Inflammatory vs. Informative

The news media tends to play for attention.  It depends on attention for income.

We've all noticed how issues are exaggerated, twisted, slanted, and misrepresented.  Edited and out of context quotes are common and perhaps deliberately misleading, even from some mainstream sources.  Exaggerated news gets ratings, and ratings are directly tied to revenue. It's quick, it's sensational, it's shallow.  It's a business, not a service.



Then there is clickbait; those shocking 'news' items designed to generate advertising revenue. NASA forecast (left) is a deliberate lie; it didn't happen.

Then there's the one (right) that says police found 19 bodies in a freezer; also a lie. It was originated by Now8News several days ago, and it has been circulated by other similar sites.  Previous fake news by Now8News includes claims Walmart bananas carried deadly parasitic worms; a man fed his unfaithful fiancee’s remains to her unsuspecting parents; a man was discovered cannibalizing a teen inside a haunted house attraction; and that police found bodies in a Satanic dungeon under a Chuck E. Cheese.  They get points for creativity, I suppose, but the behavior should perhaps be constrained in some fashion.

Does it affect us?

In a statistical analysis of the top 20 real and top 20 fake election stories posted and shared on Facebook, fake news out-performed actual news in the final months before the election.  False stories about the Pope endorsing Trump and about ISIS supporting Clinton were among hundreds that were shared millions of times.

Did that affect the election?  Probably not, according to a Stanford study, but troublesome nonetheless.  Social media hosts are inquiring into the problem of fake news; no solutions yet.

Between fake news and biased mainstream news, where do we turn?

Here's a reasonable review of real news sources for both depth and bias.  The more difficult task, perhaps, is understanding our own preferential bias and degree of objectivity impairment.  UPDATE: Since President Trump's inauguration, CNN has become somewhat blind to news and focuses almost solely on criticizing the president. For the time being, they are not particularly helpful.  FOX has matured and advanced in popularity.

Find your own accepted news sources in the illustration; what might that profitably provide to us by way of a look at our own leanings, our own objectivity, and the depth of our own understanding?

Update: Breitbart lost another hundred advertisers bringing their total loss to around 1200.  Companies discovered their advertising being posted on the Breitbart site via the click-distribution Google provides and quickly pulled out in order to avoid being associated with the misinformation and alt-right extremes.

Update 2018:  With the new administration, most news media have moved left.  Moderate centrists have moved to liberal, and the nonsensical right-leaning media, particularly Fox News, have moved to a more right-moderate position.  MSNBC is reasonable for now.  CNN is sometimes left-irrational.

Rush Limbaugh remains extreme right, however, and regularly ranked between 50% and 84% inaccurate.  With four marriages and repeated drug problems, his popularity is not admiration of character but perhaps comedic appeal.  He's worth $500 million.  What does that tell us about ourselves as an audience?

Simone de Beauvoir: gypped

Life can be an incredible gift.  There's an essential foundation to it all, most noticeable perhaps by its absence.

Simone de Beauvoir, in the third volume of her autobiography while considering her life and its approaching end concludes she was gypped, cheated by life.

"I think with sadness of all the books I've read, all the places I've seen, all the knowledge I've amassed and that will be no more.  All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places and suddenly nothing.  They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment.  At most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There isn't much she didn't see.  But that unique sum of things, the experience that I live, with all its order and randomness -- the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomble in Bahia, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns of Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, the orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I've talked about, others I have left unspoken -- there is no place where it will all live again.  If it had at least enriched the earth; if it had given birth to ... what?  A hill?  A rocket?  But no, nothing will have taken place.  I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold mine at my feet: a whole life to live.  The promises have all been kept.  And yet, turning an incredulous gaze to that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how much I was gypped."  

She was a well-educated writer, philosopher, activist, and social theorist credited with being a significant voice in the formation of western culture, especially feminism.  She was a focused atheist and the founder of existentialism; she lived accordingly and without restraint.  Curious what such a life might look like?

From Wikipedia ... de Beauvoir had a turbulent, often scandalous life. Although de Beauvoir had a long time relationship with Sartre, she was known to have a number of female lovers. ... these relationships, some of which she began with underage students while working as a professor, later led to a biographical controversy. A former student, Bianca Lamblin, in her book, Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée, wrote that, while she was a student at Lycée Molière, she had been sexually exploited by her teacher de Beauvoir, who was in her thirties at the time. In 1943, de Beauvoir was suspended from her teaching job, due to an accusation that she had, in 1939, seduced her 17-year-old lycée pupil Natalie Sorokine.   Sorokine's parents laid formal charges against de Beauvoir for debauching a minor, and as a result she had her license to teach in France permanently revoked. She and Jean-Paul Sartre developed a pattern, which they called the "trio", in which de Beauvoir would seduce her students and then pass them on to Sartre. De Beauvoir and Sartre would both take part in political campaigns to abolish the age of consent laws for sexual relationships in France.

