Why I Publish "The Guelph-Back-Grounder"

I've always had a sort of "love/hate" relationship with journalism. A lot of my friends are professional reporters. But I've also found myself absolutely appalled by what gets published in newspapers or broadcast over the airwaves and Web---even the stuff that is quite mainstream. I've had people ask "Why?", so I thought I'd take a post to give at least some of the reasons.

First of all, let me be perfectly clear. A lot of people complain about the "lamestream media" and "fake news". I have been known to use those terms myself---but they mean very different things to different people. For the "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) types, what they mean by "fake news" is news that disagrees with whatever nonsense they are trying to promote. And "lamestream media" means whatever news source that publishes news that they don't want to hear. I mean something very different. For me, "fake news" is news that isn't supported by the facts. And the "lamestream media" is a news service that is more interested in ratings, continued access to important news makers, not offending advertisers, and, building the careers of "star journalists", than the facts.  

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I recently came across an interesting episode of The Big Think's YouTube channel titled Will America’s disregard for science be the end of its reign? One particular part of the show really caught my attention. Neil Degrasse Tyson talks about two specific problems with professional journalists: their need to be the first to break a story, and, their belief in an extremely simplistic definition of "balance".

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The COVID-19 pandemic coverage we all seen lately is a classic example of how the rush to be the first to report an issue does a profound disservice to ordinary citizens. Dr Tam has been reviled in some quarters because she said that ordinary folks shouldn't wear masks. Then she said they should, but a simple cloth mask worked fine. Then she said that a multi-layer mask was important. Some people asked "Why couldn't she make up her mind?"

More recently, we've seen the same process at work with regard to one of the vaccines.

• "The AstraZeneca vaccine is safe." 
• "Well, it can cause blood clots in a very small number of people." 
• "It's not the preferred one." 
• "Let's not give out anymore shots." 
• "It's not that dangerous to people when used for the second dose." 
• "Let's give it to people for their second shot if they've already gotten it for their first." 

Again, some folks are upset about this "flip flopping" and suggest that scientists don't know what they are talking about---. The point is, however, if you really understand how science works, this sort of "flopping back and forth" is exactly what bleeding edge research is supposed to look like. Indeed, if this sort of thing hadn't happened I would have been afraid that the authorities were hiding something from the general public.  

I would expand Degrasse Tyson's point and suggest that a lot of other types of news is pretty much like science reporting. We get the "fast-breaking" stories, but rarely the over-views that emerge among the majority of experts. For example, we often hear about how out-of-control housing prices have become---but rarely anything about how zoning regulations have effectively made high and medium density development illegal on the vast majority of municipal land all across North America. As a result, we simply have more demand for housing than we have supply---which leads to high prices.

Just like Degrasse Tyson suggests with regard to science stories, the Back-Grounder attempts to find the expert consensus on issues instead of the "bleeding edge" debate. The idea is that almost every important story has a background that underlies the day-to-day events. And if the reader can learn about that, they will be able to make sense of what is happening in the immediate here-and-now. For this reason, I find that a great many of my stories keep being read and exciting people's interest---long after I first published them. That's because almost all the important stories that affect people's lives are the result of long-standing structural issues. These don't go away when reporters decide a story is no longer "the flavour of the week". 

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I work hard on the Back-Grounder, so if you find it informative why not subscribe? You get to choose how much you pay. Patreon and Pay Pal make signing up a snap. If you can afford it and you like what I write, what's stopping you?

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The other issue that Degrasse Tyson raises is the reflective tendency of journalists to bring in an opposing point of view for "balance"---no matter how little credibility it might have in the expert community. This was probably the behaviour that made me the angriest. I tried time and time again to point out to reporters that all sources aren't equal and they need to check to see if someone really knows what they are talking about---to no avail. As long as they clearly attributed a quote, they took absolutely no responsibility for whether something they printed was actually true. Eventually, politicians learned that reporters do this, which is why it took years and years of Donald Trump bullshitting the American people before some of them would finally start telling readers and listeners when he was fibbing.

I understand why lamestream journalists do this. First, they are generally run off their feet because they need to keep up the competition to be the first to break a story. You cannot be the first and also be the most accurate---the two values are directly at odds with one another. Secondly, if your news outlet won't give journalists the time and resources to do lots of research, the only way to generate news is by getting quotes from primary sources. And the vast majority of news makers are not going to give a reporter repeated access if the stories produced identify when they lie, confabulate, or, bullshit.

So this secondary problem is a result of the primary one. Access to news makers for quotes is only really essential if you don't give your reporters enough time to do research themselves. But doing research takes much, much more time to do than just asking for a couple of quotes so you can hammer out some copy before the next deadline. (This is why I only write one real story a week instead of trying to come up with "breaking news".) 

