People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
journalism
Truth decay
With politics around the world increasingly characterized by lies, fear, and anger, Frontline, on the U.S. PBS network, is looking at how Facebook has been used to drive voters apart.
John Doyle reviewed the show in the Globe and Mail and offers this observation:
At the core of the matter is one key discovery about social media that’s not new any more: Fear and anger create ‘greater engagement’ online and therefore more advertising value.
Think about that for a minute. Irrational garbage isn’t an unintended consequence of social media — it’s part of the business model.
The immersive, ultra-hooey, gibberish-forward experience
Lucy Kellaway is my hero.
Kellaway recently wrote a column for the Financial Times that is the best thing I’ve read in a long time.
Before I stumbled over this piece via Twitter, I had never heard of Lucy Kellaway. Nor, I’m sure, has she ever heard of me. Sadly, it’s a valedictory column of a sort, in which she sums up her long and futile campaign against corporate codswallop.
“For nearly a quarter of a century,” she writes,* “I have been writing columns telling business people to stop talking rot. For the same amount of time they have been taking no notice.”
When she began, she believed corporate jargon had become so ridiculous that people would soon come to their senses and begin using plain English again. No such luck.
“Over the past two decades, two things have happened. Business bullshit has got a million per cent more bullshitty, and I’ve stopped predicting a correction in the marketplace.”
The Writing Life
James Ralph was an 18th-century content creator, scratching out a living in England’s New Economy. In an age of political, social and technological upheaval, life could be precarious for those who kept the printing presses stoked with words.
Writing in 1758, Ralph said “there is no Difference between the Writer in his Garret, and the Slave in the Mines; but that the former has his Situation in the Air, and the latter in the Bowels of the Earth: Both have their Tasks assigned them alike: Both must drudge and starve; and neither can hope for Deliverance.”
The quote comes from The Age of Authors: An Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Print Culture, a remarkable collection of writing about writing and the plight of writers. Editor Paul Keen writes that Ralph was “often dismissed as a Grub Street hack writer,” but managed to produce some important work, including the essay quoted above.
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
In the new world of letters, anyone, it seemed, could be an author – even women. (Anyone, that is, who belonged to the educated classes. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that the literacy rate in Great Britain rose above 60 per cent.)
Cause for hope
Thomas Vinciguerra has written a hopeful piece for the Columbia Journalism Review that looks at the unlikely Internet stardom of copy editors.
The piece features the always-sensible John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun, who got more than a million views for a video outlining his practical and progressive views on the singular “they.”
Says Mark Allen, of the American Copy Editors Society:
People are getting more information than they ever have, whether it’s in ink or electronically. People want to read, and they want to read without stumbling. And that’s where the copy editor comes in. The copy editor is the bridge who keeps the writer from tripping up.
You can find most anything online, including a million reasons to believe that most folks these days think clear writing went out with the Lindy Hop. But here – on the Internet! – is proof you don’t have to leave your readers stumbling around like a bunch of drunks in a sack race.
Shitgibbon: the saga continues
My campaign to have “shitgibbon” declared the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2017 is gaining momentum with a ground-breaking revelation in the search for the term’s origin.
Ben Zimmer reports that this delightful word was coined by the British writer David Quantick.
“I’m surprised and delighted that a word I made up in the 1980s to insult British indie rock stars has resurfaced in the context of 21st century US politics and the shitgibbon in the White House,” Quantick told Zimmer. “It’s bizarre and a very odd journey for a very silly word.”
From the irksome Mark E. Smith to a strange-haired delusionist strongman is indeed an odd journey. Let’s hope the Oxford folks are listening.
(By the way, I’m following Zimmer’s practice and dropping the hyphen from “shitgibbon.” As the Canadian Press Stylebook notes, “in North America, the tendency is to drop the hyphen as soon as a new compound becomes familiar.” I say it’s time we all got familiar with this exemplary bit of invective.)
Polls ‘don’t predict the future’
And more hard truths about the use and abuse of modern opinion research.
By Tom Barrett
TheTyee.ca
Election polls are fun. They can help you understand why politicians do and say the things they do. They can help you decide how to vote. And as long as the parties have access to polling, you should too.
