"Welcome to the world of reality - there is no audience."

"Welcome to the world of reality - there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth — actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.... True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world."

~ David Foster Wallace from his novella Something to Do with Paying Attention

"Things and Actions are what they are"

"Things and Actions are what they are, and the
"Consequences of them will be what they will be;
"Why then should we desire to be deceived?"

~ Joseph Butler (aka Bishop Butler) from his 1726 Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel — 'Sermon 7'

MAGA: "Empathy is out. Assholery is in."

How do you describe the rise of a creature like Trump. Jeffrey Tucker, Robert Bidinotto and Robert Tracinski tracked his early ascent— along with the parallel rise of the alt-right, which simply took the unthinking opposite side, however horrendous, of mainstream issues, without abandoning the collectivism that underpinned them. And the mainstream is still trying to explain MAGAts sufficiently deranged by Trump to follow him so blindly. Doug Muder identifies several "rifts" in American culture that he's lucked into exploiting.

Donald Trump, in my opinion, is not some history-altering mutant, like the Mule in Asimov’s 'Foundation' trilogy. I think of him as an opportunist who exploited rifts in American society and weak spots in American culture. He did not create those rifts and weak spots, and ... they will still be there waiting for their next exploiter. ...

The first rift he identifies is The Rift Between Working and Professional Classes, i.e., between "the people who shower after work and the people who shower before work."

All through Elon Musk’s political ascendancy, I kept wondering: How can working people possibly believe that the richest man in the world is on their side? Similarly, how can people who unload trucks or operate cash registers imagine that Donald Trump, who was born rich and probably never did a day of physical labor in his life, is their voice in government?

The answer to that question is simple: The people who shower after work have gotten so alienated from the people who shower before work that anyone who takes on “the educated elite” seems to be their ally. In the minds of many low-wage workers, the enemy is not the very rich, but rather the merely well-to-do — people with salaries and benefits and the ability to speak the language of bureaucracy and science.

Actual billionaires like Musk or Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg are so distant that it’s hard to feel personally threatened by them. But your brother-in-law the psychologist or your cousin who got an engineering degree — you know they look down on you. Whenever they deign to discuss national affairs with you at all, it’s in that parent-to-child you-don’t-really-understand tone of voice. And let’s not even mention your daughter who comes home from college with a social justice agenda. Everything you think is wrong, and she can’t even explain why without using long words you’ve never heard before. Somebody with a college degree is telling you what to do every minute of your day, and yet you’re supposed to be the one who has “privilege”.

The tension has been building for a long time, but it really boiled over for you during the pandemic. You couldn’t go to work, your kids couldn’t go to school, you couldn’t go to football games or even to church — and why exactly? Because “experts” like Anthony Fauci were “protecting” you from viruses too small to see. (They could see them, but you couldn’t. Nothing you could see interested anybody.) Then there were masks you had to wear and shots you had to get, but nobody could explain exactly what they did. Would they keep you from getting the disease or transmitting it to other people? Not exactly. If you questioned why you had to do all this, all they could do was trot out statistics and point to numbers. And if you’ve learned anything from your lifetime of experience dealing with educated people, it’s that they can make numbers say whatever they want. The “experts” speak maths and you don’t, so you just have to do what they say.

Can we say we haven't seen that same thing here? 

In his 2012 book 'The Twilight of the Elites,' Chris Hayes outlined the ways that the expert class has become self-serving. In theory, the expert class is comprised of winners in a competitive meritocracy. But in practice, educated professionals have found ways to tip the balance in their children’s favor. Also, the experts did not do a good job running the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, and they failed to foresee the economic crisis of 2008. When they did notice it, they responded badly: Bankers got bailed out while many ordinary people lost their homes. ... 

On the public-trust side, people have been too willing to believe conspiracy theories about perfectly legitimate things like the Covid vaccine [and to applaud the appointment of an anti-vaccine loony to the job of Health Secretary]. Trump’s slashing of funding for science and research is a long-term disaster for America, and his war against top universities like Harvard and Columbia destroys one of the major advantages the US has on the rest of the world. But many cheer when revenge is taken on the so-called experts they think look down on them.

There are many genuine reasons to mistrust the people we see so frequently wheeled out by media and government as so-called experts. But you'd be a fool to abandon trust in genuine expertise—or to place that trust instead in know-nothing figureheads like a Trump or a Bannon or (closer to home) to a Winston, Tamaki or the like. 

The next rift he identifies however opens up in this era of Post-Truth Politics. Muder calls it Truth Decay, that realisation that in the marketplace of ideas, truth no longer matters. Post-modernism has won. The mainstream media's peddling opinion has betrayed their prior responsibility to just report the facts — both science and media have been corrupted by government money — and now reality is biting back in the form of a loss of public trust.