Simone de Beauvoir was indeed cheated out of every truly good thing in life. Some of what she wrote was perhaps worth review, but the fruits thereof are troublesome; her life was one of the most unconscionable of the twentieth century. Her work is part of college curricula and persists in modern thinking.

In her autobiography she reports that she stopped believing in God at the age of fourteen.  She caught her mother giving direction to her confessor, and began to see the whole thing as a lifeless sham. Noticing the conflicted hypocrisy of her own father and others, and abandoned it all including its values and principles.

The final stroke, she reports, was reading a work of Balzac's literature forbidden by the church ... she found it, and through it the world, so fantastic and beautiful that she could only come to feel angry with the lifeless organization that would try to take it from her.  In the absence of any context greater than self, she lived a life that at the end left her feeling defrauded by it all.

Our Narcissistic Culture

Children raised in a harsh and abusive
environment will be shaped by it.

Many Americans are asses, apparently.  In an interesting series of studies, we come off like a sick, narcissistic culture.  That's according to folks from around the world as well as our own opinion of ourselves.

As Miller et al point out,  the narcissism ratings associated with the “typical” American -- by both fellow Americans and study participants living outside the U.S. alike -- reached clinical standards for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Here’s their take, with PNC (short for “perceptions of national character”) referring to the average American:

In fact, in all three studies (Studies 1, 2, and 5) that used American samples, the mean PNC ratings for NPD were above the diagnostic threshold for this disorder, meaning that Americans in general were rated by their compatriots as meeting criteria for pathological narcissism as articulated in the DSM–5. … The same was true for perceptions of Americans provided by non-American participants.

 (Narcissism and United States’ culture: The view from home and around the world)

DSM-5 criteria for narcissistic personality disorder include these traits:

• Exaggerated self-importance
• Expects to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
• Exaggerates achievements and talents
• Only understood by equally superior people
• Requires constant admiration
• Expects favor and unquestioning compliance
• Unable or unwilling to recognize the worth of others

Narcissistic personality disorder crosses the border of healthy confidence into thinking so highly of self that you put yourself on a pedestal and value yourself more than you value others. Narcissists tend to be egocentric and can be cruel, manipulative, and falsely affirming. They use guile, artifice, and pseudo-intimacy in order to convince someone they deserve preferential treatment.  Study it to understand what you're facing.

There are no medications for treating narcissistic personality disorder.  Some recommend a conversation 'out behind the barn'.

We do have narcissists among us, of course, at home, at school, at work.  Children raised in such an environment will be shaped by it. 

Narcissists may rise in workplace hierarchies because of their ability to elicit approval and admiration.  The traits are embedded in our culture, at least to some degree, via discrimination, class distinctions, and worldview formation via MTV, reality TV, cliques, and the like.

Narcissistic behavior may be countered depending on the degree of the individual's malformation.
Such behavior is perhaps not genetic but is rather an adaptation to life, a coping mechanism.
While having the psychological categorization is perhaps useful, those who qualify
span the spectrum of arrogance and manipulative selfishness.  They
might more usefully be understood as socially maladapted.
Seeing it with clarity allows you to put up appropriate,
effective, and necessary boundaries.

Shutting down a narcissist: 

Review your own behavior in detail; ensure you're not contributing to the problem (anger, name calling, criticising, kitchen sinking, etc.).  Prepare in detail with a practiced response.

Look them in the eyes.

When a narcissist's ego intrudes, look them directly in the eyes. Respond with a slow nod and then slowly shake your head from side to side.  It tells them that you see them for who they are.

Say no.

Narcissists use your shared relationship against you. Don't give them control. Don't be afraid to calmly and reasonably say no; it tells them you're not intimidated.  Do so with little or no explanation; any explanation you offer opens opportunity for an escalated rebuttal.

Offer feedback rather than criticism.

Narcissists can't take criticism, accurate or otherwise. If you criticize them, you'll become the target of their anger.  Instead, tell them you just don't understand their point of view, and perhaps ask them to explain.  Done thoughtfully and in a calm manner, it disables their primary weaponry.

Use the narcissist's name deliberately.  

When you address a person by name, you focus the situation, you connect them to their behavior. For example, you might say, "Mike, I don't understand your thinking on that one," perhaps adding something like, "Mike, can you explain how you came to that conclusion?"  

Attempt understanding, perhaps.

In a quiet moment, imagine how you might feel if you were never at peace, crippled by a chronic need for approval and admiration.  Thinking it through might help you to not take their actions personally.

