J’ACCUSE!

A "Profession" is widely defined as a field of endeavor requiring highly specialized training and ability, having a set of ethical standards administered by its own members, and whose practitioners perform services for the benefit of their clients, and not for their own personal benefit.

Medicine, law, and the clergy are sometimes named as the only true professions, while more expansive definitions encompass accounting, engineering, architecture, and similar fields.

The JournoList scandal causes us to revisit the question: is journalism a profession?

I accuse it of failing the test!

Does journalism require a specialized training or ability? Not really; all it really requires in contemporary news organizations is the ability to write semi-coherently and purport to accurately provide an accounting of facts. In essence, anyone who can ask "who?, what?, where?, when?, and why? (and how much?)" and who can convert those answers to semi-coherent text, has the requisite talents. It does not require post-graduate training to be a news reporter or analyst.

So, on this front, Journalism fails the first test of being a profession.

How about "ethical standards"?

One of the leading voices in the U.S. on the subject of Journalistic Standards and Ethics is the Society of Professional Journalists. The Preamble to its Code of Ethics states:

…public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist’s credibility.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards

Well, that’s a start. But is there any mechanism by which Journalists can eject those who fail to to live up to their ethical standards from their putative profession? When’s the last time you heard of a journalist being disbarred, or de-penned, as it were? Did Jason Blair lose his license to lie in print? Unenforced ethics are no ethics at all, except for show and tell.

I accuse Journalism of failing to enforce any meaningful ethical standards.

Add to this the obvious failure of the 400 members of the now infamous JournoList e-mail group to rein in the ethical lapses of the members of that list who openly used their journalistic influence to aid a partisan political campaign by suppressing negative stories and threatening to smear other commentators who sought to publicize the negative stories to which the JournoListers objected. Clearly, using one’s position as a journalist to further one’s own political agenda (while maintaining the fiction of objectivity and service to the public) is an ethical violation, and opposing some of the more juvenile and pernicious proposals seen on the list on the grounds that it won’t work very well hardly rises to the level of professional approbium, let alone ethical enforcement.

On this front, Journalism fails as a profession.

Similarly, do journalist perform their services for the benefit of their client (which some would say in the case of journalists is the public at large) and not with regard to their own personal benefit or gain? As we have seen in the JournoList case, the particpants were happily furthering their own personal political agenda by manipulating the media they worked for to suppress coverage of damaging stories about their preferred candidate, and collaborating with others in their so-called profession in hatching schemes to intimidate members of their own profession who did not share their radical left wing political agenda. In short, they short-shrifted their clients — the public — in deference to furthering their own personal political agenda. They lied by omission, and thus failed to tell the public the whole unvarnished truth about Obama’s 20 years of listening to racist anti-American sermons every Sunday by Rev. Wright. Worse still, they sought to silence others from telling that story.

I accuse the JournoListers of violating the canons of Journalistic integrity, objectivity, and keeping of the flame of truth.

What the JournoListers did was ethically equivalent to the doctor who denies his patient the latest most effective medication because the pharmacy he owns carries a competing and less efficacious medicine, and then compounds that ethical violation of trust by attempting to smear every other doctor in town who WOULD prescribe the more effective drug. Would you like to have your children treated by a doctor like that? Happily, you don’t need to worry, because medicine became a profession in the early 20th century, and ethical standards forbid doctors from profiting from the prescription of drugs and treatments to their patients, and those who try to do so get run out of the profession by their peers. That’s what it means to be a profession.

Wouldst that the same were true for journalists; but as the JournoList scandal teaches us, Journalism has no real ethical standards, no self-enforcement mechanism, and apparently a large segment of its own practitioners who could care less. Thus, journalism is a trade, or craft, and not a profession, no matter how much it pretends to be one.

Is it any wonder Journalists feel threatened by people in pajamas, blogging from PCs in their basements? Their monopoly on opinion manipulation hangs in the balance, and the radical political activists masquerading as journalists will have no truck with that.

Statistics: Posted by Elmo Zoneball — Sun Jul 25, 2010 3:34 pm

The future looks grim. Great scientific minds from famous universities are predicting doom. Complex global models, running on the most powerful computers on the planet, tell us that unless we make drastic changes in our lifestyle, we face catastrophe. The science is rock-solid, the conclusions inescapable. Even twenty five years from now it will be too late. We must act now to save the planet!

Global warming, right? Wrong!

I’m describing a nearly forgotten 1972 report and book called ‘The Limits to Growth’. Using what was then called a supercomputer (less powerful than the microprocessor that operates my expensive coffeemaker), a group of scientists at MIT calculated that a combination of over-population, collapsing food supplies, pollution and resource depletion would cause a global collapse by the early 21st century. Paul Ehrlich, just four years earlier in his famous ‘The Population Bomb’, had predicted a similar catastrophe, and suggested we might need programs of compulsory sterilization to keep humans from breeding. He and John Holdren — know that name? — in Scientific American — the premier science magazine of the time — presented a scenario where US population would drop to 20 million by the year 2000. Land and sea would be poisoned, global starvation rampant, essential resources depleted. The models were grim; if we avoided the population bomb, the resource shortage would wipe us out. If we dodged that, pollution would kill us, or we’d starve. Our only hope of salvation? An immediate program of drastic population control, and abrupt cessation of economic growth.

