Things They Should Invent: journalistic ethics addressing people who only skim the headlines

Several times recently I have seen situations where people who are normally quite sensible have just skimmed an article or caught a glance of a headline without absorbing the whole thing, and then have taken away only the sensationalism of the headline or someone's spin on the issue, without a sense of the situation as a whole. I know, it happens to everyone sometimes, it's happened to me.

But the reason I'm concerned is because I can think of more than one case where a normally-sensible person caught only a glimpse of the issue filtered through a generous helping of spin, and as a result took or recommended political action that is detrimental to me personally. They're hurting me, and the situation they think they're addressing by doing so isn't even true. It's like if your dentist drilled a perfectly healthy tooth because he misread the x-ray.

I can't blame people for not reading every article in depth - I certainly don't read everything - but it's extra frustrating because when it's an issue that affects me I do read every article in depth and seek out alternate interpretations and primary sources, but the people who were less diligent still have the power to hurt me. (The obvious suggestion at this point is to educate people, but I don't know going in who, if anyone, is going to end up hurting me through ignorance.)

I wish journalistic ethics required constructing articles and television features so that you only get facts if you just glance at it, and you have to focus and pay more in-depth attention to get spin and opinions.

"Microblogging site Twitter"

Sometimes when news articles refer to Twitter, the first mention describes it as "microblogging site Twitter".

Is there anyone - even one single person in the world - who knows what microblogging is but doesn't know what Twitter is?

I did hear of microblogging in passing before I became familiar with Twitter, but the concept didn't make sense to me. Then, later on, when I found out that various famous people I want to stalk like and admire were tweeting, I went and checked out their Twitter feeds and from that got a sense of what Twitter is. And from this, I groked the concept of microblogging.

But there has been no point in my internet experience where my concept of what Twitter is could ever have been clarified by describing it as a "microblogging site."

Things They Should Study: newspaper comment thread agree/disagree rates

Some of the news media comments sections let you vote on whether you agree or disagree with the comments. I never give it much attention because I try to avoid comment threads in general, and the agree/disagree rates tend to sit there unobtrusively. Maybe if I am in the comment thread and you don't have to log in to click and I have a strong reaction either way I might vote, but generally I pay it no mind.

Today I noticed a comment thread on a Globe and Mail article where all the comments were the kind of asshattery that normally makes me avoid comments threads in the first place, and all the comments had received a wide margin of disagree votes. So that implies that the people posting comments are not representative of general public opinion.

I think this merits further study. What percentage of comments receive general agreement overall? How frequently does the consensus of the voters correspond with the consensus of the commenters? (For example, is a given article receiving a lot of pro-widget comments, but those comments are being voted down, suggesting that the broader audience is anti-widget?) Insofar as political affiliation can be determined, which political affiliations are most likely to comment? Which are most likely to vote?

Careless reporting

The Toronto Star governs itself by a set of values called the Atkinson Principles. The second Atkinson Principle is Social Justice, and the fourth Atkinson Principle is The Rights of Working People.

I think they came perilously close to violating those principles with a bit of irresponsible reporting about city employees' sick leave.

The situation is that city employees' sick leave is currently banked, and they get paid for sick leave that is left unused when they leave their employment with the city. In the current labour negotiations, the city wants to take this away and the union wants to keep it.

There really two separate questions here, the second conditional on the first:

1. Should sick leave be banked?
2. Should employees be paid for unused banked sick leave?

Banking sick leave is not uncommon, although far from universal. As I've blogged about before, of the people I know who have paid sick leave, nearly all of them have bankable sick leave. This is a good arrangement because, as many people are fond of pointing out, sick leave is for when you're sick, and most people don't get sick at the same rate every year. Most years you only need a couple of days (say half a day for your annual check-up and then one day off because your brains are draining out your sinuses), but one or twice in your life you need a whole lot of time off, say for chemotherapy or major surgery.

With bankable sick leave, there is no other provision for time off for major medical conditions that require extensive time off. The assumption is that you'll use your banked sick leave for this. You can probably convince your employer to give you unpaid time off for major illness (in the cases of the people I was able to ask while writing this blog entry, the unpaid time off is technically at the employer's sole discretion, but realistically you'll get it), but there is no separate paid long-term disability leave. For example, someone I know worked at her job for 20 years with barely a day off, then one day threw out her back and required several months off to recover. Because she had nearly 20 years of sick leave banked, she was able to take the time she needed to recover without loss of income, then returned to work bringing with her 20 years of corporate memory back with her.

Whether or not to pay employees for unused bank sick leave is a separate issue. Some of the situations I'm familiar with get paid out or are tacitly allowed to tack it on at the beginning of retirement, others don't get any compensation for it - it's just sitting there as a safety net. In any case, it is possible to bank sick leave with or without paying employees for unused leave. It can work both ways.

