Peers of. Social Media

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Head Notes

Four regular (not fake) news stories:

BBC news: Coronavirus Doctor’s Diary: “Fake news makes people think we want them to die.” (link)

Abc news: Due to social media “news,” people are attacking 5G communication masts (towers) across Europe, so then sometimes loved ones cannot speak to dying relatives in isolation in hospital. (link)

Sun news UK, with photographs: celebrities are advising followers that 5G towers are dangerous, as of 18 April social media followers have attacked 53 masts. (link)

Aljazeera news: Yes, it’s a Russian conspiracy: SOMEONE wants us to believe that masts cause corona. (link)

Hello Reader,

Got social peers?

Everybody likes having peers, everybody. A man once told me he bought a heavy metal concert T-shirt so that other fans of metal would find him. Not all peers are so obvious. It was E.M. Forster, in his oft-reprinted essay Two Cheers for Democracy, (link) who said that he belonged to an unspoken society of people who silently recognize each other. I suppose we can belong to overlapping groups, some vast and public, some small and quiet. 

As for those who are unthinking, unreflective, and reflexively trying always to conform as much they can, I wonder if they feel special, perhaps comforting themselves that by being so much in the majority they are so much more special than nerds and folks less classy. I really don’t know. 

A computer nerd, Paul Graham, once wrote that if you find yourself agreeing with absolutely everything believed by your surrounding culture, then you might want to think about that… I’ve read every one of Paul’s essays on the web. Read them without commenting, that is, as I don’t like his commenting peers. (On sites like Reddit and Ycombinator)

Yet I often comment for musician and computer programmer Derek Sivers, another original web writer. His peers I like. On one of Derek’s comment threads someone complimented him by saying Derek had done like Cameron in the teen movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Derek replied, “Huh?” (link to blog) So I joined in. I said I didn’t get the compliment either, but at least I enjoyed the excuse to watch the movie, on DVD, and I provided a link for everyone to a review by critic Roger Ebert, a review with a thread of eight comments. (link to review)   

I reflected on how (except maybe once on VHS with a few university students) 

I hadn’t seen the movie since I had first caught it in the theatre. Around that time, speaking of conformity, I had noticed that folks would rush out the instant the credits started. So I would tell my movie companion that if we had a good reason to rush, such as to get to a car park, then OK, but let’s not rush blindly for no reason. So I saw the end of the Ferris credits. This would have been back when only funny guys like Peter Sellers or Jackie Chan added anything at the end, decades before Marvel started adding treats. 

It was on the Web, on some thread I’ve long forgotten, that I found several people saying that Ferris comes out of the bathroom at the end of the credits. How distasteful. I privately thought, “No way, the movie is not that low!” But who was I to disagree with social Internet media?

Now I’ve rewatched it. My memory has been right all along, the “several people” who are not my peers are not correct. Who are these people? I will tell you what I imagine: They are the sort who forward social media. Who write social media. Whose peers are each other, a low sort who carelessly play the stereo louder than they know their neighbors would like, drive with a fuzzy regard for the two second rule, cheat at solitaire and murmur vague obscenities. (Janis Ian) They are people who innocently pass on social fake news as truth, innocently get alarmed at what’s on social media, and then tell folks right away about the COVID social news they just read… while seeing their peers, with self-satisfaction, as being worldly.

I wonder: Do these guys mean to lie about the ending of Ferris Bueller? I can’t say, but I can say they don’t mean to take pains to be honest about everything they say or write. I get it: As long as many people are most comfortable around peers who believe in “careless, fuzzy truth” there will always be a place for fake social media.

Meanwhile, in the regular, traditional media where any reporter’s peers, including her editor, demand “journalism ethics,” comes this COVID story: According to a hospital doctor in the UK, social media fake news is causing people to avoid hospitals. (see the first link at the head notes) I can sympathize with the doctor. 

I’m sure it’s hard to explain to a patient’s distraught wife “the theory and practise of social media” with only a quick sound bite—better to try to discredit a specific falsehood— hard to explain that her beloved brother-in-law, meaning no disrespect to him, is mistaken when he endorses and forwards something on social media. 

