Posts Tagged ‘news’
“Journalism is the first draft of history”*…
… and newsreels were the first available footage. Pathé News was a producer of newsreels and documentaries from 1910 to 1970 in the United Kingdom. Its founder, Charles Pathé, was a pioneer of moving pictures in the silent era.
The Pathé News archive is known today as “British Pathé,” and contains all of Pathé’s work, along with the archives of Reuters, Gaumont, Visnews and others…
Before television, people came to movie theatres to watch the news. British Pathé was at the forefront of cinematic journalism, blending information with entertainment to popular effect. Over the course of a century, it documented everything from major armed conflicts and seismic political crises to the curious hobbies and eccentric lives of ordinary people. If it happened, British Pathé filmed it….
… Spanning the years from 1896-1978, its collections include footage from around the globe of major events, famous faces, fashion trends, travel, science, and culture. It is an invaluable resource for broadcasters, documentary producers, museum curators, and researchers worldwide. The entire archive of 85,000 films is available to view for free on the British Pathé website while licences can be acquired for other uses.
British Pathé also represents content from partner organisations, such as Reuters’ historical collection, which includes more than 130,000 items dating from 1910 to the end of 1984…
The entire Pathé collection has been available on its website since 2002. Now the 85,000 Pathé News items are also available on YouTube.
Explore!
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As we rewind, we might recall that it was on this date in 1910 that the British ocean liner RMS Olympic was launched. The lead ship of the White Star Line‘s trio of Olympic-class liners, Olympic had a career spanning 24 years from 1911 to 1935, in contrast to her short-lived sister ships, Titanic and Britannic. This included service as a troopship during the First World War, which gained her the nickname “Old Reliable”, and during which she rammed and sank the U-boat U-103. She returned to civilian service after the war and served successfully as an ocean liner throughout the 1920s and into the first half of the 1930s, although increased competition, and the slump in trade during the Great Depression after 1930, made her operation increasingly unprofitable. Olympic was withdrawn from service and sold for scrap in 1935.
Olympic was the largest ocean liner in the world for two periods during 1910–13, interrupted only by the brief tenure of the slightly larger Titanic, which had the same dimensions but higher gross register tonnage, before the German SS Imperator went into service in June 1913.
Pathe has the footage…
“I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed”*…
With under three weeks to go until the election, Sarah Scire with a bracing report (via a new study from Pew): even as more and more TikTok users get news from the platform, the most-followed/viewed creators don’t follow the news…
Pop culture, viral dances, and comedy are big on TikTok. News and politics? Not so much.
A new report from the Pew Research Center finds that Americans on TikTok follow very few politicians, journalists, or traditional media outlets. In fact, the typical U.S. adult on TikTok follows zero accounts in those categories.
For the new analysis published Tuesday, the Pew Research Center used human coding and machine classification to look at a nationally representative group of 664 U.S. adults who use TikTok and the 227,946 unique accounts they follow. (Pew researchers have shared details on how they use OpenAI’s GPT model to tackle “rote” research tasks before.) Journalists, traditional media outlets, and politicians each accounted for less than half of 1% of the followed accounts.
And this is a problem, because…
Previous studies have shown that though TikTok users — especially those under 30 — are increasingly getting news from the platform, the vast majority (95%) say they use the platform because it’s entertaining…
…
… In 2022, Pew conducted a similar analysis of the accounts U.S. adults follow on Twitter. The most recent report highlights “one key difference in following behaviors” between TikTok today and Twitter two years ago:
“The accounts followed by the largest share of U.S. adults on Twitter contained a much higher proportion of media outlets or journalists, governmental or political figures, or policy/advocacy groups than is true on TikTok today,” the Pew report notes. “These accounts are nearly nonexistent among the most-followed accounts on TikTok at the time of our new study.”…
Eminently worth reading— and pondering– in full: “The typical American TikTok user doesn’t follow a single journalist or traditional media outlet,” @pewresearch via @SarahScire and @NiemanLab.
The full report is linked above, and here.
Apposite: “Americans are as skeptical of the media as they’ve ever been– none more so than the youngest generations“
Resonant (and dark): “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is– what’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis” (gift article)
(Image above, ironically, sourced here)
* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
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As we contemplate civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1907 that Guglielmo Marconi inititaed the first commercial trans-Atlantic radio service. Three years earlier, Marconi had introduced a service that transmitted nightly news summaries to subscribing ships.
“Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they’re growing”*…
As the press continues to treat this year’s all–too–consequential election as a horse race, your correspondent is re-visiting a topic touched a few weeks ago: the prevalence of polling data in election coverage. Rick Perlstein weighs in with a (fascinating) history of presidential election polling, then turns to it implications…
… That polls do not predict Presidential election outcomes any better now than they did a century ago is but one conclusion of this remarkable history. A second conclusion lurks more in the background—but I think it is the most important one to absorb.
For most of this century, the work was the subject of extraordinary ambivalence, even among pollsters. In 1948, George Gallup called presidential polling (as distinguished from issue polling, which has its own problems) “this Frankenstein.” In 1980, Elmo Roper admitted that “our polling techniques have gotten more and more sophisticated, yet we seem to be missing more and more elections.” All along, conventional journalists made a remarkably consistent case that they were empty calories that actively crowded out genuine civic engagement: “Instead of feeling the pulse of democracy,” as a 1949 critic put it, “Dr. Gallup listens to its baby talk.”
Critics rooted for polls to fail. Eric Sevareid, in 1964, recorded his “secret glee and relief when the polls go wrong,” which might restore “the mystery and suspense of human behavior eliminated by clinical dissection.” If they were always right, as James Reston picked up the plaint in 1970, “Who would vote?” Edward R. Murrow argued in 1952 that polling “contributed something to the dehumanization of society,” and was delighted, that year, when “the people surprised the pollsters … It restored to the individual, I suspect, some sense of his own sovereignty” over the “petty tyranny of those who assert that they can tell us what we think.”
Still and all, the practice grew like Topsy. There was an “extraordinary expansion” in polls for the 1980 election, including the first partnerships between polling and media organizations. The increase was accompanied by a measurable failure of quality, which gave birth to a new critique: news organizations “making their own news and flacking it as if it were an event over which they had no control.”
And so, after the 1980 debacle, high-minded observers began wondering whether presidential polls had “outlived their usefulness,” whether the priesthood would end up “defrocked.” In 1992, the popular columnist Mike Royko went further, proposing sabotage: Maybe if people just lied, pollsters would have to give up. In 2000, Alison Mitchell of The New York Times proposed a polling moratorium in the four weeks leading up to elections, noting the “numbing length … to which polling is consuming both politics and journalism.”
Instead, polling proliferated: a “relentless barrage,” the American Journalism Review complained, the media obsessing over each statistically insignificant blip. Then, something truly disturbing started happening: People stopped complaining.
A last gasp was 2008, when Arianna Huffington revived Royko’s call for sabotage, until, two years later, she acquired the aggregator Polling.com and renamed it HuffPost Pollster. “Polling, whether we like it or not,” the former skeptic proclaimed, “is a big part of how we communicate about politics.”
And so it is.
Even as the resources devoted to every other kind of journalism atrophied, poll-based political culture has overwhelmed us, crowding out all other ways of thinking about public life. Joshua Cohen tells the story of the time Silver, looking for a way to earn eyeballs between elections, considered making a model to predict congressional votes. But voters, he snidely remarked, “don’t care about bills being passed.”
Pollsters might not be able to tell us what we think about politics. But increasingly, they tell us how to think about politics—like them. Following polls has become our vision of what political participation is. Our therapy—headlines like the one on AlterNet last week, “Data Scientist Who Correctly Predicted 2020 Election Now Betting on ‘Landslide’ Harris Win.” Our political masochism: “Holy cow, did you hear about that Times poll.” “Don’t worry, I heard it’s an outlier …”
The Washington Post’s polling director once said, “There’s something addictive about polls and poll numbers.” He’s right. When we refer to “political junkies,” polls are pretty much the junk.
For some reason, I’ve been able to pretty much swear off the stuff, beyond mild indulgence. Maybe it’s my dime-store Buddhism. I try to stay in the present—and when it comes to the future, try to stick with things I can do. Maybe, I hereby offer myself as a role model?
As a “political expert,” friends, relatives, and even strangers are always asking me, “Who’s going to win?” I say I really have no idea. People are always a little shocked: Prediction has become what people think political expertise is for.
Afterward, the novelty of the response gets shrugged off, and we can talk. Beyond polling’s baby talk. About our common life together, about what we want to happen, and how we might make it so. But no predictions about whether this sort of thing might ever prevail. No predictions at all…
Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives?
Eminently worth reading in full. Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives? “The Polling Imperilment,” from @rickperlstein in @TheProspect.
Pair with: “The Problems with Polls.”
For more on why today’s polls are so flawed, see “A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.”
