News is bad for you ?

The Guardian has an essay arguing (unusually for something printed in a newspaper) that reading news is bad for you - News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier. Up to a point I'd agree - though I'd say it depends where you get your news from and how your interpret it....

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

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RIP Alan Jones ?

Its been an interesting week watching conservative radio bully boy Alan Jones getting a thorough trashing at the hands of normal Australians who have had enough of the bile he spews out every day (I'd always hoped the cash for comment affair could have done this, or even better the London loo incident, but sadly not).

This time round Jones' comments about the death of the Prime Minister's father managed to annoy enough people that there was a concerted effort led by various Facebook and Twitter users (in particular Sack Alan Jones and Destroy The Joint) to tell advertisers to either cease supporting his program or find themselves doing a lot of damage to their brands, with most of them promptly abandoning Jones to his fate and the program subsequently going advertisement free.

Alan Kohler at the BS has a good summary - Alan Jones: it’s about disintermediation.

Corporate leaders everywhere would be watching the predicament of Russell Tate and Robert Loewenthal, chairman and CEO of Macquarie Radio Network, with a mixture of fascination and horror.

A social media campaign against one their products, the Alan Jones breakfast programme, and directed at their business customers as well as their own company, has forced them to cancel all advertising on that show.

For those who have recently flown in from Mars, it started with a speech by broadcaster Alan Jones to the Sydney University Liberal Club dinner on September 22nd, eventually reported in the Sunday Telegraph, in which he said: “They [Labor] are indeterminate and compulsive liars. They’ll lie and lie and lie. Every person in the caucus of the Labor party knows that Julia Gillard is a liar. Everybody, I’ll come to that in a moment. The old man recently died a few weeks ago of shame. To think that he had a daughter who told lies every time she stood for parliament.”

The suggestion that John Gillard died of shame has been widely and appropriately condemned, and Jones himself called a press conference last week to (sort of) apologise. Meanwhile 70 companies withdrew their advertising from his programme, either because they didn’t like what he said or because their social media monitoring services had picked up that their own customers didn’t like it.

Yesterday Russell Tate issued a long statement in which he announced the temporary suspension of all advertising in its Breakfast Show, blaming “21st century censorship, via cyber bullying”.

Also, the MC for the evening on September 22nd, Simon Berger lost his job as public relations and government relations manager at Woolworths, having apparently worn a chaff bag onstage to introduce Alan Jones (a reference to Jones’ frequent calls for Julia Gillard to be put in a chaff bag and thrown out to sea).

The “Sack Alan Jones” Facebook page has 15,486 “likes”, which doesn’t seem that many to have caused such carnage, but there has been a lot more to it than that.

There’s a petition on change.org with 109,962 signatories, another Facebook community called “Destroy The Joint”, after a statement by Alan Jones that women are “destroying the joint”, plus an uncountable number of tweets and hashtags on Twitter.

Russell Tate was both right and wrong in the statement that I quoted above: it is, indeed, 21st century censorship, but to call it bullying misses the point.

The digital revolution is only just getting going, and the social platforms, Twitter and Facebook, which has just passed a billion users, are only just starting to flex their muscle. There is a long way to go with this. Censorship up to the end of the 20th century involved community representatives – the church and then politicians – imposing limits on free speech. With social media, the community does it more directly and much more uncontrollably. ...

The essence of change that occurred between the 20th and 21st centuries is disintermediation. It is happening much more broadly than in censorship, but in that field of human endeavour, as it is everywhere, social media and the digital revolution generally, is simply and powerfully removing the intermediaries.

The organisation and expression of community disapproval has become incredibly powerful because it is spontaneous, immediate and clearly authentic.

That’s the difference between a social media campaign and a rap on the knuckles by the Australian Communication and Media Authority, the media regulator: you can argue about whether ACMA truly represents community opinion; with Facebook and Twitter you can actually see and feel it.