The problem with the Toronto Star article is that they're presenting it as a single yes/no issue. They're presenting the pay-out as an integral part of banked sick leave, implying that to get rid of the pay-out you have to get rid of banked sick leave. If you look at the poll, they present it as a yes/no question, with no room for opinions such as "Banking the sick days is perfectly reasonable, but the payout at the end is a bit excessive." And, if you look at the comments section (I know, I know) a lot of people seem to be reading it as a single inseparable black and white issue.

My concern is that this article, especially with its somewhat sensationalist presentation (it was the most prominent article on the Toronto Star homepage all of yesterday, with the cartoon the largest image on the page), will lead people to become outraged at the prospect of up to 130 days' pay-out (which, as we know, people will be inclined to read without the "up to") and, seeing the pay-out as inseparable from banked sick leave, then write their city councillors demanding that banked sick leave for city employees be eliminated. Then our city workers will be stuck with a less just sick leave system that does not respond nearly as well to real-life sick leave needs, and all because of some unnuanced reporting from our city's largest newspaper.

Is the US louder than Canada, or is Buffalo louder than TO?

For a long time I've noticed that the commercials on US TV channels are kind of loud and unsubtle. I just assumed this was a difference between the US and Canada.

But it occurs to me that the difference might not be that they're USian and we're Canadian. It might be because the US channels I watch most often are from Buffalo, and the Canadian channels I watch most are from Toronto. Toronto is the biggest city in Canada, whereas Buffalo is smaller and is more of a local centre. So TO is more likely to be able to attract top advertising dollars and talent to make sleek and clever commercials.

What do you think?

Acting

The first couple of times I see something on TV, I don't normally notice the acting because I'm following the story. But then when I revist something much later, I notice acting that I wasn't appreciating before.

For example, Hugh Laurie (i.e. the tall one) here:



And OMG Brent Spiner! This scene is a bit cringy out of necessity, but he's playing the role of an emotionless android trying to figure out courtship rituals. Okay, yeah, whatever. But it's so much more amazing once you consciously think that the actor inside this android is a real person with a sense of humour!

Things They Should Invent: Cosby Show prequel

If I remember my Cosby Show chronology correctly, Cliff and Clair started sprogging before they finished their professional degrees. That means that the first few years were a madhouse. Clair would have been pregnant while in law school, she's articling and Cliff is interning and they have a toddler running around and another on the way, Clair having to take multiple and closely-spaced maternity leaves (in the 60s and 70s!)

That would have been way more interesting!

I hope they don't do Corner Gas in other languages

Today's Corner Gas is untranslatable.

Simpsons subtitling inconsistency

Soundtrack:

Grampa: "I just had a nightmare that I was back with your mother."
Homer: "Oh, how I hate her."

Subtitles:

Grampa: "I just had a nightmare that I was back in England"
Homer: "Oh, how I hate them!"

I desperately want to know the story here.

My only problem with the plot of today's Simpsons

How did Lisa know which key to play Heart and Soul in?

On word choices

Antonia Zerbisias objects because some people on US TV talking about abortion chose and/or landed on the word "people" instead of the word "women."

This is really interesting to me, because I tend to say "people" instead of "women" in the same place for exactly the opposite motive attributed to the speakers here. It's something I started doing a long time ago in response to two things.

First, to avoid creating a Someone Else's Problem field, I don't specifically mention gender unless it's a case of causation as opposed to correlation.

Then, after reading some Deborah Tannen where she articulated how male tends to be linguistically unmarked and female tends to be by default Other and observing a number of interactions IRL where this manifested itself absurdly (example: a woman mentioned that she had just moved into the gaybourhood, and a man in the conversation made a stupid "don't drop the soap" type joke) I decided to deliberately make the female unmarked whenever it could be smoothly incorporated. So instead of saying "This is really dangerous, someone could fall down the stairs. If it's pregnant woman she could have a miscarriage and if it's an old lady she could break a hip!" I would say "...If they're pregnant they could fall down the stairs, and if they're postmenopausal they could break a hip!" I know it doesn't actually do anything - no one is going to think for a moment that it's a pregnant or postmenopausal man - but I'm doing it on principle and as an intellectual challenge. So far no one has noticed that I do this (or perhaps they have and just haven't said anything - in my line of work people tend to notice).

I don't really have a point here, I just think it's interesting.

Me and My Llama

When I first saw this on Sesame Street as a little kid, I didn't question the plausibility of the situation. Now I desperately want to know the backstory.

Why people aren't writing about the economy as a feminist issue

Broadsheet asks why no one is writing about the economy as a feminist issue.

