit of the facts about a story, while providing the self-serving basis for his argument that he is entitled to use state television to broadcast his own opinions in the guise of "journalism." But as The Halfling observes:

In the course of human endeavours it is possible and at times necessary and essential to separate the subjective from the objective – in journalism as much as in justice. It would seem from Mr. Campbell’s discussion that he is unable or unwilling to do that.

How might a more honest Mr Campbell go about that? How would you know yourself to separate objective journalism from the subjective? Does it matter? Well, since Mr Campbell thinks he's defending journalism, he might reflect that (as the Associated Press Handbook still asserts) while "reporters are each driven by their own individual brand of curiosity, empathy, or downright pushiness, [what's still necessary are] solid interview techniques, source development, investigative and organisational skills, and keen objectivity to recognise, obtain, and effectively communicate a story to a reader, viewer or listener."

In summary, "'journalism,' as a distinctive literary genre, does not exist without objectivity." At every step.

You could start by looking at what objective journalism once meant, as the author of that last statement has done.  In his thesis on objectivity in journalism, Les Lane defines defines journalism as “an objective account of current events”: 

Objectivity, currency, and the focus on events, are journalism’s key ingredients. Take away any of them, and 'journalism,' as a distinctive genre, disappears. Substitute a focus on ideas for the journalistic focus on events, and you get academia. Substitute the past for the present and you get history. Substitute advocacy for objectivity, and the result is propaganda. 

Which is where Mr Campbell's work has ended up.

SO SINCE WE KNOW what propaganda looks like, let's focus instead on the objectivity that Campbell has abandoned. John De Mott of Temple University's journalism school identified three essential starting points for anyone calling himself a journalist:

Every vocation or occupational calling relies upon certain basic assumptions about the nature of reality ... Journalism is no exception, obviously. We assume three things:

    First, that there is such a thing as objective reality ... existingf incependent of our own individual existence.

    Second, that such reality ... can be comprehended – somehow – by a human mind.

    Third, that comprehension or understanding of objective reality ... can be communicated from one human mind to another.

It should be obvious that when a journalist (or alleged journalist, like Mr Campbell) denies objectivity in their profession, "they are also denying the possibility of it in any human endeavour."

Even if we're not clear on a definition of objectivity, when we tune into organisation purporting to report the news, there are several elements we would expect to encounter:

• Factual content: reporting the facts without the reporter’s own opinions, values, analysis, interpretation, partisan cause, or financial interests
• Accuracy: getting information right
• Impersonality/detachment: presenting the facts without first-person reference to the reporter’s impressions, feelings, actions, etc.
• Balance/fairness: reporting the different sides of a conflict, or opinions on an issue, without slanting toward one side
• Transparency: naming and explaining sources
• Independence: maintaining autonomy from sources of information and from other potentially biasing interests.

In coming out against objectivity, Canpbell is saying these things — accuracy, transparency, factual content – are less important than his own myth-making. 

Now that we know, we should take him at his word. And ignore him.

OBJECTIVITY DOESN'T SIMPLY MEAN pointing a camera at random and broadcasting the resulting "facts.  There are two issues: selection, and context.

Every good reporter selects the relevant facts to write about and broadcast; every newsroom editor which events and issues to cover. Every editor and reporter will have their own views, opinions and biases. Does that mean that "there is no real difference between factual reporting and opinion"? That all news is necessarily subjective? No:

"[O]bjective thinking is committed to truth and employs rational methods; subjective thinking involves willful disregard of the truth and/or the use of nonrational methods. The decisions journalists make in selecting what to cover and how to cover it can therefore be either objective or subjective, depending on their methods and their intent. ...

The key to objectivity is a commitment to telling the truth as best one can, without evasion.

HISTORICALLY, WRITES LANE, THE idea of  objectivity in journalism evolved through four stages, "from its emergence in the 1830s as Nonpartisanship, through Neutrality, Focus-on-Facts and Detachment, to the ambiguity of the present day." 

The 'Four Quadrants': the four evolutionary stages of journalistic objectivity
[from Lane, 'A reexamination of the canon of objectivity in American journalism (2001)']

Part of the problem, observes Lane, is "the assumption that objectivity is an ideal, absolute, impossible, incomprehensible, value-free state of being, outside of all physical, cognitive, psychological, and social contexts, where reality is perceived without distortions of any kind." To be objective in this confused view would be to somehow have access to "absolute truth" – to have the "God's-eye view on a story. To discard this impossible idea is the first step. The remedy, he argues, is what those four stages were struggling towards, which is Contextual Independence. There is one reality about which to report, and it is seen from many contexts — of which the reporter's is only one. An objective journalist therefore would be a reporter "who faithfully and accurately gets-both(all)-sides. ... In short, journalistic objectivity therefore becomes the ability to surf contexts."

Sounds like fun, right!

