Wisdom in the wild, and other stories

Orion: Wisdom in the wild. What are the effects of removing the aged from a population? Are our hunting and fishing habits not only decimating numbers, but also breaking the cultural continuity of animals?

Guardian: My son, the terror suspect. A father tells the brutal and moving story of his son's conversion to Islam, travels to Pakistan, experiences fighting for the Taliban and eventual capture and suffering at the hands of his own government.

Common Dreams: One more reason why mountaintop removal is really stupid - along with poisoning rivers, destroying forests, levelling mountains and contributing to the destruction of a livable climate, it also doubles cancer rates in the local area.

Bright Green: What's happening in Somalia is no natural disaster.

And the prize for best rant on the Australian carbon price goes to this piece of inspired prose (which comes with a language warning).

Two naughty (Aussie) boys

In the last twelve months, two of the biggest news stories* have had some remarkable parallels. The best known character of each was male, born in Australia, worked in journalism and widely perceived to be arrogant and controlling. Both published secret information (allegedly) obtained by illegal means that others wanted kept private and which proved controversial and explosive. In both cases, the original source of the secret information was incarcerated. In both cases, the events opened the lid on the seedy underbelly of power acting in its own interests. In both cases, the Guardian played a major role in bringing the story to light and in both cases the subsequent legal drama played out in the UK (and to a lesser extent, the US).
*Biggest in terms of media attention they have received, not necessarily the most important at either an immediate or protracted scale.

But the two cases could also not be more different. In the first, an almost unheard of nobody took information that was leaked to him for free, which was of obvious public interest and revealed the double standards, corruption and abuses of power associated with some of the most world's most powerful polities. In the second, a household name and one of the most powerful people in the world owning and leading the world's largest media group was in charge of a newspaper in which a significant culture of double standards, corruption and abuse of power was rife, and which systematically stole and paid bribes for information that was very frequently not in the public interest from thousands of individuals and which was published for titillation and profit. The first, for all his faults, was holding power to account for its manifold abuses. The second, for all his strengths, is responsible for an immensely powerful organisation guilty of manifold abuses, repeatedly denied and (allegedly) illegally suppressed (and he apparently pays no tax). And yet some continue to compare or conflate the two as though they are both simply stories about "illegal hacking".

The outcomes in each case could also not be more different. Julian Assange was quickly labelled a terrorist, pressure from the US government on PayPal, Mastercard and Visa cut off WikiLeaks' funding, there were widespread calls - even from senior US politicians - for his assassination, he was condemned by his own Prime Minister without trial and, ironically, Murdoch media joined in and helped magnify the character assassination on multiple continents. Yet, as far as I am aware, none of those whose abuses he revealed have been charged or resigned. In contrast, so far, Rupert Murdoch has had his next plaything taken away, fielded some embarrassing questions, received professional PR advice to eat humble pie, and taken another kind of pie in the face. Arrests and resignations continue to happen to other people. If we take his repeated professions of ignorance at face value, then my conclusion is that a corporation that has grown too large for the boss to take responsibility for a culture of systematic abuses within it is a corporation that is too large. Julian Assange is not the Messiah; Rupert Murdoch is far more than just a naughty boy.
Image by ALS.

The Conversation: media done better

I frequently complain about the quality of mainstream media (for example, see yesterday's post or last Thursday's). Today I have a brief recommendation of an Australian-based alternative.

One of the (many) major problems with much contemporary commercial media is declining standards of journalistic expertise. This has numerous causes, including the rise of the 24/7 news cycle culture (blame the interwebs) and declining advertising revenues in traditional media (blame the interwebs). But the effect is that more and more news stories are barely re-hashed corporate press releases (known as churnalism) and even those that are not are frequently written by individuals with little background in their subject, making them more prone to shallow, inaccurate and falsely balanced reporting.

Wouldn't it be nice if real experts were to write stories on some of the complex topics we face? Wouldn't it be nice if articles were not simply filling the space between ads? Wouldn't it be nice if contributors' conflicts of interest were made more transparent? Wouldn't it be nice if readers were treated as more than the product being sold to the advertisers?

The Conversation aims to do just that. Just three months old, The Coversation is a not-for-profit independent news source where all the main contributors are academics at universities or the CSIRO. Writers can only contribute on topics they are actively researching or have a history of researching. Conflicts of interest, corporate funding or associations with think-tanks have to be acknowledged upfront. Anonymous comments are banned (indeed, one needs to have an academic email address to even contribute a comment). There are no ads.

One highlight is a recent series of fourteen articles called Cleaning Up the Climate Debate. Each of the articles is given a one paragraph summary here. They are worth more than a causal glance.

I have no conflict of interest in writing this post. It is just a good site.

News of the World 0; Guardian 1

Extraordinary. The world's most read (and most loathed?) English-language newspaper, in existence for 167 years, is to cease publication this Sunday after the rapidly developing events of the last couple of days. Rupert Murdoch's sensationalist tabloid News of the World has faced escalating revelations of wicked and illegal behaviour, including hacking the phones of up to four thousand people - royalty, politicians, celebrities, murder and terrorism victims and their families, soldiers killed in Afghanistan and those of their relatives - as well as interfering in police investigations, paying police for information, lying under oath and (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the rest of this list) hacking the phones of those involved in the investigations into their own misdeeds.*
*I would provide links to each of these, but it would take all day. There is extensive coverage here and just about everywhere.

