Notes

 Almost everything we know about the world, we learn from other people.  It follows that our ability to understand the world depends on our ability to understand people.

What we can observe directly is the behavior of the people who control the information.

The technocrats are acting like they've got something to hide.  They are showing with their own actions that there's something there.

I don't have a lot of specialized expertise.  I look at what I can observe directly.  What I can observe directly is the people in power and their actions; what I can observe directly is the media and their actions.

We make practical and moral decisions primarily, and most reliably, on the basis of first-hand knowledge.  The function of propaganda is to supplant what we know from direct observation.

Human beings are competitive, like all living things.  Unlike other creatures, we have the ability to follow a moral code, and we are competitive even in that.  Virtue envy - the resentment of another person's moral standing - is as old as Cain and Abel.  Even when we stand to gain nothing by it, it is easier to take the other guy down than to build ourselves up.

There's a deliberate strategy to decouple moral reasoning from the objective, observable consequences of your actions. Global warming, pandemic masks. It's so that your sense of guilt can be properly manipulated.

Performative virtue:  disconnection of perceived "virtue" from any tangible results in the real world.

If I convince myself that most people are ignorant bigots, then I get to feel "special" just by not being a bigot.  If I believe the other guy is a nazi, then I only have to be 1 percent better than a nazi to be the good guy.

The Covid scare campaign appeals to a certain strain of vanity: the conviction that "I am among the selfless few, bearing the burden for an ungrateful and ignorant humanity".  

What "climate change" and the covid scare campaign have in common is that they are designed to focus your moral decision-making on things that you cannot directly observe - global temperatures or infection rates - so that you must outsource your moral decision-making to the Authorities.  This is the same top-down model of the communist command economy, applied to our social, moral, and cognitive universe.

The goal of the technocrats is to get you to subordinate your local, mundane knowledge - things you can observe directly - to the "information" you are fed by authorities.

How do we know what we know?

Why do we believe what we believe? How do we decide what is true, and what is important?

· internal consistency (details of the narrative agree with each other)
· external consistency (details of the narrative agree with information previously verified)
· insider details (information available only to an authentic source)
· dialog and dissent (narrative welcomes questions and challenges; fosters better understanding among divergent opinions)
· awareness of objections (narrative recognizes legitimate counter-arguments and seeks to refute them)
· nuance (recognition that a proposition may hold true in general and still admit of exceptions)
· the human voice (an intangible quality that may include a distinctive personality, awareness of ambivalence, self-analysis and self-criticism)

The internet is anarchical, and therefore makes great demands on the individual user in terms of critical thinking skills. How do we know to trust a site? We compare information from multiple sources, listen to different analyses, learn to weed out irrelevant input and compare the picture with what we know from our own previous experience.

With the traditional media, this is all delegated to the editor, publisher, producer, or university. Often we have to do this, because the material is specialized or technical in nature, or because individual contributors don't have the credibility to reliably provide the information we need.

*

Originally posted 2004.

The "decent people".

They are a class of people who believed they could discern a "decent" person by the individual's decorum and speech. Their whole world-view is based on this shallow, superficial, and trivial understanding of human nature. In reality, decent and honorable people may be plain-spoken and even at times crude. But the manners brigade will die before they'll admit they were wrong about that.

Gender and category errors.

The anti-trans social conservatives understand correctly that gender has both an external component (our reproductive organs) and an internal component (our psychological makeup), which are aligned or matched-up in a certain way in most people. What they are unable or unwilling to see is that exceptional cases may exist where the matching is different from most people. (Were this not the case, it would be the only phenomenon in all of nature that hasn't got a single exception or deviation.) They imagine that transgender people are "trying to destroy society".

Anti-trans feminists (or TERFs) make the opposite error, and deny any natural correlation between reproductive sex and innate gender identity. For them, all gender identity is "socially constructed" and the product of patriarchal stereotypes. From there, it is a short step to declaring all generalizations about men and women inherently oppressive and evil.