Apposite: from the estimable James Fallows: “Election Countdown, 38 Days to Go: What Is Wrong With Our Leading Paper?“
* J. B. Priestley
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As we pray for more consequential coverage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that the (then-venerable) Literary Digest mailed out return postcard to 2,000,000 Americans, asking them to return the card with an indication for whether they would be voting in the upcoming presidential election for incumbent, Franklin D. Roosevelt or challenger Alf Landon. They published the results of their anxiously-anticipated poll in their October 31 issue: a massive victory for Landon. In the event, of course, Roosevelt defeated Landon in an unprecedented landslide.
“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”*…
Julia Barton on a question that haunts us still…
After yet another day reading about audio industry layoffs and show cancellations, or listening to podcasts about layoffs and show cancellations, I sometimes wonder, “With all this great audio being given away for free, who did we think was supposed to pay for it all?”
I find some consolation in the fact that that question is more than a century old. In the spring of 1924, Radio Broadcast posed it in a contest called “Who is to Pay for Broadcasting and How?”The monthly trade magazine offered a prize of $500 (more than $9,000 in today’s dollars) for “a workable plan which shall take into account the problems in present radio broadcasting and propose a practical solution.”
The need for such a contest more than 100 years ago is revealing enough, but the reaction of the judges to the prize-winning plan turned out to be even more so — and it says a lot about why business models for audio production and broadcast remain a struggle.
Back in the mid-1920s, radio was just starting to catch on in America. For a couple of decades, the medium had been used mostly for logistics, to help ships communicate with each other and the shore. But after World War I, new technology allowed Americans to send and receive the sounds of music, lectures, and live events over “the ether.”
By all accounts, Americans — whiplashed by war, a flu pandemic, and massive social changes like Prohibition — went crazy to hear what the ether could deliver to the privacy of their homes. They started buying or building their own radio receivers at a pace that shocked observers. In his book This Fascinating Radio Business, Robert Landry recalls curious customers lining up behind velvet ropes to see and place orders for the latest receivers. “The size, cost, gloss and make of one’s radio was, with the family car and the family icebox, an index of social swank.”
Many stations at the time were run by department stores that wanted to demonstrate the miracle of the expensive radio sets they sold. One of the first broadcast radio stations in the country, WOR sat in the furniture department at Bamberger’s in Newark, and its first announcers were also the employees selling furniture. But as the consumer market started to be saturated, those early stations were either bleeding money or shutting down entirely. The equipment needed constant updating, the workers expected salaries, and the performers who’d once been persuaded to fill airtime “for exposure” now demanded payment.
To make things more complicated, the government required so-called “clear channel” stations (high-powered, with signals that reached far and wide) to be on the air live for 18 hours a day, forbidding the use of “mechanically reproduced” music (as in, phonograph records) to fill the time. All this made broadcasting a very expensive proposition by 1924.
I first read about the “Who Is To Pay” contest in the 1994 book Selling Radio by Susan Smulyan, who starts off noting that from the beginning, “no one knew how to make money from broadcasting.” What about advertising, the solution that seems most obvious in hindsight? The man in charge of regulating radio, then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, hated the idea.
“I don’t think there is anything the people would take more offense at than the attempt to sell goods over radio advertising,” Hoover declared, as part of a full-page spread in The New York Times on May 18, 1924, the same month that Radio Broadcast first announced its contest.
The Secretary had been speaking out against advertising for a few years by this point. Indirect advertising (or sponsorship, as it would soon be called) was acceptable in his mind — and via some math that’s hard to figure out, he guessed sponsorship could support about 150 stations nationwide.
Consumers in the 1920s were used to paying for telephone calls and telegrams, and there were other experiments to get listeners to pay for radio. One, dubbed “wired wireless,” licensed special devices to subscribers on Staten Island, who then got programs delivered via their power lines — a proto-version of cable TV that didn’t last long…
… Radio Broadcast received close to a thousand entries to its contest. They proposed everything from a 30-day fundraising drive to the sale of copyrighted radio programming bulletins. The winner, announced in the March 1925 issue, proposed a $2 federal tax on vacuum tubes, at the time the cutting-edge technology for radio reception. The prizewinner, HD Kellogg Jr. of Haverford, Pennsylvania, reasoned that vacuum tubes were the best index of high-quality gear — the better the gear, the more radio a household could consume. Kellogg also argued that only the federal government, which already regulated radio, could collect and administer such a tax. His idea was basically a less regressive version of the licensing fee the British government already levied U.K. households to fund the BBC.
Though the contest’s judges awarded Kellogg’s proposal their prize, they were ambivalent about, if not downright hostile to, his plan. One can only imagine young Kellogg’s feelings as he read the many dismissals of his idea in later issues of Radio Broadcast. “A Government tax would be obnoxious,” wrote Paul Klugh, executive chairman of the National Association of Broadcasters. “I do not believe your prize-winning plan is feasible under conditions as they exist in this country,” wrote Secretary Hoover.
