Recently I replied to an online point that said that if the US enacts laws that enforce Christian views, the country will be a theocracy. I pointed out that all or nearly all European countries for most of history have met that criterion and that the USA itself was a “theocracy” by that measure until at least the 1960s. The person making the post rebuked me for being a “prescriptivist” and implied it’s consistent with being a libertarian.
First, it’s not a political issue. I don’t advocate laws requiring people to use words with standard meanings, except in legal documents. Aside from that, I’m not exactly a prescriptivist. I prefer to consider myself a “consistentist.” Whatever meaning you give to a word, stick with it and don’t conflate it with other definitions. If you want to use “glory” to mean “a nice knock-down argument,” don’t use it to mean “splendor” at the same time. (more…)
You may have heard about Hamline University’s recent outrageous action. Not everyone has, though, and there’s been misinformation going around, so let me start by summarizing it. A lecturer (not a professor), in a course on art history, devoted a session to Islamic art. Aware that some Muslims regard it as improper to portray Muhammad visually, he informed the class that he would be presenting such an image, a classic Islamic work from the 14th century, and gave people a chance to leave before showing the picture. A student complained anyway. The university announced that it would not renew the untenured lecturer’s contract, so strictly speaking, it didn’t fire the lecturer. The action, however, was intended as punishment for violating Islamic law. Hamline is a Methodist school, not an Islamic one, in Minnesota.
Since this is at least nominally a blog on writing, my focus won’t be on the university’s vile action, but on what played out at the Hamline Oracle, a student news publication. I suspect they took the actions they did under extreme pressure from the administration, but their rolling over as they did was an act of gross cowardice regardless. (more…)
On May 28, Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was involved in a collision and then charged with DUI. This would be mostly a matter of local interest. Since then, a story has spread on the Internet that the charges against him were dropped. This suggests string-pulling and would be an important story if it were true. In fact, no reliable news outlet has confirmed it. Snopes calls it an unfounded rumor. Anything could happen in the future, but as of my writing this, there’s no evidence that the story is true.
It’s hard to tell where made-up stories originate. A tweet by Congresswoman Lauren Boebert asserted the charges were dropped. Donald Trump, Jr. lied on Twitter. Another source was some “news” sites that employ bottom-of-the-barrel freelancers and instruct them to write articles with a partisan spin. They’re called “pink slime” sites. Why pink, I don’t know. They may have names that sound newsy and uncontroversial. Some sites of this kind don’t use human writers at all, just artificial intelligence. (more…)
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has us all very concerned, and anyone who writes about it for publication needs to write responsibly. Here are a few thoughts on the subject. I’m addressing writers in the USA; most of it applies everywhere, but I’m writing with Americans in mind.
Beyond assuming that you agree the invasion is outrageous, I’m not saying what position you should take. (If you don’t think it’s outrageous, you aren’t in my target audience.) These are general points regardless of what you think people should do. (more…)
This post deals with a music publisher, GIA. That puts it a little beyond my blog’s usual scope, but it’s still publishing, and I write lots of songs (though only one has ever made me money) and have edited convention songbooks. The story is hard to believe, but the reports I’ve seen support it. My primary source is a Reason article by Robby Soave. I’ll grant that since I tend to agree with Reason‘s positions, I have to watch out for bias, but in my experience the site’s fact-checking is good, and they don’t often publish wild fictions.
On the other hand, if the report is accurate, the company it calls “the major publisher of religious content” (in choral music) is run by fanatics who don’t just support arson but think there’s “no justification” for opposing it. Or perhaps GIA is run by miserable cowards who will do anything that they think will help their revenues, no matter how unjust. Both possibilities are disturbing. (more…)
Last week I saw a YouTube video purporting to show how dumb the masses are. It cited a poll which allegedly found that 7% of Americans surveyed think chocolate milk comes from brown cows. It’s unlikely, if you think about it, that any significant number of people hold this belief, but it makes viewers feel good to think they’re smarter than others.
A search revealed that lots of sites uncritically reported this result. In fact, when I searched for a stock brown-cow image to stick on this post, many of the results referenced the poll. On the bright side, I found an article that looked carefully at the poll. Just now I found a Columbia Journalism Review article demolishing the claimed result. (more…)
These are dire times. Police have killed George Floyd and David McAtee. Donald Trump had people tear-gassed so he could take a walk. He is threatening illegal military deployments and shooting in the United States. Rioters are destroying property and assaulting people. Journalists have been the target of both police and mobs.
I’ve felt helpless, even though I’m not close to the locations of violence and am relatively safe personally. But we’re seeing the country tear itself apart by a thug president and thugs (both with and without badges) in the streets. One thing I can do, for whoever may notice, is remind the people in my profession that we can make a difference. We can speak out, forcefully and responsibly.
We should speak out for principles, not factions. Telling some group of people how horrible they are may feel great, but it accomplishes nothing. Talk about what is right and wrong. Call attention to wrongdoing — brutality, bigotry, abuse of power. Name names. But don’t attack people for being black or white, male or female, registered to vote as Republican or Democratic. (more…)
When you read the news, too often you find distorted and misleading accounts of the facts. It’s not “fake news” in the sense of deliberate fabrication, but the result of writers not understanding the issue, wanting to make it more exciting, or repeating errors which others have made for the first two reasons. I’ve been guilty of repeating erroneous reporting myself,
A video by Aron Ra shows how this works in reporting on paleobiology. He talks about an article that claims 800,000 year old DNA from Homo antecessor has been found.
The source was a respectable one, and its claims weren’t obviously impossible. He found multiple articles on the Web making similar claims, but only one of them provided a link to the original article in Nature. That article makes no claims about finding DNA; what was found was dental enamel containing identifiable proteins. That’s newsworthy enough to scientists, but not the same thing. Nonetheless, the report of hominid DNA four-fifths of a million years old even made it into the New York Times. (I hope I’ve got it right on whether that species is a hominid or a hominin. I think any member of the genus Homo is both.)
Ra says, “They were comparing dental enamel proteomes. What reporter is even going to know what that means?” He checked with some experts to confirm that proteomes aren’t genetic material. “They’re more like a genetic by-product.” Aside from the esoteric nature of the discovery, why did so many sources get it wrong in the same way? One reason is that “editors want to embellish everything to make it sound more interesting. Don’t ever do that.”
It’s good advice, but sometimes we get it wrong anyway. Reporting involves writing about things you aren’t an expert on. Sometimes you have to rely one another person’s explanation. But we should try to avoid making errors just to juice up our stories, and we should let our readers know when we discover our errors.
Update:The Union Leader corrected the headline, possibly in response to my complaint. Kudos!
News websites want clicks to their articles. They’re what bring in advertising revenue. Too many of them mislead the reader or sensationalize the story for the sake of clicks. Sometimes they engage in outright falsehood. An example is an article on the website of the Manchester, NH Union Leader, which carries the false headline “Free staters continue to meet despite ban.”
The article is actually about the Free Keene organization, which has no connection with the Free State Project beyond being based in the same state. Most libertarians in New Hampshire regard Free Keene as a little crazy. Putting their health at risk to make a point isn’t very smart. (more…)