Category: Media

Is news destroying our brains?

Posted on by Martin Newman

Rolf Dobelli gets a frosty reception from most journalists and when I call him at his home in Bern late one night (AEST), the bestselling economic philosopher sounds more than a little hesitant.

The conversation is stilted as he cautiously explains his ideas while at the same time trying not to insult me.

That’s OK though, I understand. It’s a difficult tightrope walk for Dobelli. After all, he’s just published Stop Reading the News, a guide to giving up your daily dose of news, a move that, if generally taken up, would put me out of a job.

It’s a book which patiently deconstructs the news cycle and draws numerous negative conclusions, including that there is too much news and that it is bad for your health, your brain and your happiness.

“There was always something wrong with ‘the news’, it confuses news with relevance,” he says. “News is in the business of selling what it produces as relevant to people, which is rarely the case.

“The amount of time people spend reading the news in all western countries is 60-90 minutes a day, which over a year is about a month’s worth of your life (It’s actually 15 days, but I assume he’s talking about ‘awake time’ so I don’t quibble). With the internet it became very easy to produce news and to copy news, so you end up surfing through huge amounts of little news stories.

“If you want to really have more time, just cut out the news.”

As with social media, readers get a feel-good dopamine hit from staying abreast of breaking news, imbuing them with a false sense that consuming more and more makes them smarter and better informed. Studies, he points out, show this not to be the case. Dobelli says readers instead should devour detailed, subject-specific texts if they want to retain knowledge.

Dobelli contends the modern news cycle overloads the brain and trains it to process short bites of information while at the same time ‘untraining’ the brain to absorb more complex ideas. He cites various examples and uses different exercises to show how little knowledge we retain from news stories, as opposed to life events.

And while I suspect his citations, rather than being definitive, fit his own viewpoint, they can be compelling.

A self-confessed “former news junkie”, he draws on research indicating a declining attention span and attacks the credibility of much journalism, which he broadly categorises as entertainment rather than actual news.

“Journalism has less and less meaning,” he says. “The quality goes down [as reporters are laid off]. It’s a vicious circle.

“If you consume news voraciously, like I did, you’re reading 100 stories a day, 30,000 a year. The amount of waste news you have to wade through is just incredible.”

Stop Reading the News explores the explosion of opinion-based news, the elevation of mediocrity over substance (The Kardashians!!), the way news creates the illusion of empathy, can elevate stress levels and builds a mindset that reinforces negativity.

Dobelli argues, among other things, that news encourages terrorism: “There’s a reason why terrorism was unknown in the Middle Ages: there was no news media. The terrorist’s true weapon isn’t the bomb but the fear triggered by the bomb.”

But his two biggest complaints are that news wastes our time, distracting us from meaningful work, and that it rewires our brains to make us less effective.

“When our brains encounter information without us having the possibility of acting upon it, we gradually assume the role of a victim,” he writes in one chapter. “Our impulse to take action fades. We become passive. The scientific term for this is learned helplessness.”

If news is important enough, he adds, “it will reach you through other sources, word of mouth”.

His views have at times put him in sync with Donald Trump, who has attacked the media repeatedly for bias and misrepresentation.

“I should have written this 10 years ago,” he laments. “Now I have some strange bedfellows, like Trump.”

In defence of reporters he draws a distinction between news churn and longform reads and investigations, but insists cutting regular news sources out of your daily habit is the best way to win back quality of life .

“Even if you don’t want to go cold turkey, reduce your news consumption to one – and one only – weekly publication,” he says. “Ideally print, so you don’t have to deal with hyperlinks and flashy videos on the side.”

Dobelli hasn’t always been a writer: 25 years ago, shortly after completing his doctorate at Switzerland’s University of St Gallen (one of the most prestigious business schools in Europe), he had a year-long stint as the Sydney-based chief financial officer for Downtown Duty Free’s 30 Australian stores, then a subsidiary of Swissair. He was then made chief executive of Nuance Global Ships in America, another Swissair offshoot.

“I was a corporate guy,” he says, “but I was more interested in cognitive science. Still, I have a huge admiration for CEOs. I know I couldn’t do the job [as a career]. I admire people who lead people. It’s especially tough in publicly traded companies, and corporations are one of the best forms of organised labour.”

After eight years in finance, Dobelli felt he needed another path. He quit Swissair in 1999, about three years before its shambolic grounding and failure, (a fiasco that cost Swiss taxpayers billions and left a heavily restructured and devalued firm – now Swiss), and set up a publishing company, GetAbstract, where, from 2003, he churned out six novels in a “Philip Roth style” based on his experiences in corporations (“business managers getting into trouble”).

They did well, but none well enough to be translated from the German, which prompted a switch to self-help books, starting with his 2011 bestseller The Art of Thinking Clearly and four years later The Art of the Good Life.

The 53-year-old now resides in Switzerland’s defacto capital with his wife Sabine, who he credits with putting him on track to stop reading news, and their twin six-year-old boys.

Like The Art of Thinking Clearly, his latest book leans a lot on the idea that modern life interrupts our thinking and to achieve more of a meaningful nature requires purifying your routine. Part of that process entails cutting out social media and staying off devices, the logical extension of which is removing the sources that bring you to those platforms and devices – like news.