And now too many public figures neither know nor care. About anything. And certainly not about facts. Only a short while ago a Libertarian presidential candidate with unusually decent momentum was drummed out of the campaign by not knowing "What's Aleppo?" No, a Republican senator can confuse “gazpacho” with “Gestapo” and no-one blinks an eye.

Along with the lost of trust in experts and the inability of American society to agree on a basic set of facts, we are plagued by a loss of depth in our public discussions. It’s not just that Americans don’t know or understand things, it’s that they’ve lost the sense that there are things to know or understand. College professors report that students don’t know how to read entire books any more. And we all have run into people who think they are experts on a complex subject (like climate change or MRNA vaccines) because they watched a YouTube video.

Levels of superficiality that once would have gotten someone drummed out of politics — [like a Defence Secretary's inability to answer a straight question, or the Attorney General's ignorance of the separation of powers, or the president's complete incomprehension of the Constitution he had sworn only weeks before to defend and protect] — are now everyday events.

So the MAGAts have captured the low ground. For now. They've become the swamp. But in the absence of any coherent programme, all they have is pissing off their opponents. Making liberals cry. Essentially, at the end of the rot, what we are left with is this: Empathy is out. Assholery is in. Basically, when the rubber of MAGAt policies hit the road, they're intended to hit someone. "The cruelty is the point. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry. If people you don’t like are made poorer, weaker, or sicker — well, good! Nothing tastes sweeter than liberal tears."

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

And that was all just Trump's first term! It's already got much worse.

It’s hard to look at any list of recent Trump administration actions without concluding that these people are trying to be assholes. It’s not an accident. It’s not a side effect of something else. The assholery is the point.

In the absence of anything else of positive substance, that's really all there is.

"A fact is information minus emotion..."

"A fact is information minus emotion. 

"An opinion is information plus experience.
"Ignorance is an opinion lacking information. 

"Stupidity is an opinion that ignores fact."

~ Anonymous

The role of experts

DOUGLAS MURRAY TOOK OVER Joe Rogan's podcast recently to call him out for platforming "revisionist, amateur historians who inflate their own importance while disavowing any expertise." In other words, ignoramuses on the very topic of their alleged speciality.

I wouldn't know if Rogan fits that bill because I've never listened to his podcast. But I do know it's widely influential. So bullshit begun there and in similar fever swamps elsewhere ('Hitler was right,' they might nod sagely, while laughing that 'the Holocaust never happened') spreads far and wide. So he's right to criticise these non-experts who swing their dicks in total ignorance of their topic — as if it's their ignorance, rather than their expertise, that demands they have a hearing. 

This problem is everywhere right now. Just take a look around, and you can see the crisis playing out in real time.
There’s plenty of noise and spin. But people want something rock solid, and as reliable as a Swiss watch.
But where can you find it now? Who can you really trust? Who do I really trust?

Yes, there is a role for those with expertise in a subject. But as Ted Gioia asks, Who Are the Real Experts Now?

Q: Do you distrust experts?

TED: No, the exact opposite is true. I respect expertise. But I think that some outsiders have more expertise than insiders. ... I never make distinctions on the basis of titles and degrees. Sometimes they correlate with expertise, but many times they don’t.

We all know that. Don't we. 

Here’s an interesting fact—if you made a list of the Stanford and Harvard students who have had the biggest impact on technology, at least half of them would be dropouts.

Expertise doesn't necessarily come wrapped in a degree. 

Th[is is] how the world should work. Your expertise should be your credential. Instead we pretend that your credential is your expertise.

There’s a huge difference between those two approaches. And I’m a firm advocate of the former. ...

Many of the intellectuals who shaped my own thinking were outsiders without PhDs. Consider the case of Susan Sontag, who never got her doctorate, but was the most celebrated literary critic of her generation. The same is true of Northrop Frye and Edmund Wilson, both of them critics of immense stature.

C.S. Lewis is still another example. ... He taught at Oxford for 29 years, and was famous all over the world. But his title was just tutor. ...

Consider the case of George Steiner—one of the most illustrious polymaths of my lifetime—but his doctoral thesis was initially rejected at Oxford.

He turned it into a famous book, The Death of Tragedy, and eventually received his doctorate, but he never really got accepted by insiders. Even after a half-century of publishing and lecturing at the highest level, he faced intense hostility from professional academics.

I think it was due to envy. ...

Steiner was an intellectual superstar—an expert at the highest level.

Expertise is the credential. The credential is not the expertise.

Gioia's own insights come from a lifetime shared between jazz ("I didn’t have a music degree. But I had ability, and I could back it up.") and corporate consulting.

I learned a big lesson from [consulting]. I learned that positional power is not the same as true expertise. And expertise always earns respect, even if it doesn’t come with a fancy job title.

