Manics, writers, and bloggers

The New Neo Posted on by

Back when I was a young mother in my early thirties, still looking to “find myself” careerwise, I hauled myself down to Boston to the Johnson O’Connor Foundation, which was housed in a beautiful old brownstone on Beacon Avenue. There they gave me a rigorous two-day series of aptitude tests. These tests were like nothing I’d ever taken before; some were so esoteric and arcane I couldn’t figure out what they were testing for.

I’d always been a good student, and I was used to acing tests. But when I was given the results of these, I was told my score profile was rather strange. They felt that this explained the fact that I’d been exploring a lot of different paths but hadn’t caught on with any one thing yet. And the career I was most perfectly suited for, according to the folks at Johnson-O’Connor, was–of all things–designing opera houses. I didn’t quite know what to do with that information.

Mine was considered a difficult profile because I had quite a number of competing interests and aptitudes above the 90th percentile, and also some extremely low ones below the tenth. I had very few scores in-between. In particular, I scored in the 99th percentile on something they called “ideophoria,” which they defined as the generation of ideas at a fast clip. I scored in the 5th percentile or so on something they called “foresight,” which they described as the ability to plan, step by step, how to reach a goal. So their description of me was that I could rapidly generate ideas without a clue as to how to implement them, and as fast as I could think of solutions to a problem, I could think of reasons why those solutions wouldn’t work.

Unfortunately, I could identify somewhat with this, although I still am not sure whether the tests themselves were all that valid. For example, the test for “ideaphoria” was simply to write fast on an assigned topic, to churn out the verbiage at as speedy a clip as possible. The test for “foresight” was to name as many things as you could possibly see in a certain little indeterminate squiggle. This task utterly bored me; I think I came up with three half-hearted answers and then gave up.

When I first started blogging, many long years hence, it occurred to me that that ideophoria business might have been correct after all, and it may in fact be something all bloggers share.

The other day I thought of it again when I was thumbing through the book Exuberance: the passion for life, by Kay Redfield Jamison. I had come across the following passage, comparing and contrasting the thought processes of manics and writers:

Creative and manic thinking are both distinguished by fluidity and by the capacity to combine ideas in ways that form new and original connections. Thinking in both tends to be divergent in nature, less goal-bound, and more likely to leap about or wander in a variety of directions. Diffuse, diverse, and leapfrogging ideas were first noted thousands of years ago as one of the hallmarks of manic thought. More recently, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler observed: “The thinking of the manic is flighty. He jumps by by-paths from one subject to another…With this the ideas run along very easily…Because of the more rapid flow of ideas, and especially because of the falling-off of inhibitions, artistic activities are facilitated even though something worthwhile is produced only in very mild cases and when the patient is otherwise talented in this direction.”…

Both individuals who are manic and those who are writers, when evaluated with neuropsychological tests, tend to combine ideas or images in a way that “blurs, broadens, or shifts conceptual boundaries,” a type of thinking known as conceptual overinclusiveness. They vary in this from normal subjects and from patients with schizophrenia. Researchers at the University of Iowa, for example, have shown that “both writers and manics tend to sort in large groups, change dimensions while in the process of sorting, arbitrarily change starting points, or use vaguely distantly related concepts as categorizing principles.” The writers are better able than the manics to maintain control over their patterns of thinking, however, and to use “controlled flights of fancy” rather than the more bizarre sorting systems used by the patients.

The second paragraph put me in mind of bloggers, who are of course writers first and foremost. Odd and unusual associations, a different way of combining ideas and images; yes, these seem to be the hallmark of bloggers. They also have a tendency to be a bit frenetic, mentally speaking. This was evident at the Pajamas Media meetup, and there were quite a few jokes tossed around about having mild touches of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), although no one mentioned mania. And, all in all, I noticed that the bloggers did seem to be a rather exuberant bunch, although there was no dancing on the tables.

A while back, Ann Althouse discussed a related phenomenon when she linked to this article on bloggers’ brains by Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide:

Blogging can be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive, and associational thinking.