The SMH reports that Tony Abbott's replacement in waiting Malcolm Turnbull was happy to see Jones get a taste of his own medicine - Jones has not been bullied - Turnbull.

ALAN JONES has been ''given a dose of his own medicine'' with the online campaign that has stripped his station of sponsors, and is not the victim of ''cyberbullying'' as he has claimed, the Coalition communication spokesman, Malcolm Turnbull, has said. ...

''Mr Jones has sought to lead 'people's revolts' for many years. But this was indeed a popular revolt against vicious and destructive public discourse … It is difficult not to believe that he is getting a dose of his own medicine …

''Mr Jones has complained that he has been the victim of social media bullying, saying that if it happened anywhere else in society, this kind of bullying or harassment or intimidation or threatening conduct, the police would be called in …

''But Mr Jones believes his association with certain products will encourage people to buy them … If other people take the view that an association with Mr Jones will lead them not to buy those products, why are they not able to tell the advertiser of their view and encourage others to do the same?''

The SMH had an earlier article from Peter Fitzsimmons describing the origin of the boycott campaign - Alan Jones has no shame.

Every time you think 2GB broadcaster Alan Jones has gone as low as he can go, he sets a new benchmark ever deeper in his now obviously bottomless barrel.

Not enough that he has already talked of putting the Prime Minister “into a chaff bag and hoisting her into the Tasman Sea,” or that he has said that the country needs to “bring back the guillotine,” to deal with her, and that across the country “women are wrecking the joint". Now, before an audience of Sydney University Young Liberals last weekend at the Watermark Restaurant at Balmoral he has referred to the grieving PM's late father, John Gillard – a man who was obviously very close to, and extremely proud, of his daughter – and said that he, “died a few weeks ago of shame".

The unspeakably vicious nastiness of it, the sheer bully-boy misogyny of saying such a thing, simply takes the breath away, even for those of us who spent fair chunks of time around the unvarnished Jones.

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Your E-Book Is Reading You

The WSJ has an article on the data mining possibilities created by ebooks - Your E-Book Is Reading You.

In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them.

For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.

The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books.

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Mining Magnate Gina Rinehart Bids For Editorial Control Of Australia's Fairfax Newspapers

Australia's print media is slowly collapsing under pressure from the internet (holding out a little longer than their peers in the US) - unfortunately this means deep-pocketed mining magnates / conservative fruit loops like Gina Reinhart can take over the remnant liberal sections of the media and convert them into yet another arm of the right wing noise machine. DeSmogBlog has a look at the fate of Fairfax - Mining Magnate Gina Rinehart Bids For Editorial Control Of Australia's Fairfax Newspapers.

When you think the news stories just aren’t going your way – when parts of the media just refuse to tow your particular ideological line – what are your options?

For most people, the choices are limited. You could perhaps write a letter to the editor or maybe even pen an opinion piece or start your own blog.

But if you’re the world’s richest woman with a penchant for climate science denial and a coal and iron ore empire to maintain, then your options are considerably broader.

This week, the Australian oligarch Gina Rinehart took the logical step for someone with a personal fortune approaching $30 billion and bought the opposition.

The mining magnate now holds 19 per cent of all the shares in Fairfax – the Australian media organisation which owns the country’s most respected newspapers the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age (Melbourne) and the Australian Financial Review.

Rinehart has been increasingly vocal in her opposition to taxes on mining and the Labor Government’s carbon price legislation, while backing and promoting climate science doubt mongerers – even going as far as to appoint one to the board of two of her companies.

Beyond the publicly-funded ABC, in Australia Fairfax provides the only mainstream centre-left balance to much of the anti-environmental, climate sceptic rhetoric offered by the columnists in the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Ltd papers.

Rinehart is understood to be asking for three seats on the Fairfax board, one of which would likely be taken by her Canadian-born advisor Jack Cowin, the owner of the Hungry Jacks burger franchise who has said that Rinehart should be allowed to help set the group’s news agenda. Cowin is also a board member of Channel Ten alongside Rinehart, who owns a near 13 per cent stake in the television network.

