The dismal ABC debate raises many questions about journalistic ethics and the civic obligations of the media. One thing I want to explore is the use of quotes from "ordinary voters", in light of revelations that Nash McCabe - the woman used by ABC to ask whether Obama "believes in the flag" - has had past media exposure:
Presumably, a researcher for ABC or Gibson saw the piece in the Times, figured, hey, this lady hates Obama and is seriously ginned up about the lapel issue. Let's send a camera crew and film her slamming Obama to his face. It'll be great in the debate.
A TPM reader
adds:
In [certain other debates], citizens asked questions that weren't obvious or oriented toward sound bytes. They were the kinds of questions that would not, for whatever reason, be asked by these tv moderators. Moreover, these were their questions. In this case, the producers put the producers' question into the mouth of a voter, because it made the question seem more authentic, as if people care in large numbers about the flag pin question. That is, the woman was used to legitimize the traditional media's focus on these frankly trivial and, yes, distracting issues.
So it's not just bad that they sought out someone to ask the question, but that they did it in order to avoid asking the question themselves because, you know, it's sort of embarrassing. It's not about content; it's about TV content and TV optics. There's no way for Gibson to ask that without looking petty and stupid. So they used this woman.
Let's define
journalistic sockpuppetry as the practice of starting with a preconceived statement 'X' in mind, and purposefully searching for someone (anyone) to echo it, so that you can present your desired statement 'X' under the guise of neutrally reporting someone else's words.
I suspect that journalistic sockpuppetry is fairly common. Such gratuitous dishonesty also seems pretty clearly unethical. (Any counterarguments?) Journalists shouldn't use others merely as a mouthpiece. If you've stacked the deck in such a way as to ensure that your final quote matches some preconceived content, the quoted person is no more the
author of that content than my keyboard is the author of this post. They're merely a mechanism through which
you've expressed yourself, and it's deceitful to pretend otherwise.
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A common theme in analyses of the Internet is the transformation from a 'filter then publish' to a 'publish, then filter' world. The high costs of publishing previously forced the former model on us: anyone who wanted to see their work in print first had to win over the gatekeepers (editors of newspapers, journals, etc.). But now anyone and his dog can publish for free over the Internet. So the contemporary challenge is post-publication filtering, i.e. how to find the gems in the torrent of information out there.
One option is to turn to the old gatekeepers for guidance. Anyone can self-publish, but not everyone can publish in the pages of the NY Times or Nous. So we can keep ourselves in a world of informational scarcity if we limit our attention to particular locations which impose pre-publication filtering.
That's fine as far as it goes, but it is an extremely conservative response to the new information ecology. It makes us no worse off than before, at least. But it's worth raising the question: might we have an opportunity now to improve the way we do things? I've already mentioned open-access, which is of course a no-brainer. But that is just a minor tweak, still firmly within the old 'filter then publish' paradigm. To be clear: I think there is an important place for this, at least for the foreseeable future. But I wonder whether we could supplement this with some form of more widely distributed post-publication peer review.
I imagine, for example, the Philosophy Papers Online database could be expanded to allow registered philosophers to rate and/or review the papers found therein. (If measures are needed to 'guard the guardians', these reviews themselves could be subject to peer review -- Slashdot style -- and weighted accordingly. Other online communities have already solved the technical question of how to create a software infrastructure that supports peer production. All we have to do is implement it.)
This would make PhOnline a vastly more valuable resource, since users could browse the most highly rated papers, using these peer ratings as a guide to the most important new scholarship. (At present, users may search by author, title, or date, but there is no way to gauge quality.) This would only work if other philosophers put in the effort to review their colleagues' work. But we already do this for journals, so I don't see why we wouldn't also do this for each other. Depending on how it's set up (i.e. not anonymous review), there could be additional incentives to perform this service, as quality reviewers would benefit from reputational gains within the profession. It could even be technologically enforced, e.g. by requiring that users offer a few reviews before they are allowed to submit another paper of their own to the database.
(In that case, perhaps it would be best to start this project from scratch, rather than trying to build upon an already existing database of papers.)
John Holbo offers a variation on this sentiment (but restricted, I take it, to work that has already passed through the old channels of official credentialing -- I would want to expand this to "unpublished" drafts):
If overproduction is inevitable, which I grant, the primary question is not how to fund it but how to ameliorate the damage it does us. (Having gone overboard by describing excess scholarship as 'effluent' I should probably add: producing things no one wants to read is perfectly harmless so long as these undesired things do not collectively block the road.) The question is how to overproduce with intellectual dignity?
The answer, I think, is that a supplement is needed to a pre-publication peer review process that inevitably hyper-produces hypertrophic 'conformist excellence within the heuristic contraints ...' The supplement should be a hyper-efficient post-publication peer review process that tells you what you might actually want to read.