The answer is simple: it's more effective not to. People who are into feminism will read articles that aren't specifically about feminism, but people who aren't into feminism will skip over or dis the credibility of articles that are about feminism. Positioning it as a feminist issue sets up a giant Someone Else's Problem field around the article.

An article with a title like "How the economic crisis is affecting women" would get skipped over by male readers and anti-feminist readers, and women who aren't affected in the way described in the article would leave partway through. (Think about how you skip the Women's Issues section of your local politician's website when all their articles are about childcare and you don't have young children.) However, an article with a title like "How the economic crisis is affecting people in fields that aren't receiving stimulus dollars" would attract readers from everywhere but the stimulus fields. The vast majority of people work in non-stimulus fields and the vast majority of people are at least a little bit worried about their jobs, so it would get their attention. And if every single person interviewed in the article happened to be female, I doubt the readers would even notice.

Dear CBC, you're embarassing us

Dear CBC:

Yes, it is news that Barack Obama is visiting Ottawa. However, devoting literally 50% of your top-of-the-hour world news spot to that fact is kind of excessively fangirl. Be cool and do your job instead of going all asquee.

Sincerely,

Someone who learned that lesson in high school

Open Letter to all journalists writing about pay equity

Apparently there are parts of the recent federal budget that would be detrimental to pay equity for federal employees.

Problem: we don't know how pay equity for federal employees currently works.

I know one thing that a lot of commenters don't seem to know: it isn't individual, it's by profession. So it isn't that Jane catches a glimpse of John's paystub and sees that he's earning more than her even though they both went through the same university program and graduated at the same time and were hired at the same time. It's that female-dominated professions are not being paid the same as male-dominated professions who do work of equal value and difficulty that requires equal expertise. Apparently (this was told to me several years ago by someone who is in a position to know, so any inaccuracies are the fault of my misremembering or misunderstanding) what they do is they reduce the difficulty and skill and education and stress required to do every job in the federal public service down to a mathematical formula to quantify the value of the work, and then compare the female-dominated jobs with male-dominated jobs of equal value. If the female-dominated profession isn't being paid the same as the male-dominated profession, they increase the pay for everyone in the public service (male and female) that's doing that profession.

However, I don't understand what the current changes would do, because I don't know what's going on currently. I see media saying that the proposed changes would be detrimental, but I don't know why they're detrimental because I don't know what the current system is.

I don't like to just blindly take people's word for things, I want to understand them properly. If you give me all the information I'll probably be on your side, but if you don't give me all the information I can't form a proper opinion, and therefore am going to take no action and express no opinion because I'm insufficiently informed. Help me out here, okay?

PBS censors have a sense of humour

PBS is showing George Carlin. He just said "...your neighbour has a vibrator that plays Oh Come All Ye Faithful."

The censor bleeped the word "come".

Which makes it even dirtier.

Brilliant!

Questions Ugly Betty needs to answer

Why does Hilda have customers? She's a brand new hairdresser with a chair set up in a spare corner of the family home. But she always has customers. Why? This is New York City, I'm sure there are lots of hairdressers around, the fact that she's there and she's a hairdresser shouldn't be enough to get her customers. Are her prices better? Is her location particularly convenient? Is she getting referrals? Someone should mention something in passing, because it really doesn't make sense.

I think Peter Mansbridge is misreading Barack Obama

Peter Mansbridge is saying that Barack Obama is looking cool and confident and composed.

That's not what I'm seeing. To me it looks like he's quite obviously trying very very hard to look cool and confident and composed but is really somewhere between ecstatic and terrified.

Things that bug me about random movies that I saw ages ago

1. In the recent Phantom of the Opera movie, Minnie Driver plays Carlotta, but since she can't sing opera a professional opera singer dubs the singing parts. It makes sense if you think about it from the perspective of casting an actress - the actress can't sing opera so we'll have someone else do it. However, being an opera singer also involves a certain amount of acting, and I find it difficult to believe that there are no professional opera singers who could play an over-the-top diva. Sopranos everywhere must be pissed!

2. In Juno, Juno could just take the van and drive off to the adoptive parents' house on a whim, even though it's established that it's like an hour away. The first time she gets a "Where have you been?" from her step-mother, but there are no consequences and she does it again a couple of times. I'll grant the character a bit more freedom than is realistic because this is a movie about teen pregnancy, but in no world can you just take the family's main vehicle for several hours without telling anyone! Even if her parents don't feel the need to closely supervise her, it's a matter of basic household logistics. People need to know when the car is coming back. If she isn't even going to be subject to this constraint, why bother to make the character a teenager?

Also, Bleeker can just stop running in the middle of track practice to talk to Juno? Since when is that allowed?

March of the Penguins drinking game

Every time a penguin falls down, take a drink.

(Yes, Poodle, this means I completely disregarded your advice. I take full responsibility.)