Major Bother

Here is a screen grab of the sign-in page for Mail.com from a little while ago:

As you can see, Mail.com follows the lead of many other free e-mail services by dangling before me various “news” items that they for some reason think I will want to read on my way to getting my mail. They are almost always wrong. But this particular item caught my eye for one simple reason: The headline is about Charlie Sheen. But the photo, from the movie Major League, features Corbin Bernsen and Tom Berenger.

And, I’m thinking, maybe the top of Sheen’s head there at the bottom of the frame.

That struck me as a little odd, but having never seen Major League, I thought perhaps it’s not easy to find a photo of Sheen from that movie.

So I did a Google image search for Major League +Charlie Sheen. And got this (.21 second later, if you must know):

Conclusion: Laziness at Mail.com. My guess is that photos are automatically cropped to fit the display window, and no one could be bothered to manually crop the photo so that the subject of the story would in fact be shown in the photo.

Meanwhile, what exactly is there in a story about Charlie Sheen taking drugs while making a movie more than a decade ago that qualifies it as “breaking news”?

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And Where Was the News?

Like millions of Americans (I presume), I was in front of the television set late last night awaiting the president's comments on the death of Osama bin Laden. After a certain amount of channel surfing, in which we saw a lot of talking heads all saying pretty much the same things, we ended up on CBS.

As I waited for the president, I also had Twitter running on my phone. Tellingly, it was Twitter that first brought me the news of bin Laden's demise. (Actually, it was my wife calling down from upstairs shortly before 10:00 p.m. CDT that a friend of our son had just texted him the news, prompting me to check Twitter. It would be several minutes before my e-mail started popping with news alerts from various sources.) By and by, tweets began to appear describing scenes of celebrating crowds that had gathered in front of the White House, cheering, chanting, and singing the national anthem.

And then CBS's White House bloke interrupts himself to say that his producer had just stepped outside and reported back that crowds had gathered, cheering, chanting, etc.

And my thought was, Where was the news?

Here we have a guy standing in front of a sign saying CBS News White House, and reporting that his producer ran outside to see what was going on. But where were the pictures? It seems to me that even two or three years ago, the reporter would have interrupted himself to throw to another reporter out on Pennsylvania Avenue, showing us the cheering, chanting, singing crowds. But that costs money, I suppose, so instead we have a talking head telling us what is going on outside the building.

I might as well have been listening on the radio.

Or reading it on Twitter.

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How Do They Know?

It has nettled me for some time. An election takes place, and the pundits immediately dive in with their learned analysis of what the voters “meant” with their votes. And the question always rattles around in the back of my head, How do they know? We saw it, in spades, when the Republican Scott Brown was elected to the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s former seat: The punditocracy assured us that this was, somehow, a “referendum” on President Obama’s policies, or Kennedy’s, or the entire Democratic Party’s, or all of the above. And I asked myself How do they know? Since all the while the election struck me as being Massachusetts voters’ “referendum” on the extraordinarily bad campaign run by the Democrat Martha Coakley.

The question--How do they know?--popped into my head again on Thursday afternoon as the stock market tumbled. I received in short order half a dozen news alerts on the subject, most of which followed the same tack as this from CNN:

Dow plummets more than 900 points on Greece’s debt crisis.

The first part, of course, is empirical, factual: the Dow Jones Industrial Average either did or did not fall more than 900 points. Everyone says it did, so I assume it did.

But the second part is only speculative: How does anyone know, really know that it was because of Greece’s debt crisis? Obviously no one went and polled investors and traders and other parties, all of whom said, “It’s Greece, man, it’s all about Greece’s debt crisis.”

How do they know?

Well, maybe it’s as I’ve long suspected: They don’t. For about an hour after the first news alert from CNN, which assured me that the plunge was because of Greece’s woes, came this bulletin from CNN:

Dow closes down about 350 points. Faulty P&G stock quotes, Greek debt issue roil investors.

Wait--what? Where did the P&G angle come from? An hour and twenty minutes earlier it was all because of Greece. Now it’s “faulty” stock quotes. And--oh, yeah--that Greece thing, too.

And now here’s this from yesterday’s New York Times, which pretty well summarizes everything I read or heard on the subject on Friday:

Origin of Wall Street’s Plunge Continues to Elude Officials

The article offers this intriguing quotation:

”The problem is you don’t come in and find out what the clear answer is,” said Art Hogan, the New York-based chief market analyst at Jefferies & Company. “We don’t have the clear explanation for how it happened.”

Really? All of the news outlets sure did on Thursday; they were near-unanimous in reporting that it was because of Greece. Now everyone’s saying we don’t know, we won’t know right away, maybe we won’t know at all.