To remain popular with readers, blogs must be updated frequently. This constant demand for output promotes a kind of spontaneity and ‘raw thinking’–the fleeting associations and the occasional outlandish ideas–seldom found in more formal media. (Fortunately, the permanence and easily searchable nature of archived posts helps maintain some sense of decorum.) Blogging technology itself fosters this kind of spontaneity, since blogging updates can be posted with just a few clicks whenever a new thought or interesting Internet tidbit is found. Blogging is ideally suited to follow the plan for promoting creativity advocated by pioneering molecular biologist Max Delbruck. Delbruck’s “Principle of Limited Sloppiness” states we should be sloppy enough so that unexpected things can happen, but not so sloppy that we can’t find out that it did. Raw, spontaneous, associational thinking has also been advocated by many creativity experts, including the brilliant mathematician Henri Poincare who recommended writing without much thought at times “to awaken some association of ideas.”

Hmmm—writing without much thought. I’m not sure that’s the goal; it doesn’t sound too desirable, does it? But the sheer volume of output necessary with blogging, the need to post very frequently, does mean that we must write–if not thoughtlessly–then quickly and unhesitatingly. In fact, I think the hallmark of bloggers is the ability to come up with a wide variety of ideas per hour (iph).

My home, my car, my purse, my countertops, my drawers–all are littered with little scraps of paper on which are written sentence fragments, notes for posts I haven’t written yet. My guess is that that is true of most bloggers. The generation of ideas is probably relatively easy for them. It’s finding the good ones, and fleshing them out with thoughts and well-reasoned argument, as well as doing the research that backs it all up, that’s the hard part. But for bloggers, it’s satisfying work.

Robert Frost quotations

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, Churchill or Orwell he’s not.

But Robert Frost isn’t too bad with the quotations, either–even some political ones (see here and here.)

I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

One aged man – one man – can’t fill a house.

A mind in the first throes of change?

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Via Dymphna at Gates of Vienna, I came across this article by one Jonathan Freedland, a writer for the Guardian.

Jonathan Freedland is what Norm Geras might call a “principled leftist”–at least, Freedland sounds like one. In the essay, he is struggling mightily with something he calls “heresy,” the idea that Bush might have been right about certain things:

For a left liberal like me, it is not easy to commit heresy. After all, we are meant to be open-minded free thinkers, unshackled by taboos. Nevertheless there is one thought so heretical, merely to utter it would ensure instant excommunication. I hesitate even to pose it as a question. But here goes. What if George W Bush was to prove to be one of the great American presidents?…

Today’s conventional wisdom, taking in every foreign ministry in the world ”“ including most of the US State Department ”“ holds that Operation Enduring Iraqi Freedom has been a tragedy of errors. Based on faulty premises, disingenuously sold and incompetently planned, the mission of 2003 is widely regarded as an abject failure.

But the future may not see it that way. The war removed one of the most hated tyrants of modern times, shifting Saddam Hussein from a palace to a prison cell. Couple that with the toppling of the Taliban, a regime of cruelty and brutal philistinism, and Bush’s defenders have a powerful opening argument.

Next, they can point further afield. For didn’t the war in Iraq, admittedly prosecuted at a high and bloody price, not set in train a wider series of events. Note Libya’s rapid decision to come clean…

Lebanon is the clearest example, with its Cedar Revolution leading to an outburst of people power on the streets of Beirut ”“ and the ejection of the Syrian occupier. Tentative moves toward electoral democracy have followed in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and Bahrain. Even Syria seems, grudgingly, to understand that it lives in a changed region and that it too will have to adapt…

Yes, there are contradictions and hypocrisies, but that shift represents a break from at least 60 years of US foreign policy ”“ and in the right direction. If Washington was to honour this ideal, articulated well by Bush, then the world would be a better place…

…change will eventually come to the Middle East, just as it came, eventually, to Eastern Europe. And, when it does, it is at least conceivable that the man future generations will credit as the pioneer will be none other than George W Bush.

Freedland’s essay is a good example, I think, of a mind in the first throes of change. The tone is a bit wobbly–well-intentioned but rather stunned. He’s almost shocked to find himself saying these things (ah! I remember those feelings well).

Freedland doesn’t explain exactly how he got from there to here, but I wish him luck on the rest of his journey–assuming there is a “rest.”

