Telling a Fuller Story About Sensationalized Claims

By Gary Berg-Cross

Sensational claims have been taken to task here in the Secular Perspectives blog. Luis Granados took on The supposedly scientific Prayer Study proving the existence of God and Robert of rwahrens just had to rant about:

“another of those idiotic news items where they take a common every day item and claim that the government has paid an exorbitant price for it. This one is for muffins. Muffins they claim the government paid $16 for.”

Both blogs expose an instance of a sensationalized claim, seemingly but not really grounded in facts, which advances some popular bias and lingering hope. Wouldn’t it be great if Science could prove that God exists and that we can get what we pray for - or at least what we good people pray for to the right god and not what those fanatics are praying for. Luis shows some of the fraud behind the claim for prayer. The news report that Robert took on week about alleged spending $16 a piece for breakfast muffins and $8 for a cup of coffee for employees attending a conference in Washington two years ago was quickly countered by avalanche of criticism that pointed out it was a half baked report. Only later did papers like the Washington Post report, that the price included not just a muffin, but a continental breakfast of baked goods, fresh fruit, coffee, tea, soft drinks, tax tips as part of the use of the conference space.

Media is prone to over-hyped and controversial news pieces because of the pressing need to increase viewership/readership. On the other hand it may not cover protests such as Wall Street is being occupied against corporate greed. There is a good argument that it did not get adequate coverage till there was a sensationalized violence- see Op-Ed: Wall Street is Occupied protest not getting media coverage

Sensationalism sells and may include reporting about generally insignificant matters and events such as $16 muffins appeal to the emotions are proxies for important arguments such as whether government is too big and wasting money. Equivalent dog whistle stories such as corporate wooing of pols by overpaying for Redskin booths and services may not be given equal treatment.

Consider the quick response to the grand muffin claim after The Washington Post, among other media outlets, pronounced word of the offense in a front page story, based on a Justice Department auditor's report. Senior Republican Senator Chuck Grassley who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee (which has oversight of the Justice Department), said the report was a blueprint for the first cuts that should be made by the "super committee" searching for at least $1.2 trillion in savings. Later NBC's Brian Williams featured the Justice Department's offense in that day evening's news lineup. As rwahrens feared an ill-informed link was made to sensationalized examples of wasteful government spending such as the Lockheed bill for $640 for custom molded toilet seat covers.

Wyatt Kash, Editorial Director of AOL Government contextualized the sensationalization well:

“Regardless, to put the blame totally on government employees, as the auditors and then the media so quickly did, and not at least in part on what and how hotels routinely charge for conferences services, is another example of how easy it has become in America to demonize the federal workforce--a group of dedicated public servants who in reality are working tirelessly to protect our country, provide services to the needy and tackle problems that are bigger than any one of us can solve alone. “

More examples of loud stories include misleading statements, omitting key facts and information and half truths as discussed in my Flexible Thinking in a Time of Imprecise Statements.

Advocates can get away with this because we live in a time of head spinning news overload. In our news cycle one story steps on the previous so rapildy that we don’t have to reflective on the core information that often is no more than half truth and innuendo. See my Stressed Buffet Offered by the Hurricane, News Quake for more on this phenomena.

Stressed Buffet Offered by the Hurricane, News Quake

By Gary Berg-Cross

It’s not your parent’s news cycle. Between the jolt of Earthquakes to our attention, a slow moving hurricane that just might wash out our beach resorts or dismantle a major city we are in one of those super-busy News cycles. Add to this the Libyan situation which mixes war, tyrants, democracy and oil and it’s all too much making it feels like the cognitive counterpart to overeating at some junky food buffet. But its hard to resist watching what is unfolding, which seems as hard to resist fried onions.

