Time to tune out the news?

(WuMo)

I tend to follow the news quite closely but this is the time of year when I find the news to be dreary for three reasons and feel tempted to follow the example of the family in the cartoon.

The first reason is because with just three weeks to go before the mid-term elections in the US, the discussion here consists almost exclusively of pundits examining the polls and tea leaves and trying to predict the outcome, thus inevitably going over the same ground again and again, trying to make sense of tiny fluctuations in numbers. At least politics in the UK is dealing with serious policy issues in addition to the leadership drama.
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Unnecessary reporting

Surely everyone should know by know that hurricanes involve very strong winds, heavy rainfall, flooding, and flying debris. And yet, each new hurricane has news channels sending some hapless weather reporter out into the storm to show them getting buffeted by the forces of nature. This is serious malpractice since the reporter could very easily get hurt or killed by getting hit with some flying object, as can be seen in this footage.

Fortunately this reporter was not hurt but I suggest that they preserve this clip and show it every time there is a hurricane to remind people how bad it can be, without risking anew the life of a reporter.

Morning Edition goes over the top with funeral coverage

Since I get my news online, I have managed to avoid coverage of the non-news of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral. My morning routine is to listen to the news headlines on NPR and the news program Morning Edition while I prepare and have my breakfast. I listen online instead of on the radio and yesterday (Monday) when I scanned the show’s website, I found that 16 out of the 20 items were about the funeral. Only one item, lasting about three minutes in the two-hour program, dealt with hurricane Fiona that was hitting Puerto Rico hard, dumping a lot of rain, cutting off all power to the island, and causing catastrophic damage.

So I listened to a podcast of This American Life instead.
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Just give me the facts: Part 2

I posted before about my irritation with journalists who do not provide basic facts about elections, such as the date of the election they are discussing or the vote tallies after the event, instead giving us their commentary and conclusions. This failure was clearly apparent in the special election that was held on August 16 to complete the term for the single congressional seat in the state of Alaska vacated by the death of the incumbent. On August 31, Democrat Mary Peltola was declared to have won the election, defeating two Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich.

The election was notable in that Peltola becomes the first Native Alaskan to go to Congress and the reports dutifully reminded us of that fact. But there was another very interesting feature in the election. It was the first time that Alaska was using a combination of an open primary, in which all the candidates were pooled together on one ballot (with over 45 competing) with the top four going on to the general election, and then using ranked choice voting to decided the winner among those four, provided none of the four got more than 50% of the vote in the first round.
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Brace ourselves for wall-to-wall Queen Elizabeth coverage

[UPDATE: She has in fact died.]

You may recall the massive coverage given last April to the death and funeral of Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth, with the BBC pre-empting coverage of all other programming. This was a bit much even for some Britons, who complained that their favorite programs were being replaced with endless blathering about him. The idea that the whole nation was in mourning for a long time over the death of a 99-year old man was always preposterous.

If that was done for her husband, imagine what the coverage will be like for Elizabeth when she dies. We already have in place what looks like a death watch because she seems to be having some health issues, which is not surprising for someone who is 96 years old.

Elizabeth has had a remarkably long reign. She seems to be physically tough and one wonders what she thinks of newspeople eagerly anticipating her death. It would be nice if she recovers from whatever currently ails her and lives for some time, just to spite these ghouls.

But if and when she eventually dies, we can be sure that the US media, inexplicably devoted to covering the minutiae of the lives of a family that has no discernible connection to the US, will follow the British media in going with over the top coverage for days on end, displacing much more important and relevant news, even if there really is no public appetite for such excess.

Attention reporters: Give the basic facts before commentary

Take a look at the opening paragraphs of this news article.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has already helped block one of former President Donald Trump’s allies from winning the Republican nomination for governor in a crucial battleground state. Now he’s hoping for a repeat in his own backyard.

