Except...that it is. American has banned immigration from areas considered hostile all the time, including Germany prior to direct conflict and Russia before, when we had no participation. Wrong, yes. Horrible, yes. What Donald Trump said was horrible, and he should not be president. For the record, Jeb Bush told us last week that we should only accept Syrian Christians as refugees.
Why leave the quote incomplete? Isn't what he said bad enough with the full story? Would you vote for someone who believes in that?
We can't defend the Donald on this one, but we shouldn't be distracted from a much bigger problem, the American media. Some like to paint a picture of pitty for budgets in decline, blame Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, or MSNBC. Oh it's far far worse than that.
I was lucky to go to one of the schools foundational to American media. The Newhouse School at Syracuse University. Along with Northwestern, Duke, Penn, and USC (Columbia for print), it represents a foundation of American media, including broadcast journalism. I wasn't in broadcast journalism, instead concentrating on social science research with advanced methods in measuring attitudes through surveys and experiments. I did, however, have two enlightening experiences.
First I took a class on research of media effects in government from Tom Patterson. Tom was a research professor at the Maxwell School, the another big school on campus but for public policy, and often considered second to the Kennedy School (where he is now). Tom wrote a book called "Out of Order", which got him invited to speak to President Clinton. Out of Order spoke about the decline in American journalism, largely after Watergate. Tom concluded many things but determined that the media shifted to a role of extreme cynicism and highlighting conflict to the detriment of true investigation. Wow, stunning. It was that bad.
Down the hill at Newhouse I had a summer job. I checked broadcast journalism students into the live hit lab, where they practiced news reports. I listened to the instructors talk, including Ted Koppel once (an alum). What surprised me was that the first things students learned was artistic narrative. One student practice group basically told a story about Syracuse by bouncing a red ball through multiple frames, traveling with it and telling a narrative through the city. The instructors also told students that stories are best served in black and white, better yet as conflict and in a simple narrative. "It's your job to boil it down to that" was a refrain. At one point it also struck me that journalists only deal with one variable at a time. Complexity is unwelcome....regardless of whether or not its true.
Cheap News and Narrative Bias:
Narrative bias is not political bias. It's the idea that you are biased towards a story, creating a narrative out of different blocks of data to create a story. The problem of course is that very often there isn't a story...things occur in a random fashion (most often they do). The journalist, when forcing a narrative, violates this fact.
Hasn't it always been this way you ask? No...an alternative to a narrative is bulleted facts, and this is exactly what the news used to be more like. Look at this NBC special report on the assassination attempt on President Reagan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghgORfFt_9w
I was lucky to go to one of the schools foundational to American media. The Newhouse School at Syracuse University. Along with Northwestern, Duke, Penn, and USC (Columbia for print), it represents a foundation of American media, including broadcast journalism. I wasn't in broadcast journalism, instead concentrating on social science research with advanced methods in measuring attitudes through surveys and experiments. I did, however, have two enlightening experiences.
First I took a class on research of media effects in government from Tom Patterson. Tom was a research professor at the Maxwell School, the another big school on campus but for public policy, and often considered second to the Kennedy School (where he is now). Tom wrote a book called "Out of Order", which got him invited to speak to President Clinton. Out of Order spoke about the decline in American journalism, largely after Watergate. Tom concluded many things but determined that the media shifted to a role of extreme cynicism and highlighting conflict to the detriment of true investigation. Wow, stunning. It was that bad.
Down the hill at Newhouse I had a summer job. I checked broadcast journalism students into the live hit lab, where they practiced news reports. I listened to the instructors talk, including Ted Koppel once (an alum). What surprised me was that the first things students learned was artistic narrative. One student practice group basically told a story about Syracuse by bouncing a red ball through multiple frames, traveling with it and telling a narrative through the city. The instructors also told students that stories are best served in black and white, better yet as conflict and in a simple narrative. "It's your job to boil it down to that" was a refrain. At one point it also struck me that journalists only deal with one variable at a time. Complexity is unwelcome....regardless of whether or not its true.
Cheap News and Narrative Bias:
Narrative bias is not political bias. It's the idea that you are biased towards a story, creating a narrative out of different blocks of data to create a story. The problem of course is that very often there isn't a story...things occur in a random fashion (most often they do). The journalist, when forcing a narrative, violates this fact.
Hasn't it always been this way you ask? No...an alternative to a narrative is bulleted facts, and this is exactly what the news used to be more like. Look at this NBC special report on the assassination attempt on President Reagan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghgORfFt_9w
This is on the same day as the attempt, interrupting evening prime time reporting. John Chancellor, an old school journalist lays out in 9.5 minutes the facts and always is careful to point out what is not known. At no point is a narrative being constructed. "for this evening, there really is nothing more to report" says Chancellor upon signing off. This was way back in....1981. No narrative bias here. Can you imagine that today?
Narrative bias is also combined with cheap news. There many good journalists remaining today, but they are a rare bird who go to dig up facts and investigate. More reporting today is done with "he said, she said" press releases. A journalist calls one side asking for a comment and a rlease is given, they they call the other side. Bam, story written.