Her tilt at Fairfax has prompted a flurry of outrage. Journalists at Fairfax revealed they had written a letter to Rinehart to ask for her assurance that she would sign the company’s 20-year-old “Charter of Editorial Independence” which ensures the company’s directors don’t dictate the news agenda. They have heard nothing back.

The “Charter of Editorial Independence” is signed by the company board and declares journalists should be free to go about their work “fairly, fully and regardless of any commercial, political or personal interests, including those of any proprietors, shareholders or board members.”

Senior Fairfax writer David Marr was under no illusions when he told reporters the charter and its principles were under threat. “It has protected readers, the community and it’s also protected the journalists,” he said, “and that is now what is under direct challenge by Ms Rinehart”. Sydney Morning Herald economics editor Ross Gittins hinted he could quit if Rinehart refused to sign the charter.

Former conservative Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser wrote in The Conversation that if politicians still regarded the print media as having an influence on public policy and opinion, then Rinehart’s bid would represent “policies sold to the highest bidder”.

So “what can we expect”, asked Fraser, rhetorically. “Policies that will support unbridled profits of great mining enterprises, perhaps policies not far short of those supported by the Tea Party and the Republican right in the United States. If this comes to pass, Australia will be effectively without independent print media.”

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Blackout Wednesday: The Time Has Come

There is plenty of protest on the web about US congress plans to censor the internet (they aren’t the only control freaks who want to do this of course - the Australian government has been every bit as bad on this issue, as have many others, from China to Iran). The Daily Reckoning has but one example of the torrent of complaint about this (pardon the pun) - Blackout Wednesday: The Time Has Come.

The blackout is a choice, and a brilliant one, made by founder Jimmy Wales in consultation with the whole Wikipedia community. It is a protest, a statement, a symbolic warning to the world of what can happen if governments attack the free flow of information.

The online protest is directed, in particular, against two bills roiling around Congress right now, called SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate. Early versions have been tabled. The Obama administration has said that it opposes the current versions, but the opposition was weak and suspiciously nuanced.

People who are digitally aware and politically savvy know that this is only round one. The attempt by governments to block information flows on the Web will continue in new and different bills and regulations. No new laws are even necessary; government possesses the power now to crush the information age on a bureaucratic whim.

In fact, this goes on every day. That's because governments everywhere, in all times and places, want to control information and will use all their power to do it. It is also because the legal framework that rules how information is produced and distributed is fundamentally corrupted by the fraudulent notion of "intellectual property," which, if consistently enforced, would put an end to the Internet as we know it...

- Just this past week, a judge ruled that a 23-year-old British college student can be extradited to the US for a 10-year prison sentence, all for linking to other servers that illicitly host copyrighted content;

- Late last year, US officials shut down 150 domains without hearings or trials on grounds that they were suspected of selling goods that violate trademark law. It was done on "Cyber Monday" for a reason: It was an announcement to the digital world that government is in charge;

- In the spring of last year, the FBI arbitrarily shut down every online poker domain they could find and seized the bank accounts of some of the largest and smartest people who play online poker - and all of this happened before the recent announcement that online poker is being re-legalised;

- Earlier in the year, the Department of Homeland Security seized 84,000 domains and put up an announcement that each was trafficking in child porn. Problem: It was all a mistake. Not one was actually guilty. To date, there has been no explanation of how this could have happened

- In 2010, the feds seized some 73,000 domains for the crime of linking to content that was said to be distributed illegally in violation of copyright.

Already, the damage of this sort of thing is enormous. Ten years ago, the Internet represented liberation, a new frontier of innovation, commerce, opinion sharing and spontaneous organising. Today, more and more people are consumed by fear. Bloggers are unclear about what existing law does or does not allow. No one knows for sure how to define "fair use." The deepest pockets are winning case after case. Faced with this uncertainty, many are choosing less over more content - which is exactly what the government and private monopolists want.

