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
.
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
.
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
:
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?
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