Of the two errors, the latter is more useful to socialists and radical leftists (who really ARE trying to destroy society) because it attacks the process of organizing our experience on the most fundamental level - it attacks reasoning itself. A botany book contains idealized diagrams of flowers, and an anatomy book contains idealized diagrams of people; no one imagines that these diagrams represent every case, or even exactly represent a single example, but they are useful tools for learning the overall properties of the thing under consideration.

It is not so difficult to say, "This is the general case, but execptions also exist. Each case is unique, and yet certain things are true of the overall population." And yet this is exactly what political correctness aims to do, with the intended and demonstrated result that the whole educational process grinds to a halt. And this is precisely what we've seen in ecucation for the past 50 years or more.

Fake news master Christopher Blair tells all.

Boston Globe: Fake news creator did it for our own good.

Blair says he was raised a Massachusetts Democrat. When the economy crashed in 2008, he lost work and struggled to support his family. He blamed it on President George W. Bush. Social media and online forums became welcome places to vent his anger. Busta Troll was born after the election of Barack Obama, and was triggered, Blair says, by the rise of the Tea Party movement that arose in opposition. Online, he found himself aligning with a small offshoot of people who live to goad and prank and maybe silence extreme conservatives.

In 2014, Blair, as Busta Troll, pulled off a prank that won him wide admiration in that community. The United States had just traded five Taliban prisoners for Bowe Bergdahl, an Army soldier captured in Afghanistan after deserting his post. The prisoner swap ignited anger in far-right groups, and a Facebook page dedicated to the issue quickly became a “dumping ground for bilious accusations against Bergdahl and anti-Obama chatter,” according to the Los Angeles Times, which wrote about it at the time. ...

Related: Fake news creator Jestin Coler (NPR, November 2016).

Check the facts - and we will tell you how!

That's one way to approach fact-checking.  My approach is a little different.

Why did this ostensibly neutral, public-spirited presentation use specifically the example of Muslims and Christmas trees?  Why is Google presented as the single solution to the fact-checking problem?

To be sure, questionable stories about Islam, as with any other topic, should be fact-checked, and false information about Islam (as with any other topic) can do great damage.  Google is one of many tools available for this purpose.

We can all agree on the importance of getting your facts straight, but there is a lot more to it than this video would suggest - and I suspect that the presentation has an agenda of its own.

Source analysis toolbox.

Ever since I started blogging, I've been interested not only in current events, but also in the meta-questions of "How do we know what we know?" In 2005, I posted "How can you determine a source's biases?" in an attempt to list some of the mental processes and checklists I go through to try to decide what to believe and what not to believe. The more recent phenomenon of fake news (in the sense of overtly false and spurious hoax news sites) gave fresh urgency to the problem, as I posted at my LiveJournal. Related posts are collected under my epistemology tag. This post is the latest update to my checklist.

Look in the mirror.
This is really the most important thing when analyzing a source for credibility or bias: knowing your own beliefs and your own possible biases. It's always tempting to accept something uncritically because it fits what we think we already know.

Premises / logic / values.
Know what you differ on: what you believe is a fact, or what consequences follow from it, or whether something is good or bad.

Confirmation bias.
This is our natural tendency to believe things that fit our world-view. I find it helpful to divide between "things I think I know" and "things I know I know". Only verified factual information - things I KNOW that I know - is useful for evaluating the truth or falsity of a new claim.

Narrative.
What kind of overall picture, or "narrative", is the source trying to present?

Baseline.
Before you can determine whether an event is significant or unusual (for example, a crime wave), you need to know what the normal state of affairs is (for example, the average crime rate).

Question sensational reports.
There's a military saying that "nothing is as good or as bad as first reported". Sensational reports do just what the name says - they appeal to our sensations (of fear, hope, disgust, arousal, etc.) and can short-circuit our critical thinking. News stories with especially lurid details should be treated with skepticism.

