journalism – Page 12 – Common Infirmities

Mutually reinforcing headlines in Munich

I’m spending a couple of weeks in Munich, and I had to burst out laughing when I saw this tabloid on sale from a stand. The headlines seem to be unintentionally commenting upon one another:

New war in Iraq

followed by

This is your true legacy!

(I have to admit that my translation above, while literally more or less correct, and corresponds to the way I first read it due to the juxtaposition, is not really idiomatic. In the context of large tabloid headlines it’s clear that an appropriate translation would be “This is the right way to leave an inheritance”, and the article is all about how to write your will and avoid paying inheritance tax.)

Return address

From a recent article in The Guardian about the rise of antisemitism in Europe.

A similar normalisation may be under way in Germany, according to a 2013 study by the Technical University of Berlin. In 14,000 hate-mail letters, emails and faxes sent over 10 years to the Israeli embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Professor Monika Schwarz-Friesel found that 60% were written by educated, middle-class Germans, including professors, lawyers, priests and university and secondary school students. Most, too, were unafraid to give their names and addresses – something she felt few Germans would have done 20 or 30 years ago.

That sounds very convincing. “Unafraid to give their names” sounds like an impressive fact, showing how socially accepted antisemitic threats have become, in contrast to 20 years ago. But then it reminded me of an interview given by Ignatz Bubis, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, almost exactly 20 years ago (14 December 1992, to be precise):

SPIEGEL: Mr Bubis, have you received any antisemitic letters today?

BUBIS: Yes. They range from threats to ridiculous pamphlets explaining that Jews meddle in everything, to insults. A man wrote to me recently to say, he saw me on television, and was greatly impressed by what I said — until it occurred to him, that I belong to another race, and so everything I said was terrible.

SPIEGEL: What is new about this antisemitism?

BUBIS: The only thing that is new, is that the letters now come with name and return address. Antisemitism is now socially acceptable. It is once again permitted.

(original German below the break)

Perhaps it is just wishful thinking, to suppose that there must have been a brief shining moment when anti-Semites were ashamed to sign their names to their threatening letters.

Continue reading “Return address”

Imprisoning rich criminals is mindless populism…

… says rich journalist/politician-felon Chris Huhne in the Guardian.

Just in case you haven’t been following this, Andy Coulson masterminded a criminal conspiracy to eavesdrop on private conversations and bribe public officials. His minions basically vandalised a police investigation into the murder of a 13-year-old. Now, his culpability as director of the operation has been difficult to establish in court, so unlike those minions he has been convicted only on a single relatively minor charge. He has been sentenced to just 18 months in prison, of which he will likely only serve one quarter.

But Huhne thinks the fact that the sentence is so short proves that he shouldn’t go to prison at all. He compares current penal practice to “the 1723 Black Act, which introduced 50 new hanging offences, including one for “hiding in a forest while disguised”.” He seems to think that the only proper purpose of prison is to restrain violent criminals. The rest is just playing to the tabloid-aroused bloodlust of the crowd. It’s one thing to lock up the evil people — BBC star pedophile Rolf Harris is his favoured example — but normal upstanding rich people like Coulson (and, by implication, Huhne himself) are much more useful on the outside. Merely being labelled criminals is enough suffering for their tender egos, unlike the hardened chavs who need to be sent to prison for looting a bottle of water, or receiving a single pair of looted underpants from a friend.

It’s depressing to be reminded of how primitive the thinking often is of people at the highest levels of government. Continue reading “Imprisoning rich criminals is mindless populism…”

Politicians who bring home the bacon

I commented before about the weird obsession of journalists with photographing Labour leader Ed Miliband eating bacon sandwiches. Here’s another one. It’s genuinely unclear to me whether this is about demonstrating some kind of general average-Brit bona fides — like when American politicians eat deep-fried corn dogs — or whether it’s more specifically about demonstrating that he’s not too Jewish.

How Harold Wilson kept it together

One could spend the whole day and half the night recording the weird infelicities of expression that automatic spell-checking has wrought upon once-proud journalistic enterprises. But some are truly exceptional.

According tq The New Republic, his close associate Joseph Kagan (who was rumoured to be his KGB handler, by those who thought he was a Soviet mole) was a “clothing magnet”.

It sounds like the kind of excuse a teenager caught shoplifting might use. “I don’t know how it got into my bag, your Honour. I seem to be a clothing magnet.”

Cutting the Snowdian knot

All Five Eyes — really, all eyes in the democratic world — are on Australia, watching its ingenious solution to what seemed an insoluble problem: How to conform the needs of modern network surveillance for combatting crime and terrorism, with the demands of democratic governance. In their remarkably forthright way, they have recognised that there are two basic problems:

Espionage agencies have an alarming tendency to involve themselves in illegal activity;
Their activities tend to cause scandals, as citizens grow alarmed by hearing of what they consider to be threats to their privacy.

Their solutions are equally forthright. Rather than trying stopgaps of limiting the information collected, time periods for which it can be stored, purposes to which the information may be applied, and blah blah blah, which are completely arbitrary, and only end up forcing hard-working spies to spend their time thinking up ingenious subterfuges to evade the rules, they have attacked the problem at its roots. According to a recent news report, the Australian government plans to propose legislation under which

ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) will have the power to declare their activities to be “special intelligence operations”, in which intelligence officers receive immunity from liability for actions that would be “otherwise illegal”. Since requiring even the head of their own agency to sign off on unlimited warrants for lawbreaking would be too onerous, approval of ASIO’s deputy director general will suffice.
To avoid scandals, all reporting on special intelligence operations will be banned, punishable by up to five years in prison. (And that’s only if the leaks are inconsequential; disclosing information that would “endanger the health or safety of any person or prejudice the effective conduct of a special intelligence operation” could get you 10 years.) The beauty of the system is that, since no one outside the organisation actually knows which operations are special, journalists — and academics, and pretty much everyone else — will have to stop talking about the security services altogether. And since the security services will have access to all of their electronic records in real time, there’s little risk of people deciding to hold these discussions in private.