A simple normative principle. Every scholarly book published in the humanities should be widely read, discussed and reviewed - should have it's own lively blog comment box, not to put too fine a point on it. Because any scholarly book incapable of rousing a modest measure of sustained, considerate, intelligent chat from a few dozen souls who specialize in that area shouldn't have been published as a book - i.e. after several years labor and an average production cost of $25,000. Turning the point around: any book worth that time and expense, that fails to be widely read, discussed and reviewed - that is not given it's own blog comment box - has been dramatically failed by the academic culture in which it was so unfortunate as to be born. [...]
Why is this really quite low normative standard of healthy discussion not presently met? The technological barriers are non-existent, the financial barriers negligible. It's cultural dysfunction. Sheer institutional sclerosis.
The Real Circulation Problem - of which low book sales are a symptom - concerns ideas, not paper. The academic humanities have simply never grown hyper-efficient networks for post-publication peer review that are remotely adequate to the excessive volume of peer-reviewed scholarship generated, especially in just the last few decades. This is the real scholarly argument for moving aggressively online, although it is bolstered by many economic arguments. As I have written before, the beast has poor circulation. The only way to get the blood of ideas moving is to rub its sorry limbs vigorously with ... conversations. Intelligent, bloggy bookchat by scholars, to label this crucial ingredient as the essentially unpretentious thing it is. That isn't scholarship; but - in a world with too much scholarship - it may be an indispensable complement to scholarship.
Cf.
Tyler Cowen, for a more radical long-term projection:
I don't envision the free access system as the status quo but free. Papers would be ranked directly in terms of status and popularity rather than ranked through the journals they are published in. Ultimately there wouldn't be journals and this would make a big difference as journals are the current carrier of selective incentives and status rewards...
I'm not sure about this -- what about blind review? We'll presumably want to retain this somehow, if not by journals than via some similar formal means of competition. (Though others have suggested that googling spells the doom of blind review, in which case it's hard to imagine why journals would survive in the long term.) In any case, journals certainly aren't going anywhere in the short term. So I'm really proposing a supplementary system (not a replacement) that I think we'd all benefit from right away.
Update: I've shifted discussion of my specific proposal to a
new post.
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*sigh*. Not this old equivocation again:
Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution.
It seems to be the great new trope for ignorant reporters. Conflate descriptive inquiry into sociological norms with normative inquiry proper, and then marvel at how scientists are breaking new ground in contrast to those doddery old philosophers and theologians and whatnot. Please stop.
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Advertising makes us want stuff. What's the normative significance of this fact? The most obvious thought is to see it as a bad thing: marketing manipulates our preferences, effectively brainwashing us into wanting things that don't necessarily cohere with our most deeply-held values. On the other hand, it might be argued that advertising "creates value" by increasing the satisfaction we get from advertised products. (Cf. The Visible Hand -- apparently food tastes better if it comes in a McDonalds wrapper!)
Marketing aims to shape the cultural meaning of a brand. If someone wants to associate themselves with a particular lifestyle, buying an appropriately advertised label may be an easy way for them to send the desired signal. Advertised consumer goods thus serve people who want to brand themselves, perhaps to affirm their cultural identity or to gain status. Does this make advertising worthwhile after all? (I've always thought that marketers were scum... should I revise my opinion?)
This ties in with important debates over intellectual property and "trademark dilution". See Boing Boing:
It used to be that trademarks were intended to protect "consumers" (that's us) from being tricked into buying goods under false pretenses. If it said "Coca-Cola" on the can, there had better be Coke inside, and not Pepsi or Crazy-Bob's-Discount-House-of-Soda brand. When a competitor of Coke's shipped a bottle of stuff that was misleadingly packaged or labelled, Coke's authority to sue its competition derived from its need to protect us, not its bottom line. It didn't get to sue because it owned Coca-Cola, but because it was acting as a proxy for its customers, who were being decieved by con-artists who mislabelled their goods...
But as time went by, trademarks stopped being about us and started being the embodiment of brands (which, as Surowiecki points out, are on the wane and were probably never as important as we thought to begin with).
This meant that trademarks weren't just things that helped the public know what they were buying -- they are a kind of pseudo-property. Pseudo-property that could be defended on the basis that it "belongs" to a company, who need to be protected from having the value of their marks "diluted" or "tarnished."
So now you have Visa going after eVisa.com -- a company that helps you get travel visas -- and Air Canada going after shareholders who used the Air Canada logo on communications about problems with Air Canada management. Disney's one of the worst, of course, going after daycares that paint Mickey on the walls -- even though there's not an instant's danger that anyone will mistake a nonprofit daycare center for a Disney operation and be misled into patronizing it. Most recently, of course, some of Nintendo's lawyers got a wild hair up their ass because someone mentioned some game titles on a profile-page on a porn/community site and freaked out because the association might damage their brand.