Internal consistency.
Do all the pieces fit together in a way that makes sense?

External consistency.
Does the report agree with verified facts - things I know I know?

Dialog and dissent.
Does the source welcome opposing views and seek to respond to them?

Awareness of objections.
Does the source attempt to anticipate and refute objections?

Nuance.
By nuance I mean the recognition that a thing can be true in general and still admit of exceptions. For example, it may be true that tall people are generally better basketball players, but it can also be true that some short people may be outstanding players.

Logical fallacies.
There are many mistakes in basic reasoning that can lead us to wrong conclusions.

Red herrings / straw men.
A straw man is an argument that can be easily overcome, but that nobody on the other side actually made; you can "refute" this kind of argument to try to make it look like you refuted your opponent's argument, but you didn't actually respond to the claim they were making. A red herring is any kind of argument that is irrelevant to the main issue, and distracts you from it.

Snarl / purr words.
Some words have negative connotations (snarl words) or positive ones (purr words). Using them can be a way to appeal to people's emotions instead of arguing by reason.

Vague quantifiers.
"Many experts believe ..." Stop! How many is "many"? A majority? Half? Two or three? A claim involving numbers needs to give you specifics, or it tells you nothing.

Attributions.
Misquoting another party is, literally, the oldest trick in the Book - going all the way back to the Serpent in Genesis. It is also easy to selectively or misleadingly quote somebody, to give a false impression of what they said. My rule is, "go by what the person said, not what somebody else SAID they said."

Black propaganda - rhetorical false flag.
This is a particularly nasty trick: creating outrageous or shocking arguments and making them appear to be coming from your opponent, to discredit the opponent.

Discrediting by association - "57 Communists".
This is a little more subtle than the rhetorical false flag. This is the practice of making known false statements, which can be easily disproved, that appear to come from your opponent. The goal is to damage your opponent's credibility. A real-life example was the case of 'National Report' - the granddaddy of fake-news sites - which created all kinds of hoax stories designed to fool conservatives; the conservatives then would be made to look gullible when the stories were shown to be false. (See the "fifty-seven Communists" scene in the film 'The Manchurian Candidate'.)

Bias of intermediaries.
More subtle than the 'straw man' is the practice of pretending to present a neutral forum for debate, but deliberately choosing a more articulate, stronger debater for one side and a weaker debater for the other.

The human voice.
By this I mean an intangible quality that may include a distinctive personality, awareness of ambivalence, self-analysis and self-criticism. This one is not a matter of rigorous logic but of gut instinct: something tells you that the person sounds real or fake.

Hard to win a debate, easy to lose one.
When you're debating an issue, it is very difficult to "win" in the sense that your opponent throws up their hands and says "Oh, you were right and I was wrong" Or even to definitively convince an audience that your position is the correct one. However, it is very very easy to LOSE a debate, simply by saying or doing something that brings discredit to yourself and your cause: getting your facts wrong, making a basic logic error, or losing your cool and cursing or attacking your opponent. Sometimes the most important part of debating is knowing when to stop.

Source Bias Checklist

1. Internal consistency.
2. External consistency.
3. Dialog and dissent.
4. Awareness of objections.
5. Snarl words and purr words.
6. Implicit bias.
7. Narrative.
8. Red herrings and straw men.
9. Fallacies.
10. Psychological factors.
11. Source's experiences, perspective, perceptions.
12. Debts and favors.
13. Medium is the message.
14. The human voice.
15. Encourage anonymous sources to go on the record.
16. Judge source's reliability and disclose potential biases.
17. More specificity is better.
18. Do not rely on anonymous sources for sensational reports.
19. Source must have first-hand knowledge.
20. Do not lie to protect a source.
21. What is the source's ideological orientation?
22. What are the source's financial interests?

What if ... ?