I don’t for a minute doubt his sincerity in wanting freedom to come to the Middle East; I also don’t doubt his extreme reluctance to credit it to Bush. But, when push comes to shove, Freedland is to be commended for desiring the former, even if it comes with the crow-eating humiliation–the heresy–of the latter.

Neocons and fear

The New Neo Posted on by

Every now and then I see comments here made by people who assume that my post-9/11 change was quick, and was prompted by fear at the event itself. The comments tend to be on the order of “You cowardly idiot, turning to the Dark Side just because you’re a fraidy cat.”

When I get around to the next installment of the “change” series (soon, soon!!), it will become clearer that the process was a slow and steady one, and was more cognitive than anything else, although of course an emotional reaction was part of it. But the main drive to my change was hardly fear.

I’ll give those readers the benefit of the doubt right now, because I really haven’t gotten to that part of the story yet. But in the meantime, I’ve decided to edit my profile on the right sidebar to try to make it all clearer. I’ve changed the words “I’ve found myself leaving the fold and becoming that dread thing: a neocon” to “I’ve found myself slowing but surely leaving the fold and becoming that dread thing: a neocon.”

Ah well, it probably won’t matter too much to those who are intent on assuming that I went to bed on September 10th, 2001 a liberal Democrat; got frightened out of my wits on Sept. 11; and woke up on September 12th a hardened neo-neocon Bush-loving warmonger.

Mispronunciation by accident or by design

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As a follow-up to my nu-ku-lar post, see this from Dean Esmay, on mispronouncing words as a sign of intelligence. Dean is speaking especially of words a person has only read rather than heard–certainly not the case for Bush and “nuclear”.

But it’s interesting; Dean offers a long list, and his commenters add a few more, as well as the name for the phenomenon: orthographic pronunciation (although nowhere on the thread do I see one of the most common pronunciation errors in the English language: impotent, pronounced “im-PO-tent,” rather than, “IM-puh-tuhnt”).

I’ve been tripped up by the following odd ones: my mother once used the word “dour” and pronounced it “dure,” (rhymes with “sure”). I was dourly sure that she was wrong, but when I looked it up, it turns out that her pronunciation was actually the preferred one! I guess you should always listen to your mama–

And then one day my brother referred to those fruits and vegetables in the store as “PRAH-doose” rather than “PRO-doose.” Certain he was wrong, I looked it up and–lo and behold!–the guy was right. Bummer.

And then there are those who purposely mispronounce words as a sign that they are members of the elite. The link describes how this occurs in Wolof society, but I think it also occurs at times in the West. I seem to remember reading that the great Winston Churchill purposely mispronounced foreign words, a sort of British upper-class marker of the times.

Unfortunately, I can’t find a link to back this up, but my recollection is that the idea was “we’re British, not French (or Spanish, or what-have-you), and proud of it, too! So we’ll pronounce Don Quixote the way we want to, which is like it reads in English–‘Don Quicks-oat’– not the way those garlic-eating (fill in the pejorative expression for foreigners) do. So there!”

WMDs once again

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought this comment by Paul Snively, which appeared on the recent thread about lying and WMDs, was well-put, and worth highlighting:

Brief logic lesson:

You cannot prove the negation of an existential quantifier in first-order logic given the open-world assumption. The reason is simple: it only takes one counterexample, probably taken from the portion of the open world not considered in the clause at hand, to refute the proof.

Now, Iraq is big, but it’s not an open world. In principle, you could prove that there are no WMDs in Iraq at any given point in time. In practice, however, all you can do is talk in probabilities until everyone’s satisfied that the probabilities are sufficiently low as not to matter. The only way this works is with a great deal of effort on the part of the government in question. We know what this looks like, primarily thanks to the voluntary disarmament and documenteation efforts of the South African government. The problem with Iraq in the time leading up to the war was that it looked like exactly the opposite: obfuscation, challenge, and rejection right up until the day of the invasion. With Iraq’s history of gassing its own people, invading its neighbors, and daily firings on planes patrolling the no-fly zones from Desert Storm, the prudent thing to do was to believe that Iraq had something to hide. And this is only considering the WMDs, while American policy from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration has held some half a dozen other factors to be critical to supporting the policy of regime change. Unfortunately, precisely because the Bush administration believed (correctly, as the criticism reinforces) that the international community would only be impressed by the WMD argument, that was the argument that they presented to the UN (as compared to the Clinton administration, which didn’t approach the UN). So now we have the damned if you do, damned if you don’t problem: Bush loses because there aren’t stockpiles of WMDs in Iraq, and the fact that he went to the UN at all doesn’t count. But if he hadn’t gone to the UN, the screams about unilateralism and the “rush to war” that took 11 months would be even louder.