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There's a third issue that I want to raise that doesn't come up in the Degrasse Tyson clip. That's the pernicious role that "opinion" plays in the lamestream media. There is a rock-like, core belief among all the reporters I've met that there is an absolutely impervious wall that separates "opinion" from "news". The idea is that "opinion" is just "opinion" and there's no reason at all to subject it to something like truth-testing. 

I can understand where this is coming from. I remember from my first philosophy course at university the specific class where the professor introduced the radical concept that "all opinions are not equal". The point is that if an opinion isn't based on true evidence or consistent with the rules of logic---it is pretty much worthless. A lot of people in my class had a hard time accepting this idea. And they had a point, our democratic society is based on the idea of "all men are created equal". Moreover, throughout human history there have been people who have treated people unfairly and refused to consider their opinions. 

But the key point to take from history isn't that all opinions are equally valuable, rather that we should only use rational reasons for dismissing some of them. Dismissing someone's ideas, for example, because of the colour of his skin or because she has internal reproductive organs is totally irrational. It's identified as such in informal logic by being called "the ad hominem fallacy", or, the attack against the person making the argument versus the argument itself. But refusing irrational prejudice by accepting all opinions as being equally valid is clearly a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Even if the basis of the opinion isn't the result of a reasoning flaw, there is also the issue of the assumptions that the person starts from. 

Moynihan, Wiki Media

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." Daniel Patrick Moynihan

 

 

Part of the problem is the growth of an entire industry devoted to the creation of "alternative facts". There are several elements to this. 

The first was probably the elimination of the "Fairness Doctrine" from US news. This was a law that existed from 1949 to 1987 that said that broadcasters had to do two things: provide a minimum amount of coverage of important social issues, and, ensure that different points of view were given equal access. This law was, in practice, hard to "fine tune" into creating a perfect balance. But it was able to prevent the spread of out-and-out inflammatory propaganda of the sort we saw with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.  

Secondly, there has been a concerted campaign to create a universe of fake facts. This includes things like alternative "think tanks" to push policy based on ideology instead of analysis, pseudo-grassroots organizations that are really controlled by a small number of individual donors, and, a whole world of nuttiness on line. One of  the most wacky is the creation of a "conservative" alternative to the Wikipedia, called the "Conservapedia". 

To just get a flavour of this last thing, I did a search on it about "climate change". This was the first part that I got from it. 

Climate change is the new name used by liberals for their global warming hoax, which they coined as it became obvious that there is no crisis in global warming. The modification in terminology is identical to what liberals did in redefining "evolution" to be "change over time," which of course is a meaningless expression just as "climate change" is. Numerous past predictions of climatic catastrophes have failed to hold up.[1]

I've left the hypertext links in the quoted section so you can see sort of "references" people use to back up their assertions. If you follow back the reference (ie: the "[1]"), you will see two references to Fox News, one to the Wall Street Journal, and, one to LifeSiteNews. The last one has an absolutely appalling rating with NewsGuard.

I'm making a fuss about all of this because I believe editors are missing something tremendously important, namely that a key part of whether or not people believe something comes down to whether or not they see or hear it from a wide variety of sources. We've allowed a whole environment of "alternative facts" grow up around us, and the lamestream media contributes to this whenever it allows people to spout nonsense on their op ed pages.

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Editors don't fact check what they put on their opinion pages. Instead, they tend to use an unconscious notion of what "conventional wisdom" says about things in general. 

To understand this, consider the fact no responsible journalist would ever print an op ed that argued that Jews should be exterminated in death camps because of the international conspiracy identified in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. My point is that they wouldn't do it because the Protocols is a piece of nonsense created by the Imperial Russian secret police in 1903, but rather because they have a general belief that it's not OK to write bad things about Jewish people. (There was that whole unpleasantness in World War Two, after all.) That's what I mean by "conventional wisdom". 

The problem is when you get into other things that are less obvious. The example that Degrasse Tyson uses is climate change. The editors and publishers of the mainstream media took far, far, far too long to look at the evidence and refuse to publish nonsense about something that will probably kill a lot more people than the Holocaust. That's because they were waiting for conventional wisdom to change before they used editorial control to push for a facts-based narrative in their papers. In doing so they were ignoring the fact that what they decided to print in the "mainstream news" has a great deal to do with creating the conventional wisdom that they were relying upon to justify what they printed. 

This is why the Guelph-Back-Grounder doesn't believe that there is a distinction between "news" and "opinion". Both of them should be logical and based on facts. That's why I use logical arguments and put in hypertext links to offer evidence. I get the odd person who opines to me that what I write is "slanted" and "not objective". But I usually respond by asking "What exactly do you find fault with in my argument?"---and haven't gotten a response yet. I don't think that this is because I never make any mistakes, but because the person complaining doesn't have much experience seeing journalism try to reason through things and come up with something that is a closer approximation of reality.    

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That's enough of a rant for one week. Remember to keep your distance, wear a mask, and, get vaccinated ASAP. Other than that, enjoy the warm weather---you know it's not going to last.

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Moreover I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!