I believe that is true in every field. There are experts who don’t have elite credentials—but everybody trust them. And, if you ask around, you will find out who they are.

Let me blunt. People with the highest level of expertise are very rare. So they stand out, even if they lack an impressive degree or prestigious institutional affiliation.

So you need some expertise to find the genuine experts. Gioia suggests five ways to judge the reliability of what he calls "indie experts" — that is, folk who aren't just talking their book, who don’t have institutional overseers or gatekeepers controlling what they say. They could be outsider academics, bloggers, or even big-mouthed podcasters.  But they first and foremost need a grip on reality. And then:

• Pay attention to which indie voices correctly predict the future. 
• See which ones identify key issues before others notice them. 
• See which ones tell you truths that insiders won’t mention. 
• See which people offer coherent explanations of situations that others find confusing.
• And, finally, see who is willing to speak out bravely in the face of powerful embedded interests.

When you find people who do that, you are in safe hands. They are the real experts.

It's unlikely they're going to be supporting, or promoting, Holocaust denial. 

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore."

Hannah Arendt (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) 

German historian and philosophe 

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.
    "A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.
    "And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want."

~ attributed (incorrectly) to Hannah Arendt

NB: The Hannah Arendt Centre says "the spirit of the quote is very much in line with Arendt’s own thought. But as far as I can tell, Hannah Arendt never said this or wrote this. She did, however, say many similar things. ..."

The closest in spirit and content, and also the most easily available, is from an interview with Roger Errera in 1974, what turned out to be Hannah Arendt’s last public interview. Arendt spoke about the importance of a free press in an era of mass manipulation of truth and public lying: She said:

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

The key point in Arendt’s statement is that as lies multiply, the result is not that the lie is believed but that people lose faith in the truth and are increasingly susceptible to believe anything. When cynicism about truth reigns, lies operate not because they replace reality but because they make reality wobble–a phrase Arendt employs in her essay Truth and Politics. In that essay, Arendt argued that mass lying undermines our sense of reality by which we find our bearings in the real world: 

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

The Arendtian point is that constant lying by a propaganda machine does not lead to the lie being believed but leads, instead, to cynicism.

Which is all that the liars need. 

For MAGAts, it's Schrodinger's tariff threats all the way down

 

Yeah, I know, talking about tariffs, tariff threats and tariff retaliation can get tedious. 

But the threats are real. And the US president doesn't care about the destruction of world trade (google "Smoot Hawley Great Depression" if you want a clue) — and the MAGAts don't care about anything much beyond "owning the libs" and all the 4d chess their hero is allegedly playing.

Except it's neither chess nor 4d. MAGAts are now touting the "concrete behavioural changes" the tariff threats allegedly caused in Canada and Mexico. Except, as Phil Magness patiently explains, much of what was "achieved" was either already in motion or could easily have been accomplished through less aggressive means.

• Trump boasts his tariff threat brought 10,000 Mexican soldiers to the border. Yet in 2023  he claims that his threat of a wall brought 23,000 soldiers to the border (since dispersed). So "Trump got a significantly worse deal today than he claims he got 5 years ago without any tariffs. Does that mean he got stomped?" 

• And Canada had already announced in December last year its plans to "strengthen border security* and [its] immigration system." "So Trump's big negotiating 'win'... ...is to get Canada to do what it already announced it was doing back in December. And his 'win' with Mexico is to get them to commit 1/3rd of the troops he previously got them to commit with no tariffs in 2019. 4D chess, everybody!"

As one person wryly commented, "It's the art of claiming credit for the deal."

So how d'ya reckon MAGAts will cope with the revelation of the Great Tariff Negotiator getting played by Justin Trudeau, no less — convincing Justin to "concede" to a plan he'd already announced last year? Magness looks ahead:

Prediction: most of the Tariff Fundamentalists who are touting tariffs as a "negotiating tactic" today will resume their calls for tariffs as an economic protection strategy a few days from now. A few days later they will call it a revenue source. Then a negotiating tactic again.

As another commenter observed, for MAGAts it's Schrodinger's tariff threats all the way down. 

Oh, by the way. Whoever disagrees with Trump and the MAGAts on any of this is "an anti-American conspirator" and also "controlled by China."

If words like "imbecile" and "unhinged" occur to you about now, you're not alone.

* * * * 

* NB: Note that the border security is ostensibly to arrest to the terrible threat of fentanyl pouring across the Canadian border. Yet: 

The amount of fentanyl that comes across the border from Canada is negligible. In 2024, DEA stats that just 43lbs were intercepted at the entire northern border, which is just 0.2% of total fentanyl seizures entering the US in that period.
    So even if you think fentanyl is a problem justifying some sort of policy response, it's a complete waste of resources to focus them on the US-Canada border. It's also likely that the increased border enforcement there will create other bureaucratic hassles and inconveniences for routine border crossings, as most police-heavy drug enforcement efforts do.