The Wikipedia protest is a way of saying: If this kind of thing continues and ends up institutionalised in new legislation, there will be no more Wikipedia, which is the No. 1 content-rich site on the Web and the main way people learn today (how far we've come from the debunking that was common only five years ago).

And this is just one example. Individual blogs would only contain government-approved content. Search engines would only produce only government-approved sites. Digital entrepreneurship would be suffocated by fears of threats, confiscations and jails. It is hard to see how even Facebook and Twitter could survive.

It is just marvellous that Wikipedia has taken this bold direction, and it is only possible because of the unique nature of the media in question. Many large businesses during the 1930s tried their best to protest New Deal price controls. But they could hardly shut down their giant stores. The revenue loss would have been devastating, and the victims would have been the employees. So in the end, the private sector was forced to submit to the controls. It was the same in the 1970s with wage and price controls. How could the merchants resist?

But digital enterprises are in a different position entirely. They can vanish with a few clicks, giving the world a conjectural look at what happens when the state attacks the lifeblood of innovation and progress. Small changes in the law can have a gigantic effect. Just as one click can shut down this site, one law can do the same.

It is not only Wikipedia. Others are doing the same. WordPress, the open-source platform that powers nearly a quarter of new websites and has the most-popular content management system on the Web, has also stepped out in front with a call for action: "Normally, we stay away from... politics here at the official WordPress project...Today, I'm breaking our no-politics rule...How would you feel if the Web stopped being so free and independent? I'm concerned - freaked right the heck out about the bills that threaten to do this, and as a participant in one of the biggest changes in modern history, you should be, too."

There are many such examples. And even if successful, it is not enough. With or without SOPA, digital freedom is under attack. For example, ICANN, the gateway for all domain registration, is now requiring a verified official identity, supplied by government, for domain ownership. This change sets the stage for continuing shutdowns and strangulation.

The struggle is intensifying, and the sides are very clear: It is the government and old-line media companies that depend on the state's laws versus everyone else. Everyone else consists of the independently active, privately owned global society that lives and thrives in the digital age. The astonishing innovations of this age have taught an entire generation about the miraculous power of information generation and delivery, about the capabilities embedded in the spontaneous actions of individuals, about the capacity of people around the world to generate order and progress through cooperation and exchange.

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News Deserts

The Nieman Journalism Lab has an articling explaining the spreading phenomenon of "news deserts" - Tom Stites: Layoffs and cutbacks lead to a new world of news deserts.

Here’s a challenge: Name a straightforward two-word phrase related to journalism that you can enter in Google and get only one result.

Stumped? Try “news desert” — one, and only one, direct hit.1

Now check Wikipedia. “News desert” comes up entirely empty — but “food desert” gets 3,400 words. Any why not? Hunger is a crucial issue, and “food desert” provides a vivid frame that elicits a mental movie of hungry people crawling over arid dunes in search of an oasis for sustenance.

Frames matter. They determine how an issue is understood, driving this understanding into the language and thus into people’s thinking about what actions to take. One proof of the power of “food desert” as a frame is that a Google search yields thousands of direct hits — including links to serious actions people have taken, including the Agriculture Department’s food desert locator and to Food Desert Awareness Month.

But isn’t it also a crucial issue that a huge part of the American people, the less-than-affluent majority, is civically malnourished due to the sad state of U.S. journalism — and that the nation’s broad electorate is thus all but certainly ill informed? It has long troubled me, and many others, that an issue so central to democracy has such a peripheral role in the discourse about journalism’s future, which tends to focus more on crowdsourcing, Twitter and Facebook, aggregation vs. original reporting, how AOL is faring with Patch, and search engine optimization. These are important topics, but perhaps an energizing frame like “news desert” can widen the aperture of thinking about journalism’s future and sharpen the focus on people’s and democracy’s needs — on journalism as public good.