While much of Dobelli’s criticism is reasonable (there is too much content, too much over-hyped reporting and too much deliberately teased information that wastes our time reading it) and his arguments neatly logical, they are also slanted – in the same way direct-selling businesses cadge their methodology at mass recruitment seminars.

It’s impossible not to feel there is a general antipathy for the press underlying the thrust of Dobelli’s book. It has an academic disdain for the journeymen and women whose job it is to interpret all manner of subjects beyond their individual expertise and convey them to the masses.

That, in itself, is not a bad thing. There are certainly unlikeable aspects about the production of news and sometimes those producing it. But from Dobelli’s lofty perspective there’s a notably hard edge to his arguments that makes you wonder if he’s blinkered to more of the news cycle’s attributes.

“Holding journalists responsible for the current mess is like holding sugar cubes responsible for our poor diet,” he writes. “Our own behaviour as consumers has led to a race to the bottom. All self-respecting journalists should steer clear of news journalism, just as no chef who takes pride in his work would start a career at McDonald’s.”

Myself? I’ve not stopped reading the news, and not because it’s my job (though that’s a good enough reason for me) but because when it’s accurate and informative I believe it does contribute a helpful understanding of the world around us.

The question is how do we filter the garbage and facilitate the gold? Dobelli’s meticulous disquisition is a solid starting point for both.

Stop Reading the News by Rolf Dobelli (Hachette Australia).

Originally published in the Australian Financial Review on February 15, 2020.

The power of a good headline and how to capture your reader

Posted on by Martin Newman

In the age of digital news, the art of headline writing at times feels a bit irrelevant.

Wit and clever idioms have mostly been replaced with search engine optimised key words.  But both from a practical point of view and a creative one, good headline writing is more important than ever in the modern media.  A nod to the intelligence and knowledge of the reader, and despite having evolved to be more direct, clever headlines remain an important part of the overall tone of a story. 

From a distribution perspective, writing a headline containing the most likely search terms for the attached article is the key component of a digital article today.  And any content management system worth its salt allows both an SEO headline and one that can more creatively reflect a story.

Furthermore, the ability to tease a headline without making it look like clickbait is a skill in high demand in digital newsrooms and among social media editors.  For budding journalists, it is an essential element in their tool kit.

The Walkley Foundation’s annual awards for journalism have for the past couple of years recognised not just headlines but captions and hooks, to accommodate the many forms digital storytelling takes, from the splash to a tweet.

That the winners have remained, invariably, big production headlines from the front pages reflecting significant events, underlines the professional import of headlines in journalism and the impact of traditional media, even whilst in decline.

A good headline rings bells in readers’ heads. It forms synapsistic links with topics that give them a warm fuzzy feeling or tickle their funny bone because they get the reference and are in on it.  Great headlines can support a great story and great design or elevate a mundane yarn to a loftier place than it may otherwise have deserved.

I learnt this lesson early as a cadet reporter on Sydney’s Daily Telegraph-Mirror. Sent to Taronga Zoo with a photographer to capture the moment a newborn chimpanzee was presented to the world, I’d spent most of the day labouring over the writing of it; trying, too hard, to wring out a funny line. Instead all I could manage was a mediocre intro that the sub editor scoffed at loudly as I retreated to my VT100 (with its green screen and Geiger counter staccato, the staple of office computers at the time).

The next day when I opened the paper I was stoked to see above my re-written lead and a picture of the baby monkey and its mother, the title: ‘A chimp off the old block’.  That headline saved my terrible copy from being pushed to the back of the news section. It remains one of my favourite headlines and an example of how the wit of an organisation’s wordsmiths can capture a reader’s attention, bring a story alive and bolster the quality of the product.

Like that example, great headlines are remembered and sometimes come to epitomise an event. When rower Sally Robbins quit mid-race at the 2004 Olympics as her seven teammates continued to plunge their oars into the water, Melbourne’s Herald Sun bellowed, ‘It’s eight, mate, pull your weight’.  Sometimes it controversially reflects the cultural zeitgeist, as when The Sun in Britain, full of nationalistic fervour for the Falklands War, blasted ‘Gotcha’ across its front page, crassly reducing the sinking of Argentina’s General Belgrano to a comic book moment. Writing active, not passive, headlines draws in the reader, and is a discipline any journalist needs to understand if they want their stories read.

The contracting industry has been particularly harsh on sub editors, often cut from the business in large numbers and their roles subsumed into other areas or outsourced to time-poor, brand agnostic production staff in distant hubs.

So, the optimum environment for writing engaging, funny or clever headlines, has suffered and the media overall has been victim to a witticism bracket creep as words and their use have become plainer.

At The Australian Financial Review where subbing has been embraced again and a full team employed to bolster the paper’s standards, journalists write their own headlines and desk editors then tweak and tailor them individually to both print and web.

Understanding your readership and how it consumes news is at the forefront of the effort to engage with readers, to retain them and to grow a digital audience further afield and across demographics.

Finding the right headline for a subject requires a good general knowledge, an eye for associations and either a very sharp brain or some fast work on your keyboard comparing idioms and chasing thoughts down rabbit holes of words and rhymes, of assonance and alliteration.

Blog_headline_class_LD

WORD PLAY: Journalism students discuss headline ideas. 


