I was born curious, trained as a scientist, and worked a lot in quality control.  If something is important to me, I usually like to find out what is actually going on, rather than relying on hearsay or gossip, or even “expert opinion”.  Lots of people are smart at work, but many do not take their professional wisdom home from work.  What I mean is … a lot of people do their best thinking at work, and rely on expert advice, or whatever their friends are saying, to decide how to live their lives outside of work.

It doesn’t really matter why.  Most people believe what they see on TV.  Everyone knew you could lie on the radio, but people believe TV, because they think “seeing is believing” and ”a picture is worth a 1,000 words”.  From that perspective, the internet is no different from TV.  Whatever you see in a video must be true.

Everyone knows it is possible for clever people to edit video and manipulate images, but they also know it is costly and takes time.  While journalistic standards have slipped a long, long way, most content publishers still believe that manipulating images is cheating.  So, people figure most images are not doctored, and may also believe what is being said about the images.

Here is what people don’t understand.  In the USA alone, there are 300,000 million people doing about 1,000 things a day (at 1 event per min).  That adds up to 300 billion events per day.  Even if you spend too much time watching TV or the internet, you probably don’t see more than 100 events in a day.  So, you are watching 1 out of every 3 billion things that happened yesterday or 0.00000003% of what is going on.

Somebody out there is selecting what you get to see.

When I worked in quality control in a factory, we were fussy about how many samples to collect, who was collecting them, and how they went about it.  People who worked in production wanted a good result, so they would try to collect “best case” samples.  Certain inspectors, wanting to catch a mistake, would look for the “worst case” samples.  As a manager, I wanted samples that would be “representative” of actual production. There were some difficulties, but it was much easier to do this in a factory than it is in real life.

When I was in quality control, if you told me we were going to send people out who we knew were on a mission to find the “worst case” who would collect samples of 0.00000003% of everything that was going on; then, we would put their samples on TV and tell everyone they were seeing “the truth”, I would have said you were completely nuts.

That is, more-or-less, what is going on when we watch the news.

You might well wonder where I am going with this.  Am I going to claim Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite was doing it better?  Am I going to suggest how scientists would collect and report the news?  Or am I going to just say that things are hopeless.  Well, none of the above.

In my view, the most obvious conclusion, based on the data I have reported, would be that watching the news is a really poor way to find out what is going on in the world.

I actual made my own personal decision on watching the news in 1968, while Walter Cronkite was alive and kicking.  I quit watching the news when I noticed the reports from the Vietnam War changed suddenly and dramatically even as the actual events and facts seemed to be pretty much unchanged.  Later, as I learned later from reading some books, the news media turned suddenly negative at a time when events of the war were actually taking a positive turn.  Nobody turned more suddenly on that war than Walter Cronkite himself.

This is not a story about the Vietnam War, or whether it was good or bad.  I had never thought it was particularly good.  It is a story of how I learned that the news reporting was a product of the pre-conceived narrative of reporters, rather than an objective product of what was actually happening.

In 1968, I was training to be a scientist.  So, I figured I would keep watching a little to see if future data would support my initial conclusion.  The next thing I tried was to compare news reports about things I knew something about with knowledge that I could collect independently of the news.  Here, the results were even worse.

I started working in an oil company, then a pharmaceutical company.  As I started to learn a little about the oil business, I began to notice that almost every bit of news reported about the oil business was from the same narrow perspective, again and again, while many details reported were contradicted by things I had learned first-hand.  The drug world was similar.  The news media had a particular slant on the drug industry that shaped their stories, regardless of what actually happened with drugs.

So, I lied when I said I quit watching TV news in 1968.  What I really mean is that, in 1968, I quit believing the news.

After I had completed my education, and then worked in quality control, I started to figure out why my not believing the news made complete and total sense.  What I had seen in 1968 would continue to happen as long as the news continued to be collected and reported according the same goofy methods.

Up to now, I have not commented on the popular observation that news reported by the media in 2020 seems much more inaccurate than in 1968.   I guess my response to that would be that sampling errors of exactly the same type are being made, but with a much larger magnitude of error.  This is speculation, but I would suggest that the news in 1968 was largely controlled by a few establishment people whose narrative was one of a stable world that made sense most of the time.  They happened to change their minds suddenly about the Vietnam War, or I wouldn’t have noticed that the news was driven by their narrative rather than the truth.  Now, I would guess, there is no establishment.  The news is just completely out of control.

Obviously, I am not the first one saying the news is out of control.  It is obvious, damned obvious.  Here is what I think is not so obvious.  People need to begin to understand that watching TV and internet news is a really poor way to find out what is actually going on.  It was a dumb idea in 1968, and it is still a dumb idea in 2020.

The idea that you should watch a series of images and videos selected and narrated by people with no understanding of statistical sampling and no incentive to provide accuracy is preposterous on the face of it.

Up to now, I have not commented on what “the news” consists of or should consist of.  I know that news experts will look at an event and say “that’s news” or “that’s not news”.  Lately, we have kind of noticed that the New York Times experts believe left-wing corruption is “not news” while right-wing corruption is “big news”.  Probably, most people see this for what it is.  What is news is determined by the narrative of the people who collect write, and report the news, period.

As we all know, the news media is part of an entertainment industry, and the first requirement of entertainment is getting people to watch.  The people who run the news media are supposedly people who can predict what the folks at home would want to watch.  Obviously, in the entertainment industry, if nobody watches a thing, it ceases to exist.

The final question seems obvious:  Why is anybody watching?  Because, we were all taught in school that we should watch the news to learn what is going on in the world.  Now is the time for all good people to update their education and to firmly and irrevocably reject the proposition that this is a good way to understand what is going on in the world.  Now, I want you to get up, walk to your TV or computer.  Turn it off, and read a book.    

Categories: Commentary, Truth/Science

Tags: copyright © CR Manning 2020