Naw NEWS - from press releases to stressed journalism

"Now, like toothless babies, they suckle on the sugary teat of misinformation and poop it into the diaper we call the six o'clock news"

        Kent Brockman, TV newsreader, The Simpsons

I couldn't find the video. Somebody wrote:

      "This is GREAT STUFF! No wonder Youtube has censored it."                                 

Do not miss the blunt Hans Rosling, our Swedish celebrity statistician, who has urged the 'arrogant' media to see the big picture in a feisty clash on Danish television.

'You can't trust the media'

When challenged for the source of his facts, Rosling replied:
"Statistics from The International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, nothing controversial. (...) I am right, and you are wrong,"

Send the video to your friends!!!
             

So.... what is to be done?

TASK. Listen to Write. Choose your best proposal:
Atkins  or  Davies

BIT1.  

Which news articles are not researched by journalists, but are simply based closely on press releases? Chris Atkins investigates the murky process of churnalism

When press releases masquerade as news stories

BIT2.  


In Flat Earth News, award-winning journalist Nick Davies takes the lid off newspapers and broadcasters, exposing the mechanics of falsehood, distortion and propaganda; naming names and telling the stories behind stories. This website is intended to be a focal point for exposing past, current and future media abuse.

Journalists, and anyone else with direct knowledge of media malpractice, are invited to blog about examples of media falsehood and distortion; PR tactics and propaganda; and the use of illegal news-gathering techniques. All visitors are invited to make comments on these blog posts.

Nick Davies on Churnalism

Media Falsehoods and Propaganda

This section contains background writing and documents revealing the impact on public debate and government policy of falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the news media. Each of the topics below expands on points made in Flat Earth News.

Education

The following five articles by Nick Davies attempt to dig into the underlying assumptions which inform government education policy and link to the consistent way in which Flat Earth News distorts policy. These articles relate to a reference on page 40 of the book.

• Failing schools and failing solutions
• Poverty invades the classroom
• Poverty and education: the evidence
• How the government used and abused educational research
• A book about schools

Cook and Moore_Two legs ... the minimum requirement

'One Leg Too Few' (1989) -classics

 Peter Cook and Dudley Moore

From 'The Secret Policeman's Biggest Ball' in 1989. -25 years on the show

Peter Cook: [in character, calls out to stage right] Uh, Miss Rigby? Stella, my love? Would you send in the next auditioner, please? Thank you, my dear. 

[Enter Moore, grinning broadly, wearing trench coat, hopping on one leg, the other leg -- the left one -- tucked under the coat - he hops over to Cook and shakes hands.] 

Peter Cook: Nice to see you. 
Dudley Moore: [still hopping up and down] Nice to see you. 
Peter Cook: Settle down. [puts a hand on Moore's shoulder and stops his hopping] Uh, Mr. Spiggott, is it not? 
Dudley Moore: Yes, Spiggott's the name, acting's my game. 
Peter Cook: I see. Spiggott is the name and acting is your game. 
Dudley Moore: Right. 
Peter Cook: If you'd like to settle down for one moment, Mr. Spiggott. 
Dudley Moore: Certainly, yes. 
Peter Cook: Thank you very much. [Moore hops over to the chair and rests his "stump" on it] Mr. Spiggott, er, you are auditioning, are you not, for the role of Tarzan? 
Dudley Moore: Yes. 

Peter Cook: Uh, Mr. Spiggott, I, uh, I couldn't help noticing -- almost immediately -- that you are a one-legged man. 
Dudley Moore: Oh. You noticed that? 
Peter Cook: When you've been in the business as long as I have, Mr. Spiggott, you, uh, you get to notice these little things, almost instinctively. 
Dudley Moore: Yeah. Sort of ESP. 
Peter Cook: That kind of thing, yes. 
Dudley Moore: Mm, yes. 
Peter Cook: Now, Mr. Spiggott, you, a one-legged man, are applying    for the role of Tarzan. 
Dudley Moore: Yes, right. 
Peter Cook: A role traditionally associated with a two-legged artiste. 
Dudley Moore: Yes, correct, yes, yes. 
Peter Cook: And yet you, a unidexter... are applying for the role. 
Dudley Moore: Yes, right, yes. 