Often it can require trying different lines, seeing what the words look like on the page or the preview, and changing tack if they just will not fit into the space.

Headlines can be effusive, or they can be spare, but above all else they must entice the reader to go on that ride with you, into the story.

Originally published by Macleay College on November 1, 2019.

Game of Thrones-style twist few Australians saw coming

Posted on by Martin Newman

It was the classic Game of Thrones twist that hooked millions of people around the world.

Author George R.R. Martin was adept at building up a character, dropping them in a life threatening situation, offering hope they would escape, then withdrawing it – bloodily.

It happened in the very first episode when Bran was pushed from the tower and continued on its merry way through the execution of Ned Stark, the red wedding and the murder of Jon Snow.

But without Martin’s books as a guide the last two series have been more Lord of the Rings – predicatable and shockless – with the final episode seeming little more than a set-up for a sequel.

The real Game of Thrones moment, the gut-churning twist, the realisation of loss and betrayal Australian fans had sought from the show, came instead on Saturday night – in real life.

As incumbent PM Scott Morrison carried the field in the 2019 federal election, millions of voters anticipating a Labor win looked on in horror.

With bad result after bad piling up around him, quickly and brutally Bill Shorten’s run at leading the country slid inexorably into the abyss.

The celebrations of gleeful Coalition voters felt as painful as watching Robb Stark’s headless body paraded around on horseback. The King of the North.

Shorten, the king of the working class, was just as dead – politically.

In the lead up to the election, it had misleadingly seemed as though everything had gone right for Labor and Bill.

A usually reliable measure of preferences, the leaders’ debates had been twice won by Shorten, clearly.

Even a story suggesting he was misusing his mother’s memory backfired, turning into a ball ache for the Liberals.

Most deaths are regarded as untimely, but the passing of widely-revered former PM Bob Hawke was the opposite. It was incredibly timely. And it seemed to augur success for Labor.

With Paul Keating, Hawke had come out two weeks before to endorse Shorten and a Labor ascendency.

But while Bob’s death wiped a number of anti-Shorten stories off the front pages of the next day’s papers, it may also have acted as a reminder to voters how underwhelming the Labor leader was compared to the greats of the past.

The Coalition had its own moments of luck. An egg aimed at the PM hit but did not break. For God-fearing Morrison, the unexpected recipient of the leadership after Peter Dutton’s failed tilt, it was another miracle, ahead of his ‘miracle win’.

But despite an uncomfortably narrow two per cent lead in the two party preference vote, the media almost unanimously predicted a Labor victory.

Post-election it then turned around to unanimously blame the pollsters rather than its own analysis for getting it wrong. A repeat of the Trump victory. Of Brexit. Of Gladys.

The media has grown fond of asking this question: Can polls be trusted?

Unfortunately, what has been repeatedly revealed is the mainstream media’s inability to analyse accurately.

It’s nothing unusual, factoring in protest voters and those who haven’t thought about it hard yet, that a two per cent poll lead can evaporate or be reversed. That’s all John Hewson had when he went into the ’93 election as favourite and got thumped by Conservative Australia, not prepared to cast their votes for the GST.

An insider in the Liberals’ campaign team told me it had been a source of constant incredulity within the party how wrong the media’s interpretation had been over the past few weeks.

“We focused on 10 key seats in every state, winning those,” she said. “The strategy was clear and we knew the polls were misleading. We were still strong in the first party preferred vote and our own polling showed that seat by seat we could win. Although, we believed by only a narrow margin.”

She added: “We couldn’t understand the single-focus of most of the media on the national poll trend. They just didn’t look beyond it. Nor did they listen.”

So Scott “The Accidental PM” Morrison, now has a genuine mandate to roll out his policies, while fans of fantasy adventures are reminded life provides enough of its own bitter pills to swallow.

Picture: Street art in Melbourne

Faking it… A dirty campaign to undermine democracy

Posted on by Martin Newman

Fake news comes from all sorts of sources. It’s often characterised as originating with rogue operators, unscrupulous websites cadging a living from Google AdWords or YouTube plays. But it’s not always from them, sometimes it’s from government agencies or political leaders who we are told to trust. Of course, politicians telling lies, governments misleading is in no way a new thing. We used to call it propaganda, which suggested bias but was often outright lying. The Nazis were expert at it, but the ‘good guys’ often used it too.

Today we would call Baghdad cabbie Rafid Ahmad Alwan’s assertion that Saddam Hussein had mobile biological weapons labs as ‘fake news’. It was a charge that in 2003 the US and Britain used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Both governments had been told he was a congenital liar and his claims didn’t stack up, but they ran with the story anyway because it neatly fit their agenda.

This week we were treated to the unedifying claim Donald Trump watched Russian prostitutes urinate on each other in a Moscow hotel room. We were also told Russia was blackmailing the president-elect with a dossier of dirt – essentially making him some type of Manchurian candidate.

The entirely unsubstantiated information was compiled by ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who runs a security company in London called Orbis Business Intelligence, for a political opponent of Trump’s.

The fact a US security agency may have leaked the information on the eve of Trump’s inauguration says a lot about the incumbent government’s desire to influence or derail the incoming government’s relationship with Russia.

Russia incidentally has been portrayed for the past four years as some kind of rogue, expansionist state, rather than one reacting to provocations from outside its borders.