There's been a lot of speculation lately about whether the Kremlin was the driving force behind the recent Wikileaks revelations about Hillary Clinton; and if so, "Why does Russia want Donald Trump to win the election?"  Following upon this, there is no shortage of theories by HRC supporters regarding Trump's supposed weakness toward Russia, ties with Russia, and so on.

I think it's important to ask questions about the provenance of new information, and to wonder what other parties might stand to gain from passing it on.  But when you start down this path, it's easy to build conjecture on top of conjecture, speculation on top of speculation, guesswork on top of guesswork.  And then you're going down the rabbit hole.

Look, as a pro-Trump guy I can play this game too.  Trump a Russian puppet?  But that's just what they want you to think!  You think Putin and his old KGB buddies are stupid?  They're putting out stuff that's damaging to Clinton with Russian fingerprints all over it, so that the Americans will trace it back to Russia and say, "Hey, all this anti-Clinton stuff is just Russian propaganda!"  And then the Americans will dismiss anything unfavorable to Clinton, and she'll be immunized against any and every scandal, because Russia!  And in fact that's exactly what is happening, you can see it on the social media if you don't believe me.  

Do I believe that that is in fact what happened?  I don't know.  And that's my point here:  I don't know.  I prefer to stick with what's known with some degree of certainty, where we can remain on reasonably firm ground.  Often in life we must form theories, hypotheses, or suppositions about the unknown; but we are safest if we start from a firm foundation of facts and stick to known facts as closely as possible.

Information and Sources

1. Is it true?
2. Is it relevant?
3. What are its implications?

These are the basic questions we ask ourselves when assessing the value of new information.  When the information comes by way of an unfamiliar source, it is perfectly rational and appropriate to question what motives may be at work.  

But when speculation along the lines of "Why do they want me to believe this?" takes precedence over accurately answering the basic questions, we are starting to wander down the rabbit hole of paranoid conspiracy thinking.

Source Bias Checklist

1. identify sources
2. assess source's reliability
3. get specifics
4. avoid vendettas
5. first-hand knowledge
6. ideological orientation
7. financial interests
8. debts and favors
9. bias of intermediaries
10. past experiences
11. psychological factors
12. internal consistency
13. external consistency
14. insider details
15. dialog and dissent
16. awareness of objections
17. nuance
18. the human voice
19. snarl/purr words
20. narrative
21. implicit bias
22. red herrings / straw men
23. fallacies
24. weasel words

"How can you determine a source's biases?"

What are a source's biases?  And why is it important to consider a source's biases? 

In November 2006, just days before the national mid-term elections, the magazine Vanity Fair issued a press release suggesting that several leading neoconservative thinkers - David Frum, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, and others - had renounced their earlier beliefs about Iraq and the Middle East.  But according to the neoconservatives, the release grossly distorted and misrepresented their views, and some expressed regret that they had granted the interviews at all:  in the words of Frank Gaffney, "None of us who responded candidly on the basis of such promises to thoughtful questions posed by reporter David Rose would likely have done so had the magazine’s true and nakedly partisan purpose been revealed."  More at the post Neocons Blast Vanity Fair.


Suppose you are the reader, reading a magazine - or a book, or a newspaper, or a page on the internet.  How do you determine the source's biases?

I don't think there's any simple answer, and I'm not sure it's the kind of question you can really find the answer to by typing it into a search engine.  But I'll share my own thoughts on it.  I addressed the problem of media (and source) bias in an earlier post, "Poison Pill:  The Media Today".  I quoted a New York Times editorial by Patrick Healy and a post by Neo-Neocon tracing the use of anonymous sources.  The media's problem, I argued, was largely created by its own reliance on apocryphal sources - potentially biased, and anonymous, informants whose reliability and accountability are doubtful.  As a first step toward correcting the problem, I echoed Neo's suggestion that

If the MSM really wanted to clean up their act, they might follow these sensible guidelines, devised by prominent journalists in a 2003 Poynter report:

• Anonymous sources should be encouraged to go on the record.