Huh.

So my longstanding question is answered, and the answer is as I’ve suspected. They don’t know. They’re speculating. They’re guessing, in fact. But it doesn’t sound good to say, ”Dow plummets more than 900 points, maybe on Greece’s debt crisis, maybe not. Nobody knows for sure.”

Although that’s kind of what they’re all saying now, isn’t it?

Might it not be better to come off a little less certain in these news bulletins? Might it not pay to use words like maybe or perhaps or some speculate? I’m thinking long-range here. I’m thinking of the credibility gap that widens whenever I read something like Dow plummets more than 900 points on Greece’s debt crisis, followed mere hours later by something like Origin of Wall Street’s Plunge Continues to Elude Officials. Because the next time I read an assertion that purports to know the unknowable I will again ask myself How do they know?

And I will remind myself, They don’t.

So what’s gained by their behaving as if they know the unknowable? Nothing. They have only undermined their own decreasing credibility. And both the news outlets and their audiences suffer for it.

And, really, all they have to do is stop acting like they know when they’re speculating. That’s all. It’s a matter of phrasing. And a matter of attitude.

Tone-Deafness, and Whiplash

In posting to Digg an essay from the Guardian on the pope's bizarre statement regarding AIDS-HIV and condoms (the title of this report--"Pope claims condoms could make African Aids crisis worse," also in the Guardian--pretty much sums up the bizarre part), I made the following comment:

I am a Catholic who is developing whiplash by continuously shaking his head over all of the amazingly tone-deaf statements coming from this pope. I agree that condoms are not "the" answer to AIDS in Africa, if indeed there is any single answer. But to claim, as Benedict has, that distributing condoms somehow makes the problem worse is completely irresponsible!

You do have to wonder what the man is about. Keeping on the whiplash theme for a moment, I find myself constantly jerking between my initial impression of him (he's astoundingly tone-deaf, and always genuinely surprised when his comments turn out to create a hubbub) and my suspicious, cynical, and conspiracy-minded natural state (he's craftily steering the church on a rightward course, content to alienate its moderate and liberal wings in favor of a more fervent, more pliable church full of "true believers").

I suppose both could be true.

I agree with the assessment made this morning in a New York Times editorial:

Pope Benedict XVI has every right to express his opposition to the use of condoms on moral grounds, in accordance with the official stance of the Roman Catholic Church. But he deserves no credence when he distorts scientific findings about the value of condoms in slowing the spread of the AIDS virus.

And this:

But the second half of his statement is grievously wrong. There is no evidence that condom use is aggravating the epidemic and considerable evidence that condoms, though no panacea, can be helpful in many circumstances.

To be running around bereft of any evidence to back one's claim that condoms contribute to the AIDS epidemic in Africa is right up there with such assertions as you can unlock your car using your cell-phone or you should never return your hotel key-card to the desk because it's encoded with all of your credit-card information. That is, it's irresponsible balderdash.

It doesn't matter if it's the Bishop of Rome or your Aunt Matilda: Both are at best ignorant and careless, at worst malicious.

You can forgive it more easily in Aunt Matilda, of course, for I suspect the world does not listen to every bit of blather that escapes her lips. The pope, however, should know better, and he should be more careful. You know--all that think-before-you-speak stuff.

Unless he is thinking, and carefully dropping these little bombs as he goes on his way toward some calculated end.

And speaking of thinking: Where's the "news" media in all of this? Sure, following the pope's comment, everyone in the blogosphere hopped right on it. And today's news seems to have its minimum requirement of essays and editorials. But where were the media yesterday to challenge the pop to back up his outrageous claim with something approximating evidence? They appear to have been dozing, as is their custom.

The pope is making it more and more difficult for me to continue to identify with his church. (The main deal there is that I think of it as my church, and he's the one lousing it up.) Which may be his plan. And those in the "news" media are making it more and more difficult for me to continue to trust and respect them. Which I'm pretty sure isn't their plan.

What Passes for News

As Bob is my witless, here's a headline and lead from the Associated Press, as linked by Salon.com on its Wires page:

Politics

Obamas visit aquatic park, eat shave ice on outing

By PHILIP ELLIOTT Associated Press Writer


Saints preserve us! If this is what passes for "news" these days...

But here's more breaking news!

Malia and Sasha later ate shave ice at Kokonuts Shave Ice and Snacks while their dad downed a tuna melt.

Obama joked with reporters traveling with him that he would eat his lunch first, to set an example for his daughters. The president-elect then ordered a mound of shave ice, colored orange and green.

That whirring sound you hear is Edward R. Murrow spinning in his grave.