Note that arguing that "all knowledge is contextual" is not that same as saying that "everything is relative." It simply recognises that knowledge is always gained under certain conditions at certain times. "Journalists, like other seekers, must learn to trust themselves and their fellows and the world enough to take everything in" advises Michael Sschudson (author of the much-quoted Discovering the News), "while distrusting themselves and others and the appearance of the world enough not to be taken in by everything."

They would refuse, then, as some of them do now, either to surrender to relativism or to submit uncritically to arbitrary conventions established in the name of objectivity. This requires both personal and institutional tolerance of uncertainty and acceptance of risk and commitment to caring for truth. If this is difficult in journalism, it s nonetheless most vital, for the daily persuasions of journalists reflect and become our own.

Campbell has simply abandoned his calling. Perhaps his employers should be calling him on it.

MSM looking for a new handout

"I consider that [the so-called Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill] Bill is ill-conceived. It is a means of subsidising mainstream media which is having difficulty in adapting its business model to the Digital Paradigm. ...
    "The various initiatives and subsidies undertaken by the State - primarily in the form of the Public Interest Journalism Fund - have provided artificial support for mainstream media. Those subsidies have provided a disincentive for mainstream media to adapt to the Digitalk Information Paradigm in a more agile manner.
    "What the Bill proposes is a substitution of one subsidisation scheme for another. ...
    

"Because the problem is the free riding of mainstream media content by platforms like Google and Facebook the solution lies in the area of copyright and intellectual property. What is proposed by the Bill – which was introduced by Labour ... – is a bureaucracy to determine by what means and by how much the large digital platforms will subsidise mainstream media.
    "Reading the mainstream media submissions and listening to some of the oral presentations was somewhat depressing. But then, of course mainstream media would paint a gloomy picture. Who would not when there is a pot of gold at the end of the legislative rainbow.
    "Perhaps mainstream media should address the issue of why it is that public confidence in the news media is at an all time low rather than seeking yet another hand-out."

~ David Harvey from his post (and submission to) 'The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill'

MSM have "forgotten how to learn"

 

Media here feel like they're under attack. It's not just from the politicians that they attack, but it's part of the worldwide wind-down of all legacy media -- characterised locally by the struggles of Stuff and Newshub, and the demise of Today FM.

American commentator Ted Gioia sees it as part of a worldwide battle between "macroculture" (where we all used to watch the same television shows as our neighbours) and the increasingly dominant "microculture" that's destroying it. He reckons that the battle has already reached a tipping point, and in 2024 it will turn into a war.

Take this comment from payment processor Stripe, showing that while legacy media is dying, alternative media platforms continue to explode:

In 2021, we aggregated data from 50 popular creator platforms on Stripe and found they had onboarded 668,000 creators who’d received $10 billion in payouts. We refreshed that data in 2023 and found something surprising: the creator economy is still growing about as fast as it was in 2021. Today, those same 50 creator platforms have onboarded over 1 million creators and have paid out over $25 billion in earnings.

Meanwhile

According to a recent survey by the News Media Association, 90 per cent of editors in the United Kingdom “believe that Google and Meta pose an existential threat to journalism”

All this while streaming services and major newspapers enforce layoffs, Disney claims that "AI will be advanced enough" soon to "never bother with [actors or writers] again," and Hollywood itself seems in freefall.

"The most curious part of this," says Gioia, "is how people working inside the macroculture are the only folks that don’t understand what’s going on." 

They've forgotten how to learn, he reckons.

"A Primer on Objective Journalism"

"Objectivity [in journalism] does not mean not having an opinion. It means that one’s opinion is as fact-based and as logically integrated as one can make it.
    "[It] does not mean unbiased. A bias is an automated result of one’s previous experience and thinking. A bias will be good or bad depending on how good or bad that previous thinking was. For example, one may have a bias against child-abusers or a bias in favour of clear language. 

    "Objectivity does mean that one engages in introspection to be aware of one’s biases, that one is willing to challenge and change one’s assumptions, and that one is willing to put one’s beliefs to social testing via editorial review, debate, and other types of feedback."

          ~ Stephen Hicks, from his. "Primer on Objective Journalism"

'The Media and Politics'

"Journalists cannot serve two masters. To the extent that they take on the task of suppressing information or biting their tongue for the sake of some political agenda, they are betraying the trust of the public and corrupting their own profession."
          ~ Thomas Sowell, from his 2008 op-ed 'The Media and Politics'

[Hat tip Mike Webber] 

Quote of the Day: On getting a better relationship with the news

"Just about every problem we battle in understanding the news today — and every one we will battle tomorrow — is exacerbated by plugging into the social-media herd. The built-in incentives on Twitter and Facebook reward speed over depth, hot takes over facts and seasoned propagandists over well-meaning analysers of news.
    "You don’t have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook. In the long run, you and everyone else will be better off."
~ Farhad Manjooo, from his article 'For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned'

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• Just the Facts, Ma'am - NOT PC