• We should weigh the source’s reliability and disclose to readers the source’s potential biases.

• The more specific we can be in describing the source in the story, the better.

• Anonymous sources should not be used for personal attacks, accusations of illegal activity, or merely to add color.

• The source must have first-hand knowledge.

• Journalists should not lie in a story to protect a source.

Now to the question at hand.  Journalists are here being exhorted to "disclose to readers the source's potential biases".  How would a journalist, or a layperson, make such an assessment?  Well, I think it's mostly commonsense, but I'll throw a few ideas out there:

What is the source's ideological orientation?  What are the person's political sympathies, their party affiliation, etc?  This is not to say that people can't be objective or critical about a movement they belong to - but the potential for bias is certainly there.

What are the source's financial interests?  I think this one is a no-brainer, but a person who owns a lot of stock in XYZ Corporation is going to have an incentive to promote pro-XYZ legislation and contracts.  In the case of the MSM, we all know that "bad news sells".

Debts and favors.  Is the source looking for a payoff down the road?  If I go on record saying nice things about Candidate A, maybe I am hoping to get appointed to a nice comfy job if A wins the election.

The medium is the message.  News stories go through news networks, broadcast networks, and publishers.  Books go through publishing houses.  In other words, somebody has to provide the materials for the message to be communicated.  Somewhere, a network executive makes decisions about what gets on the air and what doesn't.  Somewhere, an editor or publisher decides what gets printed and what doesn't.  So if you're reading a book you have to think about not only the author's background and point of view, but also the publisher's orientation:  for example, they might publish mostly liberal books or mostly conservative books.  Knowing something about the background of a publisher or a broadcast network can help give you an idea of what to expect.

What are the source's own experiences?  How might those experiences be relevant, and how might they affect the source's perceptions?  First-hand knowledge of any issue is always helpful; on the other hand, a person might have had an experience that was atypical or unrepresentative.  A soldier on the front lines is going to have a very vivid, detailed, and specific recollection of a battle.  The general in a command bunker may not see the battle up close, but he will have information on the "big picture" of troop strengths, enemy positions, strategic decisions, and other things that the soldier will not know, and may not be allowed to know.  The soldier's memory may be distorted by trauma, confusion, fear, or shame (of a real or imagined failiing on the battlefield); the general may ignore or suppress key information, perhaps with his career in mind.  Both perspectives are valuable, both have their limitations.

Psychological factors.  There are basic psychological factors that operate in all of us to one degree or another.  Resistance to change is one; Neo has written extensively and insightfully on the human reluctance to change familiar patterns of thought.  There is a need for approval of others; there is also a need for a sense of autonomy and a belief that we determine our own destiny.  And of course we all like to be thought knowledgeable, which is why we are often tempted to speak more than we actually know.

The centrally-managed and -edited traditional media (including radio, TV, print periodicals, and books) have nothing to fear from the internet ... provided they do not contribute to their own irrelevance by ignoring it.

The internet is anarchical, and therefore makes great demands on the individual user in terms of critical thinking skills. How do we know to trust a site? We compare information from multiple sources, listen to different analyses, learn to weed out irrelevant input and compare the picture with what we know from our own previous experience.

With the traditional media, this is all delegated to the editor, publisher, producer, or university. Often we have to do this, because the material is specialized or technical in nature, or because individual contributors don't have the credibility to reliably provide the information we need.

But centralized media can serve their own agendas at the expense of accuracy. That's where the supremely democratic world of blogging comes in.

Traditional media still play a valuable role. But they risk abdicating this role if they fail to recognize the democratizing effects of electronic communications.