America’s radio brain trust would go on to denounce almost any federal funds for broadcasting, fearing such a model could lead to censorship. Some of that aversion makes historical sense, given that Americans could still vividly remember the ugly and heavy-handed wartime censorship of Wilson-era U.S. postmaster Albert Sidney Burleson. As Adam Hochshild writes in his chilling history American Midnight, Burleson — until he left Washington with his boss Woodrow Wilson in 1921 — used his office to seize socialist and foreign-language publications, and revoke the postal privilege of other publications that reported on the war. So when broadcasting advocates in the 1920s talked about government “censorship,” the term was not abstract — it was a recent fact.
But rather than try to figure out a smarter way to fund public-minded, high-quality broadcasting, the men behind the Radio Broadcast contest decided the real winner should be: Nothing. “For the present, I think it is better to let things ride along as they are,” wrote columnist Zeh Brouck in May 1925.
Things did ride along, straight to direct advertising. Within a few years, huge swathes of the airwaves were the province of Lucky Strikes and Jergen’s Lotion, racial minstrelsy and unbelievable quackery…
… For many happy decades of the 20th century, advertising did make commercial broadcasters a ton of money. But as historians from Robert McChesney to Susan Douglas to Michele Hilmes have pointed out, the “American system” is uniquely unstable, and it leaves public-interest programming — or, at times, any programming at all — hard to sustain.
While researching this piece, I learned I’m not the first writer to notice an anniversary of Radio Broadcast’s contest. Back in 1995, Todd Lappin explored it in Wired. He marveled at how much the nascent Web was following the same chaotic business arc of radio. But he held out hope that things might turn out better. “Perhaps radio wasn’t the right technology. But the Web and the Net may well be,” Lappin wrote. “Our job is to make sure that glorious potential doesn’t get stuffed into yet another tired, old media box.”
In retrospect, that’s a depressing read. But there is something irresistible about the original contest, and the era when all ideas were still up for debate. We’ve had a century of letting things “ride along.” It seems like a good time to open the contest again…
An all-too-timely read: “In 1924, a magazine ran a contest: “Who is to pay for broadcasting and how?” A century later, we’re still asking the same question,” from @bartona104 in @NiemanLab.
* Digg commenter blue_beetle (Anthony Lewis)– now a meme.
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As we contemplate culture, we might recall that it was on this date in 2007 that two local television helicopters covering a police chase in Phoenix, Arizona collided in air. Pilot Craig Smith and photographer Rick Krolak from KNXV-TV, and pilot Scott Bowerbank and photographer Jim Cox from KTVK were killed; there were no reported casualties on the ground.
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.”*…
Further to a recent post on “seeing like a system” (and in a fashion, to last Monday’s post on misinformation), a provocative essay by Rohit Krishnan…
We’re living through a phase change that is at the root of a lot of our societal problems. It’s the fact that our information networks have become much more dense.
You exist as a node in a network. Other people are other nodes. They send you information, the edges. You process it, you create your own. Information flows in all directions.
There are all sorts of networks. If you imagine all of us as nodes and the information we receive from each other via edges, then the shape of the network defines the type of information that spreads.
When the type of information is extremely tantalising, one that spreads fast, then the whole network gets taken over with that information. And there’s even a tipping point at which the information breaks containment and spreads through the whole network. Here’s an excellent essay on the subject…
When there are a lot of neighbours to which a node is connected, then various types of information spreads much faster through the network. This is called network density, how many edges are connected on average to each node. And increased density means that there’s many more routes by which information can spread.
This is why cities have much higher rates of “cultural transmission” compared to rural areas. Or why in domains like fashion or ideas or innovation or language or even food, the speed of change and variety is much higher in cities. Because each new unit of culture can transmit from person to person so much faster when there are more people it can connect to.
Ok, this is basics about what a network is. But what happens when the entire world gets interconnected such that we’re all connected to each other much more densely? What would have changed in ourselves? Our culture?
Historically, you used to only have a few sources of news or information. Things that percolated through to your network or things you read in the news. Now information comes from all sides, hungry for your attention. And your “processing power” to make sense of this information hasn’t meaningfully changed.
Imagine seeing the world from this vantage point. A blinding array of data streaming at you, standing as a node. Some from near, some from afar. You take it all in, process it, and build up a sense of the world from it, including a sense of the other people and their beliefs reflecting back, from near and far.
