Truth versus image-making

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. has a very good article titled How to Have More Police Shootings in the April 24 Wall Street Journal. Double negatives make the subtitle confusing. The main pairings to choose from seem to be:

1. More people resisting arrest with more police misconduct.

2. Fewer people resisting arrest with less police misconduct.

Only 20-25% of the article concerns police conduct and resisting arrest. Most of the rest is about choosing between the truth and promoting one's self image. Promoting one's self-image has much more priority nowadays, especially for newspapers, journalists, politicians and some business people. "Virtue signaling" is another, newer term for promoting one's self-image.

Seeing the whole article online requires a paid subscription (which could be somebody else's), so the following are excerpts from the article.

"[T]he cavalcade of CEOs who denounced Georgia’s election law didn’t know in the slightest what they were talking about. ... Instead a bunch of business leaders simply adopted Democratic talking points not knowing what the law contained. And, more importantly, not caring." 

"If you think The New York Times and Washington Post mind in the least that their coverage is off-putting to a large number of Americans, you misunderstand the business they’re in. Once upon a time, broad reach really was our industry’s goal, to meet the desire of our advertisers for as many customers as possible. In turn, this drove our need to cover the news in a way that we could defend to all comers as “objective” and straight down the middle."

That's no longer the case. The New York Times, Washington Post, and many other media outlets now prioritize promoting and protecting their self-images over truth.

Joe Biden and Maxine Waters make prejudicial comments about a pending jury verdict to promote their self-image. Finally, of course, many people express opinions about politics and much more that prioritize "virtue signaling" over truth.

Bad news bias

 Bad News Bias by David Leonhardt of The New York Times  

Bruce Sacerdote, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, and two other researchers built a database of Covid coverage from every major network, CNN, Fox News, Politico, The New York Times and hundreds of other sources, in the U.S. and overseas. The researchers then analyzed it, classifying the coverage as positive, neutral or negative. 

"The coverage by U.S. publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source that the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional U.S. media."

"When Covid cases were rising in the U.S., the news coverage emphasized the increase. When cases were falling, the coverage instead focused on those places where cases were rising. And when vaccine research began showing positive results, the coverage downplayed it."

"About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals."

"Sacerdote is careful to emphasize that he does not think journalists usually report falsehoods. The issue is which facts they emphasize."

I credit Leonhardt for reporting on the study. It's still a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Leonhardt himself did some very negative reporting about Covid, President Trump, and the U.S.A. compared to other countries. I wrote about some of his reporting on this blog. 

Coronavirus - sloppy, biased NY Times

Coronavirus -- NY Times biased statistic

Coronavirus -- NY Times biased statistic #2

The Washington Compost

Nine reasons Trump is uniquely incapable of managing crises — including this one

With crap and hate speech like this, The Washington Post deserves a new name, The Washington Compost.

NY Times climate change editorial

The NY Times published this op-ed titled "So You Want to Convince a Climate Change Skeptic." In my opinion -- clearly not the publisher's -- it violated the publisher's motto 'All the news that's fit to print.'  At the end is a note that one correction was made. Undisclosed is that the title was also edited -- "Denier" was changed to "Skeptic." For proof see the URL, and "deniers" is still used five times in the body.

Nobody I know of denies climate change. Firstly, there are the four seasons. Secondly, average global temperatures have risen over the past few decades. Thirdly, there have been record cold temperatures in Bangladesh and India recently (link1, link2). But I wouldn't expect the op-ed author to report that. His aim was obviously to make a straw man to burn.

What about science? The author presents absolutely no science or even links to it. He likely expects any reader to grant that the existing science is entirely on his and the climate alarmists' side. He says don't try to convince a skeptic/denier with science. That's a waste of time. Instead appeal to the interlocutor’s values and how they differ from his or another alarmist's. Does the author give his values? No, but I bet they include substantial bullying and coercion by governments aimed at achieving his and other alarmists' climate goals. I have no problem with individuals or organizations trying to reduce their carbon "footprint", but not by using or encouraging force against others.

Pathetic.

Surveillance Capitalism

Last week I watched a PBS Frontline show about artificial intelligence. One person on the show (a little past midway) was Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (link). It was the first time I heard the term surveillance capitalism. I was curious enough to borrow her book from the library and start reading it.

The book is long, nearly 500 pages plus acknowledgements, notes, and index. I agree with several of the reviews on Amazon that the book is twice as long as it needs to be. I read about half before finding that she was interviewed by Russ Roberts on his EconTalk blog (link) in July. I may not read the rest of the book, since I suspect there is little to learn that goes beyond what is in the EconTalk interview.

She presents surveillance capitalism as a new kind of capitalism, quite unlike, for example, industrial capitalism or the mass production capitalism of the first half of the 20th century. I believe surveillance assisted advertising would be more accurate, but not near as attention grabbing. According to her, "Surveillance capitalism claims private human experience for the market dynamic. And that private human experience is reinterpreted as a free source of raw material for translation into behavioral data."

