Three Legged Journalism: Reporter + Source + Editor > Blogger

While on summer vacation at my parents place in rural Arkansas (Buffalo National River, the only river managed by the US Department of the Interior - please don't issue mining and fracking rights here), I have a chance to reflect on journalism, and my critiques of lopsided and inaccurate reporting over the years.

Talking with Mom on the apparent loudness of politics, and tribal journalism, and bias confirmation... We settled on risk analysis, and how so many people believe in conspiracy theories.

Around here in the Ozarks, the "deep state" conspiracy is admittedly popular. I was informed yesterday (indirectly from a confidential source) that a contractor lady for Mom - sweet gal, hard worker - informed her that the Republican staff and White House lawyers who testified to Representative Thompson and Cheney's January 6 Investigation committee were "paid" to testify against Trump.  By whom? Didn't get to ask.

Now I do know on firsthand that this can happen.  Conspiracies can definitely happen. But the rumors of conspiracy travel halfway around the world while the Truth is still waking up to a hangover.

"Going Out On a Limb" however is a lot easier for a blogger than it is for an institution. It is rare that a blogger like myself should be a better source than any of the journalism institutions or international agencies that gave Anane's wildfire story on illegal e-waste dumping the oxygen to burn people like Joe "Hurricane" Benson. So today I'll reflect on how rarely anti-conspiracy experts get it right.

Conspiracy of Dunces Under-funded International Reporters

Mike "Fishing As A Boy" was always paid to testify that hundreds of sea containers per month were dumped at a remote village of Agbogbloshie, where he testified was previously a natural beautiful landscape where he was swimming and fishing as a boy. This was expert testimony paid for by INTERPOL and EPA and broadcast by BBC, Sky News, The Independent, Al Jazeera, etc.  And it can be completely disproven in 30 seconds (it's not remote village, start with it being the City of Accra's central dump). 

But I told my hillbilly relatives, vis-a-vis the January 6 hearing, that I personally worked for a government agency (Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection) for about a decade, and within a 1,000+ person agency, a "conspiracy" would be a lot harder to plan and maintain than Tucker and Hannity might have you believe.  The "deep state" pays people to lie under oath? And no one in the agency says anything? No check-mailing staffer? Everyone is in on it?

Now in fairness I point out that I have upper middle class, college educated liberal friends in New England - whom I love as much as I do my family in Arkansas - who have made the same kind of bizarre conspiracy assumptions. Case in point - Covid Restrictions.

Now as a recycler I cannot resist the inception of citing John Tierney's WSJ editorial last weekend on Covid policy - a critique of CDC and Fauci in particular.  Tierney authored the hit piece on "Recycling Is Garbage" which I tore apart in the 1990s and have referenced years ago in this blog. But in this case I agree with a central point - that the evidence is very very weak (if it exists at all) as to whether states like Florida and Texas, which largely ignored CDC recommendations on isolation, closures, and masking had either significant or insignificant differences in hospitalizations and case-related deaths.

If you look even more significantly at the original hypothesis for the lockdown, "flattening the curve" never meant stopping the total number of covid related deaths. It meant that a pandemic will become an endemic but can be better managed in a way that doesn't exhaust or bankrupt the healthcare system, which would have a multiplier effect on all other preventable deaths.  

Neither Tierney nor I ever saw evidence that Sweden's health care system was more stressed than Italy's, or that Miami Florida's was more stressed than Boston's. This time, as wrong as Tierney was about Recycling Policy (he ignored the tonnage replacement costs of mining fracking and forestry if recycling stopped, and the Interior Department's General Mining Act 1872 federal subsidies), I agree with him on CDC. They lost track of the bottom line, the total deaths from substance abuse, lost jobs, federal deficit, etc. under covid lockdown have to be added/subtracted from the prevented (or delayed) cases.

Here's where my extremely smart and well-educated pals in New England show all humans are susceptible to "conspiracy theory thinking".  They said that red states "probably" supressed reporting of their own covid cases and fatalities. I expressed the same incredulity as I did to my hillbilly kin who think the January 6 evidence is a result of deep state payoffs and conspiracy.  Do liberals really think that a million people in Arkansas would all keep our mouths shut about cases, hospitalizations, deaths and overwhelmed hospitals just to keep from acknowledging CDC was right?

The more people involved in keeping a secret, the less likely it can remain a secret. "Cover ups" happen over one thing, generally, not over a whole false system designed to produce false results, be they presidential election counts, southern hospital infrastructure, recycling costs, or football scores.

Shadow of a Thinker Out On A Limb

The New England Conspiracy Theory - that there really was a very significant difference in deaths etc. in the southern states which didn't follow CDC rules, and the hospitals and nurses are underreporting and covering it up - is warmed up confirmation bias. It strokes the same part of the brain that MAGA election deniers enjoy by "doing their own research" and sharing blogs that deny the football score on Monday morning.

You can complain about missed calls, errors, fumbles, whataboutism plays, but people are actually denying the SCOREBOARD. That's silly-scary.

A blogger can actually claim that the final score of a game was different from the one we all watched. The blogger is in too many cases the Reporter, Source, and Editor.  As the E-waste Hoax of "Sodom and Gomorrah" demonstrated, it's possible for "rule of three" to get it wrong if one of the people (in this case the "paid source") makes something up.

But it's far safer to rely on a story told by three people than a story told by one person, and far more risky to rely on hundreds of hospitals and thousands of doctors and nurses to underreport Covid Cases, or dozens of states or thousands of county voting centers to keep a secret.

Rudy Guiliani and John Eastwood are mathematically more likely to be full of bull than the dozens of white house staff who testified against them. And if you are hearing differently, ask who is the source and who is the editor for your news source.

Postscript - here's a conspiracy theory for you. I had to tell the Searcy County Elderly Services office to stop delivering 5 pound boxes of "emergency food" to my mom. I guess the covid infrastructure somehow gives states the distribution of federal funds, which they are going back to issuing what we called "gummarmint cheese" (government cheese). If you have a cheese factory making knockoff velveeta and it isn't selling, or you have overstocked canned pears and powdered brown sugar, sell it the the State of Arkansas.  It's maddening how obvious it is that my 80 year old ma ain't eating all 8 of these bricks of government cheese. So... is it a conspiracy theory on my part that issuing "wasteful spending" to individual Arkansas homes confirms voter bias here that government spending is wasteful?

PPS: Hillary was asked once to turn over the emails, the initial subpoena, and tured them (and her assistant's laptop) over as soon as she was asked. Mar-a-lago was asked for the government boxes in January, without any leak, and Mar-A-Lago's lawyers said in June it had all been turned over.  A second subpoena was issued when information (affadavit) emerged that it was not true, and that's when the FBI showed up. It's like if Hillary said there was no laptop... no double standard.