Media
What should the media learn from the coronavirus? – Vox.com
The coronavirus is “a nightmare scenario” for the media, wrote New York Times columnist Charlie Warzel. “It is stealthy, resilient and confounding to experts. It moves far faster than scientists can study it. What seems to be true today may be wrong tomorrow.”
Warzel is right. We’ve talked a lot in recent years about fake news. But combating information we know is false is a straightforward problem compared to covering a story where we don’t know what’s true, and where yesterday’s expert consensus becomes tomorrow’s derided falsehoods. In these cases, the normal tools of journalism begin to fail, and trust is easily lost.
There’s been a lot of criticism of what the media missed in the run-up to the coronavirus. Some of it has been unfair. But some of it demands attention, reflection, and change. There’s also a lot the media got right, and those successes need to be celebrated and learned from.
The questions raised in this interview are hard, and go to one of the trickiest issues in journalism: How does a profession that prides itself on reporting truth cover the world probabilistically? What do we do when we simply can’t know what’s true, and when some of what we think we know might become untrue?
Warzel covers the way technology, information, and media interact with and change each other. He’s one of the people I turn to first when I’m churning over these questions, which is … not infrequent. And so this episode of The Ezra Klein Show is a bit different than the normal fare: This is less an interview-with-an-expert, and more the kind of conversation that I — and others in the media — am having a lot of right now, and that I think we at least need to try and have in public.
Here’s a lightly edited transcript of part of our conversation, which we released this week on The Ezra Klein Show.
Ezra Klein
You wrote that “the coronavirus emerges in the middle of a golden age of media manipulation. It’s resilient and stealthy and confounding to experts. And it moves faster than scientists can study it: what seems true today can be wrong tomorrow.”
It’s the worst possible situation for the media because the way you might normally do your reporting begins to break down, and what you somehow need to be doing is probabilistic reporting. But we don’t really have good models for that, so it creates a trust crisis.
I think face masks are a good example because that’s somewhere where all kinds of media organizations were talking to the CDC and the US surgeon general and everybody said: Face masks are not that effective, they’re more trouble than they’re worth, we should save them for nurses and others. Then, midway through this crisis, they reversed that guidance to some degree. That’s a real problem for the media because we were trying to be accurate and what we were being told wasn’t accurate. Nobody wants to second guess the CDC on face masks, but that stuff does real damage in the long run to people’s faith in us.
Charlie Warzel
I think it’s true. A month ago, there’s the sort of unthinkable moment where the American health care system looks like it might possibly explode. And there was this real backlash against the media — and it was founded.
I did a lot of soul searching in that moment as someone who covers technology, media, politics. I’ve never been a science reporter or someone who’s covered infectious diseases. But should I have seen this coming in some way? Should I have been paying more attention to this global issue, or to global issues in general? Should I always be paying 10 percent more attention to what is happening in China? And, if so, how would that have informed the way that I would have thought about this crisis in January and early February — before it really became real to me as the biggest story in the world?
I think you’re right to focus on [face masks] because I don’t know what the answer is there. The type of reporting that anyone would do is to reach out to the government experts — to speak to the people who are in these positions of authority. If that system breaks down, I don’t know what we’re really supposed to do.
There’s no good answer here, but I think this idea of probabilistic reporting is somewhere along the lines. The thing I’ve noticed from a media perspective is that there is sort of a realm of certainty around the framing of a story where you’re saying, “You don’t need to worry.” It’s framed and couched in an overly assured tone.
I think that when it comes to reporting on science or infectious disease — or probably even politics — the media needs to move a little bit toward embracing uncertainty. People want answers but they also want to be leveled with right now. I think generally that’s how a sophisticated news consumption audience wants to be treated. Part of what we need to do is embrace some of that uncertainty and say, “here’s what we know; here’s what we don’t know.” We need to be a lot more vigilant about foregrounding what we don’t know.
Ezra Klein
In February, Dr. Anthony Fauci was still saying the risk from the coronavirus to the US was “minuscule.” We assumed that the people we were talking to really knew what was going on. Maybe we should have been more skeptical and said we just don’t know that much here. On the other hand, it’s really hard as a reporter to question what the five epidemiologists you just called are telling you.
Reporters deal all the time with stories that could become something huge — viruses that could become the next global pandemic or financial issues that could become the next financial crisis — and most of them don’t. You become somewhat used to talking things down because you don’t want to constantly seem like the news organization crying wolf. But if you’re used to talking things down, and everything has a 5 percent or 2 percent or 1 percent probability of becoming the worst thing ever, then eventually you’re going to roll snake eyes.
This is something I am really struggling with. I keep thinking about how do I cover things more probabilistically without somehow substituting expertise for things I don’t actually have expertise in.
Charlie Warzel
I think that this is going to be a moment in a lot of our lives that will change the way in which we think about risk and resiliency, especially in industries like ours where there is either a future casting element or an assessment of risk and severity that we’re constantly making. I think some of the problem here has to do with the fact that we haven’t had a pandemic like this in a lifetime of people. There aren’t a lot of people alive who went through 1918 to loudly ring an alarm bell.