Why do we believe what we believe? How do we decide what is true, and what is important? Consider the role of the following factors, and feel free to add others:

· internal consistency (details of the narrative agree with each other)
· external consistency (details of the narrative agree with information previously verified)
· insider details (information available only to an authentic source)
· dialog and dissent (narrative welcomes questions and challenges; fosters better understanding among divergent opinions)
· awareness of objections (narrative recognizes legitimate counter-arguments and seeks to refute them)
· nuance (recognition that a proposition may hold true in general and still admit of exceptions)
· the human voice (an intangible quality that may include a distinctive personality, awareness of ambivalence, self-analysis and self-criticism)

Finally, what does biased writing look like?  Bias isn't necessarily bad, but you need to be aware of it and, if necessary, allow for it.  Yahoo offers this:

Check for the tone of the publication - pick out opinion statements and check the publication's references (are all of the references from the same author or does the publication offer a variety?). What other articles has the author written - the topics of these may help determine her/his bias.

Does the author present both sides of the argument/topic? If not, which side is presented more often? What is the point s/he is trying to make? Ask yourself these questions and you should be on the right track!

That sums up the main points:  variety of sources, obvious rhetorical slant, agenda.  Going a little deeper, I'll offer the following ideas:

* Look for "snarl words" versus "purr words" - words that mean the same thing but sound bad or good.
* See if you can tell what kind of overall picture, or "narrative", the writer is trying to present.
* Sometimes an article will seem to present both sides, but will use better arguments to represent one side, and weaker arguments for the other, so that one side sounds more convincing; this is a kind of implicit bias.
* Sometimes people will use bogus arguments (called "red herrings" or "straw men") to evade questions they don't have answers for; these are examples of fallacies or bad logic.  Studying the types of fallacies can help you see when somebody is trying to pull a fast one on you; you can find out more about logical fallacies here, here, or here. 

Another common form of potential bias is the use of "weasel words" - words or phrases that make a statement appear factual but really undercut the precision of the statement.  They're called "weasel words" because they allow the writer to wiggle out of being pinned down to a specific statement that can be proved or disproved.  Wikipedia's style manual has an excellent section on weasel words:

Words and short phrases that make a statement difficult or impossible to prove or disprove:

• Some humans practice cannibalism. (True, but useless and misrepresentative)
• Many humans practice cannibalism. (“many” could well be two, three, ten, or even five billion)
  
  • Throughout human history, there have been many individuals with three arms. (to illustrate.)
• Most scientists believe that there is truth
  
  • "Most" can mean any amount over 50% but short of 100%
  • A "scientist" could be anyone with any knowledge of science
  • The statement gives no necessary contextual data:
    
    • How, when and by whom were the individual beliefs counted
    • Whether the statement concerns all published scientists, or all
      those presently alive, or only those who are qualified in the given
      scientific field
  • The meaning of "truth" varies
• "More and more", "more than ever", "an increasing number"
• "Possibly", "may", "could", "perhaps" and the like
• It is believed that... Anyone could believe anything so it is very important to know who believes that, and why?
• It remains to be seen... Pointless, since it usually introduces an unverifiable statement.

The following examples often qualify for weasel words by vaguely attributing a statement to no source in particular:

• "According to some (reports, studies, rumors, sources…) …"
• "Actually, Allegedly, Apparently, Arguably, Clearly, Plainly, Obviously, Undoubtedly, Supposedly ..."
• "(Contrary, as opposed) to (many, most, popular, ...) ..."
• "(Correctly, Justly, Properly, ...) or not, ..."
• "Could it be that..."
• "(Critics, detractors, fans, experts, many people, scholars, historians, ...) contend/say that ..."
• "It (could be, should be, may be, has been, is) (argued, speculated, remembered, …) …"
• "(Mainstream, serious, the majority of, a small group of ...)
  (scholars, scientists, researchers, experts, scientific community...)
  ..."
• "It has been proven that…"
• "Research has shown..."
• Personifications like "Science says ..." or "Experience has proven..."
• "There has been criticism that ..."
• "It turns out..."'

