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the reporter Mr.Chua Eng Wee of LianHe ZaoBao told me on phone in the evening of 19 May 2012 that someone from your group had called to SPH and requested to add in one sentence for their news report. On 19 May 2012 4pm, PM Lee and his team are all with your group together for the visitation. Thus, if you don’t investigate and clarify clearly, people may think it maybe PM Lee’s team who did it.
Speaking to TODAY, PAP Member of Parliament Baey Yam Keng, who sits on the Government Parliamentary Committee for Information, Communications and the Arts, reiterated that "no one can control the media and any responsible media would want full editorial independence".
Both advocacy and journalism are fundamental to a healthy democracy, but when they are mixed together, especially on the news pages of the NYT, neither is served particularly well. Please count me among those who prefers to get news from plain vanilla journalism, not the yellow kind.
The barrage began on March 23rd at Uncommon Descent, where Sal Cordova picked up several quotes from a recent Rationally Speaking post (on “Universal Darwinism” — he got the link wrong, don’t know for sure if by unintelligent design or what). Cordova ended the short post by summarizing my position thus: “Dennett is wrong, Dobzhansky is wrong, Dawkins is wrong, and Pross (the author Pigliucci critiques) is wrong. Grand slam!” To which he added: “Duane Gish said it better: ‘Nothing in evolution makes sense in light of biology.’”
Of course I did not say anything like “Dennett, Dobzhansky, Dawkins and Pross are wrong” across the board, and instead disagreed with specific statements and positions taken by these writers. But apparently if you are a creation-fundamentalist the very concept of honest disagreement and open discussion eludes you. And so does the idea that the nature of science makes it an open-ended enterprise where progress is made in part precisely because people disagree.
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Dobzhansky exaggerated when he famously wrote (not in a technical paper) that “nothing in biology makes sense if not in the light of evolution.” I stated the obvious: plenty of research has been done in biology (e.g., during much of the molecular biology revolution) by moving evolution to a background condition, without explicitly taking it on board. But this is as controversial as to say that much research has been done in physics (e.g., non-equilibrium thermodynamics) without explicitly taking on board quantum theory. To go from there to say that one can therefore reject/deny either evolutionary biology or quantum physics is nonsense on stilts.
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My second claim was that I think that some of my fellow atheists of late have been a bit too quick at declaring things like consciousness to be an “illusion", since such conclusion is based on questionable metaphysical grounds and indeed is pitted against some of the best neurobiological evidence to date. But are the good folks (ahem) at Uncommon Descent now saying that people who think consciousness is a real phenomenon are somehow bound to accept metaphysical fables concerning the existence and postmortem survival of the soul? I don’t think so.
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This morning, Today published an article both in print and online versions on the Yale-NUS saga.
They quoted a Kent Ridge Common article, Do We Need Yale?, and its author, Koh Choon Hwee.
Without bothering to contact us to confirm the gender of Koh Choon Hwee, they assumed that she was ‘male’, and referred to her as “Mr Koh“. Further, Miss Koh had written two articles (here and here) for Today newspaper before.
Secondly, while they took the care to name their sources in the case of Yale, as in – “ Yale Daily News – an independent newspaper published by Yale University students -”, they did not bother to name their source, Kent Ridge Common, but instead referred to it as “NUS’ student newspaper”.
We are not that vain or publicity-hungry, so the quibble here is less about the double-standards and hypocrisy demonstrated in the media coverage afforded to foreign, branded university student-run newspapers in contrast to that which is dispensed to local, obscure university student-run newspapers.
Recall that in the aftermath of initial revelations about Peter Gleick's phishing of the Heartland Institute, we heard defenses of his action that included claims that he was only doing the same thing that journalists do to the importance of looking beyond Gleick's misdeeds at the "larger truth." Consider also what was described in the UEA emails as "pressure to present a nice tidy story" related to climate science as well as the IPCC's outright falsification related to disasters and climate change. Such shenanigans so endemic in the climate change debate that when a journalist openly asks whether the media should tell the whole truth about climate change, no one even bats an eye.
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Real life is messy. And as a general rule, the more theatrical the story you hear, and the more it divides the world into goodies vs baddies, the less reliable that story is going to be.