Buzzfeed, which was handed the leaked info, did what pretty much any media company would do and ran it, saying the public could make up its own mind. Of course saying that whilst presenting no balancing information creates a dangerous environment for a large section of the population to believe it.

When information is presented with the caveat ‘make up your own mind’ it invites multiple interpretations. There’s also the distinct danger the reader will form an opinion based on what they might already think of the people involved, i.e. Trump is a gauche, chauvinist, therefore the allegations are believable.

But this is where governments and other agencies have always cleverly used the media to give fake news an air of credence.

We in the media, generally speaking, are better at repeating information than analysing it. Most media organisations lack the critical facility to scrutinise the motives behind leaked information, so happy are they just for the opportunity to set the agenda and break a big story.

The other insidious thing the release of the dodgy dossier on Trump did was to allow the media to validate the claim Russia was involved in hacking the Democrats and influencing the result of the presidential election.

The Democrats, still smarting at their loss, would love everyone to believe this was true. That their loss was the result of a conspiracy and that Trump is actually an illegitimate leader.

Trump had steadfastly denied Russian involvement, as had Russia, as had Wikileaks – which in October released thousands of the emails.

In terms of fake news we’ve seen this snowball effect before, in Libya and in the build-up to the second Iraq war, where one unproven claim gives way to another, to the point where there is a concession that some of it must be true. Where there’s smoke there’s fire – not always.

And so some of the media glibly reported Trump had accepted Russian involvement in the hacking of Clinton-aide John Podesta’s emails.

Trump, clearly feeling the pressure of attacks that had turned personal, said: “As far as hacking, I think it was Russia, but I also think we’ve been hacked by other countries, other people.” He then backtracked adding “you know what, could have been others also”.

The key allegation against Russia presented in the report by America’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is the hack of the Democratic National Committee used identical methods to a previous alleged hack by Russia.

However, many hackers download pre-programmed scripts available on any exploit database and anyone using them would display the same features. A hacker in the US using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) located in Russia and accessible by anyone on the internet can appear to be staging the hack from Russia, despite being in the US.

Activist Alex Poucher, a professional hacker, claimed from his own detailed analysis of the ODNI report it was not possible to tell where the hack had originated or who was behind it.

He said: “At the end of the day, an insurmountable heap of circumstantial evidence is all this report is, without any proof to back up any of the claims whatsoever, except hearsay.

“I have personally [gone] over every aspect of the attack and what I can tell you, what I have found is that every aspect of the attack, the entry or the payload, is not particularly sophisticated. A 14-year-old script kiddy with download capabilities could have pulled off this hack.”

What we are left with are a lot of untestable allegations (hot air), all designed to discredit Donald Trump’s presidency.

All you can do is ask: Who benefits?

Sex, lies & politics: The Peta Credlin – Tony Abbott ‘affair’

Posted on by Martin Newman

So were Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin at it?

The evidence ranged against them, one or two perceived moments of tenderness mostly not associated with a work relationship, a head rested on a shoulder, protective outbursts from the PM.

The rumour mills were so over-extended NSW Liberal MP Concetta Fierravanti-Wells felt the need to deliver an ultimatum to Abbott to deal with it.

“Politics is about perceptions,” she told him bluntly.

But should perceptions be enough to cost someone their job? And once it’s ‘out’ must the rumour-mongers be sated.

The question of sacking the Prime Minister’s chief of staff is a moot point now of course, but the ongoing damage to her career legacy is very much alive.

In the final days of the Abbott government, in the lead-up to that last brutal push to unseat him, it was not Abbott who was the target of the plotters.

He’d been given a walloping in the previous failed coup over the knighthood awarded to Prince Philip, weathered it and came back with an improved poll standing.

But when laying the groundwork for another go, it was Credlin who was identified as both the easier mark and the most effective means of undermining the PM.

She had directed his career from, at times, abject ineptitude in opposition to a decisive, commanding, if no-less controversial, presence in politics. He needed her there to govern.

The attacks on Credlin were almost nonsensical – an insult to the public intellect.

She was accused of having “too-high a profile” and the prime minister’s refusal to sack her for it was painted as being blinkered and an indication of internal rot.

Credlin was Abbott’s perceived Achilles heel –hurting her would leave him weaker.

Stubbornly, loyally he stuck by her. “Do you really think my chief of staff would be under this kind of criticism if her name was Peter?” he asked.

It was a good point.

In the UK, the close relationship between Tony Blair and his bullying mouthpiece Alastair Campbell didn’t produce calls for him to resign or be sacked. They too had a cosily iron grip on the agenda that left even the Treasurer on the outer. But Campbell was regarded as too dangerous to take on – a formidably strong lieutenant to the PM.

Credlin’s was a different story – she was a woman.

A seasoned political backroom operator she’d built a reputation in the Howard government as an astute strategist working for a number of MPs, then in opposition as top aide to Liberal leaders Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Abbott.

She had paid her dues many times over, and yet there have been fewer more transparent or malicious whispering campaigns carried out in politics than that on Credlin during the short reign of Tony Abbott.

The rumours about the pair had been the subject of gossip throughout politics and the media, but had never been aired publically until this week.

Privately Credlin was painted as a Delilah figure. She had her hooks in him, siren-like, fouling his judgment and poisoning his leadership.

