Friday, March 8, 2013

Journalism and Innocent Fraud - STOP Reading Any and All Ad-Supported News?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Jobs Fuel Stock Rally

? What are these people smoking? Most of the terms used don't adequately convey Situational Awareness, and Walter Shewhart specifically warned us, 80 years ago, that "Data without [full] context is meaningless."

No wonder most media expressed "surprise" over everything from Madoff to mortgage fraud to TARP to TBTP to Control Fraud. Most citizens are still in the dark!

Labor "FARCE" participation rate down.
Wholesale inventories growing.
Personal incomes bad & deteriorating.
Aggregate Demand is Degrading.

Yet most people are reading only the wrong sources, like the first headline above, about a "jobs rally?"  Why? Maybe because most journalists are reporting selectively useless data?

They only talk to yesterday's experts, who are ALWAYS wrong about tomorrow's change! What on earth happened to investigative journalism? For comparison, we place roadsigns to tell motorists what's coming ahead, not to affirm and reassure them about what they've already passed!

Granted, you can sell more soap with ads tagged to familiar news. That's exactly the trap.

Hence ad-driven & eyeball-driven & profit-driven source & story selection ALWAYS misinforms, precisely by increasingly lagging accelerating change. That's a BAD combination! Firewalls between journalists & advertisers are as essential as the extinct firewalls between commercial/investment banking were - or those that used to exist between services and risk ratings. Journalism as it is augments Future Shock by always directing attention back instead of forward to what's patently unfamiliar. If we could rely on always extinct credentials, we wouldn't need evolution!

How many journalists ever hear about Sampling Theory? It applies to Situational Awareness too, not that they'd know. To provide a useful service, adaptive change in journalism has to match or exceed situational change.

More than anything else, that means honestly and adequately RE-SAMPLING all available sources daily, to update Situational Awareness. It's treasonousally useless - and Innocent Fraud at best - to simply reaffirm overadaptation to situations that no longer exist.

To keep an electorate informed well enough to surf ongoing reality, everything about journalism has to change ... FASTER. The whole field is hurting our country more than helping, by only preaching to the choir instead of honestly informing about change that is emerging - or is even long past.


1 comment:

FMA said...

On the money. To help support your project, for everyone who uses Chrome and hates ads, download "adblock" as an extension. Its free, but if you like make a donation.