Problem solved!

Once Australians have stopped troubling their pretty little heads about espionage, all that redirected intellectual energy will help the Australian economy to better compete with China.

Blaming the victim: Antibiotic edition

Having failed to hold back the tides, King Camerute is now taking on the worthy task of stemming the flood of antibiotic resistant microbes, according to a report on the front page of today’s Times. On the inside pages we have an opinion piece by one Theodore Dalrymple, under the title

Patients, not GPs, are to blame for the antibiotics crisis

Since GPs are responsible for prescribing most of the antibiotics in this country, I was curious how they were not to blame. I assumed the story would take one of two tacks (or both):

Patients are obtaining prescriptions under false pretences, perhaps by exaggerating or misrepresenting their symptoms.
Patients are somehow acquiring antibiotics without prescriptions.

Neither of these is mentioned. In fact, despite the headline — which Dr Dalrymple is presumably not responsible for — the article states clearly “The real problem we face is the over-prescription of antibiotics in ordinary medical practice.” Patients are never mentioned in the article until the last paragraph, which states, in full

And, hard though it ma be for some to accept, it would help if patients took their GPs’ advice rather than demanding the drugs they want. Doctor really does know best.

Well, that’s it then. The responsibility does not lie with the GP who actively wrote a prescription. It lies with the stupid but strangely powerful patient who “demanded” it. And it gets worse. We live, it seems, in a “litigious age and doctors are afraid”.

There is, after all, more rejoicing by malpractice lawyers over one missed diagnosis than over 99 people treated unnecessarily with antibiotics.

Presumably the author thinks they should rejoice more over all the people treated unnecessarily with antibiotics? I’m confused. In any case, they’re bad people, so anything that makes them happy is bad for the rest of us.

I’m no expert in British law, but why would a treatment with unnecessary antibiotics prevent a lawsuit? How many doctors have actually been sued, under circumstances where a random antibiotic prescription might have forestalled the lawsuit? Dr Dalrymple doesn’t even have a silly anecdote to offer.

Or could it be that overworked GPs find prescribing antibiotics to be a convenient substitute for actually talking to the patients? Dr Dalrymple, we learn at the bottom, is a “retired prison doctor” which, I think, helps to explain where he acquired his exquisite contempt for patients.

Weird Ed

Thursday were elections — local council elections and European parliament. The European results are being held back until Sunday, when other countries will be voting, but the local results show what look like solid improvement for Labour, big losses for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and substantial increases for the anti-immigrant UKIP. (Substantial because they held only two council seats before, and now they have over 100.) So the main topics of the news coverage were, of course,

Labour is floundering.
UKIP expected to do very well, perhaps get the most votes, in the European elections.

The best I can understand, the opposition is expected to gain a protest vote against the government currently in power in non-national elections*, so the fact that much of the protest vote was soaked up by UKIP makes them look like losers, because their gains were less than expected (if you ignored UKIP). Except, that reasoning is odd: Labour didn’t do badly in an absolute sense; they didn’t do badly in a prognostic sense — the protest vote is fleeting anyway, and their ability to hold it against a clown parade like UKIP says little about their performance in a general election.

But really, this was just an occasion, however inappropriate, for some anonymous Labour grandees to gripe about Ed Miliband. In particular, The Times quoted one as saying Miliband

looks weird, sounds weird, is weird.

Continue reading “Weird Ed”

Ironic headlines: Espionage edition

From a recent front page of the Guardian:

MPs condemn oversight of spy agencies

In fact, the article says that some MPs have recently been criticising the laxity of oversight of spy agencies. But even post-Snowden I think most of them are more inclined to condemn the very notion that mere mortals should have the effrontery to meddle with the security services. I mean, it’s not as though they couldn’t have been asking questions before Snowden had to sacrifice all comforts in his life by forcing this into everyone’s face.

Percents are hard

Some really bad science reporting from the BBC. They report on a new study finding the incidence of diagnosed coeliac disease increasing (and decreasing incidence of dermatitis herpetiformis, though this doesn’t rate a mention) in the UK. Diagnoses have gone up from 5.2 to 19.1 per 100,000 in about 20 years, which they attribute to increased awareness. Except, they don’t say what that is 100,000 of. You have to go back to the original article to see that it is person-years, and that they are talking about incidence, and not prevalence (in technical parlance); they use the word “rate”, which is pretty ambiguous, and commonly used — particularly in everyday speech — to refer to prevalence. If you read it casually — and, despite being a borderline expert in the subject, I misread it at first myself — you might think they mean that 19 in 100,000 of the population of Britain suffers from coeliac; that would be about 12,000 people, hardly enough to explain the condition’s cultural prominence (and prominent placement on the BBC website). In fact, they estimate that about 150,000 have diagnosed CD in the UK.

As if aiming maximally to compound the confusion, they quote one of the authors saying

“This [increase] is a diagnostic phenomenon, not an incidence phenomenon. It is exactly what we had anticipated.”

In the article they (appropriately) refer to the rate of diagnosis as incidence, but here they say it’s not about “incidence”.

To make matters worse, they continue with this comment:

Previous studies have suggested around 1% of the population would test positive for the condition – but the data from this study suggests only 0.25% are diagnosed.

I think that normally, if you say “only x% are diagnosed” is meant relative to the number of cases; here it would mean 0.25% of the 1%. But, in fact, they mean to compare the 0.25% of the population who are diagnosed with the 1% who actually suffer from the disease.