Monday, March 12, 2018

Information and the Press


The public dialog on news thus far seem to focus on the news media and its attempts at veracity. One should remember that the so-called news media have rarely been unbiased and open. I often recall that in my youth, the late 1940s, New York City had a multiplicity of daily newspapers. There was one for any political stance one took. There was the NY Times, the Post (a rather strongly leaning leftist paper), the News (a somewhat right leaning), the Tribune, the Telegraph, and many smaller and even narrowly focused papers. One could see individuals reading their news of choice on the subway, and thus political opinions were readily displayed in public if one understood the code.

The Chart

Let me begin with a comment on the Otero chart[1]. Like any generalization, one must first understand the generator of such a paradigm. Thus who is Otero and what is her "agenda", for all people have some agenda to promote. As the author notes:

I’m a practicing patent attorney in the Denver, Colorado area, and I have a B.A. in English from UCLA and a J.D. from the University of Denver. I’m not a journalist by training, and I don’t claim to be one. So why should you listen to me about the quality of news sources? You shouldn’t. In fact, you shouldn’t listen to anyone who tells you that you should think or believe a certain thing a certain way. But you’ve come to my site to find out what I have to say about the news anyway, so I’ll lay out a few reasons why you could choose to value my assessments. Consider them and then determine for yourself whether this information is valuable to you.

Before moving on to a detailed discussion of information, this Otero charts is worthy of some study. It in many ways attempts to be a paradigm that allows one to asses where certain sources of information lie.

First, the author presents a set of terms all of which lack any definition. One must bring their own inferences to bear on this table. For example one may ask what the difference is between analytical and complex. The issue of liberal versus conservative also begs the question of definition, especially as we can see this at extremes but not in a full spectrum. The author belies the training they allege, namely as a patent attorney, wherein one must have clear definitions just to begin. This table has none.

Second, in placing entities in this grid one must ask; by what criteria has the author made these placements? Apparently it is by the author's sole judgement and there is no factual basis presented, no metrics, no detailed analyses. If one were to accept this analysis then one should also expect if not demand a basis for the placements. For example, Croly's New Republic is left off this list. That to me would be a major fact, for Croly was in a sense one of the God parents of present day Progressive thought.

Third, one must ask why in reading any of these, if not all, can one gain information, can one sift through the desiderata presented and, as the author says, obtain something of value. Even if we grant that the chart has some value, we must ask if an individual's value maps isomorphically onto this paradigm.

Fourth, why should we delimit our access to the news, namely allegedly imminent information, based upon the opinion of anyone? The author admits that. If so, then why is this chart of any value?

Fifth, people are individuals, and the media presented in the chart tend to attempt to cluster people in groups. We all have biases, they are all too often the product of our environment and many may even be genetically based, yet the true source of bias is yet to be fully understood. However biases can be reinforced by "group think" or by the "echo chamber" effect.

Sixth, the author seems to delimit the media to mostly US based, with the exceptions of the Guardian, BBC, Economist. Anyone truly interested in obtaining information would include such voices as RT, Sputnik, Deutsche Welle, the Jerusalem Post, Le Monde, China Daily, and the list goes on. Information must be sifted and compared. In today's Internet environment an individual's news feed, that is the actual sources not some pre-filtered Facebook edition, should provide daily access to a multiplicity of sources. Each source will have its own bias and examining many will in a sense filter out or average out the extreme biases.

Definitions: Information and its Elements

Let me then return to Otero's last statement as noted previously above:

"whether this information is valuable to you"

This begs several questions. First what is information? Is it just a recantation of facts; for example the number of hogs in the US on June 1 2017. At noon precisely. Or is it the reporting of what people are saying, such as Government officials or un-named sources? Or is it the presentation of certain facts and an analysis of those facts. Such as the number of hogs by day at noon in Iowa for three years? This would be a trend and there may be consequences from the trend. Or is it the opinion of some person or persons? Information as we understand it is a complex issue. It is not just facts, it is an interpretation of those facts. It is also a ranking of facts and their interpretation in a way which may be of value to the public. That leads to the second issue; value. What is value? Knowing that a company is near bankruptcy may be of value if I know it before others and if I can act upon it. That they is financial value. Value may also accrue if I know that a certain politician has an incapacitating health problem which would delimit their abilities to act in the interest of the country, such as was the case of Wilson after his stroke, and perhaps as was the case of FDR after his fourth election victory.

Is information active and goal directed or is it just a passive compilation of non-valued facts? Information may be like some sports score, valuable only for personal enjoyment, or it may be like horse race results capable of being a basis for handicapping races and betting accordingly. Is the passive non goal directed information real information or just entertainment? Does information have to be of some goal directed nature?