In everyday life? Perhaps a good compromise is to say to your brother-in-law: If the social media story is true, and if we can wait for a day, then ethical journalists will pounce on the story and report to us in detail. 

Furthermore, if real media does not show 5G towers causing any COVID, then please don’t attack the towers! Don’t attack based on social media. Let’s remember that real journalists practise “real journalism,” while many people cannot even define proper journalism. 

My not-so-common sense is: If from social media you hear something such as electrical towers causing a virus, or white vinegar curing COVID, or alien flying saucers have just landed on the Washington Mall, and if you wait just one day… and then all you hear from the eager capitalist reporters is crickets… then you might want to think about that…

In my own life—where “I don’t do Facebook,” because I despise the ethically-challenged company director, Mark Zuckerberg— …my secret peers remain homely everyday folk who would act, speak and write with the same self-respect as a journalist.

Sean Crawford, 

as COVID fake “news” infects social media, 

Spring, 

2020

Footnotes: 

~A Texan who has a “bachelor of science degree in mass communications” was arrested and lost his job after his fake COVID news on social media. He is now out on bail. (link)

~Mark Manson on his blog says something similar to me, and he even provides a URL for you to re-post it on social media.

~My recent social media piece is archived March 25.

~I documented how Russian Trolls Meet Social Media, archived December 2019.

~Gordon Corera, BBC News Security Consultant, recently recently reported on an EU report:

The authors also say there is "significant evidence of covert Chinese operations on social media", citing reports of networks on Twitter with ties to the Chinese government.

The report also singles out Russia for spreading disinformation, saying pro-Kremlin sources and Russian state media were continuing to run a coordinated campaign with the aim of undermining the EU and its crisis response and sowing confusion about the origins and health implications of Coronavirus.

~Janis Ian sang At Seventeen back in the seventies. I don’t suppose there’ll ever be a remake of her piece. Some songs, like Mac the Knife, and some movies, like Casablanca and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, just can’t be remade.

Social Media Silver Lining

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got a silver lining to the covid-19 social media?

I was amused by the failure of nerve by the National Post. One full-page spread after another—and it went on for quite a few pages—had blue headlines at the top. Labeled Myth on the left page, and Fact on the right. This was a needed public service, but… —my mirth was from the National Post not daring to have the left side headline as Social Media Myth.

Because let’s face it, when someone tells you a myth, in person or on the telephone, they nearly always got it from social media. “My uncle Tom knows a guy, who knows a guy, who forwarded onto social media something he interpreted from the Web.” Misinterpreted, that is.

Who are these social media forwarders and believers? As it happens, I subscribe to a weekly email from famous blogger Mark Manson. On Monday he posted about how he published two nearly identical posts, exactly one week apart. The first one was well received. The later one resulted in all sorts of hysterical hatred and scorn. Why the difference? Manson has several theories, which might be phrased, in composite, as this: The Internet users were the sort of idiots who were slow to wake up to the virus that was already being reported on responsible channels. Here’s the link to Manson’s scathing “3. A tale of two emails.”.

Idiots, indeed. Over in South Korea some folks passed around a water bottle laced with household ingredients that would make it virus proof. In fact, they all got covid-19 from the same bottle. Did they get the idea of a safe water from social media? I don’t know, but such is the sort of thinking I would expect from social media lovers. Call it “being innocent of the need for common sense critical thinking.” Or call it stupidity.

Recently an acquaintance earnestly told me, over the phone, about something important she had just learned from social media. About how having a drink every 15 minutes would make you safe from the corona virus. You ask: Did I pour cold water on the idea? To my acquaintance, who maybe doesn’t have a high school diploma, did I talk down sternly from my mighty university degree in critical thinking? No-o-o.

Because a few years ago I did a thought experiment: Consider two young men. One fellow, full of idealism for saving the planet, has a non-union low-wage factory job. The other, even lower waged, and with less idealism, is employed at the local campus as a graduate student and teaching assistant. Which one saves the planet by using a ten-speed bicycle? I picture the bike rider as being the grad student, I bet you did too.

To me the difference between the two is not not knowledge of ecology, and not I.Q, but “knowledge” nevertheless, in the sense that “knowledge is power.” We all want a sense of power, of agency, and of control over our lives. "If I don’t feel power from knowledge then I’ll seek power from a fine set of wheels." Feel free to disagree, as I suppose I’m oversimplifying. Meanwhile, “they say” the panic buyers who valued toilet paper over the conventional “food and ammunition,” besides being too scared to think straight, were seeking a small sense of control in the midst of chaos. 

It seems to me that a person who has trouble with, say, science articles, or those traditional newspapers with “journalism ethics,” is going to fight against that nervous tornado of facts-hard-to-grasp by resorting to “power from social media.” And that’s why I didn’t have the heart to squelch my friend directly, but instead indirectly referred to my faith in fact-based journalism.

So where are we today? 

With all the distasteful tales whizzing around within social media, with many horrible lies needing long articles to refute them, with horrors needing a doctor on CBC radio to refute many myths at length, is there also, during this dark storm cloud, a sliver lining? As compensation, dare we hope? Has humankind, at long last, learned not to believe in social media? …

Nope. No silver lining. Not as long as people’s needs are not met by traditional media.

The good news, judging by the wimping out of the National Post, is that readers of social media can overlap with readers of ethical media. Maybe the readers of social media are both unknowing, and knowing too. In which case social media is more something to be ignored and kept in perspective, than something seen as a harbinger of social decent into barbarism. And maybe those of us with a sense of responsibility are just going to have to quietly live with the believers of social media. Like how during the blogging frenzy—remember?—folks with library cards (as noted by Neal Stephenson) were ignored by our new improved digital society, and in turn they ignored society’s practise of dull skimming and superficial soundbites, preferring instead to just quietly kept meeting with each other to have those deep conversations they loved, which society ignored. 

How many years did it take, in the time of our great-grandparents, to know that not all stuff in print is true? I think it will take us, in our own time, just as many years before we finally will say, “Just because my stupid brother-in-law forwarded it, does not mean it is true.” May God grant me patience and understanding.

If someone blindly believes in social media, or blindly distrusts journalism ethics, then it might help me to “chill out” if I remember: Some people—judging by their actions—also believe in gossip that morphs, instead of honest unchanging facts; some people won’t make the effort needed for ethics, any more than they will strive to become ladies or gentlemen. In the end, some people will make my blond aunt very nervous because they forward without forethought.. All this while peach fuzzed cub reporters are proud to be “gentlemen of the press.”

It’s been decades since I walked as a volunteer student newspaper reporter at university, yet I still check myself when I speak or write on the Web. With all due respect to social media folks, being a gentleman has become a way of life.

Sean Crawford

Dutifully stuck at home

In a plaster-walled wee cabin at the old city limits

2020 

Update: The BBC has an article, complete with a picture of the corona, about how to stop bad information from going viral.

Another Update: The government has just started up a rapid response unit. Sounds serious. Real serious. Is it serious enough to shake people's faith in social media? Not if my thesis in the above essay is correct. Sorry.

Footnotes: 

~What is a lady? I used to often say to my client Sheila-Ann, “Everybody likes you.” Gracious, thoughtful of others, never swearing, and ever polite. I noticed: Tough Handi-Bus drivers wearing rough work gloves would become smiling gentlemen around her. Now, that’s a lady.

~I documented fake news being a communist plot—er, I mean, a Russian plot, in the Part 2, Pax, to my essay Russian Trolls Meet Social Media archived December 2019.

~Three comprehensive posts defining three aspects of journalism ethics are archived in March and April of 2018.

~Of course the frenzied folks who skim sound-bites won’t have the patience to go over to my archives, and that’s OK. Better for them to stay away completely than to click an all-to-easy-link to a post intended for patient lovers of print.

Ethical Journalism and Bias

Hello Reader,

Got ethical journalism?

Proper, real reporters, as part of their felt profession of ethical journalism, make a huge effort to be unbiased. 

A student taking a diploma in journalism told me, that his college professor told his class, that if an editor was ordered, by the newspaper owner, to be biased, or in other words, to go against journalistic ethics, then he would resign, and if the order stood, so would his replacement. I believe it.

Some columns, while not purely facts, are much closer to news than mere opinion, as the writer is presenting a context for the news by “connecting the dots,” or, say, explaining the implications of a new court ruling. Syndicated columnist Gwynn Dyer, who made the 10-episode CBC series War, is a man very knowledgable about social studies and armed forces. Dyer once offended the owner of a chain of Canadian newspapers because Dyer was honest about Israel. The owner, not being a journalist, ordered the editors to drop his column. As Dyer tells it in the forward to one of his column collections, while the editor in the city where the owner lived toed the line, most of the editors across Canada quietly kept him on, for as long as they could. They didn’t like being told to enforce a bias against unfavourable news.

But you ask, isn’t it human nature to have an opinion? A bias? Especially from your religion? Especially if Muslim? Wouldn’t a Sunni Muslim refuse to report anything good about a Shia Muslim? (and vice versa) Or anything good about a “person of the Jewish persuasion?” My answer is one phrase: “Allah bless Al-Jazeera.” Trained by British journalists, Al-Jazeera is now doing trusted, balanced, unbiased reporting throughout the Middle East and beyond.  

Of course, every steam engine needs a release valve. My local newspaper includes outlets for biased emotions by the staff, in the form of editorials, headlined as such, and by personal opinion columns, marked as such, by having personal photographs attached. 

In my town, the broadsheet daily (thicker, with broader pages) would have its editorials made by a “committee,” which I guess still further smoothed out bias, while the tabloid daily (smaller, with tabloid sized pages) had it’s editorials written by one man, the chief editor. He told me during a phone interview, back when I was a campus reporter, that part of the value of having him write the editorial, besides having individuality, was that he would have a single topic. The readers knew what he felt to be most important thing that day. Meanwhile the broadsheet’s editorial committee would have several topics on the same page. I remember he laughed with me to say he was not trying to be like the Daily Bugle’s editor, J. Jonah Jameson. (The boss of Spiderman)

Alas, the tabloid has since gone to using an editorial committee. But at least I notice an attempt at “balance” to smooth out bias: It has columns from both leftists and rightists, both local writers and reprints from other newspapers, both Canadian and foreign. Here’s a sample paragraph from a column, with subjective words like ‘hankering,’ ‘scandal generator,’ and ‘enemies.’ These words are not, as in news reporting, “just the facts, Ma’am.” (Catchphrase of Detective Friday on Dragnet, the radio series, later a TV series)

"If only Barrack Obama's enemies had known what a scandal generator the Nobel Peace Prize would be, they'd have been hankering for him to win it last year."

Lisa Van Dusen, Calgary Sun Washington Bureau, October 14, 2009

Now, U.S. citizens, with their backslapping and craving to be popular, might crave to know what others think, but truly, in a Canadian or British newspaper, the reporters would be very careful not to speculate or mind read the public, in case they were untruthful by accident. They could report the “facts” of an opinion poll, but if they gave their own opinion of “what everybody felt” they would be “editorializing.” Sometimes they might do so, as in reporting on a scandalous serial murderer, but always very carefully. (Another cultural difference, by the way, besides valuing conformity, is that U.S. reporters are allowed to use deceit, as in not telling anyone that they are reporters. That paper airplane wouldn’t fly up here.) 

While newspapers set the gold standard for journalistic ethics, what about Television?

The first TV newscasters were from conventional journalism, such as Edward R. Murrow. You may remember his final words in the movie Goodnight and Good Luck where, in his capacity as a broadcaster, his told his audience to step away from “the box.” Not the advice anyone with a regular job in Hollywood would give today. My point is that the idiot box is a different medium than newsprint, for reasons I won’t go into here. If you’re interested, Neil Postman explains it very well. See his How to Watch TV News and Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book where the opening chapter has been published as a stand-alone essay.  Postman has noted, for one thing, how the words spoken in a standard half-hour TV “Six o’clock News” broadcast would be fewer than the words on just the newspaper’s front page. 

If I keep referring to newsprint, it’s because I gather from my reading that ethics in print were always the standard, the standard most important and the hardest to reach, like ballet is to the dance world, or poetry to those who write great novels and plays.

Suffice to say, the two mediums of journalism diverged. To my mind, part of the difference is that television was descended not from newsrooms, or from dramatic stage plays, but from vaudeville, where people would go out to relax and see the guys with funny hats and canes, going out to be entertained, not to think. As for “the box,” I can sometimes hear a TV announcer’s voice slowwwing down, as the camera pans… because for consumers of the boob tube the emotional  picture is more important than… cramming in wordy information and facts.

As for newspaper ethics, I guess it helped that, in contrast to TV networks being so focused on ratings, at newspapers the profit center, that is to say, the folks selling and drawing up advertisements, would be in a different room or on a separate floor. Not part of the culture of the reporters.

In a newspaper, hard news is in the A section, while sports, entertainment and lifestyle will be buried further into the paper. As I said, there’s nothing wrong with a marked off opinion having a bias. Here’s what I wrote in an earlier blog post:

During a discussion on "journalism" a friend made reference to the Fox TV news. I didn't have the heart to tell him "Fox isn't real," that I didn't know of any city daily that was a Fox-style newspaper. It's too bad. If you don't read, then you don't have the same expectations for "real journalism." You won't even have the term "infotainment" in your vocabulary. This I know because the word was new—caused a burst of laughter—when I said it to my night school class of older university students during their final semester. It's too bad: during their university education they had missed out on grasping everyday media.

... Fox News executive Michael Clemente said, "The average news consumer can certainly distinguish between the A-section of the newspaper and the editorial page, which is what our programming represents."

Only it's not called Fox Opinion, it's all called Fox News.

Lisa Van Dusen, Calgary Sun Washington Bureau, October 15, 2009

Sean Crawford

Arizona

April

2018

Footnote:

~Clay Shirkey explains dwindling newspapers well and at length: (link, remember to scroll down; his second article is much better than the first, and he has a newspaper funding piece at the very bottom.)

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/

Idiot note: 

~That newspaper owner has censored before. One time an ethical cartoonist responded by depicting her with a flame thrower, as one of the censoring firemen out of Fahrenheit 451. 

She had a hissy fit, saying the big nose on her meant anti-semitism. (since stereotypical Jews are known for big noses) 

Of course, the classic sin of the censor is to not read—if only she had read the cartoons in her own newspapers of, say, the cavemen in B.C. —with the self-described “fat broad” and the cute one— or Blondie and Dagwood, or Hi and Lois, she would have known that the less dainty person gets the bigger nose, just as Hi’s neighbour Thirsty has a bigger nose than Hi. The neighbour was portrayed as alcoholic, to be sure, and as a typical suburban fellow, not as a typical Jewish guy. 

Stupid @#& censor!  

Farewell to all that:

This is my third recent essay on journalistic ethics. If the golden age of journalism is passing away then I wanted to write about newspapers one last time. Now I have. 

Real Journalism and Balance

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

We have civil rights - not only to protect us from bad people, but to protect us from good people as well, from people who think they know what's good for us. Tyrants have always acted in the best interest of their people, or so they thought.

From Derek Sivers’s notes on Management of the Absurd by Richard Farson 

Hello Reader,

Got real journalism?

Besides being excruciatingly accurate, real journalism is balanced and unbiased.

As a former reporter for my university student newspaper, and a believer in citizenship, I utterly believe in ethical news reporting. Call it “real journalism.” Maybe ethics are vanishing along with newsprint, but still, I think we all need to know what was once expected. You might associate reporters with crowded coastal cities, like in the Hollywood movies, but newspaper journalists are working all over this fair land. I live on the Great Plains in Alberta, a province of beautiful crops and fields of contented cows.

Imagine Southeastern Alberta, near the badlands and the old coal mines. Two small towns each have libraries. Go to either library on the weekend, and it’s queer: If one’s closed, the other is open. Turns out they share the same library staff, who alternate. It’s a conservative land: All the librarians are female. You might expect the ladies would think alike. After all, it’s a rural land, in the Bible belt, with harsh winters that confine people together. And of course, librarians who share a livelihood probably share similar values. So then, which books do they stock: Leftist or rightist? Advocating communism or fascism? Abortion: For or against?

One might think the old birds who sew quilts together, and flock together, would think together. Maybe they do. But you wouldn’t know it by their books. Take your the scales of justice to their shelves, grab their books, and put them in the pans: In equal balance would be books leftist and rightist, books for and against abortion.  That’s what being a trusted librarian means, according to a friend getting a college librarian diploma. A banker once wrote that democracy is not served merely when a communist and then a fascist can each book an evening at a community hall to spout their views: It’s when the same citizens can attend both nights, to weigh and balance their arguments.

Ethical journalists, like librarians, are in a position of trust. A “balanced” news story is where the reporter takes the time and effort to track down people representing “both sides” of a story, and then letting the readers decide for themselves. (In some countries they believe the readers can’t be trusted, meaning they believe their country has no place for democracy) 

I remember reporting on stage plays. Afterwards, in the lobby, eager theatre goers, who knew I was a reporter, would ask, “What do you think of the play?” Having taken my notes in a removed, objective way, my honest answer, and it’s a cliche, was to reply, “I won’t know until I go home and write my review.” In a way journalists must sacrifice themselves, like a sports referee, or a judge at the county fair, by standing back from the contagious excitement that everyone else gets to enjoy. 

It’s nice to belong to the herd, but — If a lady is reporting on a potential new river dam that everyone is excited about, then she can’t join in. Balance means finding the cranky old farmer who says, “Everyone is so excited over building a new irrigation dam for crops, but my daddy warned me: The land can become salty, salt leached, I mean, and unfit for agriculture.” What a downer of a quote, when everyone is excited, but it must be included. Then building the dam will be from an informed choice.  

As for news with balance, consider the context: Not just news among an informed citizenry, but news within a democracy, where the people feel a sense of safety and freedom to speak and reason. Statistically, there is a link between a strong GDP (gross domestic product) and freedom of thought. Maybe freedom is not an effect of a strong economy, but a cause. Maybe, by having our reporters keeping society accountable, we have more decisions, business and political, being made not by corruption but by merit. Everybody wins.

We are so lucky, on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. I knew a boy killed in action in Afghanistan. Knew his parents, stayed at their ranch. Right now those countries with terrorism are the same ones that lack freedom of speech and press, lack civil liberties, and are the same ones where people have violence and intolerance towards each other. And corruption. The extremists think they are doing the right thing by not allowing freedom of thought, but too often it’s all too easy to put extremism above democracy, too easy to be actually serving the rulers when you think you are serving God. (No, I won’t make links to support that last sentence—for Allah’s sake, we at war on terror! There should be oodles of links you can find! If not… then a boy I knew was too good for you)

“Ethical journalism” is not a matter of degree, but an absolute. I believe such ethics are not solely of today’s time and place, nor specifically European, nor “decadent western,” nor “western plus Japan,” nor— never mind. Ethics, like the U.N.’s Universal Human Rights, exist already, in potential, for each country in the world. And in fact, there is excellent journalism coming out of the Arab world—what Arabs might call the Muslim world—called Al-Jazerah. They don’t make newspapers; they use modern electronic media. Ironically, the home base, the patron of Al-Jazeerah, is Qatar, the country that some other Arab countries are right now ganging up on. I would hope that ganging up is just coincidence, and not for the purpose of suppressing the best news outfit in the middle east. (link to Al-Jzerah)

Ethics. My young friend was a reservist with token pay, in a country (Canada) that does not have conscription, and needless to say, he surely did not die for a “job,” but for a cause. If journalists are being murdered in Russia and Latin America, it is NOT because, for a job, they are putting food on their table by reporting on dull, safe things, but because they are bravely reporting on risky things. To them, real journalism is worth it.

On this continent we have learned how to be safe in our everyday lives, after first learning “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” Here I expect ethical journalists, including “Al-Jazeera in America,” (before it shut down) to make an effort to be accurate, balanced and unbiased. The least I can do, in return, is to humbly accept my role: “A citizen’s duty is to be informed.”

Sean Crawford

Calgary,

March 

2018

Afterthought: I have to stop writing now, because I am at over 1,000 words for writing about “balance.” I have no time to explain how a journalist, clever like a fox, can produce news that is “unbiased,” just as we did at my university newspaper. That is a subject for another day.

Proper Journalism and Truth

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

“Oh no, not this old topic!” 

Question for Sean: "Could you take a fresh, delicious slant on this?"

Answer: Maybe, in the context of citizenship.

Hello Reader,

Got proper journalism?

Journalism starts with the Truth… That’s the only way we know of, right now, to have a democracy. Truth. 

In our new time of electronic media, tablets and fake news, it can be important to know what proper journalism is—or was—but I don’t think everybody knows. 

Think of old times, when electricity was confined to lightening in the sky. Did you know that a certain founding father, back in the days of the thirteen colonies, was a news printer? Benjamin Franklin believed in democracy—wait, that’s old history, and history puts some people to sleep. Better jump ahead to newer history, jumping ahead “four score and seven years.” (Gettysburg Address) Now, hear that thumping?

It’s a dewy morning, rows of tents, birds chirping, and teenage soldiers craving sleep. During hard training, sleep is extra blessed, of course. They are trying to burrow into their blanket roll, when: thump, thump, thump. All over the camp, probably one early riser for each tent, soldiers are up early, crunching their rifle butts into a pail of coffee beans. The thumping sound is inescapable. One might ask: Why doesn’t the army supply coffee already ground up? Easy: The Department of War can’t trust the civil contractors that would supply the coffee, can’t trust them not to adulterate the coffee grains. I guess in those days the U.S. economy was not yet affluent enough to pay government food and drug inspectors. The thump-thumping surely wasn’t from Americans trying to be libertarian.

The fighting ended, peace returned. Strange: When the conflict started, some would argue the Constitution was a contract made between 13 state governments. But only a few years later, and continuing down to our present day, people were forgetting the number 13, and agreeing with Abraham Lincoln: The Constitution was a contract with the “people,” and only the “people” could set the Constitution aside. “Freedom” meant “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

For any nation, then or now, some might think that only an elite with noble blue blood is fit to run the country. Like folks in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where they also think they don’t need freedom of speech. But not the U.S. Here the founding fathers decided not to allow any noble hereditary titles: No dukes or earls, because even way back in those days of buckled shoes, back in those impoverished years of neither electricity nor steam power, the founding fathers believed that “the people,” if they had freedom of speech, were capable of running the country themselves. “Democracy,” someone once said, “is the proposition that most of the people, most of the time, will do the right thing, provided they have the information.” Of course, the people can’t govern unless information, spoken and written, keeps on freely flowing. Not like in Arabia. (No wonder the Saudi King is battling terrorists: There is no peaceful way for those people to be heard) 

Let’s skip years ahead, to the time of my golden boyhood. Imagine if someone goes over to the coffee factory and finds out the coffee powder is being adulterated. “A-ha!” In America, even if the coffee factor was owned by the fearsome nephew of Vladimir Putin, you could freely go tell everyone, “A-ha!” A journalist could spread “the news.” But not “the gossip.” The difference? 

Here’s gossip: “Hey, that factory scandal? I think the Mayor is involved. Sean said he suspects the factory inspectors are dishonest. Maybe Donald Trump owns the factory…” Human nature being very prevalent, qualifiers like ‘I think,’ ‘Sean suspects’ and ‘maybe’ are soon dropped. Ouch! To err is human. And onward goes the gossip, steadily morphing along the way. 

Journalism though, unlike gossip, never morphs. Anything printed by a journalist is accurate and fit to go permanently into the encyclopedia, there to rest for posterity. How? Key word: Attribution. “According to the minister of food and drugs, the coffee tested out at…” And, “‘Six tons of coffee are transported by rail per day, according to Rail CEO Sean Crawford,’ adding ‘the new rail cars would allow…’” 

Of course a writer won’t need to attribute that the capital of France is Paris, on the river Seine, but if he wants to quote the tonnage that docks there, the number of wharf rats, or the percentage of babies bitten by rats per year, then he needs to attribute things to the port authority or the community health board. During the years when Napoleon took over, or, unhappily, this very year in Arabia or Russia, a reporter might not dare offend rich dock masters, but those countries aren’t democracies. The people there are unhappily paying their price for not having freedom of speech.

A journalist, then, is always on Scout’s Honour. No lies, no exaggerations, and no guesses. As she is typing a music story, a reporter can’t be guessing, “Well, I’m pretty sure the Beatles were playing in Hamburg in 1960, and the guitarist was Pete Best—“ Stop! Take your fingers off the keyboard and go find out. Saying “pretty sure” is a guess. Being a good citizen, a reporter is like a Lady or gentleman, speaking accurately and properly. We all know how within a family careless messy speech can damage trust, hurt feelings. At the city and state level, careless speech, drifting into lying speech, hurts democracy. Hurts all of us.

(Incidentally, Ringo replaced Pete Best in 1962)

Do newspapers employ “fact checkers?” NO! There are three categories of people who check themselves before they blab: Ladies, gentlemen and journalists. Saying “I was fairly sure” is no defence; in fact, it’s downright immoral. 

Of course in real life, in casual conversation, a non-journalist can say “I think…” Or “I am guessing that…” I do, all the time. But not at the keyboard. And I would never delete the prefix “I am guessing that…” and then hit send, putting my fake news out onto the World Wide Web. Warning: Our legal system regard keyboards as formal, as not being anywhere near as casual as person-to-person speech. Therefore defamation of character in print (libel) merits harsher penalties than something said out loud (slander) at a private party.

We are lucky. As our information is flowing, “we the people” are feeling a responsibility to be “of the government.” Take jury service. Not even a  gifted man like Bill Gates, “one of the smartest men in America,” if he was visiting Canada, would be allowed to serve on a Canadian jury. Juries are a part of the government, part of “legislation,” as they are establishing “case law.” As for “we the people,” by using our freedom of information and thought, (and serving on juries) we are of course feeling a “sense of agency.” 

It all ties together: Agency, freedom of speech, a free and ethical press… We’re lucky. The nations where the common people don’t feel agency, where they say with slumped shoulders, “What’s the use?” are the nations vulnerable to a quick violent change of government, what Napoleon called a “stroke of state,” or coup d’etat.

… Well. In the course of tying things together, trying to understand Truth and proper journalism, I’ve typed over a thousand words. What a wide ranging essay: Starting from 13 colonies, on past the brand new French Republic, where the newly enfranchised citizens did not yet have enough sense of agency to resist Napoleon… and finally stopping at modern times where in some states freedom is still expressly unwanted. Journalism, proper or not, is always there.

Conclusion: In my everyday life, if an Internet post triggers my outrage button, then, with my finger hovering over the send button, before I send along along fake news to my aunt in Boston, I can ask: Is it by a proper journalist? With attribution? Or is it outraged gossip, morphing along like a babbling brook? A citizen’s duty is to be ethical.

… …

... Afterthought: After being truthful, the next concern… for a good foxy news reporter, is being “balanced” and “unbiased.” … I learned precisely how to do so as a university student reporter—but that would be another essay for another day.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

March

2018
Sad Update: Today, Thursday March 15, according to CBC on my car radio, the news is being carried by several U.S. publications, including the Wall Street Journal, that President Trump lied about Canada. There is no news, so far, on whether respected U.S. businessmen care. Back in the 1980's Rita Mae Brown, raised in the U.S. south, noted that even a bigot hates a liar. That was then. 

Footnote: Have you heard? After the killing of a 23 year old journalism student, one of the worst states for terrorism, Pakistan, is rethinking whether people should be legally free to speak blasphemy. Over there, blasphemy is a capital offence. If such laws are becoming controversial in Pakistan, then unfortunately it’s not from realizing things are connected, with “speech freedom” being the infant twin of “political freedom,” but from finding themselves repeating the history of “the crucible” of the Salem witch trials. Or “the sorrow and the pity” of vigilanteism in post-war France. Here’s a link to the BBC. 

I don’t know whether the Americans covered the story… as part of their trying to be world leaders… against terror… I do know the BBC covered it in various languages.