Ducey is part of a burgeoning effort among establishment Republicans to lift up little-known housing developer Karrin Taylor Robson against former television news anchor Kari Lake, who is backed by Trump. Other prominent Republicans, including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, have also lined up behind Robson in recent days.

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On escaping from the world of Alex Jones

It is tempting to think that once people drink the Kool Aid of right wing lunacy, they remain poisoned forever, never to escape. But there are a few who do realize at some point that the whole thing is a sham and leave that world. Josh Owens is one such person. He was very close to Jones, initially drawn to him in 2008 as a young man of 19 by the fact that Jones gave simple answers to the complex problems of how society works, since Jones’s basic idea that there is a vast conspiracy of elites who are tying to keep you down can be repeatedly repurposed to ‘explain’ pretty much any event that occurs anywhere.

Owens worked as a cameraman for Jones from 2013 to 2017, filming his program, making ads for him, and was sent by him on ‘assignments’ to various places to gather evidence of the conspiracies at work. Jones would act like a journalist and tell the listeners to his show that he had ‘intel’ from sources he could not name that nefarious activities were going on in those locations. In an article, Owens wrote that over time, he learned that even if the team found nothing there, it did not matter. Jones would simply make up stuff to fit what he needed..
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News Corp in Australia seems just like in the US

Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News network are pernicious influences in US politics, spreading hate, division, and outright lies. But we should not forget that Murdoch is an Australian and his media empire has tentacles in his native land and in the UK as well.

Leading up to the recent elections in Australia, his media outlets in that country did what they do here in the US but it turned out that despite using the same playbook, they were not successful in their efforts to eliminate all the parties that were neither Liberal nor Labor and have the Liberals retain power.

 At the centre of this extraordinary detachment of political coverage from reality are the Australian newspapers of News Corp, from the national daily the Australian to the popular tabloids in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in particular.

Only the Northern Territory News, among its most visible publications, editorialised for a Labor victory.
…

The singular story of election night was how News Corp, with all its recourses and all its outlets, from newspapers to subscription TV news, couldn’t convince voters to follow its course, at least not in the numbers needed.

It is being seen as a demonstration of impotence in political affairs, and of absence of authority in the group’s claim to speak for the nation.

Academic and journalist Margaret Simons is no chum of News Corp but was not alone when she wrote this in the Sydney Morning Herald on 16 May: “I am not sure News Corporation bothers to deny its bias these days. But could this be the election in which the impotence of its skewed reporting is exposed?”

The election result doesn’t mean the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald convinced voters to back Labor as their election editorials recommended, but it does mean they were alert to voter movement and ready to respond.

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Does online advertising work?

As someone who spends way more time on my computer than is probably healthy, I am familiar with online ads because they bombard me all the time. We know that online advertising has been a huge wealth generator for those companies such as Google and Facebook that sell and place ad space and indeed is the source of revenue for any ‘free’ content on the internet. (This blog is the exception. It is genuinely free!)

The promise that the media platforms offer to ad buyers is that they can target the product to the individual buyer who may be looking for that particular item, thus preventing wasteful blanket ads. The way the platforms do that is by vacuuming up all the information they can glean from us from our online activity to create a detailed profile of each one of us that they can then sell to retailers, a process known as ‘microtargeting’. This promise of ultra-efficiency is what has led the migration of ads from print media to online media. It has also led to fears that that we are now living in a Big Brother world because our lives have become transparent to these big companies like Google and Facebook who seek every way of prying into our lives.
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Two awful liars talking to each other. Why would anyone watch?

The utterly smug and smarmy Piers Morgan has apparently launched a new talk show and he interviewed Donald Trump. That alone should be enough to deter any viewers but there is also a report that Morgan, in order to create buzz for the show, has misleadingly edited the footage to suggest that he had an angry confrontation with Trump.

Great. An utterly dishonest and unlikable interviewer speaks to an utterly dishonest and unlikable president. What’s not to dislike?