I use that biblical comparison because the narrative of the scheming, manipulative women has been around for thousands of years. And it is routinely trotted out when critics can’t make conventional headway. See The Tragedy of Othello, Shakespeare knew it too.

In Australia we saw it with the jibes at Julia Gillard’s husband’s sexuality, and by association her own.

There is no question Credlin came to be widely disliked within the party and the control she exerted over the PM’s diary became a sticking point for many.

But the malignant undermining, the creeping, unsubstantiated sniggering at the morals of the government, went beyond all professional criticism.

I doubt there was any affair. This is politics and she was solely a means to get at Abbott.

Women are from Venus, Men are from Tatooine – what Star Wars says about love

Posted on by Martin Newman

Star Wars is a romantic turn-off and a relationship killer, according to the experts – but only to women.

Those schoolboy crushes on Carrie Fisher cavorting about in her gold bikini were fine for males of a certain age, but most women don’t want a bloke to be still going on about it in his 40s.

On the eve of the release of Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens, Zoosk, a dating site, asked people about their attitudes to the films and romance, probing that nerdish fascination many, normally right-thinking, men exhibit for the space epic.

And while it seems that women are from Venus, a lot of men apparently hale from Tatooine rather than Mars.

The poll of 1000 people found a quarter of Australian women would not go out with a Star Wars fan, one in three avoided them and another 40 per cent would try to change them if they were in a relationship. Furthermore, a bloke with Star Wars bedsheets (and, yes, we are talking about adults here) was unsurprisingly an absolute passion eviscerator for two out of five women.

In stark contrast 55 per cent of men said they would jump at the chance to sleep with a woman who believed in the Force (…we can add that to all the other stuff we don’t understand about each other).

Now, I know both couples who turned their weddings into Star Wars-themed events and mates whose intended vetoed the same. So there is proof Star Wars diehards are breeding.

But as a bellwether for relationships the film was always going to be an awkwardly complicated thing. I mean, there was that Luke and Leia thing early on. Thank God someone set them straight. They could have had a two-headed Jedi child.

Queen Amidala and Anakin – bloody and destined to fail in a Game of Thrones-type way. Even Luke’s aunt and uncle – his parental role models – got burnt to death by stormtroopers. Grisly.

In fact droids R2D2 and C3PO seem to have had the most close-to-stereotypical relationship in the films, one marked by attachment, bickering and no sex (that we know of).

But what does all that say about men and women?

Why as men are we more inclined to escape into Star Wars, or cars, or sport, or gambling or drinking?

Are the pressures of the world so great we turn escapism into a lifestyle?

And is that what the turn-off to women is? Not so much the nerdiness, but the lack of focus on stuff that matters and on getting things done.

So as you sit in the darkness of the cinema watching Star Wars VII blast across the screen – and most certainly not thinking about your career, or your family or what Syrian refugees will be doing this Christmas – ponder for a moment at least what it’s doing to your love life.

Ukraine reporting shows bias of Western media

Posted on by Martin Newman

In the space of a few months Ukraine has been embroiled in two uprisings.

Both have appeared equally legitimate, both have been bloody and both have had the backing of differently aligned foreign governments.

So why has the media characterised the US-backed one as a democratic right and the other as troublemaking by Russia?

And why does one bloody crackdown provoke press outrage and another not?

Reporting on Ukraine has been singularly one-sided with the media and the government moulding public perceptions by omitting information, or slanting it one way or another.

At the height of the first uprising in February Viktor Yanukovych was portrayed in the strongest terms as a corrupt leader responsible for killing civilian protestors. Those civilian deaths were seen as a catalyst for a change of government by force.

There has been no such outrage expressed for the more than 100 pro-Russian separatists killed by the new government, the most recent in heavy-handed attacks on Donetsk.

The Maidan protests, backed by the US, Germany and Britain, have been given fair, at times favourably biased, coverage, while those of pro-Russians have been scandalously under-reported or ignored.

More so the language used to describe each varies damningly.

It has been accompanied by a concerted and completely over-the-top demonisation of Russia, which culminated last week in Prince Charles comparing Vladimir Putin to Hitler and ‘Red’ Ed Miliband seeming to support the remarks.

Opponents of Yanukovych were often described in the media as peaceful protesters, despite scenes of some of the most ferociously violent attacks on Ukraine’s police – attacks for which the only UK parallel might be the Broadwater Farm riots in which PC Keith Blakelock was murdered.

In Kiev 16 police officers were killed by protesters. Can you imagine the reaction to that if it had occurred in Britain?

By contrast the western media routinely describes pro-Russian separatists as rebels, militants, insurgents, Chechens, terrorists, militia.

It is often slyly suggested they have less claim on being Ukrainian, that they are insurgents from across the border or puppets of Russia, despite the overwhelming evidence that they are local, multi-generational Ukrainian residents with real gripes against the new right-wing government.

Earlier this month a fire in the Odessa Trade Union building killed 38 pro-Russian protesters, but the media quickly accepted the Kiev government’s claim they were killed by a blaze they had begun.

Pictures of teenagers merrily making molotov cocktails outside the building didn’t change the media’s attitude. Nor was there much comment on the chants about roasting ‘Colorado beetles’ (a derogatory term for the pro-Russians) that rang out as the protesters burned. Video showed those trying to flee the blaze set upon by right-wing thugs.

