Phew! Lucky our own media are always impartial, eh.

"The sudden resignations this week of BBC director-general Tim Davie and CEO of news Deborah Turness has focussed minds on the role of the media. It has been startling – and grimly predictable – to watch senior figures at the BBC scrambling to defend their failures by muttering darkly about ‘right-wing conspiracies’ and ‘inside jobs’. Few, if any, have paused to consider whether the real problem might be their own cowardice.

"The same rot runs through mainstream media across the world. In Ireland, I’ve met too many well-paid figures at RTÉ, the 'Irish Times' and the 'Irish Independent' who seem serenely proud of their refusal to touch anything remotely controversial. ... [appearing] particularly self-satisfied, even self-righteous, about [their] ability to avoid difficult issues. ...

    

"I’ve thought a lot about how these individuals can so confidently defend their inaction. Most, when pressed, admit they knew everything all along and that, when it mattered most, their courage failed them. It raises the question of how long high-status professionals should serve a system they know is doing harm. How long before they find the courage to break ranks and refuse to comply?"

~ Stella O'Malley from her post 'The trans reckoning has arrived'

"Readers will be aware that the BBC’s current travails over impartiality stem from the leak of a 19-page memorandum by the journalist Michael Prescott who was for three years an advisor on editorial standards to the Corporation. Prescott’s dossier includes the revelation that President Trump’s remarks were falsified in a BBC documentary before the 2024 presidential election ... The memorandum, brought to light and published by the 'Daily Telegraph,' can be read here:

"In a full discussion of many of the BBC’s distortions, one page of the nineteen is devoted to [our] History Reclaimed [website]. In 2022 Alex Gray compiled our own dossier of the Corporation’s historical mistakes and prejudices, based on four programmes and two news bulletins over the preceding two years which covered subjects including slavery and the slave trade, the restitution of the Benin Bronzes, the Irish Famine of the late 1840s, the Bengal Famine of 1943-4 and the imputed racism of Winston Churchill. History Reclaimed called for accuracy and impartiality, the presentation of the full range of historical interpretations, the use of experts rather than ‘presenters,’ and the establishment of a panel of qualified historians to advise and assist the BBC. You can find our report here:

"We did not receive a direct reply, but the BBC put out a dismissive response accusing us of ‘cherry-picking a handful of examples.’ We now discover that Mr Prescott thought our points ‘fascinating and compelling’ and also ‘reasonable,’ and that he encouraged a meeting with us, but this was ‘judged inappropriate’ by the BBC.

"History Reclaimed notes that like so many other organisations and people in British life, we too have been ignored by the BBC when making accurate criticisms of their content and modest proposals for its improvement. We take heart from Mr Prescott’s endorsement of our points. We will watch with interest to see if the presentation of history on BBC radio and television improves. Given that we were brushed aside then and that the BBC is trying to deny its systemic failings now, we are not optimistic. Perhaps President Trump will have better luck."

~ from the History Reclaimed blog post 'BBC Scandal Confirms History Reclaimed’s Warnings'

Misinformation” and “disinformation” ... are simply jargon for “things I disagree with.”

"The sense prevails that no two people who research disinformation are talking about quite the same thing. This will ring true to anyone who follows the current media discussion around online propaganda. 'Misinformation' and 'disinformation' are used casually and interchangeably to refer to an enormous range of content, ranging from well-worn scams to viral news aggregation; from foreign-intelligence operations to trolling; from opposition research to harassment. In their crudest use, the terms are simply jargon for 'things I disagree with'.”

          Joseph Bernstein, from his article 'Bad News: Selling the story of disinformation' 

The World, The Naked Truth + The Well-Dressed Lie

Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind, 
Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1896, oil on canvas, 910 x 720mm

One day, a long time ago, legend has it that The Truth and The Lie meet up. 

And The Lie says to The Truth: “It’s a marvellous day today”! The Truth looks up to the skies and sighs in surprise, for the day really was beautiful. And so The Lie began earning the trust of The Truth, and they began spending a lot of time together.

And then one day, they came upon a well. Says The Lie to The Truth: “The water is very nice, let’s take a bath together!” The Truth however--still suspicious--tests the water, discovering it is indeed very nice. So they undress together and start bathing. Until suddenly The Lie leaps out of the water, steals the clothes of the Truth, and runs away with them! 