If you’re somebody who is constantly assessing risk and resiliency and thinking about the interconnected ways in which our systems work globally and are reliant on each other, then you might have rung the alarm bell a little bit earlier. I actually think that’s a reason why a lot of people in Silicon Valley are some of the people who took it really seriously early. You had some venture capitalists in the valley who banned handshakes [in early February].
Those types of people are always assessing the probability of 1 or 2 percent and the type of returns you can get from that. That’s the tech investor strategy. But that’s not necessarily the way you would want the press to act.
I think a lot about the idea that we’re also competing within information ecosystems. You’re competing for attention and eyeballs, and it’s very difficult to turn probabilistic, incredibly hedged, nuanced ideas into something that can get in front of people. It’s always been in our nature, in the press to get important work out to people. And sometimes [to do that] you have to frame things in a way that couches some of the nuance.
That’s a long way of saying, I think that we should constantly be reckoning, as people of the press, with what we’re doing right and wrong.
You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Media
Georgia’s parliament votes to approve so-called ‘Russian law’ targeting media in first reading – CityNews Kitchener
TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — Georgia’s parliament has voted in the first reading to approve a proposed law that would require media and non-commercial organizations to register as being under foreign influence if they receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad.
Opponents say the proposal would obstruct Georgia’s long-sought prospects of joining the European Union. They denounce it as “the Russian law” because Moscow uses similar legislation to stigmatize independent news media and organizations seen as being at odds with the Kremlin.
“If it is adopted, it will bring Georgia in line with Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus and those countries where human rights are trampled. It will destroy Georgia’s European path,” said Giorgi Rukhadze, founder of the Georgian Strategic Analysis Center.
Although Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili would veto the law if it is passed by parliament in the third reading, the ruling party can override the veto by collecting 76 votes. Then the parliament speaker can sign it into law.
The bill is nearly identical to a proposal that the governing party was pressured to withdraw last year after large street protests. Police in the capital, Tbilisi, used tear gas Tuesday to break up a large demonstration outside the parliament.
The only change in wording from the previous draft law says non-commercial organizations and news media that receive 20% or more of their funding from overseas would have to register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” The previous draft law said “agents of foreign influence.”
Zaza Bibilashvili with the civil society group Chavchavadze Center called the vote on the law an “existential choice.”
He suggested it would create an Iron Curtain between Georgia and the EU, calling it a way to keep Georgia “in the Russian sphere of influence and away from Europe.”
The Associated Press
Media
Henry Winter’s surprise exit a sign of the fracturing evolution of the football media
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For more than three decades, English football media was a Winter wonderland. An eternal Winter. Winter extending an icy grip over the landscape. But even Winter, it seems, can end up being frozen out. Given the cold shoulder. It’s time to wrap up for Winter, now this particular Winter’s tale has reached its final chapter.
That, with apologies, was the opening paragraph to a column about Henry Winter’s dismissal by the Times, written in the style of Henry Winter for the Times. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible you haven’t the faintest idea what, or who, I’m talking about. Which to an oblique and probably self-defeating extent is actually the point.
Winter is the chief football writer of the Times, at least until he was suddenly made redundant last week. It was the dismissal heard around the world, if by “the world” you mean “the WhatsApp groups of newspaper sports journalists”. And in a low-key, navel-gazing sort of way, a move that actually tells us quite a lot about how, and through whom, we consume football these days.
Because over his 35 years at the Independent, the Telegraph and the Times, Winter probably became the closest thing football journalism has ever had to a celebrity. Players know him. Managers know him. He was ubiquitous, respected, pretty much untouchable. When the Times hired him they announced the signing with a lavish television advertising campaign. And though he rarely set out to ruffle feathers, when he pursued a cause – the Hillsborough survivors’ fight for justice, or his distaste at the cross on the recent England kit – his voice invariably lent that cause extra weight.
Winter and I were colleagues at the Telegraph for seven years, but our interactions were brief. Invariably he was out on the road: notching up hundreds of games a season, thousands of miles, match reports by the kilo, interviews by the ream, pre-season tours, under-21 tournaments, Friday night Championship games: every waking second of every waking day funnelled into this existence, a career that became a life, and vice versa.
On the writing side you might even describe him as a kind of personal inspiration: a reminder of the timeless virtues of simple, elegant prose. Extremely short sentences. Like these. No unnecessary adjectives, no undue nuance, no pun too excruciating. Barcelona v Chelsea is “the Catalans among the London pigeons”. Birmingham 0-7 Liverpool is “seven-up for Liverpool, grapes of wrath for Steve Bruce”. Mario Götze’s winning goal in the 2014 World Cup final becomes “Mario de Janeiro.” The fans are invariably “wonderful” or “magnificent”.