The apparent strangulation murder of a pregnant women in the same building in a room in which government supporters unfurled a flag out the window, has not been investigated or commented on in the press.

And though video evidence emerged on the web of government supporters in collusion with police staging false attacks dressed in pro-Russian armbands it was not written about or reported in the mainstream media.

The truth about what happened at Odessa has only emerged through social network sites.

Instead there was an overriding willingness by press, broadcasters and online news groups to not blame government supporters for the deaths and to quickly move on.

By comparison the shooting of civilians during riots in Kiev against Yanukovych were denounced in the harshest of terms around the world. Germany and the US piled pressure on the government with threats of sanctions, and when Yanukovych eventually retreated from the capital an arrest warrant was issued accusing him of ‘mass murder’.

Days later, when a leaked EU phone call raised the prospect some civilians may have been deliberately shot by the Maidan opposition to inflame the situation, little was said. An investigation by the new authorities into deaths in Kiev during the protests has so far gone nowhere.

Each day across Ukraine’s restive east more and more pictures are posted on Twitter of the bodies of civilians  – middle aged women, casually dressed men – lying dead by the roadside.

But how many do we see in the press, on TV or online news agencies?

Typically such reports are omitted or tempered with claims of trouble being stirred up by Russian infiltrators – legitimising the killings.

It’s a common propaganda technique, but we see it more and more from our governments and our media.

While the referendum in Crimea and the east for more autonomy was decried as illegal by the West and reported as such, the election of a new government in Kiev has been given legitimacy by the world’s media, even though breakaway regions boycotted the vote.

Residents in those regions have now been dubbed ‘bandits’ and ‘terrorists’ by the newly elected hardline president Petro Poroshenko.

Underlying the entire conflict are claims the US encouraged the Maidan revolution to create another Nato state on one of Russia’s most sensitive borders, and where its Black Sea Fleet is moored at Sevastopol in Crimea.

In the press Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea was denounced as a shameless land grab and Vladimir Putin accused of trying to rebuild the old Soviet Union.

Despite there being a majority of Russian citizens living in Crimea and clear parallels with the Nato-backed independence of Kosovo, relations between Russia and the US deteriorated to the point of talk about a new Cold War.

That has filtered down to the man in the street and one in the palace.

Ironically, the groups now in control in Ukraine are more right-wing than any European government since the Nazis.

But this bias in the media has existed for a long time and extends beyond the Ukraine today.

Reports on the Syria conflict are horrendously one-sided. Unsubstantiated charges of chemical weapons use by the Assad government are reported as fact.

The killing of pro-Assad voters at an election booth last week given no more than lip service.

Yes Assad has committed some terrible acts, but what of the al-Qaeda groups ranged against him? What of the beheadings, the mass killings, the torture and religious discrimination they have brought with them?

When rebels fighters deliberately cut off the water supply to 2.5million residents of Allepo a fortnight ago, only The Independent reported on it. Even Ban Ki Moon’s condemnation of this act went unreported in the mainstream media.

Similarly there has been no outrage about the Kiev authorities attempts to cut off the water supply to the Crimea.

These are actions that can force a humanitarian crisis, and yet there is no outrage and the general public remain uninformed.

Going back to the reporting on the Balkan wars, Serbia was demonised and accused of ethnic cleansing and running rape camps. The latter was not proven and the former described tactics used across the board by all sides in the conflict.

And while the massacre by the Bosnian-Serb army at Srebrenica is the worst and defining atrocity of the wars, little is ever mentioned of the 50 villages razed to the ground and 5,000 Serb civilians murdered by muslim raiding parties in the same region in the run-up to it.

Decades on Serbia is still characterised simplistically as the bad guy while equally reprehensible war crimes committed by other sides barely get mentioned. To do that would muddy the narrative that the media demands.

Having worked in Fleet Street for almost two decades I know there is no one pulling the strings. There is no secret plot to subvert particular information while promoting the other.

No one calls up editors to exert pressure, and nor do the editors dictate to their journalists. And yet with great predictability they fall in line with a prevailing mood.

The media promotes a concept of good and bad, with no in-between.

It needs a simple, familiar narrative for its readers to understand (perhaps for its journalists too), one that is often, although not exclusively, still based on old world prejudices.

Known story patterns are repeated with rare deviation.

Passion, outrage and righteous indignation sell papers and (today) get page hits.

But what of the full facts? What of the other side of the story?

Our written history is at risk if it is based on the perception given by media and governments pushing their own blinkered or negligent agendas rather than the true, full story.

Nowhere is this hypocrisy more evident than in the current reporting on Ukraine.

(Originally published in The Huffington Post)

Salivating press won’t let fantasy get in way of ‘serial killer’ story

Posted on by Martin Newman

Her story came out of the blue. A seemingly unnecessary, unprompted confession to a local newspaper reporter that she had committed anywhere between 22 and 100 murders.

In the general run of things such admissions are normally made to detectives, psychologists or prison pastors, and checked over before any such notion is taken to the press and the public.

But from the out self-confessed serial killer Miranda Barbour’s story was front page news.

More than two months after her arrest Sunbury’s unprepossessingly named newspaper The Daily Item obtained an interview with the 19-year-old after much shenanigans with local prison authorities.