The furious Truth swarms out of the well in pursuit, running everywhere to find the Lie and retrieve her clothes -- but to no avail. And The World, seeing The Truth naked for the first time, turned its gaze away to hide its own embarrassment, and contempt.

So poor Truth returned to the well and disappeared forever, hiding her shame from The World. And ever since then, The Lie travels around the world dressed as The Truth. Which satisfies the needs of society, because, the World, in any case, harbours no desire at all to ever see the naked Truth.

[HT Dan Kealy]

Quote of the Day: On politicians & #FakeNews

 

“Apparently politicians are very eager to introduce measures to protect us from #FakeNews. Somehow I doubt it means they'll stop lying to us.”
~ Per Bylund

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Fake news v fake news [updated]

 

Sometimes it's had to know whether to laugh or cry.  At Donald Trump's latest rally he took aim at what he (often correctly) calls fake news, before going on to talk about approval polls showing “different facts” to those in the actual polls; a “Swedish incident” he had made up – provoking much mirth on Twitter – and using a quote from Thomas Jefferson about this very thing, fake news, that Trump appeared to pinch from the Washington Post (who he has regularly lambasted as “fake media”) and singularly failed to understand.

It’s true that when president, under scurrilous attack by the media, Thomas Jefferson did write, answering a question about “the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted,”  that “[n]othing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.” But the fuller context is that Jefferson was talking about contemporary newspapers, those of 1807, which had become blatant scandal sheets, unashamedly partisan, and a world away from those he had envisioned in arguing for the freedom of the press decades earlier.  “As for what is not true you will always find abundance in the newspapers,” he told a friend of the 1806 newspapers teeming both with valid criticism of his Administration and made-up stories of the corruption of the Jefferson White House.

It as as Mark Twain was to say much later, that not to read a newspaper is to be uninformed, but to read a newspaper at all is to be misinformed.

So how are we to proceed? As it happens, if Trump had read Jefferson’s letter entire instead of just the section of it he ripped from a Washington newspaper, he may have himself found an answer. Here is the letter entire:

'To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, 'by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.' Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
    'Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
    'General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
    'Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d & 4th should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy.'

In other words, we would be better served if news organisations would follow as a simple policy the edict of the good detective: “Just the facts, ma’am.”

UPDATE: Trump has now claimed his fake news about a terror attack in Sweden – a claim that baffled the current Swedish Prime Minister and promoted a former one to ask what Trump is smoking – was based on his mis-viewing of a Fox News story. “It ... seems to be new that a US president bases commentary of foreign issues in Fox News coverage.”

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More Russian fake news on the way [update 2]

 

 

Soviet-era Russia almost invented modern political propaganda. Whatever the truth today about “fake news” or of claims that Russia “hacked the US election,” it’s clear that Russia's state-owned foreign language news services are still directed by the Kremlin, and are and have been attempting to sway elections around the world, broadcasting on Sputnik and RT for example what can best be described as carefully-crafted spin promoting selected candidates.

Security officials believe there are two basic elements to the Russian strategy: leaking hacked documents, such as the Democratic National Convention emails obtained by Wikileaks during the US presidential election, and creating – or seizing on and exaggerating - false or misleading news events.

It doesn’t take much to get crap passed around.

The most notorious example of the latter came in January 2016, when Russia’s state-owned Channel One reported that “Lisa,” a 13-year old girl from a Russian-immigrant family, had been abducted and raped by “southern looking” asylum seekers in Germany. The news was not exactly fake – Lisa had indeed vanished for a night, and had initially claimed to have been raped.
    But before police established neither crime had occurred (she had stayed overnight at a friend’s house), protesters from Germany’s Russian speaking diaspora appeared outside Mrs Merkel’s office waving banners reading “our children are in danger!” and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, accused the German government of a cover-up.  The Lisa case is widely viewed the most egregious example of Kremlin propaganda to date, and nothing on the same scale has been seen before or since.
    One European official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he believed it was an experiment, a “test” to see how far such tactics could be used to inflame discontent with Angela Merkel’s policy on immigration. 

London’s Telegraph newspaper cites the East StratCom Task Force (set up by the European Union set up to monitor and respond to Russian propaganda) as saying “Angela Merkel, who will seek a historic fourth term as chancellor of Germany at federal elections in September, has been singled out as a priority target in the coming year.”

