Ersatz News - Write a Story with a Point of View, then Use the Parts of the News that Fits

News by omission! News you can't use or trust. m/r

Fake News: Ignorant Reporters Blame Houston

Jon Cassidy  9-1-17

Award-winners who don’t know the first thing about climate and flood plain runoff and probably even pavement.

“She spent evenings with the art books Yankel had bought for her in Lutsk, and each morning sulked over breakfast. They were good and fine, but not beautiful. No, not if I’m being honest with myself. They are only the best of what exists.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

Every year, when the journalism prizes roll around, I feel melancholy and discontent in the way of Safran Foer’s character Brod. It’s not jealousy. There’s only one year I did anything worthy of a prize, which was not the same year that I actually received a small honor.

Year after year, Big Journalism recognizes work that is neither fine nor good. It is only, at best, the best of what exists. The right way to understand the practice of journalism is not from the standard framework of the right (bias!), which is correct, but boring and mostly irrelevant. Instead, regard journalists the way scientists do, as practitioners of an art that has nothing to with their own pursuits, as scribblers with little capacity for mathematical or abstract thinking,
As a method for approaching the truth, a narrative based on two anecdotes, three half-relevant statistics, and a bit of misguided paraphrasing is no substitute for controlled experimentation. It’s not even a substitute for a decent argument. Yet mainstream journalism foregoes even this simple tool, available to all, in favor of simply pronouncing the world to be a certain way.

The Texas Tribune is guilty of this, and of misleading its readers and other journalists into believing that Houston is somehow to blame for its devastating floods. For those not familiar with the name, the Texas Tribune is a conflict of interest organized as a 501(c)3. The Austin-based conference production/journalism outfit covers state politics, and takes lots of money from people who do business in the capitol. It covers for its biggest institutional backers, such as the University of Texas, while occasionally doing serious work that doesn’t threaten its bottom line.
This year, the Texas Tribune won Peabody and Murrow awards for a collaboration with ProPublica that blamed Houston’s flooding problems on global warming and unregulated overdevelopment.

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