In an earlier post at Dreams Into Lightning, I complained about the use of vague modifiers in the media: 

Have you ever noticed how often they use vague quantifiers like "some"
and "many", especially when they're talking about public opinion? But
of course you have - Dreams Into Lightning readers are a smart bunch.
So you've already figured out that that's an easy way for the
"journalist" to introduce his or her own opinion into a story, without
having to defend a more stringent assertion, e.g. the claim that said
opinions represent a majority (which would require the word "most").

Now go take another look at Wikipedia's list - better yet, print it out! - and spend some time looking for weasel words in your favorite media source.   I bet you'll find a lot of them.  (How many is "a lot"?  Well, try it and find out for yourself!)

Make a game of it:  print out a copy of this post, and go through your local newspaper with a pen or a highlighter.   Look for anonymous sources, or people who might have an incentive to be partial, or examples of journalists possibly putting their own opinions into the mouths of the ubiquitous "some people".  Look for snarl words, purr words, and weasel words.  Try to spot logical fallacies.  Check for internal consistency, external consistency, and awareness of objections.  Ask yourself which analyses come from people who know what they're talking about - those who have first-hand knowledge of the relevant "facts on the ground" and who are prepared to respond to opposing arguments - and which ones are unsupported opinions from people with their own agenda. 

I hope you have found this post helpful.  But the most important thing in determining a source's biases is to do your own thinking!  And that's important for students, too - so if you are a student, please take the time to come up with your own answers to this question.  Remember, your instructor can use a search engine just as easily as you can.

Related. On Scott Thomas Beauchamp and source biases.

Poison Pill: The Media Today

"Someone is trying to make us look bad." That seems to be the message for Patrick D. Healy in this New York Times editorial on the media's credibilty. (Hat tip: Democracy for the Middle East.)

For Healy, the operative metaphor is the case of the cyanide-laced Tylenol from way back in the 1980's. I'll let Patrick explain:

SO many Americans apparently now see journalists as self-interested, careerist and unprofessional that perhaps it would make sense for media executives to call up another group of bosses who once faced fundamental questions about their product: the makers of Tylenol in the 1980's.

After all, Johnson & Johnson proved that credibility, not to mention market share, could be regained after scandal - in its case, a series of deaths caused by cyanide-laced capsules some 20 years ago. Part of the strategy was to portray the company as a victim in its own right.

But as Healy admits a few lines later, "It would be hard for the media to pitch itself as a innocent victim of its own shortcomings."

No one is secretly stuffing bad reporting into the TV and print media while the editors' backs are turned. The MSM have only themselves to blame for the state of affairs, and they don't have much time to fix the problem.

And there's the key concept that Healy misses: this is not a PR issue, it is a quality issue. The media need to fix the problem, not just improve their image. Or to return to the Tylenol metaphor, they need to imagine that every newscast, every newspaper, every magazine is a bottle of pills, which is going to be ingested by the consumer. They need to make it their business - their responsibility, their personal mission - to ensure that the product contained therein is nothing but the purest "medicine". This will be a bit more complicated than adding a new layer of shrink-wrap to the packaging.

And here's where the New York Times ventures into territory charted by Neo-Neocon.

Healy writes: "With credibility in mind, several news executives are now trying to limit the use of anonymous sources." A-ha! Now perhaps we are getting somewhere. How long has this practice been with us, anyway?

Neo writes:

Well, it turns out you can blame it on Watergate.

The recent prominence of anonymous sources in the Newsweek Koran-flushing story tweaked my curiosity about the history of the practice.

To the best of my recollection, the newspapers of my youth attributed every quote to an actual named person--not that I was paying a whole lot of attention at the time to subtleties like that. Now, however, it seems as though articles are often merely glorified gossip columns full of anonymous commentary--a sort of "he said, he said" kind of journalism--especially any article written by Seymour Hersch, which usually consists of nothing but a long string of such tidbits.

The only thing we know for sure is the identity of the article's author. We are asked to take the facts on trust, without a chance to evaluate the source of the remarks. This over-reliance on the anonymous source gives both the journalist and his/her informant an overwhelming power, and takes away our ability to judge the veracity of what we are being told. I believe it's one of the most pernicious trends in journalism.