 And the Telegraph reports that at least two other European security arms expect Russia to meddle in their elections, promoting candidates keen to “drop sanctions imposed on Russia over its annexation of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine, and strongly sceptical of NATO – Europe’s remaining bulwark against any further Russian aggression.

The DGSE, France’s equivalent of MI6, said this week it expects Russia to intervene in the presidential election in April and May on the side of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front. The agency’s director general believes Russia will use internet bots to spread fake news favourable to Ms Le Pen on social media and may leak embarrassing emails stolen from her opponents by hackers, Le Canard Enchaîné , a French weekly, reported on Wednesday.
    In just the past two weeks, Denmark has publically identified Russia as a key cyber espionage threat, Norway said its Labour Party and email accounts belonging to several civil servants had been targeted by Russian hacking group, and Italy said it suspected Russia was behind a four-month malware attack against its foreign ministry last year…
    March’s vote in the Netherlands, the French presidential elections in April and May, and polls in Norway, the Czech Republic, and Serbia, may also be targeted…
    “We have to realise this is not a media strategy run by public relations executives,” said Dr Stefan Meister, who studies Russian propaganda in Germany. “This is a security strategy, run by security agencies," he said, "it is part of the security doctrine of the Russian Federation”

This is not a reason to hyperventilate. But it is a reason to remember what Robert Bidinotto reminded us of last week – that “Putin is a killer. He rose to power via the Moscow apartment bombings atrocity… He has had his political rivals murdered by poison and other nasty means. He runs an brutal oligarchy with an iron fist, and permits no opposition” – and to subject the sniff test anything emanating from Russian news services.

As we always should have.

READ: How Vladimir Putin and Russia are using cyber attacks and fake news to try to rig three major
           European elections this year – TELEGRAPH

[Picture by NRO]

UPDATE 1: Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, The (UK) Observer reports the American intelligence community is “pushing back” against a White House “it considers leaky, untruthful and penetrated by the Kremlin”:

A senior National Security Agency official explained that NSA was systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, in an unprecedented move. For decades, NSA has prepared special reports for the president’s eyes only, containing enormously sensitive intelligence. In the last three weeks, however, NSA has ceased doing this, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep their best SIGINT secrets.
    Since NSA provides something like 80 percent of the actionable intelligence in our government, what’s being kept from the White House may be very significant indeed. However, such concerns are widely shared across the IC, and NSA doesn’t appear to be the only agency withholding intelligence from the administration out of security fears.
    What’s going on was explained lucidly by a senior Pentagon intelligence official, who stated that “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM,” meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. “There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,” the official added in wry frustration.
    None of this has happened in Washington before. A White House with unsettling links to Moscow wasn’t something anybody in the Pentagon or the Intelligence Community even considered a possibility until a few months ago. Until Team Trump clarifies its strange relationship with the Kremlin, and starts working on its professional honesty, the IC will approach the administration with caution and concern.

UPDATE 2: Note that these stories are both written in Britain.

Yet at this writing [in America itself], the Russia story still hasn’t caught fire.
    Why?
    As [David Corn of Mother Jones] explains [to Politico], the press corps already has its hands full with Trump stories…

And tweets. You have a media obsessed with tweets, with the short-term, with the easy hits, and ignoring anything further.

    “This quietude is good news for Putin—and reason for him to think he could get away with such an operation again,” Corn concludes.

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Bonus Quotes of the Day: On fake news

 

“By all means: Let’s confront and defeat the menace of Fake News. But to do so, it’s critical that one not be selective in which type one denounces, and it is particularly important that one not sanction Fake News when it promotes one’s own political objectives. Most important of all is that those who want to lead the cause of denouncing Fake News not convert themselves into its most prolific disseminators whenever the claims of a Fake News account are pleasing or self-affirming."
~ Glenn Greenwald from ‘The Guardian’s Summary of Julian Assange’s Interview Went Viral and Was Completely False’ [hat tip Christian Wernstedt]

“’We lost because the Russians hacked into our computers’ is in effect an admission: ‘we were hiding something that was true and that people ought not to have known.’
    “Previously, the voters were ‘deplorable’ but now they are decent. However, they have been fooled by Fake News. So decent ... but stupid…
    “The champions of faking it -- faking science, faking economics, and revealing secretly taped banter have now created a new label -- Fake News. And a new cool war---foreign governments must be blamed, but Saudi Arabia should be appointed to head up the UN Council on women's rights. Consistency, anyone? …
    “Perhaps, in the future, everything that is anti-Government will be termed "Fake News." I hope not.
    “You may have just realised that you have Stasi friends in the GOP, too. And therein lies the great danger. Truth will be become fake, and propaganda will be sold as true.”
~ Vinay Kolhatkar from ‘Russians or Fake News, Which is It?’