Books into movies

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Norm Geras and Clive Davis both discuss the fact that most movies based on books seem to be not nearly as good as the books from which they’re taken.

They cite some rare exceptions, though; movies that equal the original books. For Norm, this consists of the movies “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Great Expectations,” “The Night of the Hunter,” “Spartacus,” “The 39 Steps,” “The Young Lions;” and he cites the movie “Shane” as the sole film that was even better than the book from which it drew its inspiration. Clive lists “The Magnificent Ambersons” and “Goldfinger” in the latter category, movies that surpass the books on which they’re based.

I agree that the books from which movies are taken tend to be superior to the films. But then, I’m much more of a librophile in general than a movie fan. I like to picture things in my mind, and to read about the interior thoughts of characters and even of authors (a specialty of one of my oft-quoted favorites, Kundera). It’s not that I hate movies, but books are the medium I adore.

I also agree that there are indeed movies that are as good as the books on which they’re based. But these tend to be movies made from mediocre or decent-but-not-great books; or to be action movies; or to be based on classics I only think I’ve read but actually haven’t, such as Oliver Twist.

I know the story of Oliver Twist so well I figure I must have read it at some point. But no; when I really think about it, I realize my memory is fooling me, forming an amalgam of the David Lean film (a chiaroscuro masterpiece which gave me the shivers as a child when I watched it on a tiny TV) and the way-too-light and airy musical “Oliver.” As for Great Expectations, although it was a classic, I’ve never been a particular fan of either the book or the movie.

So, I’m wondering: has there ever been a case of a really excellent book, one I’ve read and loved– being made into an even better movie? I can’t think of one, so far.

But I can think of one excellent book I’ve actually read that was made into an equally excellent movie, although both are so very different from each other that they cannot really be compared. Usually a stickler for slavish adherence to the original plot, I decided to let that criterion –and just about everything else of a pedantic nature–go when I first viewed the 1939 “Wuthering Heights” in a New York movie theater way back in my teenage years.

What a movie! The book was a frightening tale of revenge and cruelty on the moors of England. It had exerted a strange and mesmerizing power nonetheless, a dark and gloomy one. But the movie, although shot in black and white, was an over-the-top romance. It dealt with only a fraction of the book’s convoluted plot, but it was the best fraction. Although hardly cheery, it had a more upbeat mood than the book, and the dominant note was passion.

Okay, I’ll cut to the chase: I fell in love with the almost unbearably young Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff. I knew that, at the time I saw the movie, he was actually an old man in his late fifties (ah, ancient!), so it was rather strange to fall in love with his long-ago self. Just watch it, though, and I think you’ll see what I mean.

Here’s a little schmorgasbord of Olivier/Heathcliff beefcake–

The young stableboy Heathcliff, before his fall from Cathy’s grace:

The older, hardened Heathcliff, returned from wanderings to wreak revenge on those who’d wronged him:

And an even older Heathcliff, flinging open a window to the snowy moors over which he thinks the ghost of Cathy wanders and is calling out to him to join her:

heathcliff

Deconstructing “nukular”

The New Neo Posted on by

At his ever-interesting blog Done With Mirrors, Callimachus offers the definitive explanation of why George W. Bush says “nukular” for “nuclear,” (as opposed to GW’s own father, who pronounces the word conventionally).

Apparently, GW is just following precedent for many Presidents, and even some nuclear (that is, nukular) scientists:

It’s not exactly correct to say the president mispronounces the word. He uses an alternate pronunciation — “nu-ku-lar” — that might be considered dialectal. It is commonly heard in the U.S. South, and in the U.S. military (which traditionally draws disproportionately from the old Confederacy states). Its use has been noted since the early 1960s among nuclear scientists themselves, including British and Canadian scientists.