At the same time, stay objective and focused.  A gracious but firm stance is actually a caring gesture.  And remember, you're not likely to be the only victim.  Interfering with such behavior may be a help to others.  If there are children involved ....

If over time your actions are successful and the relationship tones down to reasonableness, consider continuing the pursuit of issues calmly and with honest negotiation.  If not, leave the walls up.  If it escalates to abusive behavior, disconnect.

👴  A non-standard solution: from Foreign Afflictions: Mental Disorders across Country Borders, we see, "... when Murphy asked one of the Inuit how the group typically dealt with such an individual, he replied that, “somebody would have pushed him off the ice when no one was looking.”"  An understandable response, but not recommended, of course.

You can perhaps imagine how one might from years of experience and inquiry have arrived at this perspective.  Discernment rarely emerges without broad-based experience.  True for us all, and for wisdom as well.

Hottest Years

While the media loves headlines like this one, scientists prefer comprehensive data and independent verification with consistency over time.  For the science community, trends are independently verified using different data collections and analysis models.  

For climate change, there are arguments about whether or not human action is a contributing factor.  There are arguments about whether warming will make any difference.  Those arguments are not among the scientists, however.  Physicists, climatologists, ocean scientists, environmental scientists, and the rest of relevant fields, generally agree that human action is a primary causal factor, and that the results, while quite variable, will be detrimental.

Global climate is indeed complex.  There are continuing scientific inquiries regarding the degree of forcing, the magnitude of effect for individual factors, varying data sets, and the contributing natural cycles.  There's a difference, however, between objective scientific inquiry and politicised campaigns.

There are organizations lobbying and publishing a contrarian commentary.  Some involve the same folks who defended the tobacco industry.  Many, perhaps most, are traceably funded by industrial interests.  Do your own research.  It takes little effort and is perhaps illuminating.

For an easy starting place, Climate Change Denial: Lobbying or Global Warming Skeptic Organizations | Union of Concerned Scientists

Apart from public opinion and biased rhetoric, whatever way we choose to go forward, there are economic and cultural changes ahead that are perhaps difficult to accomplish or even to fully grasp intellectually.

Who do you trust?

The definition of 'news' has changed.

In the weeks prior to the election, Americans were divided on who they believed.  For those doing their best to understand the issues objectively, there was little solace.

To help us understand it all, in the early 80's there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly news magazines, Time and Newsweek.  CNN was brand new.

Since then, things have changed and folks find it difficult to trust what's offered.  From a respected journalist and editor, ...

"At least in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed. Can we pluck anything out of the stream for longer than a brief moment? Can our readers?" ~Susan B. Glasser served as editor of Politico throughout the 2016 campaign.

         Fake news is thriving

In the final three months of the presidential campaign,
the 20 top-performing fake election news stories
generated more engagement on Facebook than the top
stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.

"As this wild presidential campaign progressed, that became my ever-more nagging worry and then our collective nightmare—the fear, clearly realized, that all the flood of news and information we’ve celebrated might somehow be drowning us. So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.

But 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.

And that for my money is by far the most dispiriting thing about this campaign season: not the mind-numbing endless chatter or the embarrassing bottom-feeding coverage or even the stone-throwing barbarians lying in wait to attack any who dare to enter Twitter or Facebook.

So what’s an editor with a no longer always half-full glass to do?

Four days after the election, I moved to Jerusalem to become a foreign correspondent again for a few years. To a troubled part of the world where the stones thrown are real and not metaphorical. Where an entire region is in the midst of a grand and violent reckoning with the fallout of a failed political order. And where, not coincidentally, the results of the election this year in the world’s remaining superpower will matter almost as much as they will back in Washington.

Facts may be dead, but here’s one I’ll take with me, and it’s a truth as rock-solid as those Facebook feeds are not: elections, in America or elsewhere, still have consequences."

Susan B. Glasser served as editor of Politico throughout the 2016 campaign. The founding editor of Politico Magazine, she has also been editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine; a foreign correspondent, editor, and political reporter for The Washington Post; and co-chief of the Post’s Moscow Bureau with her husband, Peter Baker. Their book, Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution, was published in 2005. Prior to the Post, Glasser worked for eight years at Roll Call, where she rose from an intern to become the paper’s top editor.

Fighting Skills

Fighting rarely accomplishes much good.  It doesn't prove we're right or solve a problem.

One technique, however, can change a profitless conflict into a victory, and that's coming alongside.  If you can change the context from 'me against you' to 'us vs. the issue', you'll both win.