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How to spot (and not to spread) fake news

 

As anyone will know who’s ever been involved in a story that’s been turned into news, it’s what you hear in the media should generally always be divided by ten.

But lately the recommended divisor has recently become very much larger – and readers are increasingly wary of fake news. News which should attract a negative sign and not just a large divisor. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to know who to trust. Here’s one tweeter’s handy guide:

Updated chart by Vanessa Otero.

For the record, she’s a lawyer from Colorado; and you know how lawyers lie for a living. So you have to wonder: can she be trusted?

So how do you judge a news story today, before you read it – or share it -- especially when so few people these days seem to read nothing but the headline,

A muslim is harassed on a bus by racist Trump supporters, you hear. And then you hear she made the story up.

A muslim immigrant rapes a twelve-year-old girl, you hear. And then you discover the story is made up by the authors of an anti-immigrant website.

A child is photographed in a sea of dead bodies in Syria and broadcast by mainstream media. And then you discover the pictures came from a music video made four years before.

Not to mention the stories emanating from the CIA that Russia hacked the American election – stories rejected by the FBI who “decline to accept the CIA’s analysis” because unlike the CIA (who has actually hacked elections) their own “evidentiary standards require it to make cases that can stand up in court.”

Even the fact-checking sites themselves whom you used to be able to trust are now accused of bias.

So who do you trust in a post-truth world when you know it’s the truth that will always set you free?

And by what manner or means can you manage to winnow the fake from the fulsome?

Visiting professor at Loyola University Ben Bayer reckons he has developed the perfect sniff test.

This isn’t [he assures us] like that professor’s dogmatic list of sites to avoid. It’s general advice that anyone can use to figure out for themselves what to treat as reliable and unreliable — to assemble their own list of reliable and unreliable news sources.

So how do you develop a critical nose for news?

It involves learning how to do a sniff test on the news.
    The sniff test for news is just like the one you do at the supermarket. You wouldn’t bite into a melon that smells funky, so why would you swallow a news story that does? News is funky when the source is suspicious, when the nature of the claim being made is disproportionate to the evidence offered, and when it’s presented in a dishonest manner.
    The sniff test for news is far from infallible. But in my experience, running the test before believing and sharing a story can help avoid embarrassing mistakes.

Bayer has written a series of five posts that he’s been sharing over the last fortnight (currently up to four) that you might like to read, and digest, and share with those really annoying friends who continually post fake fricking news! Ahem.

Eventually [he said when he started the series] I’ll include a separate link to an essay about each question here, so you can share just the one you might think an offending poster needs to ask him or herself:
    (1) What is the source of this story and what do I know about it?
    (2) How likely is the story to be true in the first place?
    (3) If this story were true, what else would be true?
    (4) Does the story represent its own facts honestly?
    (5) Why do I want to believe it is true? Why would someone else want me to believe it’s true?

Feel free to share.

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“Why no leftie fake news sites?”

 

Fake news. Left liberals like to think they’re not part of it – to be specific, of the whole website-publishing-fake-political-stories-that-go-viral thing. The Double Standard for instance has this morning published a piece by “a fake news writer” claiming (to The Sub-Standard’s obvious delight) that “leftie / liberal fake news [sites are] much rarer” because “it just has never worked, it never takes off. You’ll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.”

Perhaps a simpler explanation is that the liberal left don’t need to set up fake news coming from sites in Macedonia and elsewhere because they have them coming out already in the mainstream media from places like the Clinton News Network and Times Square. (Not to mention Tony Blair’s entire media army, from which milieu the very term “spin doctor” emerged.)