Like almost everything with Trump, he just makes stuff up. Except "instead of the Big Lie, it is the Little Lie. Thousands upon thousands of them. They keep everyone off kilter trying to rebut them."

"... a broader, decade-long 'crank realignment' in American politics."

"Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s transition from semi-prominent Democrat to third party spoiler to Donald Trump endorser is emblematic of a broader, decade-long 'crank realignment' in American politics.…
    "The partisan shifts of both Trump and RFK Jr. are part of a long term cycle in which .... a generic suspicion of institutions and the people who run them has come to be associated with conservative politics. Conservative cranks are not even close to new (the John Birch Society, for example), but they’ve become increasingly prominent ...

    "If I’m agitating for a 'liberal' realignment of American politics, it’s partly because I live in terror that the realignment will come anyway—but it will be illiberal….
    "Let’s talk about what kind of implicit idea would cause someone to combine a traditionally conservative proposal (keeping out immigrants) with a traditionally leftist proposal (government price controls)—and do so in a way that so overwhelms every other consideration, including democracy itself, that it causes them to flip their vote.
    "The implicit premise is that government exists to hand out favours to 'people like me'—and to kick everybody else in the teeth, especially poor immigrants coming here in search of a better life. That particular policy combination indicates a tribal mindset….
    "At any rate, this is precisely the political realignment I’m trying to avoid, one that brings together the worst of both worlds: bloated Big Government welfare-statism and paranoid, xenophobic nationalism."

~ Matt Yglesias from his post 'The crank realignment is bad for everyone.'  Hat tip Robert Tracinski who comments, "There’s still a good chance that this is exactly what we’re going to get."

 

"Lately journalists have been behaving more like lawyers, marshalling evidence in favour of their own view and ignoring anything that doesn’t help their argument."

"Traditionally, science reporting was mostly descriptive—writers strove to explain new discoveries in a particular field. The new style of science journalism takes the form of advocacy—writers seek to nudge readers toward a politically approved opinion.
    “'Lately journalists have been behaving more like lawyers,' [Michael] Shermer says, 'marshalling evidence in favour of their own view and ignoring anything that doesn’t help their argument.' This isn’t just the case in science journalism, of course...."

~ James Meigs from his article 'Unscientific American'

"The line isn't Left vs Right. It's 'the truth matters' versus 'the truth is what we need it to be'."[UPDATED]

 

"The line isn't Left vs Right. It's 'the truth matters' versus 'the truth is what we need it to be.' That's the epistemological line between good and evil. The Activist Left knows that's the actual line, and they've known it for a long time. ...

    "There are people who reject the dialectical approach. Then there are people broken by it. Finally, ... there are people who know exactly what they're doing and do it to deceive and conquer."

~ James Lindsay

RELATED:

"In universities across the world, humanities departments have, over time, come to reject the notion that there is such a thing as objective truth.
    "This nihilistic outlook was originally promoted by a small group of academics in the mid-20th century, but is now the dominant philosophy in a range of disciplines from literary criticism to gender and cultural studies. And while the doctrine has quietly swallowed the humanities, many thought it would never infiltrate the hard sciences. If one is engineering a bridge, for example, it would be reckless to reject the objective truth of gravity. If one is studying mathematics it would be foolish to deny that 2 + 2 = 4. 

    "And, rather than being a method to discover how the world works, such theorists argue Western science has been used as a tool to subjugate others. Efforts to 'decolonise' science are therefore efforts to undo this subjugation, by bringing into the fold other 'ways of knowing' that exist outside scientific methodology. These might include local knowledge about land management, religious knowledge about cosmology, or traditional ways of healing. Writing at 'The Conversation,' academic Alex Broadbent, of the University of Johannesburg, argues: 'There is African belief, and European belief, and your belief, and mine – but none of us have the right to assert that something is true, is a fact, or works, contrary to anyone else’s belief.' ... 

    "But herein lies the irony – by indulging the de-colonial activist agenda that rejects the existence of objective truths or a hierarchy of knowledge, universities undermine the very premise on which society deems them worthy of public funding. If we accept the de-colonial notion that no form of knowledge can be deemed superior to any other, then what exactly are students paying for? What specialised skills or benefits do university graduates gain that non-graduates lack? Why should the public continue to fund these multibillion-dollar organisations if the knowledge they offer is just as valid as any other 'way of knowing'?"

~ Claire Lehman, from her column 'In maths, truth & knowledge can't be mere matters of opinion'

It all started going wrong when they started calling themselves 'journalists' instead of reporters.

It's not like it's my job to fix the failing media's many problems, but here's where I reckon the problems started — and they were always about more than just disruptive technology ...