If you do this, as a sentient being, you can’t help but develop a world model. A sense of the world, a sense of what others think of the world, perhaps even another layer or two. Even if you develop it only to help speed up the information processing that you need to do. It will be different in structure for each of you, of course, but part of a shared consensus reality nonetheless. A sense made up of all the information that came your way, including the sense you have of all the sense of information that came other people’s way, which helps them process the information flowing their way. Creating a collective sense of what’s going on, a knowledge of the shared reality in which we live.
We call this our culture…
Culture is the digital biosphere we create for ourselves. Culture is the infosphere we all swim in. If you think of the information that we all swap with each other as water, culture is the ocean made up of it, or a distilled version of the most common or communally known parts of that ocean.
Edward Hall, in his books Silent Language and Beyond Culture, writes about how culture is composed of the communication patterns, behaviours, and symbols that are shared amongst a group. We can think of culture as the common interconnected web that underlay the beliefs that we all hold, which constantly changes and evolves as our beliefs spread.
This is especially salient because part of the culture now is filled with efforts of many to escape it. This isn’t new, of course, and have existed since Thoreau. But there is an increase in it. People try tools for thought and software to recommend things or remember things, or AI to remember everything they read and interacted with, all so that there can be a way to deal with the information avalanche.
While this makes sense for an individual, the fact that this collectively defines the information ecosystem around us also means that the problem is on the supply side. This is why there is the rise of private spaces, especially since Twitter’s demise. Hence the theory that we live in the dark forest era of the internet:
Is our universe an empty forest or a dark one? If it’s a dark forest, then only Earth is foolish enough to ping the heavens and announce its presence. The rest of the universe already knows the real reason why the forest stays dark. It’s only a matter of time before the Earth learns as well.
This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.
In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.
The push to create private spaces, on discord or group chats, to truly express oneself or let mini-ecosystems flourish, they all are needed to make us stop sitting with our face deep inside the information superhighway. It’s to help make the networks you’re in a bit sparser.
And my thesis is that almost everything that we see that pushes against the cultural state we used to recognise, is as a result of this densification of our information networks. Whether it is group chats, private forums, discord, smartphones that are not that smart, yearning for the flip phones from Motorola, various tools for thought, AI software to help you focus, better note taking tools, the angst against media headlines, the disbelief in economic and political institutions, the underlying sense of malaise that seemingly everyone feels, the vibes.
And the way we’re interconnected changes the way we see and process information that comes our way, which changes the culture. The form of the network changes the way the network operates.
In the era of superfast many-to-many communication, the ideas that spread are the ones which can “take over” the entire spectrum. Small ideas grow, wither, die. It’s only the memetic megafauna that survive.
In a sparse network you might have pockets which retain their individuality and survive for longer. Like Galapagos syndrome for ideas. Both good and bad.
Letting your ecosystem interact with the external giant internet might mean it will die out or get outcompeted…
…
… The outcome of having a dense network is insidious but powerful. It means only the narratives which can go viral do go viral. The collective epistemic commons becomes filled with those narratives which outcompete the others and muscle their way to the top. It means that at a time of unprecedented low unemployment, high wages, high standard of living, GDP growth, high stock markets, strong dollar, people in the US still think they’re living in the worst of all possible times. An anti-Panglossian sentiment.
It means that everyone is convinced everyone else is having a bad time. We’re surrounded by vibes about everyone’s life getting worse, wars and famine and pestilence and injustice worldwide. We see gaffes and mistakes made by everyone laid bare instantly.
The denser network makes the impact of the message change. It molds itself to the medium.
At some level of interconnectivity, we all fall prey to the weaknesses of information deluge. Our attention is finite and so is our processing capacity for information. You can have the world do a denial of service attack on your cognition by overwhelming it with bits of information, so you’re stuck in place like a fly in amber. And it does this so easily that we haven’t even recognised when it happens let alone how to prevent it.
That too is why we have so many tools for thought, and ways to capture notes to search them afterwards, and tools for doing work about work, and endless lists and notes and contextual reminders and and and … It’s why we yearn for cultural islanding. It’s why there’s the never-ending “current thing”. We’re all left tilting at the windmill of being a node in a dense network…
Dense networks, dark forests: “Seeing Like a Network,” from @krishnanrohit.
(Image above: source)
* “Howard Beale” (Peter Finch), Network
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As we deal with density, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974, at 8:01a, that the bar code made its retail debut: the first OPC-coded item, a ten pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, was canned at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio by cashier Sharon Buchanan for customer Clyde Dawson.
Bar codes are now, of course, ubiquitous in retail, but are also widely used in healthcare, transport and logistics, mail, parcel, and baggage handling, and ticketing.
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