Elites and the affluent are awash in information designed to serve them, but everyday people, who often grapple with significantly different concerns, are hungry for credible information they need to make their best life and citizenship decisions. Sadly, in many communities there’s just no oasis, no sustenance to be found — communities where the “new news ecosystem” is not a cliché but a desert.

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Why energy journalism is so bad

Chris Nelder has a post at Smart Planet pondering the woeful state of most mainstream energy journalism - Why energy journalism is so bad.

One of the questions that plagues me constantly is, “Why is energy journalism so bad?” Most mainstream articles about energy will leave you horribly confused at best, or horribly misled at worst. Today I will try to teach you how to read reports on energy without getting lost.

The topic came up again last week when my colleague Christopher Mims pointed up a sharp discrepancy between three recent stories by Reuters, published between November 21 and 24.

The first reported Saudi Aramco’s CEO Khalid al-Falih as saying that unconventional oil (heavy oil, synthetic oil from shale and tar sands, coal-to-liquids and so on) had eliminated global supply concerns, and would rise from 2.3 million barrels per day (mbpd) today to 8.4 mbpd by 2035. This would shift the global balance of power, he said, and reduce U.S. dependence on oil imports. Further, he expected conventional oil supply from Brazil and Iraq to rise. All of this was by way of explaining why Saudi Arabia had recently halted its ongoing $100 billion program to expand production capacity beyond its claimed 12.5 mbpd current capacity, and would not seek to expand it to 15 mbpd (a fact that was already widely assumed by most who follow the energy markets, but apparently was still considered newsworthy).

The second said that oil prices should remain high because global demand had remained strong, and would reach more than 89 mbpd this year according to the IEA. (The International Energy Agency, or IEA, based in Paris and serving at the pleasure of the 28 industrialized countries in the OECD, currently shows 88.7 mbpd for Q3 2011 under a liberal definition of “oil” which includes biofuels and certain types of natural gas liquids. The Energy Information Administration, or EIA, based in Washington D.C. and serving under the U.S. Department of Energy, shows 86.7 mbpd under a more restrictive definition, which excludes biofuels, non-associated natural gas liquids, and other components.) But while demand has been strong, the article noted that supply has been “inconsistent,” citing the loss of 1.6 mbpd from Libya, and various “hiccups in production in Russia, Britain, Norway and Nigeria.”

The third suggested that high oil prices “could strangle economic hopes,” and quoted the IEA’s chief economist Fatih Birol: “I hope that colleagues from the producing countries are also looking at the market indicators carefully, including the diminishing OECD stocks levels and the fragility of the global economic situation.” In his view, too little worldwide investment in oil supply would keep prices high enough to stifle the recovery of the global economy.

So which is it? How can three stories from a single source, published over a five-day span, simultaneously claim that supply is adequate and inadequate; and that prices would remain high due to strong demand, but would be so high that they would destroy demand?

Even worse, how can the IEA simultaneously claim in its new World Energy Outlook 2011 report that by 2035, the world needs to invest $20 trillion in oil and gas supply and infrastructure to add 47 mpbd of new capacity (equivalent to about five times Saudi Arabia’s production, or twice the production of all OPEC countries in the Middle East) to compensate for the decline of mature fields, or else risk “far-reaching consequences for global energy markets”. . . while at the same time asserting that the world must slash subsidies for oil and gas development and transition to renewables quickly in order to arrest climate change, starting now?

Welcome to my hell.

Let’s review a few of the common errors in energy journalism.

Uncritical acceptance of authority

Citing subject matter authorities is a necessary element of journalism, but so is casting a critical eye on what they say. Unfortunately, most journalists repeat what their selected authorities say verbatim, and rarely mention contrary views.