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some people do feel that certain issues are so important that there should be cause in political debates to overlook lies or misrepresentations in service of a "larger truth" (Yellow cake, anyone?). I have seen this attitude for years in the climate change debate (hey look, just today), and often condoned by scientists and journalists alike.
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The attacks of 9/11 brought about an almost instant reordering of newsroom hierarchies.
Old South Asia hands who knew their way around Afghanistan and Pakistan were suddenly in high demand. Former Kabul correspondents, neglected for more than a decade after the withdrawal of Soviet Union, found themselves speedily rehabilitated and sent back to the Hindu Kush. Arabists who could not only pronounce the names of terrorist suspects but also read the Jihadist websites that fired terrorist imaginations also raced up the rankings.
But in the new journalistic caste system, security specialists with good contacts in the intelligence community quickly rose to the top. The new Brahmins were the harvesters of secrets.
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News organisations will always reward the brave and the fearless, the clever and the articulate, the well-read and prescient. But increasingly the secret to journalistic success in the post-9/11 world is to become a reaper of secrets.
It is unlikely that Rick Santorum, or many of his followers, have read any post-modern theorists. Santorum, after all, recently called Obama a “snob” for claiming that all Americans should be entitled to a college education. So he must surely loath writers who represent everything that the Tea Party and other radical right-wingers abhor: the highly educated, intellectual, urban, secular, and not always white. These writers are the left-wing elite, at least in academia.
But, as so often happens, ideas have a way of migrating in unexpected ways. The blogger who dismissed The Washington Post’s corrections of Santorum’s fictional portrayal of the Netherlands expressed himself like a perfect post-modernist. The most faithful followers of obscure leftist thinkers in Paris, New York, or Berkeley are the most reactionary elements in the American heartland. Of course, if this were pointed out to them, they would no doubt dismiss it as elitist propaganda.
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Of course, not everything in the mainstream media is always true. Mistakes are made. News organizations have political biases, sometimes reflecting the views and interests of their owners.
But high-quality journalism has always relied on its reputation for probity. Editors, as well as reporters, at least tried to get the facts right. That is why people read Le Monde, The New York Times, or, indeed, the Washington Post. Filtering nonsense was one of their duties – and their main selling point.
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It is unlikely that Rick Santorum, or many of his followers, have read any post-modern theorists. Santorum, after all, recently called Obama a “snob” for claiming that all Americans should be entitled to a college education. So he must surely loath writers who represent everything that the Tea Party and other radical right-wingers abhor: the highly educated, intellectual, urban, secular, and not always white. These writers are the left-wing elite, at least in academia.
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The case illustrates a genuine dilemma: there is no obviously superior way to engage in online criticism. Every strategy involves trade-offs, its benefits accompanied by costs. There are at least four approaches available to those who want to engage in critical commentary.
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The truth is, criticism can be insulting, vulgar and defamatory – and still miss the target. Conversely, criticism can be polite and devastating.
Take, for example, Alex Au’s critique of Lee Hsien Loong’s leadership, published in Yawning Bread last May. Alex certainly ignored the OB marker that citizens should criticise policies but not politicians. But his blog did not cross any legal threshold, including defamation.
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There is obviously an enormous appetite for no-holds-barred, publish-first-think-later commentary – not because people like nonsense, but because they want to decide for themselves what's nonsense and what isn't.
we had a chat with Gavin Schmidt, who for 15 years has been a climate researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and, in 2004, spearheaded the launch of Realclimate.org. The blog has become a vital online touchstone for anyone eager to assess what’s known and yet to learn about greenhouse-driven climate change. Here’s our conversation (which was recorded on Feb. 13, so there’s no discussion of Schmidt’s views on the Heartland Institute saga; his thoughts are here):
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There’s a need for training and in filling in the gaps between the extremely casual tweeting, say, and the I.P.C.C. assessment report. There’s a whole range of levels of communication that could fit in between those two things…. The stuff in the middle, that’s where the people who know what they’re talking about should be acting, because we’re not there collectively now.