But, as campaign polls proliferate like dandelions in April, they also become the source of a vast amount of the hooey that gets spewed by pundits.
Pollster Bob Penner has a long history of working for election campaigns. In a recent interview, he said the “literacy around polling” is pretty low.
Polling numbers naturally bounce around within their margin of error. “If you do the same method day after day, each day [the result] will be different,” said Penner, president and CEO of Stratcom. “That’s called sampling error.”
But if a pollster goes on TV and says the bouncing numbers are just sampling error, “he wouldn’t be on TV,” Penner said.
“So he’s got to construct a reason for why the numbers moved other than the probable real reason, which is just a natural variation in the polling method. So he says it’s because of the ads they ran today. Or it’s because of the media story that was on last night. Or it’s because this guy endorsed him. And that’s almost never true. It’s almost never the reason.
“But they’re out there saying it and people are at home consuming it and saying, ‘well, those ads really moved the numbers.’ ”
BC’s coming election: Myth of the demon vote splitter
Libs and NDP sow fear of third parties siphoning votes. But political life is complicated.
By Tom Barrett
TheTyee.ca
We’re going to hear a lot about third parties and vote-splitting as we approach the May 14 election. That’s because everybody who knows anything about B.C. elections knows one big thing.
As a Young Liberal delegate said during last fall’s annual party convention: “The only time the NDP wins is when the free enterprise vote is fractured.”
The Liberals and Social Credit before them have been saying the same thing for more than half a century. When Martyn Brown was campaign director for the BC Liberals in the 2001, 2005 and 2009 elections, he worked that line like a government mule.
“It is a powerful argument, no doubt,” he has written, “one that I helped elevate to an art form in my long time in B.C. politics. It certainly helped elect Gordon Campbell’s three successive majority governments.”
There are, however, a couple of problems with the argument. For a start, as Brown now concedes, it misses the point by ignoring why people vote for third parties. It’s based on an outdated Cold War mentality. It also ignores how voters shift allegiance in elections. And it oversimplifies history.
As political scientist Norman Ruff wrote after the 1996 election — one of the key events in free enterprise vote-splitting mythology — “there has never been a monolithic free enterprise vote in British Columbia.”
Canadian Online Publishing Awards
Congratulations to the Tyee, which has been nominated for seven Canadian Online Publishing Awards.
The nominations include a project I worked on for the Tyee Solutions Society with reporters Christopher Pollon and Geoff Dembicki, editor Chris Wood, TSS director
Michelle Hoar and TSS acting director Fen Hsiao. B.C.’s Quest for Carbon Neutrality looked at British Columbia’s climate change policies four years after former premier Gordon Campbell launched one of the most ambitious climate strategies anywhere.
In the online awards “green division” (daily and weekly newspapers and broadcasters), the Toronto Star was nominated 14 times and the CBC 10. The Globe and Mail has eight nominations and the Huffington Post, the Grid and The Tyee each have seven.
The Tyee story about the nominations is here. And there’s a full list of the nominations here.
‘Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit…’
My favourite writing coach, Roy Peter Clark, has written a splendid tribute to William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well.
Zinsser’s best-known book is now in its 30th anniversary edition, having sold more than a million copies. Seeing as it’s probably the best book on writing nonfiction, that’s nice to know.
Writing on Poynter.org, Clark celebrates two pages of On Writing Well that reproduce a marked-up draft of the book.
For the record, they are pages 10 and 11 in my edition. I’ve studied them until my eyes bleed. I’ve shared them with countless aspiring writers, young and old. There have never — I say never! — been two pages in a writing text as practical, persuasive and revealing as pages 10 and 11. Like the music ethos articulated by the likes of Miles Davis and Tony Bennett, Zinsser demonstrates in writing that there are notes in a composition (words in his case) that the artist should leave out.
Pages 10 and 11 show how Zinsser slashed words and phrases that most of us would lazily let stand. The result is tighter, clearer and more powerful. “Faced with such a variety of obstacles” becomes “faced with these obstacles.” “He tends to blame himself” becomes “He blames himself.” “Two or three different” becomes “several.”
As Zinsser says, “rewriting is the essence of writing.”
Rannygazoo 