The main authority cited in nearly all articles about energy is Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Prize and an economist with the oil industry consultancy IHS CERA. Journalists love to quote Yergin. He always has an optimistic outlook on the future of oil, forecasting abundant supply and low prices. Editors love him too, and regularly grant him high-profile space in their publications (like this recent Wall Street Journal op-ed) to offer sunny pronouncements and spew invective on those who believe peak oil is a serious issue. The fact that his predictions have been continuously and badly wrong for the last decade straight doesn’t seem to phase them in the least, nor does his cozy (and well-paid) business relationship with oil companies. Hey, he won a Pulitzer, and is regularly described as “one of the world’s foremost energy authorities.” Good enough!

Other authorities often cited are active traders and portfolio managers in the oil market, but it’s a rare day indeed when the authors bother to ask whether those authorities might just be “talking their books.”

The authority problem leaks downstream, too. When a reputable publication makes errors, it often leads to a series of repetitions by even less skilled journalists who cite the original as fact.

The problem isn’t just authority, though. Dozens of serious petroleum geologists and analysts with real bona fides in petroleum forecasted the current oil supply plateau and the price volatility of oil beautifully over the last decade, while economist Yergin missed it. So why don’t journalists consult their views? This brings us to the next problem.

Optimism bias

Consider this recent example in the Financial Times. The author elatedly painted a picture of an impending era of energy independence as unconventional oil from gas shales caused a “U-turn in US oil supply,” even suggesting that, “in the coming decade the US will leapfrog Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s largest producer of liquid hydrocarbons.”

The article went on to cite a jumble of relevant and irrelevant data, along with highly speculative forecasts represented as near-certainties. After sorting it all out, I found that the cited numbers didn’t add up: 10 mbpd currently produced by the U.S. and Canada (including about 1.5 mbpd from Canadian tar sands), plus a projected 2 mbpd of new “tight oil” production from U.S. shales, plus another 1.5 mbpd of projected new production from the tar sands gives me 13.5 mbpd, but the author slid directly from that data to a forecast by the National Petroleum Council (NPC), an oil industry group, projecting that the two countries would produce a whopping 22 mbpd by 2035!

Further sleuthing revealed the problem: the author had uncritically reported the best-case “2035 High Potential” scenario offered in the NPC’s latest report, in which production from tar sands rises to 6 mbpd; offshore Gulf of Mexico rises to 3 mbpd; “tight shale” (not to be confused with “tight oil”) rises from zero today to 1 mbpd; enhanced oil recovery technology adds another 0.6 mbpd, and Arctic production rises to over 2 mbpd.

The author did not mention that the NPC report also included an alternative, “2035 Limited” scenario, in which North American production actually falls about 1 mbpd from 2010 levels. ...

But a simple reality check should give any author pause before suggesting that some magical array of technologies will somehow double North American oil production over the next two decades, or that within the next decade unconventional supply in the U.S. and Canada, with a production cost in the range of $80 to $90 a barrel, will exceed supply in Saudi Arabia or Russia, where their production costs are half of that or less. And it doesn’t seem too much to ask that journalists bring a modicum of skepticism to their coverage of oil industry propaganda.

Let’s have another look at the chart of historical U.S. oil production, freely available on the EIA’s web site for anyone who cares to look at it:

That little bump at the end is what all the fuss over unconventional oil in the U.S. is about. I suppose if one ignores the production costs and flow rates and takes plenty of antidepressants, one could imagine that bump is a U-turn that could eventually send U.S. production back up and over its 1970 peak. But I assure you that once you spend a few thousand hours gaining literacy in the subject, such that you can read and understand these scenarios, such optimistic visions begin to sound more like whistling past the graveyard than serious forecasting.

Just remember this: In the eyes of most editors, an optimistic take on future supply is just good energy journalism. And a balanced, nuanced article with indeterminate conclusions doesn’t sell papers. But a pessimistic take (no matter how true, or buttressed by facts) is editorializing, which is bad.

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