Day: September 13, 2004

Glenn Reynolds has an excellent commentary on an issue that I was discussing earlier about errors on weblogs vs. errors in the mainstream media,

But all fun aside, I think there are some important lessons for Big Media — and for everyone else — in the rise of the blogosphere. They stem from the fact that bloggers operate on the Internet, where arguments from authority are difficult since nobody knows whether you’re a dog.

In short, it’s the difference between high-trust and low-trust environments.

The world of Big Media used to be a high-trust environment. You read something in the paper, or heard something from Dan Rather, and you figured it was probably true. You didn’t ask to hear all the background, because it wouldn’t fit in a newspaper story, much less in the highly truncated TV-news format anyway, and because you assumed that they had done the necessary legwork. (Had they? I’m not sure. It’s not clear whether standards have fallen since, or whether the curtain has simply been pulled open on the Mighty Oz. But they had names, and familiar faces, so you usually believed them even when you had your doubts.)

The Internet, on the other hand, is a low-trust environment. Ironically, that probably makes it more trustworthy.

That’s because, while arguments from authority are hard on the Internet, substantiating arguments is easy, thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks. And, where things aren’t linkable, you can post actual images. You can spell out your thinking, and you can back it up with lots of facts, which people then (thanks to Google, et al.) find it easy to check. And the links mean that you can do that without cluttering up your narrative too much, usually, something that’s impossible on TV and nearly so in a newspaper.

It’s interesting to note how Dan Rather and CBS have reacted to suggestions that they based a major story on fake documents, with National Geographic’s reaction to claims by some of its readers that one of its photographs from a July 2004 issue appeared to be staged.

On pages 78-9 (photograph above), the picture caption reads that hunters are carrying “tusks taken from an elephant found dead in the bush.” Soon after the article was published, several readers pointed out that there are faint but unmistakable numbers on the tusk on page 78—which we failed to notice before publishing the story. We now know that the tusks belong to the Tanzania Department of Wildlife. When we asked photographer Gilles Nicolet to explain, he admitted that he himself had supplied the tusks to the hunters after borrowing them from local wildlife authorities.

This was in direct contrast to what Nicolet had repeatedly assured us when we were preparing the story. As part of our rigorous internal system of checks and balances, we routinely obtain independent verification of the circumstances in which a photograph is made. In very few instances, we are unable to do so. This story was one of those cases, and we published it knowing that we were relying heavily on Nicolet’s accounts.

In light of his disturbing admission about the tusks, we immediately launched an investigation into the other photographs in the story and determined that the two on page 85—which the caption identifies as showing a successful hunter removing his spear from an elephant and then removing the tusks—were actually made several years earlier and are not of the Barabaig. (See photographs below.)

Source:

From the Editor: A Special Message. National Geographic, July 15, 2004.

Ugh. Just sent the following letter-to-the-editor after reading a horribly inaccurate report about the “assault” weapons ban in my local newspaper, the Kalamazo Gazette,

There were a number of problems with the September 13, 2004 front page story on the expiration of the “assault” weapons ban by Ted Roelofs.

1. Roelofs claimed, “It [the ban] also outlaws magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.” This is simply not true. The law banned the manufacture and sale of *new* magazines with a capacity of more than 10 rounds. It remained legal throughout the years the law was in place to buy larger magazines manufactured before the law went into effect. The upshot was that while large capacity magazines became more expensive, they were still readily and widely available.

2. Roelofs claimed that, “It [the expiration of the ban] does not apply to fully automatic weapons, which have been banned since 1986.” This is simply not true. The Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986 also banned the sale of *new* automatic weapons. It does not apply to fully automatic weapons manfuctured prior to the law’s passage.. Legally purchasing an automatic weapon certainly involves a bit more effort and costs than buying a semiautomatic, but it is not the case that automatic weapons are outright banned for private, civilian ownership. In fact, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, about half of the legally owned automatic weapons in the United States are owned by civilians.

3. Roelofs claimed, without providing a source, that assault weapons fell from 3.57 percent of all guns recovered at crimes to 1.22 percent from 1995 to 2002. Without knowing the source, this is a suspect claim since almost immediately after the “assault” weapons ban, gun manufacturers began making available the same guns banned by the law but with minor cosmetic changes, such as replacing pistol grips with thumbholes. If these sorts of guns were not included in that analysis, then it doesn’t really prove much about which types of guns criminals prefer.

I keep hearing that the mainstream media has a lot of professionals and layers of checks and balances as opposed to bloggers who just sit around in their pajamas, so why do I keep finding such obvious errors in MSM reporting?