Bush is not the only modern president to say it that way. Oddly, his father wasn’t among those who did (though he had his own grating way with Sa-a-addam). But Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, both Southern men, said “nu-ku-lar.” So did John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford, who perhaps picked it up during their military service.

The first U.S. president we know of to say “nu-ku-lar,” and the first to be widely scolded for it, was Eisenhower, as far back as his “Atoms for Peace” speech to the UN….

According to Callimachus, it turns out the Bush isn’t stupid, he’s lazy–lazy of tongue, that is. This type of laziness has been common to vast numbers of human beings throughout time, and has contributed greatly to the growth and evolution of language. The process by which nuclear becomes nukular even has a name; it’s called metathesis by linguists. The same process has given us such tried and true favorites as “dirt” and “fright.”

So, George Bush’s pronunciation may really be progressive–although don’t tell that to any actual self-labeled “progressives.” In fact, it may even be evolutionary.

Lies and the lying liars who hear them

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It’s said all the time on the left, and even by many liberals: Bush lied. Bush lied through his teeth, especially about WMDs in Saddam’s Iraq.

I don’t even have to provide the links; we all know what a recurrent refrain it is. Thread after thread, on this blog and others–even when Bush and WMDs aren’t really the issue at hand–have been taken up with the argument.

But this post isn’t about the issue of WMDs and lying. That’s been hashed over time and again, to no avail, so often that I’m convinced it’s an argument that goes beyond logic and beyond facts. I’m more interested in what’s behind the argument; what drives it.

So, why “Bush lied?” Wouldn’t it be enough to say that Bush was mistaken, misinformed, stupid, duped, misled, lazy, deluded–oh, any number of other criticisms of Bush that could so much more easily be argued than lied?

After all, “Bush lied” is fairly easy to refute. The usual counterargument goes like this: almost everyone on earth, including most of the intelligence operatives in the US and Europe, believed that Saddam had WMDs. In fact, there’s a theory that perhaps even Saddam himself was fooled into thinking he actually had WMDs.

But no matter; Bush lied.

I’ve become convinced that the key to this assertion is a relatively new and fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of the term “lied,” an error that has its genesis in the growth of narcissism (please see Dr. Sanity’s fine series on the affliction).

In truth, the hallmark of a lie is that its locus is in the speaker. To be lying, the speaker must be aware of the falsehood of the utterances. So whether or not something is a lie has nothing to do with the listener, and everything to do with the teller.

But many listeners in our day and age have lost sight–not just of truth vs. relative truth, or objective vs. subjective truth–but of any truth-falsehood distinction outside of their own perceptions. So the new definition of a lie has become: something that fooled me. Something that I heard and thought was true, and then discovered wasn’t true. It made me angry to be jerked around like that. So it’s a lie.

Such a listener lacks awareness of any need to ascertain the state of mind of the speaker in order to define an utterance as a lie–it is simply irrelevant; it does not compute in the equation. In fact, the so-called liar is actually often either mistaken, misinformed by others, in denial, or deluded. But that doesn’t matter to a listener who hears everything only in terms of him/herself and how something makes him/her feel.

Thus, a lie is born.

Another intelligence leak–of a different sort

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I was surprised to see this story in Wednesday’s Guardian.

It’s about another intelligence leak–they seem to be quite popular nowadays, don’t they? But this one, unlike the others, isn’t about a failure of the Bush or Blair administrations, and doesn’t reflect poorly on them. Actually, it’s about something that plays into their hands, by undermining the hopes of those who believe that reasoning and negotiation with Iran can effectively keep its nuclear ambitions in check.

The leak consists of a report that has amassed evidence that Iran is planning a nuclear future that includes nuclear weapons, and not just a peaceful reactor. Is there anyone naive enough to have doubted that, even before this report? Well, my guess is the answer is “yes;”probably much of the Guardian’s readership would have fallen into that camp, which is why the publication of this leak in that particular venue is quite stunning:

The Iranian government has been successfully scouring Europe for the sophisticated equipment needed to develop a nuclear bomb, according to the latest western intelligence assessment of the country’s weapons programmes.

