Tag: media

Hispanics in the mist

One must salute the bravery of these two intrepid amateur zoologists as they go out into the deep, dark, wilderness of Los Angeles:

Can journalists only report about the issues of their own race? That’s the question being debated about two white journalists who decided to embed themselves in a home in the MacArthur Park neighborhood with at least seven undocumented Mexicans to “learn Spanish so that we can better report our native city.”

Reporter Devin Browne and photographer Kara Mears are documenting the yearlong project on a blog called The Entryway. The name is derived from the fact that the two share a bed in the apartment’s front entryway. They both pay rent to the host family. The blog, which started in March after a two-year search for a host family, has led to fair deal of criticism, and praise, from reporters and bloggers. Some call the project voyeuristic.

The most amusing part of what should prove to be a thoroughly amusing anthropological experiment on the two white girls was the fact that it took them two years to find a place they were willing to live. My guess is that the reporter will come to her senses and quit both the project and journalism the first time a cockroach gets in her hair while the photographer will get pregnant after a series of short affairs with gangbangers and eventually be arrested for being in possession of a handgun used to murder a convenience store clerk.

I do so enjoy the NPR/SWPL approach to every subject they “investigate”. It doesn’t matter if they are ice-fishing in Minnesota, climbing mountains in Tibet or chewing qat with jihadists in Yemen, look past the details and the story always ends sounds exactly as if Dian Fossey had written it. Because no matter what the subject nominally is, the only thing NPR/SWPL ever write about is how the nominal subject makes them feel.

The dangers of journalistic knowledge

To me, the amusing thing about this eye-opening experience is that it is apparently the first time this journalist has ever experienced the phenomenon. To those who actually possess more than a modicum of knowledge about anything, it is distinctly clear on nearly every page of every newspaper every single day:

Unlike most of the journalists covering the event, I was not an expert on that particular industry. It wasn’t my normal “beat.” The reason I was there was because I’d been interviewing the company’s CEO over the previous several months for a book project. But that also meant that while I wasn’t an expert about the industry in general, I was in the odd position of knowing more about the company’s “secret” product than any other journalist in the room.

It was an eye-opening experience. A lot of major news outlets and publications were represented at the press conference following the announcement. A few very general facts about the product had been released, but the reporters had only been introduced to details about it a half hour earlier. There was still a lot about how it worked, how it differed from other emerging products, and why the company felt so confident about its evolution and economic viability, that remained to be clarified.

But the reporters’ questions weren’t geared toward getting a better understanding of those points. They were narrowly focused on one or two aspects of the story. And from the questions that were being asked, I realized–because I had so much more information on the subject–that the reporters were missing a couple of really important pieces of understanding about the product and its use. And as the event progressed, I also realized that the questions that might have uncovered those pieces weren’t being asked because the reporters already had a story angle in their heads and were focused only on getting the necessary data points to flesh out and back up what they already thought was the story.

Almost every single time a major media outlet has done a story on me, someone related to me, or something related to me, there has been at least one factual error. Sometimes it is a big one, usually it is something pretty trivial, but it’s always there. Naturally, this renders me somewhat skeptical about the factual reliability of all the other stories I read in the media. Think about the last time a travel magazine or the New York Times wrote an article about a place you know well. Did they nail it or did they write about a few well-known places that are known to every tourist and no local actually goes?

The increasingly useless Wikipedia

It’s no myster why fewer and fewer people are bothering to contribute:

The research found that in the first three months of this year the English-language version of the site suffered a net loss of 49,000 contributors, compared with a loss of about 4,900 during the same period last year. Such contributing editors are vital to the integrity of Wikipedia, which relies on volunteers to create pages and check facts.

The study, conducted by Felipe Ortega at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, analysed the editing history of more than three million active Wikipedia contributors in ten different languages.

They’re all being driven off by a small cabal of privileged editors who camp on sites and attempt to push their left-wing ideological agenda. From what I’ve seen on the transformation of the page about me over time, they appear to be mostly college students who have plenty of time on their hands and a complete inability to understand the either the concept of objectivity or an encyclopedia.

Look at the difference between the page for Sam Harris and my page, for example. My page is little more than an attack on my views and attempts to minimize anything that might be viewed as positive, whereas Harris’s resembles a defense lawyer attempting to exonerate his client. The part about “conversational intolerance” is hilarious. On my page, for example, it’s very telling that the editors go out of their way to inform people about certain members of my family and not others, even though the positive story was a much bigger one in the global media than the negative story. Of course, it’s not at all Sam’s fault that his defenders are overly enthusiastic propagandists, but the difference between the two pages is indicative of the intrinsically flawed nature of Wikipedia and its uselessness with regards to anything even remotely controversial.

On the radio

Here’s a link to yesterday’s interview on Morning Magazine. It was a relatively slow day… only four interviews. This one, however, was not about the book, but the wars and Veteran’s Day.

The Obama administration’s dithering over whether or not to accede to the theater commander’s request for more troops is a good example of the sort of thing Michael McSorley and I were discussing. If you can’t make up your mind about such a relatively minor decision, then you clearly have no idea what you’re doing in the strategic sense. If Obama doesn’t have enough confidence in General McChrystal to grant his request without hesitation, he should either replace McChrystal or end the occupation and bring the troops home.

Personally, I suspect the troop request was a political CYA on McChrystal’s part. He knows he can’t win there because the US lacks sufficient loyalty from the famously fractious locals and he also knows Obama has zero desire to send more troops to Afghanistan, so the request for 40,000 troops is essentially McChrystal washing his hands of responsibility while hoping Obama has the balls to withdraw U.S. forces. I think he’s miscalculated and that Obama will ultimately send the requested troops because, like most individuals with weak characters, Obama is terrified of being correctly perceived as weak. If the general is fortunate, Obama will send fewer troops and give him the ability to claim that he wasn’t given the necessary forces required to do the job.

Of course, none of this ritual dance between commander and commander-in-chief has anything to do with either the U.S. national interest or the interests of the individual American soldier.