Peter Cook: A role for which two legs would seem to be the minimum requirement. Well, Mr. Spiggott, need I point out to you with overmuch emphasis where your deficiency lies as regards landing the role? 
Dudley Moore: Yes, I think you ought to. 
Peter Cook: Perhaps I ought, yes. Need I say with, uh, too much        stress that it is in the, uh, leg division that you are deficient. 
Dudley Moore: The leg division? 
Peter Cook: The leg division, Mr. Spiggott. You are deficient in the leg division to the tune of one. Your right leg I like. It's a lovely leg for the role. As soon as I saw it come in, I said, "Hello! What a lovely leg for the role!" 
Dudley Moore: Ah! 
Peter Cook: I've got nothing against your right leg. 
Dudley Moore: Ah! 

Peter Cook: The trouble is -- neither have you. [delayed applause]          You, uh, you fall down on the left. 
Dudley Moore: You mean it's inadequate? 
Peter Cook: It is inadequate, Mr. Spiggott. 
Dudley Moore: Mm. 
Peter Cook: In my view, the public is not yet ready ... 
Dudley Moore: No? 
Peter Cook: ... for the sight of a one-legged Tarzan swinging through the jungly tendrils, shouting "Hello, Jane." 
Dudley Moore: No. No, right. 
Peter Cook: But don't despair, Mr. Spiggott. I mean, after all, you score over a man with no legs at all. By one hundred percent. 
Dudley Moore: Well, I've got twice as many. 
Peter Cook: You're streets ahead! 
Dudley Moore: So there's still hope? 
Peter Cook: Of course there is still hope, Mr. Spiggott. 
Dudley Moore: Ah! 
Peter Cook: I mean, if we get no two-legged character actors in here within, say, the next, oh, [checks his wristwatch] eighteen months, there is every chance that you, a unidexter, will be the very type of artiste we shall be attempting to contact with a view to jungle stardom. 
Dudley Moore: [likes the sound of that] Jungle stardom. 

[Moore gets off chair, shakes hands with Cook while hopping up and down.] 

Peter Cook: I'm just sorry I can't be more definite at this stage. 
Dudley Moore: Oh, good Lord! 
Peter Cook: But you must understand ... these days. We've so much tied up in the remake of Gone With The Wind, Part Four, we can't afford... 

[ Moore exits right, hopping and waving goodbye.  Cook, alone on stage, does a little hopping himself to the music as we fade out.]   -scripts

From "Beyond the Fringe," -best audio
their complete 1964 gala farewell performance



BONUS.
... and for Christmas, watch this (it was 11 years before Life of Brian!)




four bits:

M:	Let me introduce myself Arthur. My name is Matthew. Jolly good. Let me explain, Arthur, we are doing an in-depth profile of Jesus.
S:	Er, which newspaper do you work for?
M:	I work for The Bethlehem Star. bit2. M: Now what I'd like you to do, if you're willing of course, is tell me what happened, in your own words. S: Basically what happened was that me and the lads were abiding in the fields. Yeah, and we were watching our flocks by night. M: Watching our flocks by night, yeah… S: Yeah. That's when they get up to all their rubbish. Hot summer nights, the rams go mad. Specially that one over there, he's a filthy little bugger. [We hear bleating.] Will you cut that out?! Doing that in front of you, a holy man! M: Yeah, well, it's only human. bit 3 M: Right. Now then - What was the atmosphere like in the stable, on this joyous, historic occasion? S: The atmosphere in the stable was very, very smelly. bit 4. S: Joseph, in particular. He was sitting in the corner of the stable, looking very gloomy indeed. M: : He might have been feeling a bit disgruntled, not being the real father. M: Yeah! Anyway, Arthur, I gather later on in the evening, three wise men came by, am I right there? S: Three bloody idiots if ever I saw any. In they come, call themselves Maggie. M: Yeah? S: And, er, they were bearing these gifts, you see.Gold, frankincense, and [nasally] mhhhhhhhyr. S: Well, I think the gold was probably welcome. But what's a little kid going to do with frankincense and [nasally] mhhhhhhhyr? I ask you.