Remember fighting?  Over some issue, you and your adversary face off, voices escalate, angry faces, accusations spill, the kitchen sink shows up ... typical.  
Tactical change required -- deescalate, discover the goal, collaborate, sit side-by-side with the issue across the table from the two of you, and search for pathways to the goal.

Deep breath, and think it through.  Pointing your frustration at the other person triggers defensiveness.  Instead --  Question the issue, the science, the solutions, the alternatives, the ethical and moral context.  Ask specifics about how and where and how much; about what has or hasn't worked before, about what's safe, about what's fair.

It's tough.  It means I'll have to hear and understand my partner's viewpoint and concerns.  It means they'll have to objectively present their own view, and so will I, but it's worth the effort.

Husband and wife
Parent and teen
Employer and employee, co-workers, neighbors, friends, acquaintances ... and the subjects span the spectrum.  'Conservative vs. liberal' is a big one recently.

We're more polarized as a society today than is healthy; that's polarized, as in 'shallow', perhaps, but we needn't be.

Note: for scorekeepers.  Every time you fight with your wife and win, you erode the trust and closeness of the relationship, maybe just a little.  It's perhaps more immediately destructive in your relationship with your teen.  At work, it breaks down the team, and among friends, it undermines the safe place of being able to depend on each other.  Statistically speaking, the price is high.

Politidrivel

Celebrities and others spawn strange logic.  This photo and comment, for example, have circled the country and beyond.

If you care about refugees, you don't care about homeless, according to the message.  Nonsense.

The issues are separate.

• The homeless -- Poverty and inequality in the U.S. are inadequately addressed by either party; the results are devastating with more than 20% of our children living in poverty. (UNICEF, 2012, the United States ranks second highest child poverty rate of 23.1% among developed nations, just under Romania's 25.6/%.)
• The refugees -- On the far side of the world, displaced people fleeing for their lives are a life and death crisis. At latest count, the U.N. has identified 13.5 million Syrians in need of humanitarian assistance (food, shelter, medical help).  Included are more than six million inside the country and five million outside who have been driven from their homes.  Half of them are children.  Millions have had to quit school.  They've left their jobs, their possessions, their communities, and fled for their lives while 11.5% of the country's population has been injured in the conflict or killed.

Both issues are relevant to Americans as individual and national conscience concerns. Neither can be ignored or swept aside as part of some political rhetoric.

Either we have a heart of compassion for the disadvantaged and oppressed, or we do not. Criticising compassion for one as a neglect of the other is political wordplay. Both issues are critical humanitarian concerns, and the list is much longer than just these.

Shallow, inflammatory political statements are not helpful, are they.

Freedom of Speech and the Challenge of Alt-information

Strongly biased media offers varied interpretations of the same information.  Alt-truth? Untruth?

• Climate is or isn't changing.
• Muslims are bad or not.
• Politicians are crooked, or ... okay, that may be true, pretty much.

Climategate, as one example, was a manufactured controversy.

True?

True, but it took time to sort out the truth.  Emails and files at the East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit were hacked and distributed a few weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.  Quotes from the content were published as evidence of a conspiracy among climate change scientists.

Was it deliberate misinformation via the media?  Perhaps.  We subsequently spent months and money on official investigations that found there had been no scientific misconduct or inappropriate data handling.  All work had been openly discussed and appropriately peer reviewed. Further, we found that criticisms and accusations were unsubstantiable and based on partial statements taken out of context and misinterpreted.  All the accusations proved false, but public trust in the science community suffered.

That sort of thing has become the norm, and it seems folks are often believing what they prefer, perhaps as the easier path.  Critical thinking is somewhat rare in the public forum, especially on social media.  Exaggerations, gossip, and misinformation; they're perhaps all the same in validity and intent.

Critical thinking follows an ethic of inquiry without bias, a basic element of honesty.  That's asking a lot.

Unfortunately, everyone demonstrates all of the traits listed in the illustration here.  That's everyone of us and all of the critical thinking errors, some more some less.  Note that the errors are the 'easier, quicker path' solutions to resolving internal questions.  Rising above such error is a tedious, lifelong task, one required for knowing truth.

Are we able to monitor ourselves about such things?  The last time I objectively considered an opposing viewpoint was ....

Convictions about truth need never change.
Acceptance of information, however, should perhaps be critically refined.

False news, then, is a difficult problem as the number of media sources and our exposure to them continue to increase.  Suggestions?

Shhh, listen

Among the more difficult tasks we face, understanding others with clarity, especially those who have reached different conclusions than we have. 

An exchange of opinions is not full communication. Not until we can grasp the path by which another has arrived at their convictions and conscience values can we knowledgeably relate to one another. 

Anything else is more likely to be conflict than conversation. 

Of such is the foundation for understanding and practical love. Of course.

James 1:19 👌