This is neither new, nor trivial. They have peddled fake news that has literally changed the world. Consider for example how the New York Times helped to save, then lionise, the “anti-communist” Castro (“Fidel Castro has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution’” wrote the Times’s Herbert Matthews over the sound of Castro’s firing squads, “but it amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist.”) And to actively cover up Stalin’s many infamies ("Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” wrote the Times’s Walter Duranty while the corpses were being piled high around him.) Not to mention how even today its senior staff gather each week in the Times office to “craft the narrative” for the week, or even year, ahead – and have all-but admitted post-election that it publishes advocacy instead of news.

The Times being just one among hundreds, and still the most influential mainstream outlet among them, why on earth would you need to start fake liberal-left news sites when the mainstream ones are already doing the job for you?

..

Bullshit News [updated]

 

You may have heard that Google is refusing advertising on what it calls “fake news sites.”

The shifts comes as Google, Facebook and Twitter Inc face a backlash over the role they played in the U.S. presidential election by allowing the spread of false and often malicious information that might have swayed voters toward Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Great news. Though just as many voters would have been swayed towards his opponent by broadcasts from the likes of the Clinton News Network (CNN) and the New York Times, which has all-but admitted it publishes advocacy instead of news and, according to one former senior staffer, makes up its news-slant a whole year in advance.

Given the behaviour of the mainstream media in this election season, one has to question whether many of these folks can be seriously considered journalists any longer. Gone was even the pretence of unbiased, fair and accurate reporting. MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, the Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, the Associated Press and others all pushed a positive slant in their coverage of Hillary Clinton.  There was scant coverage of her email problems, Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, and her seemingly endless prevarication.
    As Wikileaks revealed in the slow rollout of John Podesta emails, there was even collusion with the Clinton campaign and several media outlets such as Politico and CNN. These were ethical breeches of the first degree. The people involved should be barred from the business, but none were fired or even disciplined for their transgressions.

Add this together with both candidates’ multiple lies this election season, oft-backed up by reporters willing to lie for them (Hannity here being a prime example, but hardly alone in that) lies that would have outstripped the ability of any honest fact-checker to sort out (rather than issuing Pinocchios, it would have been far easier simply to signal the few times when candidates told the truth), and you have all the ingredients for everyone being grievously misinformed by both mainstream media (who long ago straying from the ethic of “Just the facts, ma’am”) and minor mavens posting anonymously from Macedonia.

So what can one do in this era of post-truth politics? Decent intellectual hygiene demand that one handle all news from whatever source with tongs. That we remember those sources who who at least state their bias and simply select their facts, rather than manufacture them – and read widely among these sources to find all the facts, if you can (like news of the buses that have apparently transported many of this week’s spontaneous anti-Trump protestors). That we remember those for whom facts are too often too slippery; and avoid altogether those whose modus operandi is putting out outright sludge. That we check sites like Snopes if something does appear too good to be true (but remember all such sites have their own political bias).

I doubt I’ll agree with everyone on Google’s ban list, but this at least appears a good start – for some time here I’ve been avoiding posting their memes myself. I suggest you do too:

Add to that MSM sources like RT and CNN, and you have a very good start (and a guide to what will not be linked here, even in your comments.

PS: Just to respond to an obvious question: No, this is not censorship – and anyone who claims it is knows nothing about what censorship is:

“Censorship” is a term pertaining only to governmental action. No private action is censorship. No private individual or agency can silence a man or suppress a publication; only the government can do so. The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right not to agree, not to listen and not to finance one’s own antagonists.

Nor to sanction the peddling of falsehood as fact.

UPDATE: Useful thoughts on the proposal from a Facebook friend:

Big internet companies trying to do your fact-checking for you creeps me out but I think there are ways that it could be done without getting Orwellian.
    In terms of "fake news" (a phrase I hate almost as much as "crony capitalism"), here's what I recommend the big internet companies such as Facebook do:
    If an algorithm determines that a post is fake, put some kind of word or icon next to the link to indicate that. Clicking that icon then provides you with information for *why* the algorithm determined it was likely fake (such as links to or excerpts from snopes, FactCheck, Wikipedia etc). Given that [IBM’s] Watson can answer Jeopardy questions and provide the reasons why it gave the answer it does, I assume this kind of thing must be possible.
    Facebook users can then determine for themselves whether they agree with the assessment of the algorithm. If they decide that the algorithm usually gets it right, then that build trust. If they decide they don't agree with it, then they are no worse off than they were before.
    This feature could even be opt-in. Users could be encouraged to "try our new fact-checking algorithm."
    Perhaps you could even have your own custom weighting of which sources you consider most reliable. So, users could say "I trust FactCheck.org 0.9 but snopes only 0.4" or something. That would probably require a lot more computation because then everyone's getting custom results, but might not be so bad if most people use the default settings.
    I suppose this doesn't really solve the "trending topics" problem, but I think it would be a good step in the right direction.