Some of us are. But we’re not there collectively, and that kind of cedes that whole field to the people who don’t know anything and the people who are more fond of their own voice than they are of the facts and the people who want to disinform and misinform the public.
So it’s that area in the middle, the hinterland between the paper and the tweet, where I think there’s a lot more scope for us to communicate and where, quite frankly, the field is wide open.
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Drones play an increasing and controversial role in modern warfare. From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iran and Yemen, they have become a ubiquitous symbol of Washington's war on terrorism.
Critics point to the mounting drone-induced death toll as evidence that machines, no matter how sophisticated, cannot discriminate between combatants and innocent bystanders.
Now drones are starting to fly into a more peaceful, yet equally controversial role in the media. Rapid technological advances in low-cost aerial platforms herald the age of drone journalism.
But it will not be all smooth flying: this new media tool can expect to be buffeted by the issues of safety, ethics and legality.
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Instead of acquiring military-style multi-million dollar unmanned aerial vehicles the size of small airliners, the media is beginning to go micro, exploiting rapid advances in technology by deploying small toy-like UAVs to get the story.
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Last November, drone journalism hit the big time after a Polish activist launched a small craft with four helicopter-like rotors called a quadrocopter. He flew the drone low over riot police lines to record a violent demonstration in Warsaw. The pictures were extraordinarily different from run-of-the-mill protest coverage.
Posted online, the images went viral. More significantly, this birds-eye view clip found its way onto the bulletins and web pages of mainstream media.
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any conclusion about the pace of emissions cuts necessary to limit dangers from climate change is implicitly as much (or more) about economics as science.
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climate change is a complex phenomenon, subject to great uncertainty, with changes in our knowledge occurring virtually daily. Climate change is unlikely to be catastrophic in the near term, but it has the potential for serious damages in the long run. There are big economic stakes in designing efficient approaches. The total discounted economic damages with no abatement are in the order of $23 trillion. These damages can be significantly reduced with well-designed policies, but poorly designed ones, like the current Kyoto Protocol, are unlikely to make a dent in the damages, will have substantial costs, and may cool enthusiasms for more efficient approaches. Similarly, overly ambitious projects are likely to be full of exemptions, loopholes, and compromises, and may cause more economic damage than benefit.
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the best approach is one that gradually introduces restraints on carbon emissions. One particularly efficient approach is internationally harmonized carbon taxes – ones that quickly become global and universal in scope and harmonized in effect. A sure and steady increase in harmonized carbon taxes may not have the swashbuckling romance of a crash program, but it is also less likely to be smashed on the rocks of political opposition and compromise. Slow, steady, universal, predictable, and boring – those are probably the secrets to success for policies to combat global warming.
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a cursory look at the “standard operating procedure” (SOP) laid down by the powers on high for our traditional media could well explain MHA’s “plan” to make the announcements on 25 January. The SOP would have required every reporter to check facts with the government with the understanding that the story cannot run until the government has replied. This is evidenced by the curious style of newspaper reports in Singapore: the government’s reply comes first before the substance of the story is reported in subsequent paragraphs. For decades, reporting any story without the government’s stand incorporated within it would constitute “unbalanced” reporting, a cardinal sin according to the high priests of Singapore. My guess is that Wanbao would probably have tried to check facts with MHA, and MHA must have stalled for time. In other words, MHA would have known for days, (weeks?) that the news was likely to break.
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I argued that at the technocratic level, the government is trying to be more effective and responsive in meeting housing, transport and similar bread-and-butter concerns. However at the paradigmatic level, they are still complacent. They still believe that the old ideology of craving foreign investment, throwing pieces of gold at top talent, keeping less-than-top talent as cheap as possible, going for broke over GDP growth, going as fast as they can on immigration, remain the best ideas there are. If there is voter resistance, it is the voter who is wrong, not the PAP, though small concessions and dollops of public relations may be used to bridge the gap.
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The third tier (which I called Group C in the earlier article) comprises the issues the party considers of existential importance. On these, they will resist as hard as they can. They are acutely aware that they risk losing power altogether if they let go of these old habits. Control of media, and the associated control of the national agenda are among them.