Here's my more detailed advice, which I first offered way back in 2009 (back when blogging was the latest next-big-thing):

Deborah Hill-Cone suggests in today's Business Herald that "bitter bloggers" who lambast the mainstream media for its manifest failings are duty bound to solve old media's problems for them, i.e., to shed some light on "how the [mainstream] media might turn a buck so we [the royal "we"?] can fund quality journalism." Ironically, her column is not online, so her audience have to rely on bloggers to retype it all for her, but here's her main beef, that 

"all this old versus new media aggro is just a distraction from the fact that neither [bloggers nor] Rupert Murdoch . . . have an answer for the future of journalism." 

Well, it's not like I'm duty bound to solve all the problems for the profession of journalism (there's more than enough problems in my own profession of architecture, thanks very much), but here's a simple enough solution for the old media to adopt -- so simple that even a journalist might understand.  Here it is:: 

            Recognise the division of labour, boys and girls, and just report the news!

We, the bloggers, can get on with commenting on the news, since that's what we do best; and you get on with finding and reporting the news, since that's what you're supposed to do best. In other words: 

• don't editorialise; 
• don't pontificate; 
• don't ask how people feel, ask instead what they saw; 
• don't report events as if people are outraged, just report the events themselves;
• don't report what everyone knows is transparent science fiction; report real science fact instead;
• don't report what "celebrities" do as if it matters a damn;
• don't report puff pieces about actors/musicians/writers as if they're not just puff-pieces for their new film/album/book; 
• don't report what everyone knows is just spin -- report instead what's being spun, and the news that someone is spinning, and who; 
• don't assume the whole world has the same values as your friends; 
• don't just rewrite press releases as if they were news; 
• and don't create the news yourself.
• In short, just report the news. All of it. Report it as if the truth actually mattered. 

Your role model in this new endeavour should not be Woman's Day, which your front pages and the Six O'Clock News more and more resemble, but the classic private detective whose motto should be hung over your desk in copperplate lettering: "Just the facts, ma'am." 

This week offers the perfect example of why people are switching off the mainstream. With 400,000 Americans taking up pro-freedom signs against their government, the mainstream media has either pretended they don't exist -- preferring instead to focus on the tough issues like the new White House dog -- or tried to suggest that all the protesters are insane. Meanwhile, the issue of the week in New Zealand, according to every news report every time I switch on the local media, is the latest in the Tony Veitch saga -— giving numb-nut so-called journalists the opportunity to interview each other over how well they did (or didn't) handle the story, and Mark Sainsbury and John Campbell the chance to wring their hands over the courage/bravery/pluckiness [delete one] of the two protagonists. 

No wonder no one can take mainstream "journalism" seriously any more. Instead of Philip Marlowe, we have to endure endless re-runs of Barbara Cartland. 

"Substitute advocacy for objectivity, and the result is propaganda." And John Campbell.

JOHN CAMPBELL IS SAID to be a journalist. What we used to call a reporter.

Over at The Halfling's blog, he critiques John Cambell's view "that journalism is not an objective craft but a subjective one and that, in the final analysis, objectivity is impossible." What we used to call: an excuse for bad reporting. 

Beneath Campbell's essay-length excuse, writes The Halfling, "there is a very strong element or subtext of post-modernist critical theory." Campbell, he says, "equates 'truth' with story-telling rather than ascertaining truth from an empirical and evidence based examination. ... He then sweepingly and without any evidential foundation suggests that objectivity is a myth."

Campbell's self-contradictory assertion (asserting relativism as an absolute truth) at once dismisses every reporter who risk their lives in pursuit of the facts about a story, while providing the self-serving basis for his argument that he is entitled to use state television to broadcast his own opinions in the guise of "journalism." But as The Halfling observes:

In the course of human endeavours it is possible and at times necessary and essential to separate the subjective from the objective – in journalism as much as in justice. It would seem from Mr. Campbell’s discussion that he is unable or unwilling to do that.

How might a more honest Mr Campbell go about that? How would you know yourself to separate objective journalism from the subjective? Does it matter? Well, since Mr Campbell thinks he's defending journalism, he might reflect that (as the Associated Press Handbook still asserts) while "reporters are each driven by their own individual brand of curiosity, empathy, or downright pushiness, [what's still necessary are] solid interview techniques, source development, investigative and organisational skills, and keen objectivity to recognise, obtain, and effectively communicate a story to a reader, viewer or listener."

In summary, "'journalism,' as a distinctive literary genre, does not exist without objectivity." At every step.