And what was this existence? Perhaps from a non-industry perspective, the most macabrely fascinating aspect of Winter’s career is the way it represents one of the media’s last concerted attempts to embody what you might term “the authentic voice of football”: authoritative, omniscient, unaffiliated, gospel. Ultra on the streets, Shakespeare on the sheets. And by extension the idea that this sport is a common space, a singular space. That when we watch football we are all essentially watching the same thing, together.
This is, in case you hadn’t noticed, an idea that has been in recession for quite some time, a process that largely mirrors the evolution of the football media as a whole. But for decades it was the way we all received the game: through the giants of television and radio, the doyens of Fleet Street, camel-coated men who offered not so much opinion but judgement. When Alan Hansen said something on Match of the Day, or Brian Woolnough opined in the Sun, it became truth by the very dint of being uttered, by the sheer absence of alternative or dissenting voices.
More latterly that role was assumed by Twitter, a website where – as a friend once memorably described it – journalists could pretend they were celebrities and celebrities could pretend they were journalists. Naturally Winter, with his million-plus followers, was at the vanguard of the migration, holding court in the digital town square, still road-testing those puns, still toasting those magnificent fans.
But, under the surface, the terrain has been fracturing for years: attention and influence draining away not just from traditional newspapers, but from everybody. Even television has lost its power to unite us: its live action now mostly paywalled, its pundits now invariably partisan, its content disposable. What once constituted our shared football space has splintered into a million galaxies: forums and fan media, podcasts and YouTube channels, blogs and specialist websites, Reddit and TikTok, the curated feeds that allow us to view a game through whatever filter we choose: tribal, social, banter, fantasy team.
The old world – a drowned world of traditional gatekeepers and newspaper dukes and lukewarm Gareth Southgate quotes embargoed until 10.30pm Friday – is gone. And perhaps the last people yet to notice are the dwindling few still inside it.
What might an “authentic voice of football” sound like in 2024? What kind of journalist could meaningfully speak to all the sport’s various silos? They would need to be an expert in men’s and women’s football, the game’s social and historical context, geopolitics and finance, transfers and tactics, analytics and sports science, banter and rage, all the major European leagues and quite a few others besides. And, of course, they would be conversant in all the dizzying new languages of visual media, across all conceivable formats and platforms. That person, in case you’re wondering, doesn’t actually exist. It’s all football. But increasingly, it’s too big for any one entity to conceive, let alone cover.
And for the avoidance of doubt, none of this is necessarily a bad thing. For all its inequities and inefficiencies, the landscape of football media is broader and richer place than it has ever been. You have Fabrizio Romano for transfers, Grace Robertson for tactics, Versus for football culture, Stadio podcast for the global game, Mark Goldbridge for performative rants about Erik ten Hag, the Guardian for chin-strokey think-pieces written by the guys picked last at PE. In a way, there has never been a better time to consume football. The garden is blooming. But for spring to begin – and yes, you know it’s coming – first winter has to end.
Media
Pakistan says it blocked social media platform X over ‘national security’ – Al Jazeera English
The platform remained inaccessible to users, but government officials refused to acknowledge any restrictions, until now.
Pakistan blocked access to social media platform X around the time of elections in February, the interior ministry said, citing national security concerns.
Users had reported problems using the platform, formerly known as Twitter, since mid-February, when jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party called for protests against a government official’s admission of vote manipulation.
At the time, both the government and the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the state regulatory body, refused to comment on the outages that were also widely reported by internet watchdog groups.
On Wednesday, the Ministry of Interior mentioned the shutdown in a written court submission.
“It is very pertinent to mention here that the failure of Twitter/X to adhere to the lawful directives of the government of Pakistan and address concerns regarding the misuse of its platform necessitated the imposition of a ban,” said the report, seen by the Reuters news agency, which confirmed the long-suspected shutdown.
“The decision to impose a ban on Twitter/X in Pakistan was made in the interest of upholding national security, maintaining public order, and preserving the integrity of our nation,” the ministry said, according to the report submitted to the Islamabad High Court in a challenge to the shutdown.
It additionally said the platform had been reluctant to resolve the issue.
Activists challenging the ban said it was designed to quash dissent after the February 8 general elections that were marred by widespread opposition claims of vote rigging and protests.
The authorities had shut down mobile services on the day of the elections, citing security concerns. NetBlocks, an internet monitor, also reported that users could not access X on February 10 while the country was awaiting the results.
The decision to temporarily block X was taken after considering confidential reports from Pakistan’s intelligence and security agencies, the report said.
It claimed that “hostile elements operating on Twitter/X have nefarious intentions to create an environment of chaos and instability, with the ultimate goal of destabilising the country and plunging it into some form of anarchy”.
The Sindh High Court on Wednesday ordered the government to restore the platform within one week, the AFP news agency reported, citing lawyer Moiz Jaaferi, who launched a separate challenge against the ban.
Access to X has been sporadic, occasionally available for short cycles based on the internet service provider, forcing users to use virtual private networks, said Alp Toker of NetBlocks.
Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) party is the most prolific user of social media platforms, particularly after the country’s traditional media began censoring news about the former cricket star and his party in the run-up to the polls. Khan has 20.6 million followers on X.
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