It’s been a summer news buffet starting with politically high stakes showdowns like the US debt ceiling drama. At times we have been on watch for imminent implosions of such as with the Greek or Italian economy. Important topics, all too often covered in a sleazy, political way. We have become hyper-vigilant after our credit rating took a hit and people pointed heated fingers without much light. The series of sudden stock market plunges was juxtaposed with the creeping famine in the Horn of Africa. Any of these would normally have held the front pages and commentator attention for days, even weeks. But this buffet cycle they are pushed off by scandal stories like the Murdoch affair or the Norwegian massacre.

It’s a head spinning news overload. Stories step on each other so fast that reflective time is lacking to digest seed information that often rings of half truth and innuendo. There are so many channels of info that the low achieving popular push out the more thoughtful channels and
commentators. The result for the consumer is a stuffed head lacking in healthy, meaningful knowledge. Are they really cutting the small budget of the National Endowment for the Arts & the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to reduce the deficit in a meaningful way? The effect is what one Guardian Reporter called “news twilight.” That’s a condition where there is little story follow up, so one cannot even be sure what has been confirmed and what has not. Information, especially TV just spews by and there isn’t time to reel it back. So it just passes into memory as a fragment without analysis. I was reminded of a vivid version of this as we approach the 9/11 anniversary. Brewster Kahle (founder of the Internet Archive & the Open Content Alliance, a group of organizations committed to making a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts) was discussing their effort to building a library archive that allows people to go back and analyze and understand TV and Internet materials, that we can have critical thinking about what is broadcast on television or across the Web. One project is "Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive," which catalogs 3,000 hours of domestic and international TV news footage from 20 channels from the week around September 11, 2001. Kahle was asked about the snippet showing Palestinians celebrating on the streets after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Most of us didn’t hear or see Palestinian Ambassador Manuel Hassassian responding that;

“Palestinians were totally shocked by what had happened. Israel immediately started showing footage, footage that were not related to jubilation by Palestinians about the innocent victims of September 11. The footage that they showed is when Palestinians, in 1993, went down the streets, gave the soldiers the olive branch, and they were in festivity that peace is around the corner. OK? So there was a mix-up there. It was not the Palestinians rejoicing what happened on September 11th.”

Which version is the truth? Honestly I don’t know. Kahle’s archive apparently doesn’t yet go back to 1993 on this item. It’s not easy to go back, go capturing information going forward is possible. It’s just going to be one giant archive.

I’m a fan of archiving, libraries, information and easy access to it. So I will be watching the path of Hurricane Irene. But unexamined medium without library discipline and critical analysis is often a poor diet. When the earthquake shook my world I got on Twitter to find out what the collective cloud of tweeters knew. It was a start and soon I had a link to a definitive USGS site for FACTS. I later read in WAPO that minutes after the quake there was an article about it posted on Wikipedia –

“Wikipedians needed just eight minutes to cooly consign the “2011 Virginia earthquake” to history — the elapsed time between the temblor and the first bulletin in the online encyclopedia.”

Not everything that was posted was accurate, since some had anti-Washington message, but the editors corrected it. Great!

Twitter and Wikipedia can be informative and empowering if not enlightening. But too much of contemporary Western societies now lives on a diet of information overload. This is stressful, reducing intellectual performance and resulting in poor judgments. These are symptoms of a new concern in the Information Age which some call cognitive overload. This is a term originally used to describe the state noticed earlier among computer workers. Now we are all highly multi-tasked and as a result experience distractions & stress. We all may experience a form of cognitive overload called “technostress” from the abundance of information that we can’t easily incorporate into our normal schedule. Everywhere there is information being thrown at us. The naked, human information processing system can’t keep up and adequately digest one tragedy before another
happens. It is compounded by new means of communicating which is a major contributing factor to people’s super-saturation with vast amounts of information instantly served via Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Like all advances these offer their challenges and are part of an enlightened road we started on centuries ago. The original Encyclopedie was a step towards information overload by a quality team of writers. You could argue it put us on the road to information overload. But unlike our current media diet is was a very structured one bound together as they said with a progressive principle, “only by the general interests of humanity and the sense of mutual-good will.”