You could start by looking at what objective journalism once meant, as the author of that last statement has done.  In his thesis on objectivity in journalism, Les Lane defines defines journalism as “an objective account of current events”: 

Objectivity, currency, and the focus on events, are journalism’s key ingredients. Take away any of them, and 'journalism,' as a distinctive genre, disappears. Substitute a focus on ideas for the journalistic focus on events, and you get academia. Substitute the past for the present and you get history. Substitute advocacy for objectivity, and the result is propaganda. 

Which is where Mr Campbell's work has ended up.

SO SINCE WE KNOW what propaganda looks like, let's focus instead on the objectivity that Campbell has abandoned. John De Mott of Temple University's journalism school identified three essential starting points for anyone calling himself a journalist:

Every vocation or occupational calling relies upon certain basic assumptions about the nature of reality ... Journalism is no exception, obviously. We assume three things:

    First, that there is such a thing as objective reality ... existingf incependent of our own individual existence.

    Second, that such reality ... can be comprehended – somehow – by a human mind.

    Third, that comprehension or understanding of objective reality ... can be communicated from one human mind to another.

It should be obvious that when a journalist (or alleged journalist, like Mr Campbell) denies objectivity in their profession, "they are also denying the possibility of it in any human endeavour."

Even if we're not clear on a definition of objectivity, when we tune into organisation purporting to report the news, there are several elements we would expect to encounter:

• Factual content: reporting the facts without the reporter’s own opinions, values, analysis, interpretation, partisan cause, or financial interests
• Accuracy: getting information right
• Impersonality/detachment: presenting the facts without first-person reference to the reporter’s impressions, feelings, actions, etc.
• Balance/fairness: reporting the different sides of a conflict, or opinions on an issue, without slanting toward one side
• Transparency: naming and explaining sources
• Independence: maintaining autonomy from sources of information and from other potentially biasing interests.

In coming out against objectivity, Canpbell is saying these things — accuracy, transparency, factual content – are less important than his own myth-making. 

Now that we know, we should take him at his word. And ignore him.

OBJECTIVITY DOESN'T SIMPLY MEAN pointing a camera at random and broadcasting the resulting "facts.  There are two issues: selection, and context.

Every good reporter selects the relevant facts to write about and broadcast; every newsroom editor which events and issues to cover. Every editor and reporter will have their own views, opinions and biases. Does that mean that "there is no real difference between factual reporting and opinion"? That all news is necessarily subjective? No:

"[O]bjective thinking is committed to truth and employs rational methods; subjective thinking involves willful disregard of the truth and/or the use of nonrational methods. The decisions journalists make in selecting what to cover and how to cover it can therefore be either objective or subjective, depending on their methods and their intent. ...

The key to objectivity is a commitment to telling the truth as best one can, without evasion.

HISTORICALLY, WRITES LANE, THE idea of  objectivity in journalism evolved through four stages, "from its emergence in the 1830s as Nonpartisanship, through Neutrality, Focus-on-Facts and Detachment, to the ambiguity of the present day." 

The 'Four Quadrants': the four evolutionary stages of journalistic objectivity
[from Lane, 'A reexamination of the canon of objectivity in American journalism (2001)']

Part of the problem, observes Lane, is "the assumption that objectivity is an ideal, absolute, impossible, incomprehensible, value-free state of being, outside of all physical, cognitive, psychological, and social contexts, where reality is perceived without distortions of any kind." To be objective in this confused view would be to somehow have access to "absolute truth" – to have the "God's-eye view on a story. To discard this impossible idea is the first step. The remedy, he argues, is what those four stages were struggling towards, which is Contextual Independence. There is one reality about which to report, and it is seen from many contexts — of which the reporter's is only one. An objective journalist therefore would be a reporter "who faithfully and accurately gets-both(all)-sides. ... In short, journalistic objectivity therefore becomes the ability to surf contexts."

Sounds like fun, right!

Note that arguing that "all knowledge is contextual" is not that same as saying that "everything is relative." It simply recognises that knowledge is always gained under certain conditions at certain times. "Journalists, like other seekers, must learn to trust themselves and their fellows and the world enough to take everything in" advises Michael Sschudson (author of the much-quoted Discovering the News), "while distrusting themselves and others and the appearance of the world enough not to be taken in by everything."

They would refuse, then, as some of them do now, either to surrender to relativism or to submit uncritically to arbitrary conventions established in the name of objectivity. This requires both personal and institutional tolerance of uncertainty and acceptance of risk and commitment to caring for truth. If this is difficult in journalism, it s nonetheless most vital, for the daily persuasions of journalists reflect and become our own.

Campbell has simply abandoned his calling. Perhaps his employers should be calling him on it.

When the distinction between true and false no longer exists ...

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

~ Hannah Arendt, from her book The Origins of Totalitarianism [hat tip Stephen Hicks]

 

The Bullshit-Asymmetry Principle, aka 'Brandolini’s Law'

The bullshit-asymmetry principle, also known as Brandolini’s Law, is the simple observation that it’s far easier to produce and spread BS, misinformation and nonsense than it is to refute it.