By this time, while not known outside of East Coast America, Barbour was already big news in the small Pennsylvania town.

Nestled behind an imposing flood wall on the Susquehanna River near the point it empties into Lake Augusta, Sunbury has a population of less than 10,000 people, limited job opportunities and a burgeoning drugs problem.

For a small place it has its fair share of problems with residents more than twice as likely to be the victim of violent crime than the national average. But while having a disproportionate number of rapes and assaults the murder of Troy LaFerrara on 11 November last year was still out of the ordinary.

The 42-year-old married man was lured by an advertisement for sex on the Craigslist website and allegedly stabbed to death by Miranda Barbour as her husband of three-weeks, Elytte, strangled him with a cord from the backseat of their car.

The Daily Item seized on the tale, running some 36 stories in the paper and online between Barbour’s arrest and her eventual ‘confession’ to reporter Francis Scarcella.

Because of the couple’s supposed interest in Satanism the paper ran at least two stories reporting on and theorising about Satanic links to the murder.

Barbour having read the extensive coverage of her case in the Item wrote a letter to the paper requesting a meeting on 7 January. It was initially denied by the Northumberland County Prison authorities but after calls for staff to be stood down for breaching the prisoner’s rights it went ahead on 14 February.

It may be fair to surmise that at this point Barbour had already made up her mind about ‘revealing all’ to the paper and had either held back from talking to the authorities or never intended to, despite another five weeks passing.

She told the Item she was a serial killer and had stopped counting after 22 murders, but added that she had killed less than 100 people.

Barbour also claimed to be able to pinpoint each of the murders and lead investigators to the bodies.

By going to the press first she ensured her outlandish claim would get prominent exposure even if it later fell apart under scrutiny.

Police had no choice but to take it seriously and investigate fully, especially as they already had one murder on their books she had been charged for.

Within hours The Daily Item’s grisly scoop was making headlines around the world and Barbour was being billed as possibly the worst serial killer in America’s rich history of psychopaths.

In the UK the Express asked ‘Is this the world’s worst serial killer?’ (Harold Shipman.. Luis Garavito anyone?)

But despite the police having had no time to test the validity of her claims few media outlets cast doubt on the story.

Having played on fears of Satanism in the weeks following the ‘thrill killing’ of LaFerrara The Daily Item’s prison interview revealed sensational claims of Barbour’s induction into a Satanic cult at the age of 12 in North Alaska and her first murder committed the following year with the man who had recruited her.

Despite professing to be one of the devil’s acolytes Barbour contradictorily told the paper she only killed ‘bad people who do bad things’ and so was justified.

For most law enforcement officers, however, the mere mention of Satanic cults is generally met with eye rolling. A popular unfounded fear in middle America the existence of such groups in any real sense is extremely rare. It is far more common that claims turn out to be the figment of the imagination of delusional, often mentally unstable individuals.

The killing of LaFerrara too did not sit easily with the tale of a young girl committing regular murders for several years without raising an eyebrow of suspicion or leaving a trail of bodies behind her, as she claimed to have done across Alaska, Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and California.

To get away with such a spree would require extreme care and cunning.

But the LaFerrara murder was anything but clever. The alleged killers, having placed a traceable ad on Craigslist, were in phone contact with the victim and left their 2001 Honda CRV dripping with blood. Not even the cleaning fluid and towels they were caught on CCTV buying shortly after the murder were enough to wipe away the evidence. And having killed LaFerrara they then dumped his body in an alleyway where it was quickly found.

This was the most telling indication that Miranda Barbour had made up her killing spree.

But the media attention did not abate and, instead, latching on to her claim to have only killed ‘bad people’ some media firms enthusiastically branded her ‘The Dexter killer’, after the fictional TV serial killer who murders only other baddies.

Nevermind insulting the dead and that her only known ‘alleged’ victim LaFerrara had done nothing worse than answer an online sex ad.

To this day Barbour has provided no credible evidence to detectives of any murder other than the one she has been charged with.

As scepticism grows around her story, the infamous murders of her home state serial killer Robert Hansen (the story of which was recently made into the movie The Frozen Ground with Nicholas Cage) might have inspired her to make up the story. Her incarceration also coincided with British serial killer Joanna Dennehy’s boastful and unapologetic admissions of three brutal knife murders of men she felt slighted by.

While inquiries continue, the question remains could she have been involved in any previous killing?

Given her frenzied attack on LaFerrara, you may say it’s possible.

But if she has, it cannot be on the industrial scale claimed and it’s more likely the police have caught her at the start of a spree rather than the conclusion of one – her claims being nothing more than attention-seeking fantasy.

For the media, who too readily embraced a big story that defied all conventional logic, the question is will they be more scrupulous next time or have they, in the drive to sell more copies and generate more online page hits, forever sacrificed getting it right first time round in favour of enticing in readers?

(Originally published in The Huffington Post)

New Literalism: How internet misfittery is warping the news

Posted on by Martin Newman

Someone apologised on Tuesday, although they hadn’t done anything wrong.

Unusual you might say, but it’s something we’re going to see a lot more of.

The reason for that is we have come to a time when misinformation, supposition and the tidal bores of online outrage are treated in the media with the same reverence as fact – provided they have an audience.