“By using HDR,” he told me by email, “The Washington Post has combined different moments, and thereby created an image that does not exist. The aircraft visible in the final product was not there for all the other moments combined into the final, and that alone simply raises too many questions about the factual validity of the actual published image.”
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“We were trying to be upfront, to tell the reader we used technology to achieve this result,” du Cille said. “ ‘Composite’ is probably what confused people, because in this case, it is a composite of exposures, not of an element” of the photograph.
Irby said the Post had the right idea by disclosing the technique, but could’ve done more to explain how and why that photo was chosen. “The caption definitely does offer you new insight about the photo. However, it presents more questions than usable information.”
Du Cille said he may write something for the Post explaining how the photo was made and why it was used. But he said that the issue is transparency about techniques, not the technique itself.
“I want our photographers to be experimenting with a range of things, not just technologies,” he said. Although HDR is uncommon now, “Ten years from now, HDR may be built into cameras, and who will know it?”
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But Sean Elliot, president of the National Press Photographers Association, said, “HDR is not appropriate for documentary photojournalism.”
Friday’s front page carried a photograph marking the 30th anniversary of the crash of Air Florida’s flight 90 into the 14th Street Bridge. The photo was taken using a high dynamic range. Several readers and journalists have questioned its use. On Saturday, Poynter.org ran a story about the photo and some of the reactions to it.
I selected the photograph, taken by Bill O’Leary, because it was a visually arresting image of the bridge.
Regular readers will know that I think that the print media overall has done a pretty good job on covering the science of climate change, if not always getting the politics right. They will also know what I think about the "debate" over climate change and extreme events (above). But every once in a while I see a story that is so breathtakingly bad that it is worth commenting on. Today's installment comes from Justin Gillis at the New York Times and was published on Christmas Eve. The article is so bad that it might just be the worst piece of reporting I've ever seen in the Times on climate change.
Previous attempts at drafting guidelines for science reporting failed because they came from the scientific community, looking like tablets of stone handed down from a priesthood of scientists. But these days many science reporters agree that basic guidelines would protect them from the vagaries of their news editors' preferences. The Science Media Centre also suggests making sure that newspapers include science in the training package for all reporters, editors, and copy editors.
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The media were not solely responsible for the MMR scare, but some of the news values that caused the problem are alive and well: the appetite for a great scare story; the desire to overstate a claim made by one expert in a single small study; the reluctance to put one alarming piece of research into its wider, more revealing context; journalistic "balance"—which creates the impression of a significant divide in scientific opinion where there is none; the love of the maverick; and so on.
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Every story on new research should include the sample size and highlight where it may be too small to draw general conclusions.
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In Germany, there is news today (here) about a prominent climate scientist who earlier this year saw a court rule against him and in favor of a journalist, Irene Meichsner. The basis for the lawsuit was what one observer of the German media calls "personal defamation" by Rahmstorf against the journalist.
A freelance journalist becomes the target of the renowned climate researcher Stefan Rahmstorf, who in the struggle for the supposed truth does not stop short of personal defamation.
In the name of the people, a ruling was announced on 9 February this year, which was remarkable: the defendant was sentenced by the 28th Civil Chamber of the Cologne District Court, Germany, "to (…) refrain from giving the impression that
a) the claimant had plagiarised the blogger Richard North and the journalist Jonathan Leake;
b) the claimant had asked the defendant via the editors of the Frankfurter Rundschau to remove the name of the claimant from the blog post of the defendant “FR withdraws article against the IPCC” and name only the Frankfurter Rundschau."
In addition, the defendant must pay the claimant €511.58 plus interest and pay two-thirds of the cost of litigation. The Chamber justified its sentences by noting that it was a case of untrue factual allegations, which infringed the claimant’s personal rights "because the objective misrepresentation cannot be classified as value-free."
This ruling is particularly intriguing because the defendant is the climate researcher Stefan Rahmstorf who has often sharply criticised false representations in media reports in his blog (http://www.scilogs.de/wblogs/blog/klimalounge). At least in this case, in which he sets his sights on an article in the Frankfurter Rundschau of 8 February 2010, he seems not to have heeded the rules that he has repeatedly urged journalists to observe: the acquisition of expertise on the matter and the correct representation of facts.
