Being a news avoider

All professionals are vulnerable to professional deformation - a tendency, often exacerbated by groupthink, to fail to see that their training and experience has inculcated into them an incomplete and biased view of the world. So it is, I fear, with Nick Robinson's claim that the Today programme's ratings are falling because of “news avoiders” who no longer want to face the world’s problems.

What this omits is that many of us who want to face the world's problems are unhappy with the BBC's coverage thereof. This isn't merely because of partisan bias; or because of individual errors and inaccuracies; or because the corporation is impartial between truth and lies; or because it over-indulges ignorant, evasive or dishonest politicians; or because it is insufficiently attentive to who sets the news agenda.

It's also because of another problem.

For years, much of the public has been horribly wrong about basic facts about society. Which alerts us to the likelihood that the media does not properly inform us. Such mistakes are worldwide, so the problem is much bigger than the UK media.

This happens because even the best journalism provides only a partial description of the world. Even when the news is the truth, it is not the whole truth.

To see my point, let's start with the sad story in the summer that the head-teacher Ruth Perry had taken her life after Ofsted had downgraded her school.

This highlights two things about the news. One is its focus on human interest stories to the neglect of less salient or eyeball-grabbing facts. Teachers have for years been angered, alienated and stressed out by Ofsted, but it took a suicide to drive this onto the news agenda. The other is that the story soon disappeared, long before anyone had satisfactorily answered the question of how best to regulate and improve our schools. News inherently has a short attention span and journalists are looking for the next new story, not the old one. This lack of attention span distorts politics. The government recently had a "health week" to get the media talking about healthcare in which everybody forgot that a week of chat is never going to solve the system's problems. What we had was airtime being filled to suit the government's agenda and to replace silence.

Journalists' love of human interest stories means that something gets deprioritized. That something is often statistics, which are much drier than anecdotes. My favourite example of this statistical illiteracy came from Jeremy Vine who, after a cycling accident, said: "This was the first penny farthing injury the hospital staff could remember seeing, which suggests they are normally extremely safe to ride.” Thus giving us a perfect example of base rate neglect.

His error is however not an isolated one. The BBC Trust has found (pdf) that "the BBC sometimes falls short in its reporting of statistics." We see this in (for example) reporting of attacks by XL Bully dogs. How common are these? How dangerous are such dogs? Reports of individual instances are dramatic and eye-catching but not informative. Yes, journalists' historic blindspot about statistics is being corrected by the rise of data journalism. But if we want an accurate picture of society, all journalism must be data journalism.

Which brings us to another problem. The news reports events rather than trends. It thus foregrounds politicians' words and deeds and neglects slow-moving developments such as our almost 20 years of stagnating productivity and real wages and the associated decline in real interest rates. The upshot is that, as Phil says, reporting "caresse[s] the surface of politics" by neglecting the socio-economic forces that shape it. Laura Kuenssberg, for example, said back in 2020 that the nation's credit card was "maxxed out". She was utterly wrong, because she was overly heedful of politicians' talk whilst ignoring the long-term slump in government borrowing costs. Similarly, the BBC was caught off-guard by the rise of Corbynism because it paid too much attention to MPs who disliked him and not enough to the countless young graduates who felt alienated from the system; an estate agent's window told us more about the source of Corbyn's popularity than most news reports. And it failed to see Brexit and the rise of anti-"woke" sentiments because it failed to appreciate that economic stagnation breeds both discontent and illiberalism.

Many social developments - economic stagnation, the decline in crime, fall in global poverty and so on - are emergent. They are not the product of any single individual's actions, so the journalists' emphasis on human interest causes them to neglect them and the knee-jerk question of "who's the hero or villain?" is the wrong one to ask.

This focus on events rather than trends means that journalism often produces expiring information - things that are briefly interesting but soon irrelevant: the minutiae of the Brexit negotiations, gossip about cabinet ministers' careers or day-to-day moves in share prices and so on. Which means that wider, generally applicable lessons aren't learnt.

To see what I mean, take just two cases from this week's news. One is that the police are switching off their bodycams or deleting footage from them. In response to this Jim Colwell, Acting Chief Constable of Devon & Cornwall Police, "says the vast majority of body-worn video shows good policing." This should be a good base for a discussion of selection bias. But it's not. Equally, reporting of HS2 should be a starting point for a discussion of the sunk cost fallacy. But it's not.

In both cases, viewers could learn useful lessons they could apply in everyday lives. But the news does not provide this. Instead, what we get are isolated facts presented with little context (how dishonest or not are the police? what if any errors and biases are made in decisions about infrastructure?) or inference. This doesn't happen because of bad journalism, but because of the nature of what news is.