Scientists in Tehran are also shopping for parts for a ballistic missile capable of reaching Europe, with “import requests and acquisitions … registered almost daily”, the report seen by the Guardian concludes.

The warning came as Iran raised the stakes in its dispute with the United States and the European Union yesterday by notifying the International Atomic Energy Authority that it intended to resume nuclear fuel research next week. Tehran has refused to rule out a return to attempts at uranium enrichment, the key to the development of a nuclear weapon.

To what do we owe this possible change of heart on the part of the Guardian’s editors? Could it be the case that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad may have actually overplayed his hand in such a way that even European leftists can no longer deny that the man is a dangerous madman with the destruction of Israel on his mind? According to the Guardian:

Governments in the west and elsewhere have also been dismayed by recent pronouncements from the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has said that Holocaust denial is a “scientific debate” and that Israel should be “wiped off the map”.

I’ve written about Iran’s plans and about Holocaust denial before. These days there’s no denying that overt anti-Semitism, or anti-Semitism cloaked in the guise of a certain sort of mindless and virulent anti-Zionism, are both very popular in Europe.

Can it be, though, that something about the nakedness of Ahmadinejad’s statements has caused at least a certain number of Europeans who are not flagrantly anti-Semitic to stop and think about what’s actually happening in Iran today, and to relate it to the Holocaust? I would like to think that the bold outrageousness of Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic rhetoric has touched a nerve, and that most Europeans who don’t actively desire a second Holocaust can recognize the emanations coming from Iran from previous bitter and shameful experience, closer to home.

More about the reporting of the Munich Massacre of 1972

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In my previous post, I recalled hearing the “good news, bad news” reports of the Munich Massacre:

Those of you who, like me, are of a certain age, may recall that when the shootout and botched rescue attempt occurred at the airport the first reports–widely disseminated–were that all the athletes were safe. Then, just a few hours later, the news was reversed.

Do you remember? I do, only too well. It was exquisitely painful, and the pain was somehow even greater because of the initial false reports. How did they get it so wrong back then? I’ve never read an explanation; if anyone has one, please feel free to offer it.

I still don’t have an explanation, but I found some interesting links via this post by Yehudit of Keshertalk. In one, Roone Arledge, who was the head of ABC sports at the time, tells the story of waiting for a report on how the airport rescue attempt had gone:

The console phone rang five minutes later; it was Marvin. He’d just seen his friend Otto Kentsch, assistant to the chief Olympics spokesman, coming out of a meeting, eyes watery. Kentsch wouldn’t go on the record, but he told him: The hostages were dead. All of them.

I found myself suddenly faced with the oldest dilemma of the news producer. If I put the story on right now, we’d have a worldwide scoop. But what if, by some long chance, Kentsch was wrong and the whole world heard ABC blow it?

I decided to wait for confirmation. Better right than first. I had what I needed to hold the network, though, and I wanted Jim to prepare our listeners.

“Looks very dark for hostages,” I whispered into his earpiece. “Announcement soon. Don’t get their hopes up.”

We kept waiting for word. Fifteen minutes … 30 … 45. At Olympic headquarters, they were reviewing the day for the media in half-hour increments, halting between each one for French, then English translation. German thoroughness, God almighty!

Finally, at 3:17 a.m., Reuters removed all our doubts.

“FLASH! ALL ISRAELI HOSTAGES SEIZED BY ARAB GUERRILLAS KILLED.”

We could go with it.

“Official,” I whispered to Jim. “All hostages dead.”

He turned to look straight into the camera. For the first time that day, he appeared truly tired.

“I’ve just gotten the final word,” he said. “When I was a kid, my father used to say our greatest hopes and worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears were realized tonight….” He paused. Then, “They’re all gone.”

Roone Arledge was correct, although I wonder how often his words are heeded today: better right than first.

Getting the story straight: misreporting on the miners (and the Munich Massacre)

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The sad news of the deaths of the trapped miners is the most important part of this story, not the media problems inherent in its reporting. My heart goes out to the families and friends of the miners. Mining (like commercial fishing in my part of the world) is an inherently dangerous activity, and all who work in the field are inherently brave, as are their families.

