A Mistake Too Amusing To Let Stand

Imagine my glee when I encountered the first paragraph of a story in the dead-tree version of the New York Review of Books:

Tony Judt had a thing about railway trains.  We even know from his last book, a brilliant compilation of his ideas on history and politics, distilled just before his untimely death from a series of conversations with Timothy Snyder, that he had wanted to write a history of trains, entitled Locomotion.

I decided then and there to write a blog post, which is not what you are reading now because my plans changed when I sought out the on-line version of the same article and found this:

Tony Judt had a thing about railway trains. We even know from his last book, a brilliant compilation of his ideas on history and politics, distilled from a series of conversations with Timothy Snyder just before his untimely death, that he had wanted to write a history of trains, entitled Locomotion.

Okay, that’s a bit better, now we know that talking to Timothy Snyder was not fatal.  But who died?  The dead-tree draft at least made it clear that Tony Judt was dead.  The on-line version suggests that Timothy Snyder is the dead guy:

“…a series of conversations with Timothy Snyder just before his untimely death…”

The writer (Ian Buruma) seems unable to get out of his own way.  So, the snarky blog entry I had intended to write—about an apparently fatal conversation with Timothy Snyder—has expanded. 

The expanded scope includes:

• Data quality for narrative data.
• Clarity: A rule of thumb for amateur writers.
• Obviousness in examples—expect stupid rebuttals.
• The ethics of changing already-published material.

I’ll cover these topics in upcoming posts.  I’ll add the links to this post as they become available.  Stay tuned.

The Anatomy of Media Bias: Trayvon Martin, Mike Daisey, and the Press - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic

The “right proportions of the truth.”  Too bad “fair and balanced” has already been co-opted. 

The peculiar problem of the information age is that we now have access to far more true stories than any one brain -- evolved for life in groups of a few hundred -- can possibly process. Our natural tendency to extrapolate from the subset we're exposed to means we can wind up with wildly inaccurate views of the world as a whole, even when all the stories we hear are true. For people with a storytelling gift as powerful as Mike Daisey's, or a job that empowers them to choose which of a hundred newsworthy tales makes the evening broadcast, that implies a responsibility beyond the traditional obligation to speak the truth. What we need today are the right proportions of truth.

The Anatomy of Media Bias: Trayvon Martin, Mike Daisey, and the Press - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic

Enough to Make You Retch

Embarrassed by the gag-inducing realities of industrial meat production, the industry fights back by criminalizing investigative journalism. Information Irresponsibility, Legislative Division.

From The Atlantic:

Earlier this month, politicians in Iowa bowed to corporate pressure when they passed a law designed to stifle public debate and keep consumers in the dark. Instead of confronting animal cruelty on factory farms, the top egg- and pork-producing state is now in the business of covering it up. As one of the people this new law is designed to silence, I'm concerned that Iowa is shooting the messenger while letting the real criminals go unpunished.

HF 589 (PDF), better known as the "Ag Gag" law, criminalizes investigative journalists and animal protection advocates who take entry-level jobs at factory farms in order to document the rampant food safety and animal welfare abuses within. In recent years, these undercover videos have spurred changes in our food system by showing consumers the disturbing truth about where most of today's meat, eggs, and dairy is produced. Undercover investigations have directly led to America's largest meat recalls, as well as to the closure of several slaughterhouses that had egregiously cruel animal handling practices. Iowa's Ag Gag law -- along with similar bills pending in other states -- illustrates just how desperate these industries are to keep this information from getting out.

The Ag Gag Laws: Hiding Factory Farm Abuses From Public Scrutiny - Cody Carlson - Health - The Atlantic

Data Quality is King. The King Is Dead. Long Live The King.

Twitter can spread false information just as quickly as true.  An essay on the website of the American Journalism Review suggests that this is why Twitter cannot be said to “break news.”  For starters:

While they might not mean it literally, bloggers and news organizations that credit Twitter and other social networks with "reporting" or "breaking" news are implying a contest between social networks and the press, in which lumbering news organizations are smacked down by a faster and more agile rival. And what journalist with healthy competitive instincts wouldn't feel a bit goaded or threatened by that? The far less provocative truth is that the media are working through Twitter, not racing against it.

What’s more, it appears that the pattern of tweets about Whitney Houston’s death—and actual death in this case—supports that view:

While nearly an hour passed between the first known mention of Houston's death and the AP's report, Twitter's timeline clearly shows that the story flatlined until the AP tweet. It was that properly attributed post by a credible news organization with a broad following that broke through the noise.