News versus Information versus Opinion

As we noted, Information is the presentation of facts and an assessment of these facts to present a set of reasonable conclusions. In a sense, Information is akin to what an expert witness would do in a Court of Law. First the expert or reporter, would be identified and their bona fides made available. Anonymity would be denied. Then the expert or reporter would present a set of facts all of which would be verifiable. The facts then become a basis of the web which is woven to present the story the reporter presents. Unlike an Expert, however, who may use their ow professional opinion, a reporter has no right to an opinion when reporting on the facts. That is why in a classic newspaper the information is separated physically from the opinions. This classic separation has disappeared in all newspapers as of today.

News is a subset of information. The distinction is its immediacy. Information is not time sensitive. Historians are purveyors of information. Information which has a true sense of immediacy takes on the rubric of news and the reporter then is the assembler of this type of information we would call news.

Propaganda versus News

The classic work by Bernays on Propaganda was written in 1928, a decade after he and others were involved in the Government entities supporting Wilson's War efforts. Wilson used Propaganda as described by Bernays to promote and support his ideas and this was actually accomplished via a Government office.

As Bernays notes:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number…

Read the first sentence very carefully. He is not talking about the debate in the Federalist Papers, but outright manipulation. He is speaking from experience. He is also speaking as a prophet as to what will come in but a short time in Germany, and perhaps in today's world. The question is; who does the propagandizing and who decides what people must think?

Let me give another example. One could ask if Edward R Morrow was a propagandist for Roosevelt to get the US to enter the War with Britain. The basis for such a supposition has some merit but not enough to make it a certitude. Yet what Morrow did was in a sense propaganda. He met the Bernays results, using facts, news if you will. News during WW II was as much propaganda as anything else. Likewise the new during Vietnam turned on the Government and became counter-propaganda.

Quality: An Amalgam of Value and Trust

But information must be quality information. What do we mean by quality and especially quality information. We argue that quality is an amalgam of value and trust. Let me explain.

Silicon Valley has emerged as a source of profit for many of those who are affiliated with it. But what is it really worth? What value does Silicon Valley types and their products provide? This is the question as to what do we mean by value in our society. An adjunct of value is the concept of trust. I was introduced to this concept as a critical element in a stable society by the late Dave Staelin, a former teacher and colleague. I thought that value was a sine qua non, but Dave convinced me that trust was equally if not more so an element in what we see as a productive element in a stable society.

Now what do we mean by value, and in turn what do we mean by trust. Value means potentially many things to many people. There is the concept of personal values. Namely what does a person hold dear to them, what are their metrics of judgement of themselves and their surroundings. One may hold altruism as a value, humility as a value, cleanliness as a value. Then there is the construct of values of a society. Namely such things as the right of free speech and the right to practice a faith. Then there may be the value of one's individualism, the sanctity of individual rights. Then too is the value inherent in some artifact. An auto has value in that it takes us from one place to another quickly, reliably, and with less human exertion. We can assign a simple measure to that value by how much it costs us and what we get in return for that cost.

Our interest is in that latter definition, a concept of economic or societal value. Thus we may ask what value some new technology brings forth. Let us take a computer, a personal computer, as an example. We may ask; what value does it have to a person? to me? to society? Obviously it may allow me to type better, write faster, calculate more accurately. However, there may be externalities that reduce the value. It may allow me to do more, but then I no longer need a typist, thus I have increased its value to me and reduced it to them. Thus how does one ascertain value; to the person or to the group. If I were a Marxist I would be focusing on the value of the labor as a input to the building of the computer rather that what it does for the user of the computer.

Thus to simplify the analysis I will use value as what added benefit accrues to the individual who employs the entity which purportedly conveys the value. Thus the value of a personal computer, the value of Goggle search, the value of Uber, will all be judged in the context of the user first and then society second. It would seem to be easier to perform such a task.

Before continuing let me address the issue of trust, and its adjunct, quality. Something, an instrument of some type, has value to a person because the individual can use it the instrument to perform some task for which the instrument was designed and for which the representation one relied upon at the time of its acquisition would be correct. Namely it does what is was supposed to do. One relies upon a representation by a purveyor, not only that the instrument functions as it was supposed to but that if it does not there will be a remedy. The combination of value with trust, namely its concatenation, results in the concept of quality. Namely if one obtains something that adds value and one can trust its delivering value, trust, then one has a quality experience, and quality adheres to this overall process. Value adheres to the instrument and trust to the purveyor. Quality adheres to the concatenation of both.