And that's my point. Yes, we all complain, rightly, about the BBC's flaws. Even if these defects could be cured, however, the news would not properly inform us. And I'm not sure they could be wholly cured because they perhaps arise in part from the nature of journalism itself. Journalists' lack of grounding in statistics and social science makes them vulnerable to being overly influenced by fluent charlatans, especially if all they want is a soundbite; if you think this is confined to political reporting, you've not seen financial journalism.

This is an old problem. When I was growing up I saw almost every night news reports of murders in Northern Ireland by protestants, loyalists, Catholics or republicans. "What is all this about?" I wondered. But the news never told me; for that, I needed history and sociology books. As long ago as 1975 John Birt criticized journalists' "bias against understanding". Like many of us, he was better at diagnosing than curing. But the accusation he made still holds good now. It's quite reasonable, therefore, for people who are curious about the world to avoid the news.

Comments

[Scurra]

I recall someone years ago suggesting that, after seeing tv channels that were "[xxx]+!" (airing the same shows an hour later), there ought to be a News Channel +1 which was about running news bulletins from a year ago but then following them up with discussion of what happened to those stories; how they turned out, or whether they just faded away.
I still think that was a brilliant idea.

[aragon]

Yes, if it bleeds it leads, and if some new event occurs drop the dead donkey.

But isn't more in-depth analysis the role of investigative journalism, documentaries, and programs like Panorama, Dispatches, Horizon etc.

Or as you suggest history or cultural shows, or famous series like the BBC's Civilisation (1959).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilisation_(TV_series)

Or more recent like the 'Blue Planet' with less propaganda. Economists are said to be more interested in the output of their models than reality (Excelgate?). Statistics are not the be all and end all, what if the data doesn't exist.

Using your example: Will Dunn in my opinion gets almost HS2 right.

https://www.newstatesman.com/business/2023/09/hs2-is-another-casualty-of-britains-optimistic-accounting

"estimates that one civil servant who worked on the project described to me as “like asking a builder to quote you for a kitchen extension without letting him into the house” – and had to be sold to the Treasury."

The executive are not willing to pay the freight. (the true cost).

Too much oversight and the Christmas tree problem (every one wants to hang a bauble).

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/sep/29/we-are-a-political-project-how-hs2s-costs-have-spiralled-out-of-control

"Placating Conservatives in marginal seats, inflation in construction and a maze of bureaucracy have seen the cost balloon from £32bn to £71bn.

Political inaction and interference, not too little control but too much from an incompetent executive.

No HS2 is not about sunk costs fallacy, an incompetent legislature and executive interfering.

"Camden has a "a hole in the ground which is splitting apart and blighting our communities”. As a local councillor, Danny Beales, put it: “All this pain, for no long-term gain, is not acceptable."

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/nov/02/can-a-new-bradford-emerge-from-hole-in-the-ground-westfield

"Part of the site was eventually used for a temporary “urban garden”. In the summer of 2012, it was also briefly home to a small protest encampment. Now, though, a new Westfield centre called The Broadway – which is around a third smaller than the original design – is finally about to open."

More than ten year delay and scaled down to one third.

On Dogs, well some people want Guard dogs/Weapons, others want companions.
We should ban weapons.

As for the Chief Constable, should attract ridicule, most of the time people, most people are not committing crime. (Although it is more like selective enforcement of poor legislation - everything is a potential hate crime). RIPA, Equalities act, Online Harms, Net Zero etc.

As for the island of Ireland, I blame Cromwell!

[Former Wise Man]

I agree with much of your argument about the lack of context and background of news stories. But (as you note) under present conditions it's useless to expect reporters in the mad scramble for "breaking news" and eyeball capturing to search behind the immediate facts or appearances.

That should be the job of long-form journalism: investigative or documentary programs in the broadcast media and analytical pieces in print. Here in the U.S., such efforts have all but vanished. The only exception is the documentaries, an hour or more in length, from the Public Broadcasting System. They are often well made, when about subjects that don't trigger PBS's leftist / woke bias.

Part of the responsibility for drive-by journalism lies with the audience, though. Generally there is little appetite for deep dive examination of issues. It's hard to blame even conscientious people for that. After working 8 to 10 hours, plus an hour commuting home, who wants to spend any of the small remainder of the day Being Instructed when there is so much in the way of diversions and entertainment around?

[Jan Wiklund]

"he knee-jerk question of "who's the hero or villain?" is the wrong one to ask." - A friend of mine coined the word "moral positioning" as a major illness of present day thinking. There must always be a villain, there must always be hero. Someone must always be Evil and another one Good. And that is actually poisoning the whole society and makes us unable to solve problems.