X Factor: The nadir of naturalism

Is X Factor the nadir of reality television? Hell no. It’s just one low point out of many. (Try Google for evidence. It won’t take long.) But the on-air snit that’s got everyone talking does demonstrate the nadir of a particular school of literature.

Before I go there, listen to a comedienne. Take it away Michele A’Court:

The problem with sticking real people on television is that we get to see all that when really we were hoping for something else. You're hoping to see a nice bloke having a crack at singing stardom and instead meet a dude who was involved in a fatal stabbing. You think you're getting to know a lady looking for love and find out she's a convicted fraudster. You're hoping to watch talent being discovered and nurtured, and instead you're confronted with bullying and rabid narcissism. The stuff you'd cross the street or leave the party to avoid, or openly confront on your better days. Yet there it is, in your living room. Ew….
    Really, we should stop putting real people on TV to entertain us. I'm not suggesting filling it up with cats (they've already got the internet) but instead of real people, how about fake people?  Let's get some writers – people who know about flaws and redemption and dramatic arcs  – and get them to invent some characters and make up stories for them. Put words in their mouths that offer insight and wisdom, and take us on a carefully mapped journey that entertains and edifies. What, back in the old days, we called a "plot" with a "theme". And we could train people to pretend to be people acting out these satisfying stories. We could call them "actors." …
    There's an art to imitating life. If you want a show about music, let's hear some and take a vote. If you want something else – real drama through conflict and resolution involving  complex human dynamics – you might need a team of people with something more in their skill set than a hair-do and an excess of self-confidence. You'd want people capable of  consciously creating entertainment.

Hard to argue with.

But maybe there’s a reason so many shows moved away from things like a "plot" with a "theme," with people acting out these satisfying stories – and it wasn’t just because “real people” are cheaper than actors. (Although hard to believe when you look at some actors’ pay, or examine the morals of, say, the girls from the Jersey Shore.)

Maybe the reason was a school of literature called “Naturalism,” that extolled the virtues of exposing the “real lives” of “real people” and claimed this constituted an art form. But if you’re going to present “slice-of-life stories” and “kitchen sink dramas” and “fly-on-the-wall” theatre with the argument that you’re presenting “real life,” then how much more real to present actual real people being themselves.

Which means (if you can’t find your off switch in time) you end up with stuff in your living room you'd either cross the street or leave the party to avoid, or would openly confront on your better days.

It’s not just an argument about bad aesthetics. Because it’s the bad aesthetics that lead directly to teams of people with nothing more in their skill set than a hair-do and an excess of self-confidence infesting your television screen – and your newspaper.

As usual (ahem) Ayn Rand skewered the problem and pointed to the solution:

The Naturalists object that the events of men’s lives are inconclusive, diffuse and seldom fall into the clear-cut, dramatic situations required by a plot structure. This is predominantly true—and this is the chief aesthetic argument against the Naturalist position. Art is a selective recreation of reality, its means are evaluative abstractions, its task is the concretization of metaphysical essentials. To isolate and bring into clear focus, into a single issue or a single scene, the essence of a conflict which, in “real life,” might be atomized and scattered over a lifetime in the form of meaningless clashes, to condense a long, steady drizzle of buckshot into the explosion of a blockbuster—that is the highest, hardest and most demanding function of art. To default on that function is to default on the essence of art and to engage in child’s play along its periphery.

The end result of that default is the meaningless child’s play it’s been impossible to avoid for the last few days. The antidote is to essentialise the state of things, to condense otherwise meaningless conflicts (like those our headlines have recently been exposed to) into something meaningful by means of drama. Or, as comedienne Michele A-Court says “take us on a carefully mapped journey that entertains and edifies.”

It’s funny how so much so true can be condensed by comedians too.

[Pic by Stuff]