The relatively few people who saw the initial Whitney Houston tweets had reason to be extremely skeptical. Social media death hoaxes have befallen countless very-much-alive public figures, including President Obama, Lady Gaga, Eddie Murphy, Jon Bon Jovi and Chuck Norris (who, as fans noted, is invincible and cannot be killed). "Twitter Death" has become a near-daily occurrence, prompting a great many users to respond with caution when they hear that Madonna, Jackie Chan or Snookie has gone to the great beyond.

In that context, it's tough to make the case that a handful of dubiously sourced Twitter posts by unknown individuals with relatively small followings broke the news of Houston's death in any meaningful way. Those early tweets were indistinguishable from other celebrity death rumors, except that they turned out to be true.

And information consumers might be learning something about the differences between electronically supported rumor-mongering and actual journalism:

Rather than marginalizing the news media, Twitter and other social networks may be reinforcing their value. A generation of social media users is learning―through debunked reports and hoaxes ―the difference between saying something and reporting it. The ways in which people first hear information may have changed, but their reliance on reporters to separate fact from fiction and provide depth and context to the news has not.

The Twitter Death Epidemic  | American Journalism Review

‘The Lifespan of a Fact,’ by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal - NYTimes.com

A good review of a weird take on information responsibility, reporting, and the potential for non-fiction to attain the exalted status of “art.”

This brings us to D’Agata’s other outrageous proposition — that one needn’t concern oneself with facts because rarely are facts reliable, and that belief alone should be considered as muscular as fact, even when the belief has been proved to be based on invention. As long as a story “is believed by somebody,” he writes, “I consider it a legitimate potential history.” Hogwash.

‘The Lifespan of a Fact,’ by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal - NYTimes.com

The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Another opportunity to recall that “A lie ca travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”

A couple of years ago, on a slow day at the office, I decided to experiment with editing one particularly misleading assertion chiseled into the Wikipedia article. The description of the trial stated, "The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing. ... "

Coincidentally, that is the claim that initially hooked me on the topic. In 2001 I was teaching a labor-history course, and our textbook contained nearly the same wording that appeared on Wikipedia. One of my students raised her hand: "If the trial went on for six weeks and no evidence was presented, what did they talk about all those days?" I've been working to answer her question ever since.

I have not resolved all the mysteries that surround the bombing, but I have dug deeply enough to be sure that the claim that the trial was bereft of evidence is flatly wrong. One hundred and eighteen witnesses were called to testify, many of them unindicted co-conspirators who detailed secret meetings where plans to attack police stations were mapped out, coded messages were placed in radical newspapers, and bombs were assembled in one of the defendants' rooms.

…

So I removed the line about there being "no evidence" and provided a full explanation in Wikipedia's behind-the-scenes editing log. Within minutes my changes were reversed. The explanation: "You must provide reliable sources for your assertions to make changes along these lines to the article."

That was curious, as I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress. I also noted one of my own peer-reviewed articles. One of the people who had assumed the role of keeper of this bit of history for Wikipedia quoted the Web site's "undue weight" policy, which states that "articles should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views." He then scolded me. "You should not delete information supported by the majority of sources to replace it with a minority view."

…

"Explain to me, then, how a 'minority' source with facts on its side would ever appear against a wrong 'majority' one?" I asked the Wiki-gatekeeper. He responded, "You're more than welcome to discuss reliable sources here, that's what the talk page is for. However, you might want to have a quick look at Wikipedia's civility policy."

I tried to edit the page again. Within 10 seconds I was informed that my citations to the primary documents were insufficient, as Wikipedia requires its contributors to rely on secondary sources, or, as my critic informed me, "published books." Another editor cheerfully tutored me in what this means: "Wikipedia is not 'truth,' Wikipedia is 'verifiability' of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that."

…

So I waited two years, until my book on the trial was published. "Now, at last, I have a proper Wikipedia leg to stand on," I thought as I opened the page and found at least a dozen statements that were factual errors, including some that contradicted their own cited sources. I found myself hesitant to write, eerily aware that the self-deputized protectors of the page were reading over my shoulder, itching to revert my edits and tutor me in Wiki-decorum. I made a small edit, testing the waters.

My improvement lasted five minutes before a Wiki-cop scolded me, "I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.' ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write."

The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Apple: App Access to Contact Data Will Require User Permission - John Paczkowski - Mobile - AllThingsD

Ah…

After a week of silence, Apple has finally responded to reports that dozens of iOS applications have been accessing, transmitting and storing user contact data without explicit permission. Path was the first to be flagged for this, and others, including Twitter, Yelp and Foursquare, have since tidied up the way they ask for address book data. Apple has faced growing criticism that it has given iOS developers far too much access to address book information without requiring a user prompt.

Today, the company agreed with that assessment, and said that soon, apps that use address book data will require explicit user permission to do so

Apple: App Access to Contact Data Will Require User Permission - John Paczkowski - Mobile - AllThingsD