The war in Ukraine is an overly explicit example. There are no heros there, but perhaps a lot of villains, and the trouble is not to punish them but to make a decent life possible in spite of them. But can the politicos see that? No, they have been brought up in the media-shaped - or perhaps Hollywood-shaped - Good/Evil binary and are uncapable to see beyond.

[rsm]

If statisticians were intellectually honest about productivity, output, and employment measures, would they include error margins wide enough to provide data compatibility with the opposite of the story our blogger wants to tell?

[Laban]

"the countless young graduates who felt alienated from the system"

As they should be. On leaving uni and getting a job people used to start looking for a house to buy. This Guardian piece caused a stir for the wrong reasons.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/oct/01/the-moment-i-knew-she-called-my-mother-back-to-say-shed-changed-her-mind

Killer sentence?

"By October I was a newly single PhD graduate, had bought my own house and was waiting for a new job to start."

That was in 1973. Top comment:

"I'm having trouble getting past the new Phd graduate / house owner combination. What a time to be alive."

[aragon]

I have just read this:

https://jacobin.com/2023/10/stagnation-productivity-profit-crisis-brenner-debate-1970s-economics

First we are not stagnationists now, we are in relative, and absolute decline.

We had a canter through events before:
* Oil shock
* Chicago School of Economics
* Neoliberalism

Just to clarify for people in the South of the UK, the crisis in the North has been continuous (but uneven) since 1970's.

Thatcher directed North Sea Oil Money to London and in particular Finance.

Hence the 'Loads of Money' and the City sold out to the Americans, hence the Big Bang, along with the asset stripping of privatisation, and ponzi scheme of ever higher London property prices.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/12/15/class-war-waged-and-being-won-rich-destroying-us-democracy

""Warren Buffett homed in on the essence of the crisis in 2006. "There's class warfare, all right," he said, "but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.""

The elite have switched from creating value through innovation to extracting value though Financialisation.

This is not sustainable, as the greed of the elite is unlimited, whether it's, housing, commercial property, private equity, china etc

Minsky will have his moment.

As for manufacturing, this is the true source of scarcity, not the silicon found in sand but the manufactured silicon chip.

The three minute pop song has a scarcity value (due to the internet) of zero. Hence the rearguard action to manufacture scarcity through copyright. And given it's lack of production costs and the impact of advertising/marketing, far more profitable, than making stuff.

So lobbying and advertising/marketing become key sources of wealth.

Resources and manufacturing are sources of wealth, and intellectual property as sea anchor and tax on the wider population.

Of course this will not stop the progress towards the 'Intellectual' ownership of all property and the exercise of social control, through laws, software and devices.

Capitalism is over, rent-ism and feudalism are here.

Our new tyrannical overloads, same as the old ones, but with better Yachts.

[Blissex]

I tend to agree with many of the detail points raised by our blogger, but they are not very useful without two "details" that I think are quite important:

* Our blogger is effectively describing just *daily* news. But there are weekly, months, quarterly news periodicals too. Their very purpose is to look back on the preceding week, month, quarter and reflect on and analyse the news in that period.

* However the vast majority don 't do that, they simply repeat the "conventional wisdom" of the those who set the "talking point agenda".

And that's what is the most pernicious aspect of the news industry: it not so much that they present the *daily* news without context, because of the constant pressure for updates, but that even when they do so they simply follow the agenda of their controllers.

That is because of two simple reasons:

* The people who want news with insight as to what matters and what is the context are not willing to pay for that, which is quite expensive.

* As a result it is quite easy and cheap to compromise the top staff of both daily and weekly/monthly/quarterly news publishers.

Useful, insightful news are *valuable* and people who need them, from traders to businesses, are willing to pay a lot for them, but not the general public, many of which are smugly satisfier middle class people.

[Blissex]

«Generally there is little appetite for deep dive examination of issues. It's hard to blame even conscientious people for that.»

But a lot of affluent people smugly satisfied that they got theirs and are alright only need to be told that all is well in the best of all possible worlds. :-)

«After working 8 to 10 hours, plus an hour commuting home, who wants to spend any of the small remainder of the day Being Instructed when there is so much in the way of diversions and entertainment around?»

Yet in decades past after 8-10 hours down the pit miners would go to workingmen clubs where one of them would read aloud passages from the previous day's Hansard record of Commons speeches and then they would discuss them, because their activists understood that insight into the workings of the machine was useful to the class struggle.

Those activists by and large became rentier middle class and the only class struggle they like is that of the rentier upper and middle classes against the "lazy, uppity, overpaid" working class.