Credit must go to the years of investigative work by Nick Davies at the Guardian, who kept following the story despite threats from NotW and scorn or lack of interest from many other mainstream media sources.

The fallout will continue for some time. There will be retrials, public inquiries, reform of how the media are (self-)regulated, questions about how one of the editors at the heart of the scandal ended up working for the Prime Minister, reviews in the role of police corruption and very serious questions (hopefully) about the BSkyB takeover that looked set to give Murdoch even more control over British media (and which ought to be rejected on media plurality grounds alone).
UK voters can sign a petition against the takeover and/or contact your MP.

I have no illusions that this will be the end of bad journalism, nor that Murdoch will be likely to change his ways, or lose his malign influence on the politics of too many continents. A publication like NotW doesn't get to where it was without an extensive public willing to pay good money to read gossip and slander. Those malformed desires will not disappear overnight. Other publications will quickly fill the void.

Nonetheless, perhaps this whole episode is a chance for us to stop momentarily and consider what really counts as news, and whom we trust to tell us about it.

Let us also remember that the self-righteous and vicarious schadenfreude offered by the gutter tabloid press at the failings and foibles of the famous is all too easily replaced with self-righteous and vicarious schadenfreude at the humiliation of that very press's flagship. So let us not rejoice at a black eye for Murdoch, but mourn for our own myopic moral vision that all too often secretly wishes to be kept in the dark.

"And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed."

- John 3.19-20 (NRSV).

Churnalism: when recycling goes bad

Churnalism. n. Journalism based significantly on a press release.

"There are more people working in PR than in journalism now."

"About 54% of news articles are derived at least partially from press releases."

I'd post original content, but I don't currently have time, so I'm just going to recycle a story. I wonder how different this piece is from the website's own press release.

Of course, even when journalists actually go beyond a press release, there is no guarantee of quality. I have been interviewed for a handful of news pieces, and have family and close friends who have been involved in dozens more pieces. Of these instances where I have had direct or very reliable knowledge of the story, I would estimate that more than three quarters of the published stories made basic factual errors, many of them non-trivial.

I have also been (briefly and part-time) a journalist and was frequently given press releases to work from (and not really expected to go beyond them).

Just because it is coming from a major news source doesn't mean it is news. In a recent post I warned against believing everything you read in comments on major sites. The moral of this story is, don't believe everything above the line either.

Making a mess is easier than cleaning it up

A major UK paper has been forced to retract an article filled with false smears against the IPCC and climate scientists. The so-called "Amazongate" scandal was a complete beat-up (like much of the woeful mainstream coverage of climate "scandals"). Basically every claim in the article was acknowledged as false or misleading. The real scandal was not found at the IPCC, but in a media and blog world where such claims were immediately picked up and echoed on literally thousands of sites. Ironically, the accusation levelled at the scientists (making claims based on unsubstantiated sources) was actually only true of the journalists and bloggers who repeated it.

The Sunday Times only made the embarrassing retraction when one of the scientists blatantly misquoted and slandered in the article complained to the UK's Press Complaints Commission.

The sad thing is that each step of the process of complaint, investigation and correction probably used considerably more time, energy and money than the original investigation and publication. Misinformation is much, much easier to create than to clean up. Much like oil spills, I guess.

Housing affordability: Gittins, good government and greed

Sydney Morning Herald economics editor Ross Gittins has yet another stimulating article in today's SMH on the hot topic of housing affordability. He argues that none of the 'solutions' currently being kicked around by the MPs will improve the situation. Increasing the first-home owners' grant, cutting stamp duty, a subsidised saving scheme or anything else that gives buyers more power will only make things worse, pushing prices up:

That is because genuine solutions to affordability are counter-intuitive - contrary to common sense - and pollies often settle for "solutions" that don't work but sound like they should. Because the fundamental cause of hard-to-afford prices is demand exceeding supply, the only genuine solutions involve either increasing supply or reducing demand.

Instead of giving more buying power to all buyers (thus raising prices), Gittins argues, we can cut demand by removing the tax-breaks associated with property ownership. I'll let you read the details of his proposed alternative (and why he says it will never be implemented), but I found the article interesting for three reasons.

First, this piece once again highlights the way that the media often shortcircuits effective government. The very media scrutiny required to keep governments honest also encourages short term, populist solutions, those that are easily packaged and 'sold' to the electorate. Partially this is due to our own lack of patience. We want to see results now, and we threaten political failure to those who don't deliver on time. But I think it is also due to a common misconception of the nature of representative democracy. It is a widespread assumption that MPs are there to reflect our preferences and opinions, that they ought to be swayed by public opinion. But do we want those who govern us to be held ransom to our collective prejudices? No, they ought to lead, to be swayed only by persuasive arguments, not a daily media-driven popularity contest. We elect representatives to make decisions for us, on our behalf. We give them the time, resources and authority to make and implement judgements on our behalf and for the common good. They are not simply agents to enforce the will of the majority.*

Second, I really hope that this issue (housing affordability) doesn't come to dominate the upcoming election campaign. Not only are there more pressing and more important issues that may get marginalised by it, but collectively focusing on this issue encourages us in our self-obsession. I don't need more help in thinking about myself.

And third, there is a better solution, both simpler and far more difficult than the one Gittins suggests: "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions." (Luke 12.15)
*Of course, there is more to be said on this topic. Andrew Errington has started a series on Jesus and government, in which he will (of course) be drawing heavily on the work of O'Donovan.
Fifteen points for guessing the English town in the picture.