In fact, the iSchool at University of Washington launched a course on Calling Bullshit with the first class being booked up within one-minute of registration. The professors, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West have since written a book: Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World.

Phil Williamson in Nature also wrote a nice article emphasizing that we should take the time and effort to correct misinformation where we can. In it, he proposed the idea that “The global scientific community could…set up its own, moderated, rating system for websites that claim to report on science. We could call it the Scientific Honesty and Integrity Tracker, and give online nonsense the SHIT rating it deserves.”

[Credit: Sketchplanations]

”Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. Nevertheless ... "

"Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken ... Nevertheless the opinion of experts, when it is unanimous, must be accepted by non-experts as more likely to be right than the opposite opinion."

Full citation:

"Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. Einstein’s view as to the magnitude of the deflection of light by gravitation would have been rejected by all experts not many years ago, yet it proved to be right. Nevertheless the opinion of experts, when it is unanimous, must be accepted by non-experts as more likely to be right than the opposite opinion.
    "The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this:

1. that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; 
2. that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and 
3. that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

"These propositions may seem mild, yet, if accepted, they would absolutely revolutionise human life.
    "The opinions for which people are willing to fight and persecute all belong to one of the three classes which this scepticism condemns. When there are rational grounds for an opinion, people are content to set them forth and wait for them to operate. In such cases, people do not hold their opinions with passion; they hold them calmly, and set forth their reasons quietly. The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately."

~ Bertrand Russell, from his introduction to his Sceptical Essays (1928)

How do you define an "expert"?

"[N]ew experts had to earn their place at the top of the knowledge pyramid by gaining a reputation among their peers. To become an authority, with all the privileges thereof, it was not enough to be learned; one was expected to have contributed to the body of knowledge."

~ Joel Mokyr, from his 2017 book A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy

"A pro-censorship position could now be presented as a matter of national security."

"When people talk about disinformation today, it is almost always from within a left-wing narrative framework. The villains behind the disinformation tsunami allegedly inundating the civilised world are identified as white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes, anti-vaccination zealots, and fundamentalist Christians....
    "In normal circumstances, the pet hates of leftists don’t carry very much weight. Tragically, however, the life of the world stopped being normal in January 2020, as it became clear that a novel coronavirus – Covid-19 – was about to ignite a global pandemic. Fearful that the small but very vocal clusters of anti-vaccination zealots, located in just about all Western nations, would undermine the public health and immunological measures vital to fighting the virus, public servants began establishing anti-disinformation units to identify and counter the lies being spread about Covid-19....
    "[P]oliticians and activists moved swiftly to extend the brief of these disinformation units to encompass just about all of the Left’s pet hates. The situation was not improved by the intervention of national security agencies alarmed at the volume of Russian and Chinese disinformation pouring onto Western social media platforms.
    "From the perspective of the Left, this conflation of Far-Right disinformation with the disinformation emanating from authoritarian nation states would prove to be enormously helpful. A pro-censorship position ... could now be presented as a matter of national security. In New Zealand, willingness to buy into this aspect of the anti-disinformation project was aided by the still raw memories of the Christchurch Mosque Massacres. ...
    "What the New Zealand Left – notoriously ignorant of its own, and the international movement’s history – finds it almost impossible to accept is that disinformation (or, as it was once, more honestly, known: “propaganda”) was, and is, every bit as rampant on the revolutionary left, as it was, and is, on the reactionary right. ... Not that the state-subsidised Disinformation Project would ever acknowledge the fact..."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'Disinformation from the Left'