[Blissex]

«"By October I was a newly single PhD graduate, had bought my own house and was waiting for a new job to start."
That was in 1973.»

https://blissex.files.wordpress.com/2023/07/dt19890418-1.gif
Tuesday April 18, 1989
"Dogbert: I have decided to dedicate my life to the less fortunate.
Dilbert: That's very noble of you, Dogbert. Will you be working with the homeless, or perhaps the hungry?
Dogbert: I thought I'd start with people who didn't buy real estate in the 70's ... perhaps work my way up to that other stuff."

The USA like the UK is a meritocracy and those who well are those who have the merit of having made the right choices:

* They chose to be born in decades where they could then buy property at a small multiple to wages.

* They chose to be born in families with enough income that they could afford to get and education or a parental loan to buy property even before getting a job.

* They chose to be born in an area where property prices would boom as the government would concentrate investment to attract businesses and jobs there instead of an area where the government would wreck businesses to destroy the labour unions by making their members jobless and thus also smash property prices.

Those who did not make the right choices are getting their just deserts :-).

[Blissex]

«Those who did not make the right choices are getting their just deserts :-).»

The just deserts for those who chose to be born several decades ago but in the wrong areas or in the wrong families:

https://blissex.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/poliuklifeintenements1965.png

The just deserts (if they are luck) for those who chose born recently but in the wrong families:

https://blissex.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/polihousinghknanoflat-2021-01-04.jpeg

[Blissex]

«https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/12/15/class-war-waged-and-being-won-rich-destroying-us-democracy
""Warren Buffett homed in on the essence of the crisis in 2006. "There's class warfare, all right," he said, "but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.""
The elite have switched from creating value through innovation to extracting value though Financialisation. This is not sustainable, as the greed of the elite is unlimited, whether it's, housing, commercial property, private equity, china etc»

Buffett was wrong: it is a class warfare that is being won both by the "rich class" and by the middle class. it is not just the "the greed of the elite is unlimited" but that of the acquisitive/aspirational middle classes too, who are delighted to have been associated to the upper class in benefiting from fabulous amounts of upward redistribution.

It is not just the top 1%, it is the top 20-40% that is winning. This is politically very important.

«Those activists by and large became rentier middle class and the only class struggle they like is that of the rentier upper and middle classes against the "lazy, uppity, overpaid" working class.»

The middle class have found that if they ally with the working class to win better wages and pensions from the upper class the upper class are powerful and cunning and push back hard, while if they ally with the upper class to extract bigger rents and prices from the working class and pay them wages and pensions, the latter are much weaker and cannot push back that hard.

"Centrism" (and equivalently reaganism/thatcherism) has as central political characteristics the alliance of the middle class with the upper class, paid for by the working class.

[rsm]

How can you pretend the poor ever had enough to extract through rent to account for the wealth gains of the rich? Why not name money creation as the central reason the rich get richer?

[aragon]

The Tories need just above a quater of the vote to win a majority. (26%+)

What happens when the middle classes realise they have fallen for the money illusion. (That they have any - other than debt).

It was Blissex who posted the story of a middle class family in the south losing their home.

A stagnant or shrinking pie, for the already desiccated poor, and public sector, where will the juice be extracted from next?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2023/oct/02/uk-house-prices-falling-manufacturing-ofwat-business-live?filterKeyEvents=true

"UK house prices fell by 5.3% in the year to September, lender Nationwide reported, with drops in price in every region of the country as rising interest rates squeeze the market."
UK factories have suffered another contraction, with manufacturers hit by weakening demand in September."

https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/09/tim-gurner-what-plutocracy-looks-like

"In the US, the results of Gurner’s "normality" have been stagnant real wages for the bottom half of workers going back two generations, and an economy in which half of fast-food workers and a quarter of adjunct college teachers have to rely on welfare to make ends meet; and in which four in ten Americans would struggle to come up with $400 in cash to pay for an emergency procedure, according to the Fed. Under the Thatcher-Blair-Gurner dispensation, Britain has similarly moved towards a low-wage, low-worker-power economy."

The middle classes are next...

https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/10/rishi-sunak-is-demolishing-the-centre-he-once-embodied

"The centre was a triangulation of positions within that neoliberal consensus, rather than a reflection of the needs and values of any British majority.

Now technocratic government’s smartest operator is signalling that it has had its day."

[...]

"As usual, Labour is fixated on the past. In opposition Keir Starmer has tracked the Conservatives wherever there might be electoral risk in doing otherwise. Some have concluded that he has no beliefs, but lately he has revealed the face beneath the blank managerial mask – an unwise move."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/02/political-class-fault-british-politics-guy-who-did-this

They both did, the Thatcher-Blair-Cameron-Starmer axis.

[Joey Vimsante]

I hope there is peace, and democracy in Northern Ireland.