Let me give a current example and counter example. Let us assume I purchase a product from Amazon, say a chain saw. I need the item to remove trees. Thus it must cut wood while providing reasonable safety. The instrument must start, function as specified, and not wear out in an untimely manner. It must also have a modicum of safety. Now if I were to purchase from Amazon and they represent that they sell it to me, then I have value and I have trust, namely if it does not work Amazon will remediate the purchase. On the other hand if Amazon just presents the product and a third party actually is the purveyor, I do not know then and there is no trust. The transaction has no quality. You see one needs both value and trust. This is the Staelin construct again. Let me give another example. This time Google. I am seeking information about some health related matter, say a physician who can care for a certain ailment. Does Google provide value? Yes, it may give me a list from which I could then address and seek what I am looking for. Do I trust Google? That is a good question. Trust in this case means if I ask for a physician expert in dealing with the specific ailment, then I assume that Google will present all the options, the alternatives. I assume or trust that Google will not filter out physicians whom they do not like, are not acceptable to Google. How do I know this? As with the Amazon case it is by experience. I am pragmatic, I rely upon experience, mine and others. This works until it does not work. Then pragmatically trust is lost, and near impossible to get back.

Thus, if Amazon fronts for a poor third party vendor and as a consumer I am scammed, then I am wary of everything on Amazon. I move to Walmart. If I find out Google refuses to, for example, list any physician who is a registered Republican, then I become wary of Google across the board. Trust is lost and a key part of the quality equation is vitiated. The instrument no longer has quality and thus I seek an alternative.

Let is leave trust aside for a moment and focus on value. Value has a philosophical as well as economic understanding. We somehow wish to address the amalgam of the two. We want to do this for the development of technological implements. Thus the instrument may be a new cancer immunotherapy, a new computer processor, a new water desalination technique, a new way to remove carbon dioxide from an exhaust, or a new app. What is the value we would ascribe? Economically we would project cash flows from an anticipated market. But there is also societal value as well. A new app may generate cash but would have minimal societal value. In fact it may be a value destroyer. Namely a person would defer a productive action while expending time on the useless app.

Thus we look at value as both economic and societal. Yet can we monetize this? Namely can we make a pari passu comparison? Let me defer that for a moment. The above simple example does show we have value creating, healthcare, and value destroying, apps, instruments. We also have value transferring instrument, which is fundamentally what bankers and VCs do. They take money from one source and reallocate it to another. Value transfer agents do not create value themselves. The seek those who do. Yet value transfer agents look at value solely as an economic return. Thus if they invest in a value destroying instrument, such as an app, they then also become a party to that action.

One way to determine the societal effects on value is the concept of externalities. Namely the effect that may be secondary or a result of the primary action. There is a well-established body of work on quantifying externalities. The problem often is, however, that externalities are unanticipated consequences.

The problem we see today is twofold. First, value is often measured solely in short term financial returns devoid on the unintended consequences of the externalities. Second, trust is oftentimes never a factor in the delivery of instruments. I again use the example of Amazon. As it seeks to continually expand, it does so outside the scope of its ability to maintain trust. Its use of third parties and its separation of control on these parties has led to loss of trust. Similarly, for an entity like Google, its burgeoning political bent, for better or worse, can irreparably taint it reputation as a trustworthy source of information. This of course is orders of magnitude for entities like Facebook and Twitter.

Thus when we seek quality, the amalgam of value and trust, we will have the conundrum of Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM). Pirsig says:

"The definition was: "Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined." The fact that this "definition" was actually a refusal to define did not draw comment. The students had no formal training that would have told them his statement was, in a formal sense, completely irrational. If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity. When I say, "Quality cannot be defined," I’m really saying formally, "I’m stupid about Quality.""

Pirsig goes on:

"He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques. He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an argument could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives authoritative reference."

"There’s an entire branch of philosophy concerned with the definition of Quality, known as esthetics. Its question, What is meant by beautiful?...he saw that when Quality is kept undefined by definition, the entire field called esthetics is wiped out—completely disenfranchised—kaput. By refusing to define Quality he had placed it entirely outside the analytic process. If you can’t define Quality, there’s no way you can subordinate it to any intellectual rule. The estheticians can have nothing more to say. Their whole field, definition of Quality, is gone."

Indeed esthetics, and aesthetics does read onto to what quality is, it is a perception, not a measurable quantity.

Thus, we should look at value as the amalgam, seek out trust, and then quality, as elusive as Pirsig notes, should be self-evident.

Thus when we return to the issue of information we want not just valuable information, but we demand quality information. Namely it has actionable value and it is predicated on trust.

Let me expand a bit on trust. Now when looking at a set of comments on the Internet, say such as a product review on Amazon, we look for ones whose reviewer states who they are and what bona fides they have. If we have some anonymous reviewer we have no way of ascertain whether we can trust this. Anonymous means they are hiding the most essential element of trust, namely that they stand behind their good name. Thus anonymous news reports are useless for we have no way of identifying their veracity.

News: Real or Fake?