Minisinformation, green gloating, and apocalypse porn

"Remember when a flood was just a flood? A watery calamity that might make roads impassable, homes unliveable and sometimes, in the worst cases, claim lives? Not anymore. Now it’s always a deluge, an apocalypse, a portent of the horrors to come if mankind keeps on sinfully heating the planet. Now a flood is always a lesson from on high – from a ticked-off Poseidon, presumably – warning hubristic humans to ‘reduce carbon emissions.’ Floods are our fault now, like everything else.
    "This neo-Biblical view of floods, this pre-modern belief that gushing waters are divine wrath for human misbehaviour, was much in evidence following the flooding of New York City on Friday....
    "The flooding was bad, there’s no question about that. ... [But t]here’s been a nauseating streak of apocalypse porn in the chatter about New York’s floods.... Hacks have been trying to outdo each other in the hyperbole stakes. ... With dire predictability, Friday’s flooding has been blamed on climate change – which is to say on that pesky, polluting modernity created by mankind. ... we must [they howl] ‘reduce carbon emissions and stop the ongoing heating of the planet’ or else these violent visitations from Mother Nature will ‘become more extreme’ ... In short, appease the weather gods, offer up industrial society as a sacrifice, and maybe they’ll leave us alone. ...
    "There is something distinctly medieval in this view of extreme weather as nature’s rage with mankind. You see it all the time. In response to wildfires in Australia, heatwaves in Europe, big storms in the US, the same cry goes up: we’re being punished for our eco-crimes. ...
    "It is a testament to the creeping irrationalism in chattering-class circles that every weather event is now interpreted as a ‘sign,’ a species of heavenly punishment. Like pre-modern peasants, who at least had the excuse of having never heard of science, they’re incapable of shrugging off rain or heat or wind as perfectly normal events. No, they’re rebukes, lessons, all providing ‘a glimpse of the possible winter world we’ll inhabit if we don’t sort ourselves out.’
    "The idea that weather is turning more violent, and that it’s all down to climate change, is essentially misinformation. As Bjorn Lomborg points out, ever-fewer people are dying in natural disasters. Even as the human population has quadrupled over the past hundred years, deaths from climate calamity have dropped 20-fold. The risk of a human dying in one of nature’s catastrophes has fallen by 99 per cent since the 1920s. Modernity isn’t taking lives – it’s saving them.
    "Which is why we need more of it, not less."

~ Brendan O'Neill, from his column 'Stop this green gloating over New York’s floods: Friday’s flooding was bad, but it was not an eco-apocalypse'

"Jacinda Ardern ... is now one of the leading anti-free speech figures in the world"

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told the UN that free speech 

is "a weapon of war," "censorship is necessary" to protect free speech .. and that 

war is peace and freedom is slavery. (Pick any two.)

"Jacinda Ardern may no longer be Prime Minister of New Zealand, but she was back at the United Nations continuing her call for international censorship. Ardern is now one of the leading anti-free speech figures in the world and continues to draw support from political and academic establishments. In her latest attack on free speech, Ardern declared free speech as a virtual weapon of war. She is demanding that the world join her in battling free speech as part of its own war against “misinformation” and “disinformation.” ...
    "In her speech, she notes that we cannot allow free speech to get in the way of fighting things like climate change. She notes that they cannot win the war on climate change if people do not believe them about the underlying problem. The solution is to silence those with opposing views. It is that simple. ...
    "[It is] chilling ... to hear Ardern express her fealty to free speech as she calls on the nations of the world to severely curtail it to prevent people from undermining their policies and priorities. She remains the 'empathetic' face of raw censorship and intolerance. She is now the virtual ambassador-at-large for global speech regulation and criminalisation."

~ Jonathan Turley from his post 'Harvard’s Jacinda Ardern Calls on the United Nations to Crack Down on Free Speech as a Weapon of War'

RELATED:

"The organised Left—once a bastion for free speech, equality, and social justice—has become drunk on the heady wine of identitarianism, losing its way in the maze of its own making. The politics of identity have eclipsed the quest for universal values, and in doing so, mutated into a grotesque facsimile of the very far-right extremism it purports to fight. The great irony lies here: In their incessant mission to highlight the pervasive evils they claim to battle, they have themselves become the embodiment of these forces." 

~ Dane Giraud, from his post 'The real devils among us' [emphasis in the original]

"Disinformation?" "You want disinformation, then look at the Green movement"

"'The green movement *is* a disinformation campaign’...
    "There has been a concerted effort since the 1990s to convince people that climate change is making natural disasters worse. ... But a disaster is defined by two things: deaths and costs. And we’re not seeing an increase in either. In fact, deaths from extreme weather events have actually drastically declined over the past century. Only a few hundred people now die each year from natural disasters in the US, for example. So the climate movement is undeniably a disinformation campaign....
    "In the recent cases in California, Greece and Hawaii, for example, it was bad fire prevention, bad forest management or bad grasslands management that played a key role. In the American cases, authorities failed to clear the area around electrical wires, which are often the trigger for fires. They also failed to stabilise electrical poles, which likely collapsed and contributed to the fires. Hawaii in particular did not have the proper kind of disaster preparedness, such as working sirens and widespread training, that would equip people to escape unharmed.
    "In the case of the Greek fires, we were told by the media that the main cause was climate change, then it emerged that arson was more likely to blame....
    "Blaming climate change only serves the interests of powerful politicians. ... to cede responsibility for their own failures. ... to raise money and demand more subsidies for renewables.
    "At the same time, stirring up predictions of a secular apocalypse feeds people’s spiritual needs.... to embody an almost superhero self-image... to sound the alarm and ultimately harmonise humankind with nature.... Telling people that they must play a role in avoiding the ultimate apocalypse serves a perfect storm of political, financial and spiritual interests all at once."

~ Michael Shellenberger, from his interview at Spiked: ‘The green movement is a disinformation campaign’