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the malice, which Rahmstorf shows for the author of the article, seems like personal defamation that has no place in public disputes. Not even – or, should I say, especially not - when it comes to a subject as important as climate change. Much of Rahmstorf's way of behaving in this case is reminiscent of what he has always argued against so eloquently: the facts are polished until they support a predetermined interpretation. This case is only superficially about facts that may be true or false. Rather, it is about the importance which is assigned to specific facts in the reporting on climate change. These interpretations are not sacrosanct. There is no one who can or would want to deny Stefan Rahmstorf and other climate scientists the right to criticise interpretations they consider inappropriate and to counter them with others. But anyone who, like Rahmstorf, fails to distinguish carefully between facts and interpretation and applies the one-dimensional criterion of right and wrong to both, enters the arena of a public battle of opinions. Disguised as a scientific expert, he is really a political agitator. He does not fight against false factual claims, but against unpopular interpretations, and in this case he also employs unfair means, as the verdict of the Cologne court documented. The fact that Rahmstorf has now changed or entirely removed certain passages from his blog post of 26 April 2010 without informing his readers about it, all fits into the picture.
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The moral of the story is not very encouraging - because Rahmstorf has had considerable success. The move that led to the article being withdrawn by the FR made it onto the front page of the New York Times, as Rahmstorf, obviously rather gratified, tells his readers in his blog of 25 May. His initiative is mentioned in the New York Times as one of several successful attempts by climate researchers to publicly correct grossly distorted or false reports. In some cases this may be justified. In this particular case, it is nothing less than a demonstration of how to try and suppress unwelcome interpretations using an authoritarian concept of truth and with the help of a media conspiracy theory based solely on isolated cases and thus basically void of empirical substance.
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In Germany, there is news today (here) about a prominent climate scientist who earlier this year was convicted of defaming a journalist, Irene Meichsner.
The case (described in detail in English here) has to do with Meichsner's reporting of errors in the IPCC 2007 report in early 2010 in the Frankfurter Rundschau. The scientist, Stefan Rahmstorf (known in the US as a blogger at Real Climate and whom I've occasionally sparred with) is a German government advisor who strongly attacked Meichsner for her coverage of the IPCC. His attacks prompted the Frankfurter Rundschau to subsequently correct Meichsner's reporting, apparently based solely on Rahmstorf's say so, such was his authority.
Meichsnner, believing that she had done no wrong, sued. The Cologne court then decided in her favor, concluding that Rahmstorf's attacks were unsupported by evidence and even libelous.
Interestingly, in the US, Rahmstorf's efforts to take down the journalist were uncritically celebrated by no less than the New York Times, which helps to illustrate both a bandwagon effect in coverage of climate by journalists who see themselves on the "same side" as the scientists and also the extensive deference than scientists are granted by the media. Given the court outcome, I wonder if the NYT will be correcting its earlier coverage?
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[T]he malice, which Rahmstorf shows for the author of the article, seems like personal defamation that has no place in public disputes. Not even – or, should I say, especially not - when it comes to a subject as important as climate change. Much of Rahmstorf's way of behaving in this case is reminiscent of what he has always argued against so eloquently: the facts are polished until they support a predetermined interpretation. This case is only superficially about facts that may be true or false. Rather, it is about the importance which is assigned to specific facts in the reporting on climate change. These interpretations are not sacrosanct. There is no one who can or would want to deny Stefan Rahmstorf and other climate scientists the right to criticise interpretations they consider inappropriate and to counter them with others. But anyone who, like Rahmstorf, fails to distinguish carefully between facts and interpretation and applies the one-dimensional criterion of right and wrong to both, enters the arena of a public battle of opinions. Disguised as a scientific expert, he is really a political agitator. He does not fight against false factual claims, but against unpopular interpretations, and in this case he also employs unfair means, as the verdict of the Cologne court documented. The fact that Rahmstorf has now changed or entirely removed certain passages from his blog post of 26 April 2010 without informing his readers about it, all fits into the picture.
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Irene Meichsner – who had to fight her legal battle for her reputation on her own - has had enough of climate issues for the time being. She no longer writes about this subject.
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