Zuboff is very disturbed about it, enough to label it Big Other, an allusion to Big Brother. Online companies, especially Google and Facebook, can track users and collect personal information about them. Their purpose is to present ads for its advertisers, who want to sell goods or services to the users, and be paid revenues for doing so. Roberts asks her several times what is the harm in this. He agrees that advertising is often annoying and in rare circumstances might lead to harm, but in general, what is the enormous harm that Zuboff tries to portray? She doesn't answer his questions directly, but dances around the topic and moves on to talk about something else.

In its early years Google's mission was to create the best search engine. The user would enter search terms (keywords) and Google would hunt for and show the user the websites with the content most relevant to the keywords. However, this didn't yield much revenue. The Google founders at first disdained but then turned to advertising. By showing ads along with search results, Google could collect more revenue from advertisers, and Google desired the revenue to improve its search methods. At first searches and ads presented were based only on the keywords the user entered. Then Google decided that also getting and using info about the user could make the advertising more effective. The oft-used term is targeted advertising.

The metric of effectiveness is click-through rates, a topic Zuboff covers some. However, she says very little to quantify them. She does say click-through rates skyrocketed at Google and elsewhere after search engines started using personal information of users as well as keywords. What does "skyrocket" mean -- go from less than 1% to 1.5% or 1% to 2%? She mentions increases in her book, but not from x to x+Δx, only Δx. Anyway, she portrays the after state with generous helpings of the words certain and certainty. For example, she says to Russ Roberts: "What are these businesses selling? They are selling certainty. They are not selling certainty about, you know, oil futures or pork bellies or whatever. They are selling certainty about future human behavior. They are trying to get as close as possible to being able to guarantee outcomes to their business customers." Huh? A click-through rate of 1-2% or even 3% is certainty or a guarantee?

During her interview with Roberts she says: "[T]he impact was a revenue increase of 3,590%, just during those years 2000-2004." Okay, 36 or 37 times as much. What part was due to an increase in click-through rates versus the number of searches and how much Google charged advertisers for more prominent placement of ads?

Incidentally, as much as feasible, I use the Brave browser, search engine DuckDuckGo, and AdBlock Plus to minimize the barrage of advertising and other attempts at grabbing my attention when online. (Sometimes I use Google because it allows more detailed search terms and shows more results than DuckDuckGo.)

Attention intruders

Glenn Harlan Reynolds has an article about Big Tech's efforts to get our attention (link). The cost of clickbait and advertising has apparently become so cheap, and/or the hosts want the revenue so much, that we are flooded with it. Most articles on the internet or a smart phone have several advertisements or other clickbait imposed within the article.  By other clickbait, I mean (a) links to other articles the host offers as a way to get more advertising revenues and (b) invitations to sign up to receive alerts or notifications to more content from the host by email or text messages.

I use ad-blockers to "gray" much of the content, but still find nearly all of it very annoying. If an advertiser or other clickbait maker had to pay me to show me their clickbait, my time on the internet and smart phone would be far more tolerable.

NY Times Promotes Hate Speech

In the opinion section of yesterday's NY Times is an op-ed (pay-walled) about the massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand. The subtitle is, "All those who have helped to spread the worldwide myth that Muslims are a threat have blood on their hands."

The author says the white nationalist who committed the massacre was inspired by the millions of people the author includes in the quoted subtitle. Not even once does the author use a quantifier such as no, some, few or all next to "Muslims." Does he want us believe that no Muslim is ever a threat? The author exemplifies the absence of thinking about individuals, and only about amorphous collectives. He never mentions that any Muslim, even the 9/11 highjackers-murderers, was or is a threat. Moreover, anyone who has ever condemned any Muslim terrorist-murderer "has blood on his hands." That includes me. By his innuendos condemning even one Muslim is tantamount to condemning every Muslim and abetting crimes against Muslims. Most of the article is hate speech towards anyone has ever had a negative thing to say about any particular Muslim or Islam. Moreover, it is hate speech promoted by the NY Times.

Presidential Tweets

Barack Obama tweeted about the incident in Charlottesville, VA. The New York Times reported it as the Most-Liked Tweet Ever. What did he say? Obama: "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion..."

Duh! No one is born hating anybody, period. That's typical Obama talk -- flowery, shallow, pablum. Also, he took it from Nelson Mandela's autobiography. I'm confident Obama meant it about alt-right people. Would he say it as well about Antifa people or Islamic terrorists?

The Times' motto is: "All the news that's fit to print."  ❗😉

In order to not be accused of bias (hopefully), I will comment on some tweets by President Trump, too. Another New York Times story concerns his tweets about Amazon's paying taxes. The Times is far more correct about this than the President's falsehoods and half-truths. President Trump probably feels the need to take pot shots at Amazon because Amazon's founder-chairman-CEO Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post (since 2013), a nemesis of Trump.