All these new and exciting uses of trademarks -- shutting up critics, blocking new entrants into the market, and controlling the speech of private individuals -- are justified by the importance of brands.
If branding is just a way for companies to manipulate consumers and rip us off, then such heavy-handed legal "protection" is simply evil. But if brands create real (cultural) value for consumers, then there's some trade-off here, and so a real debate to be had.
Actually, even granting this value, I think the pro-marketing argument fails. It shows the value of imbued significance or cultural meaning -- but there's no reason to think that this meaning is best shaped by advertisers. A far more attractive alternative would be for such meanings to emerge from the distributed contributions of cultural citizens, as per my old post: '
Democratizing Culture'. We don't need advertisers to impose cultural meanings from On High. So, my
low opinion of them remains...
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Alonzo Fyfe suggests that "[committing] informal fallacies in public discourse is morally contemptible... a sign of intellectual recklessness."
Right now, people throw fallacies around with reckless abandon. Once upon a time, drunk driving was, for the most part, an accepted activity. This was until enough people got fed up with the harm done by those who engage in this activity that they decided to ‘raise the consciousness’ of society to those harms. I do think that we are long past due for a concentrated effort on the part of individuals to insist that people recognize the harms that result, and the moral problems associated with using, these fallacies.
He adds, "It should be considered a minimum standard of competence for any reporter that they can demonstrate capacity to recognize informal fallacies by name," but this seems excessively schoolmarmish. What we really want to promote is
the art of good reasoning -- something not readily reducible to such mechanical competencies. This presents us with something of a catch-22: it takes broad rational competency to diagnose incompetence, so when everyone is incompetent, nobody quite realizes it. (Hence the need to promote
philosophical education, to break the cycle of
bad reasoning!)
Those quibbles aside, I'm definitely sympathetic to Fyfe's complaint. Public discourse is often of quite poor quality, and this ought to be considered a
bad thing. Fallacies are just one symptom of this; the broader problem is a lack of
meta-political principles or commitment to deliberative democracy, understood as collective
inquiry into normative issues.
Metapolitical principles are
ethical principles, which identify the bounds of healthy political behaviour. Pundits who flout these principles are behaving unethically, and
should be recognized as such. Our democracy is a moral cesspool, polluted by those who show no concern for truth, reason, or intellectual honesty. It's about time we cleaned it up.
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[Part Three in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]
Creativity is a key value promoted by the new media environment. The enhanced capacity for both individual- and peer-production enables our transformation from passive consumers to engaged producers of social media. This is not to wholly replace polished, professional ("Hollywood") production, as Benkler notes (pp.55-6):
It does not mean that there is no continued role for the mass-produced and mass-marketed cultural products—be they Britney Spears or the broadcast news. It does, however, mean that many more “niche markets”—if markets, rather than conversations, are what they should be called—begin to play an ever-increasing role in the total mix of our cultural production system. The economics of production in a digital environment should lead us to expect an increase in the relative salience of nonmarket production models in the overall mix of our information production system, and it is efficient for this to happen—more information will be produced, and much of it will be available for its users at its marginal cost.
The point, again, is to supplement commercial mass-media products. Peer-produced niche products and information may prove valuable to diverse audiences, but – no less importantly – their production engages the creative capacities of their amateur producers, which – as every amateur hobbyist well knows – can be an extraordinarily empowering and meaningful human experience. As Benkler (pp.134-5) writes:
[Home-made film] Jedi Saga will not be a blockbuster. It is not likely to be watched by many people. Those who do watch it are not likely to enjoy it in the same way that they enjoyed any of Lucas’s films, but that is not its point. When someone like Cejas makes such a film, he is not displacing what Lucas does. He is changing what he himself does—from sitting in front of a screen that is painted by another to painting his own screen. Those who watch it will enjoy it in the same way that friends and family enjoy speaking to each other or singing together, rather than watching talking heads or listening to Talking Heads.
Social media creates communities, and empowers the participants. They become contributors to their culture, rather than passive “consumers” of an (often imported) mass-media. Such cultural engagement exemplifies the core ideals of democracy, whereby active citizens work together to build a society, sharing their individual and collective experiences.
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Oh dear. William Saletan of Slate magazine reports the latest neuroscientific breakthrough: to make judgments, people use their brains! Shocking, I know. But you won't believe the philosophical implications:
According to the neuroscientists, philosophers on both sides are wrong, because morality doesn't come from God or transcendent reason. It comes from the brain... The war of ideas is a war of neurons.
It seems a little
conflation goes a long way when you're a journalist.
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