No news is cheaper than crime, war or terrorism. There you have the state (be it police, military, or leaders) who direct journalists right to the scene. There they can find black and white, conflict and a narrative already written for them. The damage they do with it is not small. In the 1980s researchers captured a small window in the development of television service in British Columbia. In the three city study they compared three places with similar crime rates. One had cable TV, the other just broadcast, and the other was too remote for either and had nothing. As it turns out those who lived in the cabled city overestimated crime dramatically, fearing the trouble in their world. They over indexed dramatically in this perception. We know for a fact that news does this.
This troubled me particularly this week when my mother, who is recovering from an illness and has consumed alot of TV lately seemed depressed about the world. She's had CNN on all day long...even the main broadcast stations are nearly as bad. John Chancellor signing off...heck no.
Now let's revisit the narrative bias and throw in a dose of politics. It's not enough that the news media has been corrupted by what Tom Patterson referred to in Out of Order, or that they have increased fear in our society...nope. They've gone one step farther. Journalistic trash like Bill O'Reilly and Rachel Madow (and their associated blogs) constantly embellish news to make it fit....boom....a narrative. My left and right friends might be uncomfortable with this, but I consider both these "journalists" to be the worst of human scum...living and thriving off of fear. They are pathetic.
They also do something far far more evil. They make us question everything in the news now. Maybe that's healthy, except when cynicism drives us toward ad hominem interpretation of facts...oh Fox said that, CNN said that, NPR said that...then what is left?
Many editors decided to leave the longer Trump quote out of the story. It complicated the narrative...adding just a hint of nuance. Did it matter in policy? Probably not that much. Trump is an idiot on this issue. What it did do though is provide an out for a large percentage of Americans to discount how bad it was. THis is the same goddamned thing that happens with climate change reporting btw.
The race to the bottom has taken most of American journalism with it...every local paper plays with headlines and now copy like they never used to. Narrative bias is the rule, not the exception. Cynicism is at an all time high and no one is grounded.
There is one conclusion. Journalists in our day really perform the role of drug dealers. They create the marketing, the demand (for Trumps and maybe even for terrorists?), and the distribution of stories that damage our society.
The best thing that we can do, is to tell the journalists and blog media that supports our views but who engages in this nefarious conduct to fuck off, go to hell, and in doing so say they are destroying the fabric of our society along with their counterparts who seem opposite politically but are the same character wise. It's time to be brutally honest.
These are scum. They are hurting your parents, your children, and your friends.
No news is cheaper than crime, war or terrorism. There you have the state (be it police, military, or leaders) who direct journalists right to the scene. There they can find black and white, conflict and a narrative already written for them. The damage they do with it is not small. In the 1980s researchers captured a small window in the development of television service in British Columbia. In the three city study they compared three places with similar crime rates. One had cable TV, the other just broadcast, and the other was too remote for either and had nothing. As it turns out those who lived in the cabled city overestimated crime dramatically, fearing the trouble in their world. They over indexed dramatically in this perception. We know for a fact that news does this.
This troubled me particularly this week when my mother, who is recovering from an illness and has consumed alot of TV lately seemed depressed about the world. She's had CNN on all day long...even the main broadcast stations are nearly as bad. John Chancellor signing off...heck no.
Now let's revisit the narrative bias and throw in a dose of politics. It's not enough that the news media has been corrupted by what Tom Patterson referred to in Out of Order, or that they have increased fear in our society...nope. They've gone one step farther. Journalistic trash like Bill O'Reilly and Rachel Madow (and their associated blogs) constantly embellish news to make it fit....boom....a narrative. My left and right friends might be uncomfortable with this, but I consider both these "journalists" to be the worst of human scum...living and thriving off of fear. They are pathetic.
They also do something far far more evil. They make us question everything in the news now. Maybe that's healthy, except when cynicism drives us toward ad hominem interpretation of facts...oh Fox said that, CNN said that, NPR said that...then what is left?
Many editors decided to leave the longer Trump quote out of the story. It complicated the narrative...adding just a hint of nuance. Did it matter in policy? Probably not that much. Trump is an idiot on this issue. What it did do though is provide an out for a large percentage of Americans to discount how bad it was. THis is the same goddamned thing that happens with climate change reporting btw.
The race to the bottom has taken most of American journalism with it...every local paper plays with headlines and now copy like they never used to. Narrative bias is the rule, not the exception. Cynicism is at an all time high and no one is grounded.
There is one conclusion. Journalists in our day really perform the role of drug dealers. They create the marketing, the demand (for Trumps and maybe even for terrorists?), and the distribution of stories that damage our society.
The best thing that we can do, is to tell the journalists and blog media that supports our views but who engages in this nefarious conduct to fuck off, go to hell, and in doing so say they are destroying the fabric of our society along with their counterparts who seem opposite politically but are the same character wise. It's time to be brutally honest.
These are scum. They are hurting your parents, your children, and your friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment