Those Stubborn Facts: The News Media’s Priorities

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Amber Heard, celebrities, election 2016, Hillary Clinton, Johnny Depp, journalism, media bias, Michael Sussmann, misinformation, news, priorities, Those Stubborn Facts, Trump-Russia

Number of Google News search results today for “Michael Sussmann trial” (regarding misinformation and the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign): 16,300

 

Number of Google News search results today for “Johnny Depp trial”: 1.92 million

Im-Politic: The Washington Post’s Phony Probe of Policing Abuses

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crime, Im-Politic, journalism, law enforcement, Mainstream Media, police misconduct, police reform, policing, statistics, Vera Institute of Justice, Washington Post

As RealityChek readers surely know by now, reporting information out of context is one of my biggest gripes about journalism these days. (See, e.g., here.) So if there hadn’t been so much important news coming out of the Ukraine war and on so many other fronts this week, I’d have already written about an especially egregious example that appeared in the Washington Post this past Thursday.

Its big “exclusive” finding? “The Post collected data on nearly 40,000 payments [to resolve police misconduct claims] at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments within the past decade, documenting more than $3.2 billion spent to settle claims.”

Sounds like a bundle right? Even a criminally large amount of money. In isolation, of course. But information never exists in isolation. And any reporter or anyone else with a working brain or a lick of integrity would have tried to answer these two questions: How does this sum compare with the nation’s total policing budget over the same period? And how does it compare with the national cost of crime?

None of this background appeared in the Post piece. But it took me a grand total of thirtyseconds of searching on-line to find answers from reliable sources.

The national law cost of policing? That’s $115 billion per year, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, whose declared mission is ending “the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty.”

That is, the organization isn’t exactly an apologist for current policing performance. But it’s telling us that over ten years, the cost of settling police misconduct claims equalled 0.28 percent of America’s policing budget (of $1.15 trillion). Any decent person would like to see that number fall to zero percent, but 0.28 is pretty close. And it’s even better considering that, as at least Post reporters Keith Alexander, Steven Rich, and Hannah Thacker (along with their editors) had the honesty to observe (in the middle of this long article) that

“City officials and attorneys representing the police departments said settling claims is often more cost-efficient than fighting them in court. And settlements rarely involve an admission or finding of wrongdoing.”

The authors also state that their figures exclude payments of less than $1,000. Let’s suppose, however, that including these incidents doubles the total amount of payouts over the last decade. Then they’d represent 0.56 percent of the national policing budget. That’s still awfully close to zero for a line of work whose employees lay their lives on the line every day, and who constantly need to make split-second life-and-death decisions.

It’s of course certain that the number of police misconduct charges that produced payouts, whether they stemmed from genuine abuses or not, doesn’t include all cases of misconduct because so many undoubtedly aren’t reported. But even if all of them were, and consequently the total cost of misconduct got doubled, its share of total U.S. policing spending over the last decade would barely top one percent. So forgive me if I’m not overcome with outrage.

As for the second question, in February, 2021, a team of academics and policy analysts estimated that in the 2017, crime cost the U.S. economy $2.6 trillion. That single year number is more than 8oo times bigger than the Post‘s figure for the last ten years’ worth of costs for police misconduct payouts.

As a result, these police misconduct costs as a percentage of the costs of crime to America over a year – much less a decade – don’t even represent the proverbial “drop in the bucket.” They’re more like an aerosol particle in the bucket.

The researchers who came up with the cost-of-crime figure acknowledge that limitations on the available data for crime forced them to include modeling techniques in their calculations, and that more work (and more actual information) should be performed to produce greater accuracy. But even if the $2.6 trillion overestimates the national cost of crime by half, it would still render the police misconduct payouts total utterly trivial in comparison.

Policing abuses definitely need to be reduced dramatically. But how about setting the same goal for the kinds of rampant journalistic abuses most recently epitomized by this Washington Post investigation?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Utterly Incoherent Polling on Ukraine

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Biden administration, fake news, journalism, NATO, No-Fly Zone, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, polling, polls, Reuters/Ipsos, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war

Just when you think American polling can get any weirder, along comes another survey that proves me wrong.

It was a mere week ago that I called attention to surveys by Gallup and by the team-up of the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center whose questions were so mindless that they were absolutely incapable of determining Americans’ actual views on various U.S. options in the Ukraine-Russia war – and especially on the potentially (and literally) national-life-or-death matter of involving the American military in efforts to counter the Russian invasion.

Just six days later, a survey from the Reuters news agency and the Ipsos company veered deeper into cluelessness than I’ve thought possible – and deeper than I’d ever anticipated even for polling on foreign policy.

I single out the latter category throughout the decades that I’ve followed them, these surveys have routinely failed to pose questions that suggest in any way that various measures could create major costs and risks for American security and prosperity. And as made clear here and here, this incompetence can be particularly misleading and dangerous when it comes to U.S. moves that could engulf the country in a nuclear war. (Here’s one conspicuous exception.)

But yesterday’s Reuters/Ipsos poll went one big step further. Its most attention-getting result was that 74 percent of U.S. adults believe that “The United States and NATO should impose a ‘no fly zone’ above Ukraine.”

As widely recognized, a no-fly zone could well generate direct combat between the United States and Russia, and all too easily lead one or both countries to fire nuclear weapons at the other’s homeland. That’s because “imposing” the zone means sending American military aircraft into the skies over Ukraine to prevent their Russian counterparts from attacking targets in the invaded country – ranging in principle from convoys of Western military aid to fleeing refugees to Ukrainian civilian and even military targets. Maybe the Russians would keep their aircraft on the ground. And maybe they wouldn’t.

Thank goodness that the Biden administration and the NATO leadership realize how potentially suicidal that policy could be.

According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, though, nearly three-quarters of Americans disagree. That’s of course their inalienable right. But as with the previously cited findings along these lines, this response needs to be questioned because those surveyed were never told of the possible and possibly catastrophic consequences.

How do I know this? Because the Reuters reporter who wrote separately about the results actually admitted this whopping shortcoming. In the words of correspondent Jason Lange, “It was not clear if respondents who supported a no-fly zone were fully aware of the risk of conflict….” Which inevitably raises the questions “Why the heck didn’t the question mention this point,” and “Why the heck did the pollsters think that the query was worth posing in this kind of vacuum?” And if Lange (and his Reuters colleagues) knew something that Ipsos didn’t, why the heck didn’t they bring up the point before publication?

No one in their right mind would ever take seriously a book or an article or a broadcast or any piece of information accompanied by the acknowledgement, “Some of what you’re about to read or hear is worthless.” But that’s exactly what Reuters and Ipsos have in effect done.

Even more off-the-wall:  When the same survey asked respondents their views about banning energy imports from Russia, the pollsters included “even if it causes American gas prices to increase.” (For the record, 80 percent agreed and 20 percent disagreed.) Why did Reuters and Ipsos believe it was important to tell respondents that a certain policy could make it more expensive to drive their vehicles, but not that another policy could turn the entire county into glowing heaps of rubble?

So it looks like the Reuters/Ipsos poll has taken American journalism and polling a big step beyond (beneath? alongside?) Fake News.  It’s the first example I can recall of Utterly Incoherent News.  We can only hope that it doesn’t become just as commonplace.      

 

Im-Politic: You Bet Sarah Palin Got Shafted in Her NY Times Libel Suit

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Elizabeth Williamson, First Amendment, freedom of the press, Gabrielle Giffords, Im-Politic, James Bennet, Jared Loughner, Jed S. Rakoff, journalism, libel, Mainstream Media, media bias, press freedom, Sarah Palin, The New York Times

The more I read about it, the clearer it is that the outcome of the Sarah Palin libel suit against The New York Times was a complete travesty of justice.

Let’s start at the end. The presiding judge, Jed S. Rakoff – an appointee of former (Democratic) President Bill Clinton’s – who had already thrown out the case once ostensibly on the merits, and who therefore should have never been permitted to handle the retrial – decided to dismiss Palin’s charges a second time while the jury was still deliberating. What was the hurry, Judge?

Worse, the jury sequestration procedures were so slipshod that its members found out about his decision before their work was done. Rakoff said the jurors insisted that their own verdict against Palin wasn’t influenced by this news. Which means we’re supposed to believe that the ruling of the supreme authority figure they were dealing with for the entirety of the trial, whose very robe-clad figure symbolizes impartiality, and one of whose main duties is to instruct them on the legal dos and don’ts of their role, had no effect on their thinking. That’s remotely believable?

Just as serious – though not so unmistakably biased – was Rakoff’s view that there was so little evidence that Times editors acted with malice in producing an editorial that pinned responsibility on Palin for a failed assassination attempt on a Member of Congress that the paper should have been acquitted literally ASAP. And the jury got it just as wrong.

Here are the two paragraphs, from a June, 2017 Times editorial, on which Palin mainly based her case:

“Was this attack [by a shooter on Republican Members of Congress in 2017] evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killing six people, including a nine-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and nineteen other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

“Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They’re right. Though there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask for of the right.”

The crucial tests that must be passed by libel charges against a public figure (like Palin) are (1) that the statement in question is false (The Times admitted as much a corrections it ran soon after); and (2), created by the Supreme Court in a 1964 case involving The Times, that the statement was published either with “actual malice” or with “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

As should be obvious to anyone knowing standard English, the key portion comes in the first paragraph, which notes the 2011 attack on Rep. Giffords and others, claims that “the link to political incitement is clear” and directly proceeds to recall a map contained in a Palin political ad. The only possible sane interpretation is that the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate’s organization played a role in inciting shooter Loughner. And for good measure, this accusation that Palin’s ad activated Loughner was repeated in the second paragraph.

The allegation about the ad’s effect was not only false, but false on every count. What was depicted under crosshairs in the ad were not pictures of Giffords herself or any other Members of Congress, but their districts on a map of the continental United States. (As shown below, the lawmakers’ names were included under the map.)

And Loughner was so certifiably insane that, as was totally predictable, no evidence has ever emerged that he knew of Palin’s ad. Nor did he have to, as he had become preoccupied with Giffords years earlier. And indeed, as alluded to above, the Times admitted the falsehood in two corrections it ran within a day after the editorial came out.

These corrections have been cited, including by Rakoff, as evidence that the paper was not aiming to smear Palin, but simply committed an innocent mistake. But does he really believe that such brief ex post facto statements, inserted at the end of the new version, are seen by nearly as many readers and have nearly the impact of the original?  Moreover, this new version still describes the Palin ad as an example of the dangerous and indeed “lethal” “viciousness” of much American political rhetoric nowadays – before abruptly somersaulting and tacking on the qualifier that “in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established.”

Rakoff found even more convincing of the Times‘ benign intentions an email sent by editorial page chief James Bennet – who rewrote the commentary and added its most controversial language – to original drafter Elizabeth Williamson once his rewrite was finished (and, as both of them knew, finished very close to the deadline they were needlessly determined to meet, as described below).  In it, Bennet asked her to “Please take a look” at his changes, which he acknowledged – rather apologetically – were substantial. 

As explained by Washington Post media critic Erik Wempel, Rakoff judged that the email established Bennet’s good faith because “No matter what you believe about Bennet or his colleagues, he’d be foolish to ask for Williamson’s review of the draft if he’d been committed to planting damaging falsehoods in it.”

But nothing in Bennet’s message alerted Williamson – who, as made clear above, also believed in a Palin-Gifford shooting connection – to the possibility that he’d exaggerated the Palin angle in any way.  It doesn’t appear that this aspect of the rewrite was even mentioned.  (I haven’t managed to find a copy of the entire message, but am relying on the reproduction contained in the above-linked Columbia Journalism Review article.)  If anything, the last-minute nature and apologetic tone of the message indicate most strongly that Bennet viewed it as a sop to a colleague whose work he found thoroughly unsatisfactory 

Moreover, Williamson’s response shows that the last issue she was thinking about was whether Palin’s role in the nation’s violent politics had been misrepresented. 

For his part, Bennet contends both that he was unaware of previous Times reporting, and that when he wrote about the “clear” “link” between the type of “political incitement” represented by the Palin ad and the Giffords shooting, he never intended to argue that there was a clear link between the two.

Amazingly, when he presided over the first case in 2017, Rakoff simply ignored this transparently feeble attempt – from a highly educated individual who for decades had earned his living and carved out a distinguished career at the very top of his profession through his skill at using words – to argue that the words he set down on paper had nothing to do with the message he wished to convey.

Instead, the judge declared (in his above-linked 2017 ruling) that “What we have here is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Mrs. Palin that are very rapidly corrected. Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not.” That is, nothing of legal significance to see here.

But during the retrial, evidence came out undercutting his reading of events. First, as mentioned above, it became apparent that the editorial was a rush job where there was no need to rush. In fact, as recounted here, the morning that news appeared of the 2017 attack on the Congressional Republicans appeared, Times editorial staffers weren’t even sure that any commentary was warranted, much less what it would say.

It’s important to realize here that, unlike their news division counterparts, the editorial page staff was under no competitive pressures from rival news organizations to keep releasing breaking, originally reported material. And especially, as noted above, since editorial page chief Bennet didn’t even receive the first draft of the piece from Williamson until very late in the production day, any responsible publication should have proceeded with caution on such a highly charged topic.

That’s an even stronger point considering that, as even Rakoff has acknowledged,

“Certainly the case law is clear that mere failure to check is not enough to support ‘reckless disregard’ in the context of any libel claim. But … where the assertion is that someone incited murder: That is such a strong statement that even under a reckless disregard standard, it calls for more assiduous checking than would be normally the case.”

And revealingly, despite the ongoing confusion about what focus the editorial should take, Palin was fingered from the beginning as a culprit behind what looked like a national outburst of political violence. As argued in the first draft (cited in the 2017 Rakoff judgement linked above):

“Just as in 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a nine year-old girl, Mr. Hodgkinson’s [the Congressional Republicans’ attacker] rage was nurtured in a vile political climate. Then, it was the progun right being criticized: in the weeks before the shooting Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.”

Weirdly, the draft included a hyperlink to a post from ABC News debunking the Palin-Giffords shooting connection. But upon seeing an insinuation that someone – especially a national politician – had incited murder, Bennet didn’t engage in the kind of “more assiduous checking” Rakoff suggested is called for (even when a public figure is involved) when it comes to libel claims revolving around such grave charges. He didn’t make any effort at all. Instead, he decided that itwas much more important to meet the 8 PM deadline for making the following morning’s edition. And in the process, he wound up actually dialing up the anti-Palin rhetoric.

As reported here, in pre-trial testimony, Bennet “cited deadline pressures as he explained that he did not personally research the information about Palin’s political action committee before approving the editorial’s publication. He said he believed the editorial was accurate when it was published.”

But this is the crucial point: Why did he swallow the Palin claim so easily? Because it was Sarah Palin. Someone who, in the milieu in which he spent his entire professional life, was almost uniformly derided as a ditz at best (“I can see Russia from my house!”) and at worst as a demagogue who paved the way for Public Enemy Number One Donald Trump. And if this unmistakably blithe assumption that Palin was of course a hate- and violence-mongerer doesn’t amount to a reckless disregard for the truth, it’s hard to imagine what would,

Fortunately, Rakoff’s legal but bizarro and gratuitous decision to jump the gun on the jury seems likely to increase the odds of a retrial -and perhaps a Palin victory. Unless a U.S. justice system that’s fallen flat on its face in this case gives him yet another chance to allow a news giant to abuse its power.

Im-Politic: American Journalism’s Editing Crisis Deepens

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Biden, Bloomberg.com, China, Donald Trump, editing, Im-Politic, imports, Jeff Bezos, journalism, Mainstream Media, Michael Bloomberg, tariffs, Trade, trade deficit, trade war, Washington Post

A RealityChek post last month suggested that America’s news media are experiencing a genuine editing crisis, and just yesterday appeared an example that left even me – someone who for decades has been tracking these lapses (or biases?) and the misinformation they’ve often spread – speechless.

Well, OK, not exactly speechless. But here’s what I mean.

The Bloomberg.com article in question, titled, “China’s Response to U.S. Trade Talks Shows Gap Between Two” was almost entirely unobjectionable. Indeed, for the most part, it focused quite competently on recent statements made by top U.S. and Chinese officials showing how far the two economies remain from resolving the trade and broader commercial issues they’ve clashed over for many years.

But then came this chart:

From the title, you’d expect it to show both that the immense U.S. trade deficit with China currently stood at an all-time high, and that the increase was being driven largely by still soaring American imports from the People’s Republic.

Except if you eyeball the chart with even a little care, you see that if America’s imports from China (the solid white line) are now in record territory, it’s not by much compared with the previous peak in mid-2018. Moreover, since they’ve barely budged since then, and the U.S. economy has grown by some ten percent during this period, the China shortfall has clearly become smaller as a share of gross domestic product – a crucial piece of context.

Moreover, it’s absolutely clear that the Chinese trade surplus with the United States hasn’t been surging at all lately. Indeed, according to the vertical orange-ish bars it’s represented by, it’s slightly below last year’s peak and has fallen slightly  since early 2018. Yes, there’s been a surge. But it took place during the decades before.

And kind of mysteriously left out: Mid-2018 is when former President Donald Trump began imposing tariffs on imports from China.

But that’s not the main point here. I’ve seen and written about headlines that misrepresent the body of the article they accompany. (That last post on editing provided one example.) But I don’t ever recall seeing a chart’s title contradicted by the chart itself. Like Amazon.com co-founder Jeff Bezos, who now owns the Washington Post, Bloomberg.com co-founder and majority owner Michael Bloomberg has more than enough bucks to at least try preventing such embarrassing goofs. Time to start opening up that wallet.  

Im-Politic: A Labor Shortage Story Short on the Facts

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Bloomberg.com, Boris Johnson, Brexit, editing, European Union, globalism, Im-Politic, Immigration, Joe Mayes, journalism, labor shortages, media bias, Open Borders, truck drivers, truckers, trucking, United Kingdom

Is Bloomberg.com trying to make yours truly look good? It certainly seems that way. Exactly two days after I wrote that American journalism has long been suffering from an editing crisis (and subjecting readers and viewers to a flood of ineptly reported and reasoned articles, posts, and broadcast segments), this news site ran a piece illustrating perfectly two of this so-called profession’s biggest (and intimately related) flaws: pushing narratives largely by ignoring information that provides crucial context.

The lead paragraph tells you all you need to know where Joe Mayes’ September 22 story was going (and where he and his editors believed it should go): “The red lines of Boris Johnson’s Brexit project are starting to crack as voters face growing shortages of food and fuel, as well as a marked rise in living costs.”

As the second paragraph elaborated, “Despite riding to power on a Brexit campaign that pledged to cut immigration from the European Union, the prime minister [Johnson] and his cabinet are now preparing for what would be a significant and politically damaging U-turn: Tapping those same EU workers to plug the labor shortages crippling parts of the U.K. supply chain.” And “the most immediate and pressing concern”? “A major shortage of truck drivers.”

What could be more revealing – and embarrassing for supporters of the United Kingdom’s 2016 decision to leave the European Union (in large part to gain more national control over immigration inflows)? Immigrants from the same EU are now being recognized even by the Leaver-in-Chief as that country’s last hope for staving off starvation, freezing to death this winter, and raging inflation.

No question Brexit was a landmark decision, and no doubt there were plenty of valid reasons to be skeptical (as the close 2016 referendum results indicate). But this Bloomberg piece plainly suggests that the countries that have decided to remain in the EU literally have truckers to spare the British.

Which insinuates that the Brexiteers deserve to have insult added to injury. Except this story line is a crock. As an internet search that took me mere minutes revealed, there’s lots of info out there making clear that truck driver shortages are a global problem – that is, they’re not limited to countries that left the EU. Indeed, this industry website reports that trucking companies in Europe are expecting a 17 percent driver shortfall this year.

Further, the survey it’s based on found that any number of steps could be taken by trucking companies and governments in shortage-afflicted countries to increase driver supply without importing foreigners. Like raising pay. Like lowering the training age to encourage more young people to replace retiring truckers (a big problem in a sector with an aging workforce). Like creating safer parking areas, which would be especially helpful in attacting more women into the business. (They currently make up only two percent of drivers globally, according to the survey.)

In fact, finding such ;material is so easy that it raises the question of whether the main problem (and all the others I’ve spotlighted on RealityChek – e.g., here) doesn’t reflect simply a competence crisis. It also reflects a bias crisis, with the target being any measures or information that clash with longstanding globalist orthodoxies – in this case, Open Borders- friendly policies on the immigration and labor shortage fronts.

Im-Politic: A Small Step Toward Quality Journalism ( I Hope)

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Atlanta, crime, editing, Georgia, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, Sally Buzbee, Tim Craig, Washington Post

It was not only great news that the Washington Post‘s new Executive Editor, Sally Buzbee, has just announced that the paper will hire 41 new editors. It’s urgently needed news, as made painfully clear by this September 13 article on rising crime in Atlanta, Georgia – which violates one of the most important rules of good journalism: Don’t try to shoehorn an article into a certain narrative when you’ve presented almost no supporting evidence.

The narrative chosen by reporter Tim Craig and evidently approved by enough editors to warrant publication is plainly stated in the headline: “Brutal killing of a woman and her dog in an Atlanta park reignites the debate over city’s growing crime problem.” It’s hardly unheard of for headlines to clash with the body of their story, or to exaggerate the findings. After all, nearly news organizations are private businesses, they need to make money, and what better way to generate the kinds of eyeballs that will make advertisers pay top dollar than clickbait – which of course is journalism’s version of flashy packaging.

And sometimes, headline writers just make innocent mistakes, and place such labels on stories too late for the reporter to object – or even an editor to spot it. That’s not a capital crime, especially when we’re dealing with a form of communication that’s often necessarily hastily composed.

But the claim of a “debate” on crime convulsing the city wasn’t confined to the headline. Craig himself wrote that Atlanta’s crime rate is dominating the political debate in Georgia, a state that is expected to be key in next year’s midterm elections. Georgia Republicans believe a tough-on-crime message offers them a chance to win back suburban Atlanta-area voters after the party suffered punishing losses in last year’s presidential and U.S. Senate contests.”

Meanwhile, “many Democrats,” readers are told, dismiss [such] concerns as a partisan effort to rally conservatives to the polls by stoking fear….”

The above link documents that Atlanta crime is definitely influencing city and state politics. But what’s weird about Craig’s story is that it per se offers almost no examples of such clashing opinions.

Toward the end of the article, Craig quotes a single resident fretting that “state Republicans will use the city’s crime problem to their political advantage.” But even she both acknowledges a “crime problem,” calls it “unbelievable” and “said she thinks some of the city’s Democratic leaders went too far last year by embracing calls to shift resources away from the police.”

The only Democratic politician whose views are presented – Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis, told Craig that Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp, who’s up for reelection next year and has focused on the crime issue, “is right to be concerned” because “the city’s criminal justice system is overwhelmed amid a shortage of police officers and ballistics experts needed to help solve crimes.”

This is a debate on crime? Or even close?

In fact, the rest of Craig’s article is devoted almost exclusively to a wide variety of Atlantans emphasizing how serious the city’s crime problem is and worrying that if some dramatically different strategy to fight it isn’t adopted soon, its economy could suffer and its “community cohesion, vitality and civility” could be damaged. (One exception to the head of a local business booster group – who’s basically paid to be optimistic.)

Just as important, no one mentioned in the article voiced any support for defunding police or “reimagining public safety” to focus on non-coercive ways to reduce crime or any of the other police reform proposals that mushroomed following George Floyd’s 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer.

Spotting such internal contradictions isn’t the only editing problem experienced lately by the Post (or other major news organizations). As known by RealityChek regulars, the output of these outlets regularly contains major factual mistakes, ignores crucial context, presents too narrow a range of opinion, and relies on experts plainly not worthy of the title (to name just a few of their leading shortcomings).

So let’s hope Buzbee’s hiring decision stems from a recognition of these problems (rather than a desire to add new bells and whistles to their websites and the like), and that lots of other news organizations follow suit. Her newspaper’s latest motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” spotlights the essential role journalism plays in protecting Americans’ freedoms. She and her peers should also remember that the trust on which this role is based will weaken further in incompetence.

Im-Politic: A Solution to the Big Tech Misinformation/Censorship Quandary

Tags

algorithmic amplification, antitrust, Big Tech, censorship, competition, Constitution, Facebook, free expression, free speech, Im-Politic, internet, journalism, Mainstream Media, misinformation, monopoly, news media, Section 230, social media, tech, Twitter

Don’t look now (a heckuva way to begin a piece of writing!), but I may have come up with one solution to the incredibly complex and just as important national dilemma over regulating how gargantuan social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter handle Americans’ speech rights.

First, let me stipulate that I’m anything but an expert on the Constitution, law and regulation of any kind (except maybe in the international trade field), or technology of any kind. But maybe I know enough to have produced a plan that’s outside-the-box enough to break the various legal and political and philosophical logjams that have left the nation with a status quo that seems to satsify no one, but that’s anchored in reality.

In addition, the thoughts below were prompted by a very stimulating panel discussion involving genuine experts in all these fields that took place this past weekend at a wide-ranging policy conference held by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. (I spoke on a separate panel on China.) So my ideas aren’t coming from completely out of the blue.

The nub of the problem is that Americans across the political spectrum are furious with the platforms’ speech policies, but for radically different reasons. Those to the left of center blast them for posting what they view as misinformation. Their conservative counterparts claim that right-of-center views are too often censored – typically because they’re bogusly accused of spreading misinformation.

All sides seem to agree that the platforms’ practices matter greatly because, due largely to their algorithmic amplification powers, they have such power to turn material viral that they’ve achieved the massive scale needed to become a leading  – and often the leading – way in which Americans receive news, opinion, and other forms of information that affect politics and public policy. But towering obstacles stand in the way of pretty much every proposal for reform advanced so far.

For example, their status as private companies would appear to block any move to empower government to influence their speech practices. Antitrust specialists disagree strongly as to whether they’re now monopolistic or oligopolistic enough under current or even proposed legal standards to warrant breaking up. The companies themselves of course deny any such allegations, and contend that if they needed to downsize, they wouldn’t be able to compete effectively around the world with foreign counterparts – especially those from China. Some have proposed turning them into public utilities, but opponents call that a great way to stifle any further innovation.

So here’s my idea: Turn the platforms into a new type of entity that would be subject to a new body of regulation reflecting both the distinctive importance of free expression in American life and the distinctive (and indeed predominant) role that the platforms now play in enabling individuals and organizations both to disseminate material, and (stemming from an aspect of free expression rights that’s often overlooked, but that’s now unquestionably vulnerable due to the main platforms’ sheer scale and reach) to reach their potential audiences. One possible name: Electronic Speech Companies (ESCs).

As history demonstrates, there’s nothing unusual about the federal government organizing private business into different categories for tax purposes, and there’s nothing unusual about government at any level regulating such businesses with an unusually heavy hand because of their outsized role in providing vital goods and services. That should be clear from the long-established policy of creating utilities. So I don’t see any Constitutional problems with my idea.

I agree that government’s price-setting authority over utilities can stymie innovation. But ensuring that these entities don’t curb free expression any more than (legally) necessary (see below) wouldn’t require creating such authority. I’d permit these ESCs to charge whatever they want for their services and to make money however they like (including selling users’ personal information – which does raise problems of its own, but which are unrelated to the speech issue). As currently required by the controversial Section 230 provision of the Communication Decency Act of 1996, they wouldn’t be able to disseminate any content that’s already illegal under federal criminal law, intellectual property law, electronic communications privacy law, or (most recently) criminal and civil sex trafficking law.

I’d also make them subject to current libel law – which means that plaintiffs would need to prove that false and defamatory information had been spread maliciously and knowingly. Could this rule mean that now-incredibly clogged U.S. courts would become more incredibly clogged? Sure. So let’s also set up a separate court system to handle such cases. Since a dedicated tax court system already exists, why not?

Frivolous suits could be reduced with “loser pays” requirements for court costs. The Big Tech defendants would doubtless still hold a huge advantage by being able to hire the very best legal minds and driving those costs up by dragging out proceedings. But a number of legal non-profits have emerged over the years to help the little guys and gals in these situations, so maybe at least the potentially most important and promising suits wouldn’t be deterred by financial considerations.

What the ESCs wouldn’t be permitted to do is bar or delete or modify any content, or any users, on misinformation grounds. Advocates of continuing to permit and even further encourage or require such practices argue that the platforms’ vast scale requires greater discretionary and often required authority along these lines in the name of any number of good causes – election integrity, public safety, national security, etc. (See, e.g., here.)

But three counter-arguments are more persuasive to me. First, I can’t imagine developing any legal definition of misinformation (as opposed to libel or other well-established Constitutional speech curbs) that would be genuinely neutral substantively and that therefore wouldn’t be easy to abuse massively – and to the great detriment of our democracy’s health, due to the platforms’ scale.

Second, that’s no doubt why such regulations have absolutely no precedent in U.S. history, despite past periods and instances of intolerance dating from the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

Third, if the ESCs are going to be held liable for disseminating etc misinformation, what excuse will there be to maintain protection for the rest of the news media? I’ve spent much of my multi-decade career in policy analysis finding instances that would unmistakably qualify. Not that ongoing and arguably worsening conventional media irresponsibility is any cause for complacency. But would a government remedy for such an intrinsically nebulous offense really result in a net improvement?

Individual victims of ESC censorship would, however, need remedies for these forms of cancellation, and as with libel and slander, a special court system could handle accusations, using the aforementioned provisions aimed at leveling the legal costs playing field. The Justice Department could file its own suits, too, and some seem likely if only because its own inevitable political sympathies are bound to shift as power in Washington changes hands over time. This prospect, moreover, should help keep the ESCs on their best behavior.

The big danger of my proposal, of course, is that misinformation would keep appearing and metastasizing online, and spreading like wildfire offline due to the ESCs’ extraordinary reach. That can’t be a healthy development. But it’s surely an unavoidable development for anyone valuing any meaningful version of free expression and its crucial corollary – the marketplace of ideas. For empowering a handful of immense ESCs to restrict misinformation threatens to narrow greatly and even fatally the competitive essence of this marketplace.

Throughout U.S. history, Americans have relied on these dynamics, and the common sense of the public, to crown as winners the best ideas and the benefits they bring, and declare as losers those that have either caused or threatened serious dangers. Is anyone out there prepared to deny seriously that the results, though imperfect, have been historically excellent, that the potential for improvement remains just as impressive, or that any alternative yet proposed looks superior? If not, then I hope you’ll consider this ESC plan at least a promising framework for ensuring that these digital giants don’t become the ultimate arbiters.

Those Stubborn Facts: U.S. Journalism Gets a Global Failing Grade, Too

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fake news, journalism, Mainstream Media, news, news media, Those Stubborn Facts

Number of countries examined in Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism survey: 46

Overall level of “trust in the news”, 2021: 44 percent

Change from 2020: +8 percentage points

Level of “trust in the news” in the U.S., 2021: 29 percent

Change from 2020: None

U.S. journalism’s rank in trustworthiness: 46^th

(Sources: “Executive Summary and Key Findings of the 2021 Report,” Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, June, 2021, pp. 9 ff, The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021 (ox.ac.uk))

 

Following Up: Welcome Shrinkage of China’s Ties with U.S. News Organizations

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Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, China, China Daily, ChinaWatch, Following Up, Houston Chronicle, journalism, Mainstream Media, news media, propaganda, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Free Beacon, The Washington Post, transparency

Since Memorial Day is – or at least should be – a remembance and tribute to what’s best about America, it seems appropriate to report some good news: Some of the nation’s leading news organizations have cut some not-at-all-trivial ties with China.

These ties concern their decision to stop distributing with their print editions and posting on their websites a Chinese government propaganda vehicle called ChinaWatch. As I wrote more than two years ago, their decision to present ChinaWatch and the form of this presentation created two problems. First, although the Constitution’s First Amendment should authorize giving even possibly genocidal, increasingly hostile dictatorships the right to present their material in the United States, journalistic ethics and (I believe) the law should require the clear labeling of any such material as foreign government products.

I argued that neither the Chinese government nor the news organization’s carrying their material met these obligations.

Second, since ChinaWatch was paid advertising, it became a source of revenue for the news organizations that featured it, and because these news organizations covered the Chinese government, its appearance raised conflict of interest questions that at least should have – but weren’t – have been forthrightly acknowledged. Importantly, some news organizations have received millions of dollars from Beijing – not decisive sums in terms of the overall finances of some of them, but not trivial, either.

Happily, these problems have now been reduced, although not eliminated. The New York Times said about a year after my post that it had stopped accepting such material from all state-run media. According to this Tibetan dissident publication, the same goes for The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post says it has not run or distributed ChinaWatch specifically since 2019.

Official U.S. government lobbying records show, however, that multi-million dollar relationships still exist between several major U.S. news organizations and Beijing’s propaganda machine. As reported last week by the Washington Free Beacon, over the last six months,

“China Daily [the parent organization of ChinaWatch] paid more than $1.6 million for advertising in Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, and Foreign Policy magazine, according to disclosures filed with the Justice Department. The Beijing-controlled news agency paid another $1 million to American newspapers, including the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, and Houston Chronicle, to print copies of its own publications.”

And unlike the The New York Times, the Post, and the Journal, the Free Beacon observes,

“Many of the newspapers [still] working with China Daily face severe financial problems. The Los Angeles Times furloughed workers last year as advertising revenue cratered during the coronavirus pandemic. Papers like the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe have failed to turn a profit for years.”

The nation’s news organizations have more than enough credibility problems these days (see, e.g., here and here). Severing all official ties with Chinese and other foreign government media, or at least making every effort to publicize them to their readers, could only help them regain some of that trust.