[{"type":"vizyBlock","attrs":{"id":"vizy-block-ZQ8GkHzE9z","enabled":true,"collapsed":false,"values":{"type":"type-0jFlVakMTB","content":{"fields":{"sectionHeight":"h-auto","backgroundColour":"bg-white","textBuilder":{"sortOrder":["new2","new1"],"blocks":{"new2":{"type":"heading","enabled":"1","fields":{"headingText":"With so much sensationalist news out there competing with valid journalism for your attention – and often winning – being able to tell the exploitative from the illuminative is a valuable skill.","headingColour":"text-black","headingSize":"text-2xl"}},"new1":{"type":"text","enabled":"1","fields":{"text":"At the moment, the ideal of an informed public is suffering in something of a perfect news storm.\n\nThe interdependent weather fronts colliding are the 24-hour news cycle, Google’s diversity of sources, a global panic culture and political coverage that paints one side as uniformly outrageous and the other as cringingly ineffective: Abbott vs. Gillard, Newman vs. Palaszczuk, Romney vs. Obama.\n\nNews companies have found their new news audiences are always switched on, always hungry and, through Google, able to choose facts to suit their preceding opinions.\n\nSo used to being shocked, so prepared for it, the audience is anxiously tensed to leap on the tawdry or gory or disastrous.\n\nHeadlines such as “Australia actually unpopular destination for refugees” don’t sell.*\n\nPeople crave certainty in uncertain times. And there’s profit in that. At its worst, that led to the goings-on at News in the UK, but in its garden-variety form it has led news devolving from knowledge, analysis and consideration to information, opinion and soundbites.\n\nOr, more often in the case of financial and business news, an addiction to data (which sits one rung of below information, and two below knowledge) and whichever statistic is most alarming at that hour.\n\nBut now, a caveat before we unload on journalism: largely speaking, journalists do their best and care passionately about doing what they do and about doing it well and accurately. But, as every business knows, where there is passion there is overwork. And news is business.\n\nThus, these days reading news is, more than ever, about reading between the lines.\n\n##### **Here’s how:**\n\n###### **Experts and gurus**\n\nIn general there are three ways journalists establish the veracity of their stories they appeal to your mind, your heart or your respect for someone’s reputation.\n\nIt’s roughly the same idea as academic referencing in research, but it is perverted by placing the angle before the evidence. A quick way to clock a true expert is to research their credentials.\n\nLook for markers of success and that they practice what they preach. Would you go to a financial planner who was broke? If a story really gets you thinking, it worth doing some digging into who is quoted.\n\n###### **Bleeds it leads**\n\nOne of the oldest sayings in journalism is ‘if it bleeds it leads’: essentially, bad news sells. These days news services are struggling to find a business model that works when so much content is free online.\n\nMany simply try to drive maximum traffic through their sites. Shock tactics and so-called beat-ups are one way of grabbing attention.\n\nMost of the time, bad news is not nearly so bad. For example, remember the hullabaloo that preceded the activation of the Large Hadron Collider?\n\n###### **Chinese whispers**\n\nDo you hear what was said or what you want to hear? There is no way to avoid it, communication misfires almost constantly.\n\nA speaker can think one thing but accidentally say another, the listener can misunderstand what they say, the note taker can make a mistake, the tape recorder can pick up the sound of papers rustling at a crucial time. And that’s just communication across one link of the chain from brain-to-mouth, mouth-to-ear, ear-to-brain, brain-to-hand, pen-to-paper. Multiply these each time the information passes to the next actor in the sequence – including journalist, editor, proof reader, sub-editor and printer – and it is a wonder anything is even largely accurate.\n\n###### **Damn statistics**\n\n‘Lies, damn lies and statistics’ is true!\n\nStats are compressions of mathematical data into pieces of information. Compression always loses something. And there are big loopholes through which data can be pushed to get the result you like.\n\nFor example, if a study on income has a sample of 1000 people of whom 999 earn $1 a year and one Clive Rinehart who earns $1 billion a year, then the average wage – mathematically speaking – is just over $1 million. Prosperity for all!\n\nStats, facts and figures have their place. Generally, that place is not the centre.\n\n###### **Agenda and bias**\n\nBack in the Obama-McCain race there was 25 seconds that beautifully demonstrated media bias. You can watch it here.\n\nIf you don’t want to watch, this is what happens: the reporter asks a group of diners if they are going to vote for McCain – no one puts their hand up (one couple fights about it); then he asks who is going to vote for Obama – everyone puts their hand up. Then he turns to the camera and says, “See, it’s split.”\n\nAustralian mainstream media doesn’t seem embrace such gasp-inducing chutzpah, but there are definite leans to many of our outlets. Keep an eye out for them.\n\n###### **Simple and simplistic**\n\nEdward De Bono – regardless of what you think of him – wrote something useful about the difference between simple and simplistic.\n\n“If you do not seek to understand a situation or process, your efforts will be ‘simplistic’ rather than simple. Simplicity before understanding is worthless.”\n\nTime poor generalist journalists often never get a true and deep understanding what they are writing about. (Dedicated subject-matter journos, such as Laurie Oakes, absolutely understand what they are talking about). The average newshound just has to get the story down on paper, compressed by time, and move to the next thing.\n\nThey simply lack the time – and very often the inclination – to pore over details. Confronted with 4000 words of research for a 500-word space they prune things off. Often that simplification ends up simplistic and vital, subtle accuracies are accidentally lost.\n\n###### **Questioning headlines?**\n\nMy last point is taken verbatim from journalist Andrew Marr and his book My Trade because it can’t really be said any better.\n\n“If the headline asks a question, try answering ‘no’. “Is This the True Face of Britain’s Young?” (Sensible reader: No.) “Have We Found the Cure for AIDS?” (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) “Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace?” (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold.\n\n“It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic.”\n\n##### **What it all means**\n\nJournalism is a tricky trade. The tricks cut both ways: you can foist them upon the audience or you can be caught out by them.\n\nAs long as attention spans continue to shorten – or as long as pandering to short attention spans makes more money – news is only going to get ‘trickier’ – in both senses of the word.\n\n*According to 2011 research form the UN, Australia ranks as the 46th most popular destination for asylum seekers.","textSize":"text-xl","textColour":"text-black"}}}},"buttons":"","sectionTitle":""}}}}}]