But the media issues are still of importance. By now just about everyone is familiar with the fact that an error was made by the media in reporting the twelve trapped West Virginia miners as rescued and safe, when in fact the tragic truth was that they had died. The mistaken reporting was quite widespread, and seems to have been the result of a combination of wishful thinking and the reporting of rumor without careful and insistent disclaimers to that effect.

Here was someone from one paper, at least, who didn’t jump the gun on this story (via Antimedia). How is it that this editor avoided the pitfalls into which the others fell? It’s pretty simple; she waited for an official announcement:

“I feel lucky that we are an afternoon paper and we have the staff that we do,” said editor Linda Skidmore, who has run the 21-person newsroom for three years. “We had a reporter there all night at the scene and I was on the phone with her the whole time.”

Skidmore adds that her staff never believed the miners had been found alive because no official word was ever given. She said no update about miners being found alive ever appeared on the paper’s Web site, either.

“I was on the phone with her and I was hearing things on CNN and FOX that she was not hearing there,” Skidmore said about reporter Becky Wagoner. “She heard that the miners were alive just before it was broadcast, around midnight. She talked about hearing church bells ringing and people yelling in jubilation–but nothing official.”

Another editor, Sherry Chisenhall of the Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, didn’t get it right. But she didn’t mince words, and for that I respect her:

…it won’t excuse the blunt truth that we violated a basic tenet of journalism today in our printed edition: Report what you know and how you know it.”

So, what happened? It seems that “sources” said the miners were alive, but who those sources were and what information they were relying on is still unclear. One thing is clear: there was no official announcement by those in charge of rescue operations, and the AP was heavily involved in pushing the premature story into many newspapers via the wire service.

The failure appears to have been one of attribution:

Certainly we should do our professional best to give readers, listeners and viewers substantive and specific attribution in our stories. Attribution supports both accuracy and authenticity. Ideally, strong and clear attribution heightens the credibility of the stories.

To be sure, the attribution within stories is reflective of the rigor of the newsgathering process. As reporters, we should be respectfully pushing our sources by asking, “How do you know that?” As editors and producers, we should be prosecuting the reporters’ work, asking, “Do we have a high level of confidence in that information? Is it verifiable?”

It appears that no one was really asking those questions. Maybe it’s only human to want the story to be a happy one, especially when families are rejoicing and citing a miracle. It would take a curmudgeon to question whether the information on which they were relying was true. But reporters are supposed to be skeptics who do not report rumors, and if they do choose to report them, they need to label them as such.

The Anchoress has a thoughtful discussion, relating this to press mistakes during Katrina.

This article is the best description of the confusion; it is itself confused and confusing.

Michelle Malkin has a thorough rundown.

A further note: when I first heard that the miners were alive, I felt joy and relief. Like so many, I felt especially letdown when the later corrected reports came through with the news that they had died. It sparked a memory in me, one I haven’t seen anyone else mention, but on a topic that’s been much in the news lately because of Spielberg’s movie “Munich”–the Munich Olympics massacre of the Israeli athletes.

Those of you who, like me, are of a certain age, may recall that when the shootout and botched rescue attempt occurred at the airport the first reports–widely disseminated–were that all the athletes were safe. Then, just a few hours later, the news was reversed.

Do you remember? I do, only too well. It was exquisitely painful, and the pain was somehow even greater because of the initial false reports. How did they get it so wrong back then? I’ve never read an explanation; if anyone has one, please feel free to offer it. But the entire operation was so mishandled by the German government that it’s no real surprise that the reporting on what happened was mishandled, too.

This, from Wikipedia, is the only reference I’ve been able to find so far to the misleading news from Munich:

Initial news reports, published all over the world, indicated that all the hostages were alive, and that all the terrorists had been killed. Only later did a representative for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suggest that “initial reports were overly optimistic.”

I well remember the sorrow and bitterness in Jim McKay’s voice and on his face when he made the later, corrected, announcement:

Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They’ve now said that there were 11 hostages; 2 were killed in their rooms yesterday morning, 9 were killed at the airport tonight. They’re all gone.

“They’re all gone.” Sad words then, sad words today, although the situations behind the deaths are so different.