Didn’t happen. These Stanford and Cornell and MIT professors were all completely, foolishly wrong. We now have 300 million people in the US, and we still export food. The global per-capita death rate from starvation is far below 1970’s. While the developing world is certainly polluting itself, the developed world is far cleaner than it was back then. Most resources remain abundant. Ehrlich and Holdren’s folly was beautifully demonstrated by libertarian economist Julian Simon. In 1980, Simon bet Ehrlich $1000 that the prices of five metals, metals Simon allowed Ehrlich to choose, would go down. If global shortages developed over the decade, as Ehrlich and his friends predicted, the prices would instead sky-rocket. Holdren chose the metals for Ehrlich. Ehrlich accepted the bet, bragging he felt bad about taking Simon’s money. In 1990, after the prices declined by over 50%, Ehrlich wrote Simon a cheque.

Fast forward to 2010…the usual suspects are still here, but we have a new ‘crisis’. James Hansen, the Cassandra in this latest episode of ‘the Sky is Falling’, predicted in 1988 that in ‘twenty or thirty years’ the West Side Highway, outside his office at NASA Goddard in Manhattan, would be under water due to rising sea levels. Check Google Earth — it’s high and dry. In the El Niño summer of 1998, when global temperatures reached a modern maximum, the end was supposed to be upon us. Instead, it got cooler. Katrina was supposed to usher in a new era of more frequent and more powerful hurricanes that would devastate our Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Where have they gone? As Kevin Trenberth, one of the latest generation of global warming Jeremiahs, complained plaintively in the ClimateGate emails a few months ago: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.â€

What can we learn from this? First, the environmental movement never learns, because no one ever holds them responsible for their bogus prophesies. Ehrlich and Hansen and their cohorts have made foolish and errant predictions over and over and over again, and yet they still have an audience. Holdren, who has been wrong more consistently, about more things, than perhaps any pseudo-scientist in history, is now science adviser to President Obama.

Second: none of this is really about the planet. It’s about political power. As the years have gone by and each successive prophesy of doom has failed, the bogeyman has morphed repeatedly. First it was pollution, then overpopulation, then resource depletion. And now it’s anthropogenic global warming. But the proffered solution is always the same: give government complete control over the economy and over the most personal choices each of us can make — how many children we have, how often and how far we travel, where we live. Ask yourself; if every decade the nature of the ‘crisis’ changes, but the solution they offer is always the same, doesn’t it seem possible the ‘crises’ are manufactured — mere pretexts to impose a ‘solution’ chosen long in advance?

Atmospheric carbon dioxide may indeed be a problem. There’s some evidence for global warming, particularly at the poles. Sea levels are rising steadily but very slowly; they may in the future rise faster. Certainly, it would be wise to take measured steps to lessen carbon dioxide emission into the atmosphere, and to investigate ways we can live with the consequences of more CO2. One possible solution most of us could agree on is to rebuild the US nuclear power industry, and gradually phase out coal burning power plants. We can certainly fund research into alternative energy, though given how long we’ve worked on that area without a major breakthrough, we shouldn’t pin our hopes on it. But we need to recognize that the world is not going to reduce its CO2 emissions any time soon. It’s out of our hands. China and India will not dampen down the blazing speed of their economic growth, and even draconian restrictions on carbon use in the developed world won’t offset the gigatons of carbon dioxide the developing world will be releasing.

A quarter century from now, atmospheric CO2 will be over 450 ppm, and there isn’t a whole lot we can do about that. The planet will probably be warmer, but nobody really knows by how much. What we can control is whether the US will still have a dynamic, vibrant economy, or whether we voluntarily commit suicide in a quixotic attempt to forestall the inevitable. We need to resist attempts to ensnarl our liberty in a clinging web of carbon rationing, taxes, and regulations. We need to resist giving the government power over how often we take airplane flights, how big a car we can drive and how fast, and where we choose to live.

The road to totalitarian hell is paved with good intentions of ‘saving the earth’. That is a road we don’t need to take.

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Statistics: Posted by RWP — Tue Jan 12, 2010 7:59 pm

(Corrections invited.)

This week’s "Ask Marilyn" column has a problem for which Marilyn gives the correct answer for the wrong reason. The question is, "Is being dealt two aces or an ace and a deuce more probable." There are a couple of unstated assumptions: using ordinary deck and dealing exactly two cards are the main ones. Marilyn’s explanation is to use the tableau:

AA
22

then to point out that being dealt two aces requires being dealt the top row and being dealt ace/deuce is being dealt one of the columns. This explanation is wrong on two points. First, it implies that the odds for the A2 combination are twice that of the AA combination (actually, the odds are 8:3 in favor A2 over AA) and it uses an arrangement of the ex post dealt cards rather than ex ante undealt deck.

The correct explanation: for two aces, the probability of an ace on the first card is 4/52 and the probability of an ace on the second card is 3/51; as these both must occur, the probability of both occurences is 12/2652. For an ace then a deuce, one has a probability of 4/52 for the ace and 4/51 for the deuce giving 16/2652 plus the (identical) probabilities of a deuce then an ace giving 32/2652 for the probability of the A2 pair.

Of course, naming the cards makes the probabilities equal. That is, the ace of spades and deuce of hearts has the same probability as the ace of hearts and the ace of diamonds.

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Statistics: Posted by Doctor Stochastic — Sat Jan 09, 2010 6:56 pm