Our five optimists -from evolutionists to revolutionists

Every one of the great revolutionists have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.  
          (G K Chesterton)

The scientists with reasons to be cheerful -THE GUARDIAN

We’re hardwired to focus on bad news stories, but that is not the whole truth. Ed Cumming meets the optimistic statisticians and economists using facts to reveal why more people are healthier and happier than ever before -by Ed Cummings

OUR FIVE academics trying to tell a more positive story with data. We are hardwired to seek out bad news and focus on the things going wrong. We’re on the edge of our seats, secretly waiting for calamity. Usually the news provides.

1# De Fries

As you might guess from the subtitle of DeFries’s 2014 book The Great Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis, she is hopeful about our ability to avert disaster. She argues that history has progressed by “ratchets”, where things improve; “hatchets”, where unforeseen problems occur; and “pivots”, where new solutions are found. 

2#  Max Roser
Max Roser runs Our World in Data, which shows how standards of living have changed over the centuries. Begun in 2011 as a “massive procrastination exercise when I was trying to write a book”, as Roser says, the site now employs full-time researchers and is looking for new sources of funding. Using the best and most official data available, he shows how global poverty continues to fall while standards of living, health and education continue to rise.

3-4#  Matt Ridley & Steve  Pinker
In the UK, Matt Ridley has been beating his Rational Optimist drum for years, while Harvard professor Steven Pinker argued persuasively in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature that violence is on the decline. 

5#  Rosling - Hans -OlaPresiding over the field is Hans Rosling, the Swedish professor who is the closest thing statistics has ever had to a rock star. His TED talk The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen has been viewed more than 10m times.

The brand is manifested in Gapminder, a public-access site founded by Hans, Ola and Ola’s wife Anna in 1999. At the site’s core is a customisable graph, where you can plot different data trends against each other and break them down by country. 

Our wrong answers  must be due to preconceived ideas that  in a systematic way created and maintained ignorance. Only preconceived ideas can make us perform worse than random. During that work we have encountered all kinds of pre-conceived ideas and outdated concepts about our contemporary world. Our priorities have been guided by such ignorance-encounters. With the Ignorance Project we have now decided to start a systematic search for widespread ignorance about the world.

change is the essence of life - Still life what an oxymoron

Whatever has tradition, will have future. Read the 4 items, and express your opinion.


item 1. -The Australia into which I was born in 1945 was 97% Anglo-Celtic, and people were relatively sure of where their values lay. 
. Today perhaps 40% of the Australian population come from any of 200 different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. 


… In 1971 I worked in London for six months, and again that was a society which was overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic, and knew what it believed in as a group. Today,2007, one Londoner out of every three is non-white. 


Thus Australia and England are now quite a different countries from the nations and peoples celebrated in their respective school history books. 
The most non-German city is its capital, Berlin, also certain for London.




Item 2. - According to the 1991 Indian census, there were 49,736 fluent speakers of Sanskrit in India. And at the time of the independence from London, the number did not add up to 500, Nevertheless, Sanscrit is THE language of pure India.




Item 3.- Futurist Alvin Toffler (1990) described in his book Powershift,  three forms of power and shows how these have changed over time:
Yesterday VIOLENCE was power, at my time WEALTH is power, tomorrow, KNOWLEDGE will be power.  
Somehow, the link in the three cases was the spread of technology.

Item 4. - 
Find your favourite OXYMORON

Two words with contradicting meanings used together. Something that appears self-contradictory. A ridiculous comparision. Conjoining contradictory terms.

One case where many oxymorons are strung together can be found in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo declares:

     "O heavy lightness! Serious vanity!

         Feather of lead, bright smoke,


            cold fire, sick health!"

Some paradoxical oxymorons become clichés:

• Irregular pattern

• Real utopias
• Bitter sweet
• Deafening silence
• Forward retreat
• Noisy silence
• Quiet riot
• Serious joke
• Sweet sorrow

Unjust Law
Tax Return
Airline Food
Alone Together
Taped Live
Peace Force
Anarchy Rules
Affordable Housing

French Resistance
Microsoft Works
Rap Music

From American politics:
The news reported that he had died of death by friendly fire.
Eight years of "Compasionate Conservatism"
Amazing " Open-minded Conservative"