This practice seems to be the logical development of a phenomenon that started with Vietnam and became stronger with Watergate. ...

As usual, Neo nails it. Read her whole post - it's beautifully written, carefully thought out, and meticulously researched. But meanwhile, back at the Times, the thought of breaking that anonymous quote addiction is already giving Healy fits of withdrawal:

But reducing anonymous sources could have its limitations. Many journalists, believe it could undermine the ability to get at the truth that so many readers and viewers believe the media is missing or trying to avoid.

And even if the news media outlets were squeaky clean, somehow freed of all human failings, there would still be Americans whose biases would lead them to distrust the media.

("Whew! Well, I guess we're off the hook. If we stop using anonymous quotes, we won't be able to get at the truth ... and anyway, folks love us for our imperfections, right?")

"Many journalists believe ... " You see? He can't even write an editorial about anonymous sources without quoting an anonymous source.

If the MSM really wanted to clean up their act, they might follow these sensible guidelines, devised by prominent journalists in a 2003 Poynter report:

• Anonymous sources should be encouraged to go on the record.

• We should weigh the source’s reliability and disclose to readers the source’s potential biases.

• The more specific we can be in describing the source in the story, the better.

• Anonymous sources should not be used for personal attacks, accusations of illegal activity, or merely to add color.

• The source must have first-hand knowledge.

• Journalists should not lie in a story to protect a source.

(Hat tip, again, to Neo.) These are sensible guidelines, a first step towards curbing the use of anonymous sources. They do not "undermine" jounalists' ability to get the truth out, they enhance it.

But this isn't what the New York Times wants to hear. And so, after bravely facing up to the enormity of the problem, Patrick Healy retreats into utter denial. The last lines of his column are almost painful to read:

And even if the news media outlets were squeaky clean, somehow freed of all human failings, there would still be Americans whose biases would lead them to distrust the media.

Analysts say that the political partisans who are most likely to be critical of the press are also among the most reliable and hungry consumers of the news.

Maybe therein is a silver lining: if the people who distrust you the most are also many of your most devoted customers, perhaps survival is assured. They have accepted flaws as part of the bargain of following the news.

Well, there's the sound of confidence for you. Especially that last paragraph - "maybe" and "perhaps" in the same sentence! And maybe, perhaps, I might possibly be the Queen of the Space Unicorns. There's always hope, right?

Earth to the MSM: The public doesn't trust you. Deal with it. You folks at the New York Times want the public to "trust" you? Listen, I'll let you in on a secret: My readers don't trust me, either - and I don't expect them to. That's the whole idea. I have to earn their confidence, and keep it, every single day.

No one is perfect, and the human mind is limited. Sometimes a thing can look like one thing, and be something else, or nothing at all. (Ask me about green lasers and Coptic Christian murders.) What bloggers demand of themselves - because their audiences demand it of them - is a commitment to openly acknowledging past errors and learning from them. And even more, a commitment to getting the story right the first time.

"Scrutiny is intense. The Internet amplifies professional sins, and spreads the word quickly. And when a news organization confesses its shortcomings, it only draws more attention." No kidding. The internet does exactly the same thing to us bloggers - that's why we treat our medium, and our audience, with the utmost respect. "Also, there is no unified front - no single standard of professionalism, no system of credentials." All respectable bloggers live by a strict code that forbids concealing our errors or reporting dubious "facts". This "single standard of professionalism" - and its attendant "unified front" - may soon become more concrete with the help of Roger Simon and the nascent Pajamas Media organization.

As I've said before, a growing segment of the population are willing to take a cue from Neo's cinematic namesake by "swallowing the red pill" and awakening from the pseudo-reality of the media matrix. The problem for the media, then, is not one of image, but of substance. The mainstream media must adapt to a more critical and demanding public - or face extinction.