It may be a measure of how
dire things have become when I admit I hesitated to offer my two
cents’ worth on the following topic for fear of being hounded
and excoriated by the Rabid Right or Loony Left.
Then I smacked myself
upside the head with a copy of Strunk and White’s “Elements
of Style” and decided to woman-up and give it a go.
I have been a writer all my
working life, in one form or another. None of it
has been
Pulitzer-winning, but it has all been as grammatically and
syntactically correct as a former student of Mrs. Gladys Macpherson
could make it, and as true as available facts allowed.
I have worked on three
weekly newspapers and three monthly magazines; worked in curriculum
development for English; worked in advertising; done a fair bit of
public speaking; and worked for a state MP, researching problems and
writing media releases, news stories and speeches.
I am
presently the semi-retired proprietor of a small publishing
company.
This background probably places me as an outrider in the formerly
healthy herd of journalists. (I’ve chased a few fire
trucks, but more likely could be found writing a feature about the
last spotty dog to ride on Ol’ Ladder No. 4.)
In all the years I have
been reading and writing I have not seen such a level of animosity as
that which presently seems to be circulating in the air like toxic
pollen. There are a number of people who apparently live for
the chance to slag off anyone expressing an opinion or comment with
which they disagree. Few now would defend to the death other
people’s rights to differing opinions, it seems.
(Sidebar: You
can see the declining quality of education in the mean-minded, often
ill-punctuated and badly constructed comments in reply to any article
in print, online or floating in the air waves. Clearly there
are few schools still able to afford good English teachers, and it
appears that teachers of logic and rhetoric have gone the way of the
Muttaburrasaurus. )
There is much bad, sloppy
and lazy reporting passing for news. I hesitate to
use
the phrase ‘fake news’, given the twisted way it is used
by some, but often that’s just what it is. There is also
a regrettable tendency by some news commentators to add colour to
facts, rather than just reporting something—why do they say
someone has back-flipped or flip-flopped when that person has changed
his or her mind about a policy? Surely we should applaud
someone who, upon receiving new information or after longer
consideration, announces that she is withdrawing her previous
decision or comment or policy in favour of one that is more
appropriate to the changed circumstance? Or is it only people we like
or with whom we agree that we can be generous in describing?
“I
am determined; you are pig-headed; he is a stubborn S-o-B.”
Perhaps we should be
grateful there is any news at all—given the amount of
infotainment (great neologism!) that fills the day, finding any hard
news is like discovering a piece of real chicken in a commercial
pie. Each week I run through the Sunday newspaper’s TV
guide with a highlighter pen, so that we don’t miss any shows
that we particularly want to see. Whereas at one time there
might be two or three shows contending for our attention at 8.30 or 9
pm, now there are often none at all. Most of the
science-based shows, behind-the-news stories, and the natural history
shows have gone. Only a handful of clever comedy and satire
shows survive. If it were not for Australia’s ABC and
public broadcasters like PBS, we'd probably be using our television
screen as a blackboard to remind ourselves to get cat food or
wine.
Fortunately we have a large home library--which is getting more
tattered by the year.
It has been suggested that
citizen journalists may go some way towards filling the vacuum left
by journalistic shoe leather on the streets. This may be
true,
but a few hundred people following a face book page or blog do not
replace the hundreds of thousands of people who once avidly read the
large daily newspapers. Julie Upham distilling the
police
blotter for the Everett Times every week did a useful service,
calling to our attention a rise in housebreaking, or a missing
grandfather, or a theft from the local charity shop. Susie
Bloggs's sharing of questionable ‘science’ stories or
sharing of outright falsities does no good for anyone.
Finding the news these days
is as complex an operation as shopping for food that hasn’t
been filled with some substance you don’t wish to consume.
Much more of my life is now taken up with pursuing the real story of
something I’ve heard about; just as my shopping trips are
filled with much reading of 2 point type on the backs of
packages.
A good proportion of my on-line time is spent tracking down the
origin of something a well-meaning person has shared as truth and
countering it with a citation of fact. Finding an
article
that blames autism on fluoride in the water without a skerrick of
scientific evidence, or one that tells me kale will cure cancer makes
me as itchy as running across a badly written and misleading
sentence.
What can we do to counter
fake news, false science, and mean-minded editorialising?
Call
it out when you see it, offer real evidence to refute fakery, and
block rubbish from your news feed. You may lose some friends,
which is a very sad possibility in these strange times.
Pointing
out a fact that is opposed to something a friend holds to be truth
will not often get you any thanks, and is more likely to cause the
friend to react as if you had personally attacked him rather than his
incorrect belief. Someone has probably studied this
phenomenon and written a learned paper about it. “I
believed that typhoid vaccine caused my cousin’s baby to have a
cleft palate and you have attacked my belief
and
snowed me with scientific data and taken away my certainty about why
this happened to that baby—I hate you”
Above all, be aware of the
“argument from incredulity”. Just because you do—or
don’t—believe something to be true does not mean that it
is—or isn’t—true. “I can’t
believe any President of Bloggistan would say a thing like
that!”
Perhaps you can’t believe it, but when forty-seven journalists,
five hundred and three audience members and four national media
networks have all reported it, you may have to reassess your
belief. What is difficult
to believe is
that so many people when presented with facts will persist in
disbelief.
What to do? Clearly
there’s a sizeable group of people who don’t wish to be
offered eye-witness accounts by an astronomer when they are firmly
attached to the prognostications of their favourite
astrologer.
These people, like sleeping tiger snakes, are better left
unprodded.
For the rest of us, let us
be wary of opinions that are not underpinned by evidence, and let us
never share any information we aren’t reasonably certain is
true. There are still some upright and straightforward
journalists, in print and on the air. There are a number of
reliable websites for just about anything from disease to climate to
cookery to cultural practices of the Tlingit. Let us consult
these sources, especially when we are offered new information that
seems a bit unlikely. (You didn’t really think that an
elephant would carry a thirsty lion cub to the water hole while its
mother paced unconcernedly alongside, did you?)
And let us support the
independent media organisations which over time have proved their
commitment to truth.
This was recently published in the
on-line “Swan
Magazine”, which in its former iteration as a printed monthly
employed me part-time writing up interviews with local worthies, book
reviews, doing real estate write-ups (I was noted for being able to
find something good about the most modest property!) and selling
advertising. It was not a hugely remunerative job, but gave
me
a lot of experience and flexibility. The proprietor was—and
is—a man of culture and education who manages to balance the
public interest with the realities of funding any publication these
days
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