In the massively expanded and ever expanding world of online social networking and commentary there is now a sizeable section of the community who take everything they find on the internet at face value and who do not inquire. This amorphous, shape-shifting group regards what they see online, mistakes and all, literally and farms it out as fact to their connections.

Context has been thrown away for many people online and in its place is a new and dangerously ignorant reality.

By the time art collector Dasha Zhukova issued her grovelling apology on Tuesday afternoon for having been photographed sitting on a Bjarne Melgaard chair in the form of a black woman, millions of people around the world had already got a completely wrong opinion of her.

It was fuelled by the media, who reported the ‘outrage’ of regular people, which it then stoked and re-reported on. Many publishers seemed to leave out crucial information that would have explained the context of the photo, perhaps to not diminish the suggestion of racism.

Some punters even thought the chair was a real woman, made to pose semi-naked in subjugation.

And as if the existence of the picture, published digitally on the pop culture website Buro 24/7 about Garage magazine (of which Zhukova is editor), might not be enough to stir people up, others proffered that it had been doubly offensive coming on Martin Luther King Day (or MLK Day).

Nevermind that this was a Russian website and MLK Day is only celebrated in the US, and oddly Hiroshima and Toronto, and that elsewhere in the world few people are aware of it.

Online those boundaries are forgotten and made indistinguishable.

The digital community in the US, and quick to follow the media, quickly concluded this was some added racist slight by backward Europeans.

And because of this US-centric addition to the controversy the rest of the world suddenly was given the impression that the entire event had occurred in America rather than in cyberspace somewhere over the Urals.

Few people saw it for what it was – an edgy piece of political art designed to underline Zhukova’s serious industry credentials as a collector of modern art.

Not everyone’s cup of tea, sure, but not a malicious or even clumsy act of bigotry.

Created by the New York-based Norwegian artist and sculptor Bjarne Melgaard the piece first appeared at a Paris exhibition last year, titled Empire State, New York Art Now.

Because it deliberately and closely referenced the 1960s forniphilia (human furniture) works of British sculptor Allen Jones, who created similar works with white women as subjects, it was not at the time regarded as racist.

At the height of Pop Art Jones, now aged 76, created a series of furniture pieces based on bound white women, that inspired the sexualised female props in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

But in Tuesday’s digital furore few knew this or bothered to find it out. Instead this one unexplained picture fuelled a completely unnecessary racism row.

Zhukova, the partner of billionaire Roman Abramovich, and the publishers of Buro 24/7 fell on their swords, aware once the ball was rolling no sensible explanation would be enough to satisfy the online hornets’ nest that had been stirred up. While drawing a line under it their apologies, though, only gave those way-off claims of racism the appearance of credibility.

On Wednesday, the story is front page news and the truth even more obscured amidst the blustering, ignorant hubbub.

But this is hardly an isolated incident.

Increasingly misinformation peddled online is being repeated enough to make people believe it. And if enough people believe it the media starts to report it as though it were real.

In the past week a picture reportedly of a Syrian child sleeping between the graves of his parents swept the internet. It seemed to perfectly and dramatically underline the futile loss of lives in the Syrian conflict and further condemn the country’s leadership.

The only problem was it wasn’t a Syrian child and they weren’t graves. The picture set up and taken in Saudi Arabia by an artist had been appropriated because it fit the subject matter the original disseminator wanted to convey.

When photographer Abdul Aziz al Otaibi contacted the person who had first deliberately misrepresented it on Twitter as an example of Syrian atrocities, the response he got was: “Why don’t you just let go and claim it is a picture from Syria and gain a reward from God.”

The damage, in any case, had already been done with more people viewing the viral image than will ever read the truth about it.

On a less important level this week there was also the ‘bikini bridge’ hoax, picked up by the mainstream media as fact.

Writing in the Telegraph, Radhika Sangani noted: “Apparently all it takes for the internet to believe something is a trend is a few celebs tweets, blog posts and a hashtag.. behind all of this is something much darker: we all believed it because it sounds plausible.”

And commenting on the number of hoax YouTube videos reported as fact in the press last year Caitlin Dewey in the Washington Post described 2013 as “the year the media decisively elevated social media phenomenon, real or imagined, to the level of actual news”.

She cited the cheapness of sourcing it, the growth of social media and the lust for page views – tactics pioneered by high turnover news sites like Mail Online.

The often valueless sourcing of opinion from Twitter has meant you can find anyone online for comment on a particular angle to a story.

Gone are the days where a journalist would always seek out an expert in a field for their view. Now they take their pick from any number of anonymous postings, no matter how ill-informed, biased or stark-raving mad they are.

Reaction, any reaction, is reportable, no matter how right or wrong it is.

And now that everyone has a voice to express themselves the new literalists even make objections to the use of metaphors. No article can run online today describing a rivalry as a ‘war’ without several po-faced readers commenting self-righteously that war is nothing like that and the author’s an idiot for suggesting it.

The value of harnessing an online audience for news outlets has never been greater. We now measure the success and therefore the value of companies by the membership or readership they command. And it is so large now papers and broadcasters are unable to preclude it from mainstream news.

Unfortunately the upshot is facts, context and the full story have increasingly become a casualty.

(Originally published in The Huffington Post. Illustration: Internet Painting by Miltos Manetas)