The next issue is that of Fake News. Just what is Fake News? Let me refer to a recent article from the MIT Sloan School, in Science[2]. The authors note:

We define “fake news” to be fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent. Fake-news outlets, in turn, lack the news media's editorial norms and processes for ensuring the accuracy and credibility of information. Fake news overlaps with other information disorders, such as misinformation (false or misleading information) and disinformation (false information that is purposely spread to deceive people). Fake news has primarily drawn recent attention in a political context but it also has been documented in information promulgated about topics such as vaccination, nutrition, and stock values. It is particularly pernicious in that it is parasitic on standard news outlets, simultaneously benefiting from and undermining their credibility.

The authors continue:

Journalistic norms of objectivity and balance arose as a backlash among journalists against the widespread use of propaganda in World War I (particularly their own role in propagating it) and the rise of corporate public relations in the 1920s. Local and national oligopolies created by the dominant 20th century technologies of information distribution (print and broadcast) sustained these norms. The internet has lowered the cost of entry to new competitors—many of which have rejected those norms—and undermined the business models of traditional news sources that had enjoyed high levels of public trust and credibility. General trust in the mass media collapsed to historic lows in 2016, especially on the political right, with 51% of Democrats and 14% of Republicans expressing “a fair amount” or “a great deal” of trust in mass media as a news source.

Strangely as we noted in our discussion of Propaganda, it was Wilson and his attempt to get us into and totally committed to WW I that true American propaganda was developed. Also the Germans took up Bernays Propaganda and brought it to the fore in WW II. Thus when news become propaganda, for any cause, we have the potential for catastrophic results.

Now Fake News has always been with us. It always will be. It is the individuals duty to attempt to question the alleged facts. Juries do this all the time. They are presented with what at times is Fake Facts, and the jury must decide whether they have a basis or not. They are the trier of facts.

Regrettably the paper in Science presents no detail of the analysis performed. Namely it does not demonstrate how one determine what is Fake and what is Real. Fake News may actually build upon facts, then in drawing a conclusion, it uses terms like "could", "may" etc.


Russia and Disinformation

Let us examine the issue of Russia, disinformation and putative interference. First we should note that such actions have been multilateral for decades. During our own Revolution the English Crown managed certain presses and as such tried to influence the locals. It was in my view the efforts of Thomas Paine who established a well-accepted understanding of what a rebellion was essential. Russia has also been actively expressing its interests, as the Soviet Union, since 1918 when Ludwig Martens came to the US as a Soviet agent and seeking funds for the new Soviet Republics. It was in a920 when the US Senate actually had hearings and asked Hillquit for his reasons and objectives of his activities in the US.

In the Martens case the Congressional Record notes[3]:

Whereas one Ludwig C. A. K. Martens claims to be an ambassador to United States from the Russian Soviet Government; and Whereas, according to newspaper reports, he refuses to answer certain questions before the Lusk investigating committee in the city of New Tor , committee appointed to investigate propaganda against this Government is the ground that he is such ambassador and entitled to diplomatic privilege and

Whereas said Martens has headquarters in the city of New York and is alleged to be directing propaganda against this Government; and

Whereas, according to his testimony before said Lusk committee, he came to this country as a German citizen and is a member of the Communist Party pledged to overthrow capitalistic systems of government the world over;

Now it is critical to see that this hearing is a century ago. That even then Congress was concerned about Russian Propaganda.

Conclusion

Information is in the eye of the beholder. Unfortunately that may very well be the conclusion. Fake News is considered fake because we do or do not maintain a level of integrity in those who report it. Equally so, Fake News has a continued existence, and actual proliferation due to a panoply of reasons. For example, people may truly believe the news because they want to. Or, for example, people find it humorous or absurd and have a propensity to share that with others. Also the readers of Fake News may not have the intellectual resources to differentiate what they see as real or fake. This reason is a serious problem. If we have an electorate who cannot understand what is being said then we can have purveyors of falsity become rulers of the people. Education was a one-time excellent but over the last fifty years it has become politicized, spending excessive amounts on politically correct training and less if any time on critical thinking skills. Education should not tell people what to think but how to think. Nothing is necessarily what it appears to be and trust no one may be mantras of the truly educated.

Thus the paradigm with which this piece began, one of classifying various news outlets as regards to the information they present as news is truly vacuous. It has not only no merit but it fundamentally falsifies how information is contained. Information is attained through a dialectic, contrasting one view with another, while validating the facts. Perhaps one should look at Popper's approach of falsification. Namely that one should not accept some of these facts, one should continuously question and seek a means or method by which they can be falsified. In a competent Intelligence organization that is the key exercise. Facts as given must always be question, for an adversary who makes it too easy to obtain facts may be deliberately spreading false information. If an adversary seeks to perform a counter-intelligence operation effectively, they do so in such a manner as not to be identified and not to be falsified. That being the case how then should one deal with alleged Russian collusion, and in turn, the Press?

[3] US Senate Record, Committee on Foreign Relations, Russian Propaganda hearing 14 April 1920.

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