The 1960s Wasn't Eden: How "Gotcha" Journalists Mean Well But Twist Facts on Secondhand Clothing

How "Gotcha" Journalists Mean Well But Twist Facts

As the kid of a Journalism / Mass Communications professor ("Dr. I"), I'm very fond of reporters and journalists. I bemoaned the mistake the print media made in the 1990s by resisting online sales. Yes, ebay was a threat to the classified ads, which were about 1/3 of revenue (subscriptions and ads were 2/3). As advertising dollars then also migrated to the internet, and free content eroded subscriptions, it's amazing that good reporters like Barbara Davies at DailyMail are able to make a living.

But you can't run a paper based on a 1960s strategy.

So, if something rather ordinary and gradual, but important, has been happening for decades, how does a good journalist juice up the content? Add a little spice - or sugar - to a story?

Bigass Font!

The fast fashion trash mountain: Shocking report reveals today's cheap clothes are so badly made they often can't be resold — and end up rotting into a toxic soup in Africa

If my dad were to edit the headline, confident in his classified ads and advertising revenue, and not afraid of losing subscribers to the 1960s "Yellow Press", he might have written something more educational, less twisty.

"Report reveals today's cheap clothes end up in Africa."

This would ease up a bit on the "gotcha", because Africans today are a LOT more affluent than they were in the 1960s. They buy a lot of new clothes, made by increasingly efficient Asian clothing manufacturers. As Hans Rosling/Gapminder noted a decade ago the screaming poverty of the 1960s is long gone, and good damn riddance.

Hans Rosling of Gapminder Recognized

A few years ago my son, then a student at United World College, sent me a link to "The Best Statistics You've Never Seen", a TED talk by Swedish doctor and statistician Hans Rosling.  I shared it pretty widely.  In recent years, Dr. Rosling (who still seemed quite young) was increasingly turning over presentations to his own adult son.  Last Friday, we learned Rosling had died of cancer [NYT Obituary]

Over Facebook and Twitter, Rosling has not exactly been a celebrity like Prince or Bowie, but you start to observe really really smart people are all noting his passing.

Here's a short 2015 interview with Rosling with Engish subtitles.   If you haven't seen it yet, go to one of his longer 2006 TED Talk video in English.



It isn't the 1970s.  It has not been the 1970s for over a decade.  The talk about "third world" and "lesser developed nations" and "primtive" and dystopian descriptions are being kept alive by a type of white nostalgia that seeks to leverage exoticism into a kind of nuture-instinct currency.  I do it even now - returning from Africa I find far more photos on my card of grass roofs than of metal ones.  We are attracted to documenting poverty, leveraging schadenfreude, gaining a fantasy of heroicism in the process.

 "Herrschaftskritischer Ansatz" is another good German expression to describe it.

Here is my observation about how Rosling's Gapminder can bring us together.  Yes, this is political.  The wealthier blue state democrat demographic and blue collar red state demographic are both guilty of portraying the rest of the world as seriously far more "other" than it is.

Fighting Over the Poor (instead of For them)

Watching Hans Rosling's latest presentation at Swedish statistical institute "GapMinder".

"Don't Panic - End Poverty"

It is a bit long and overlaps a lot with his TED Talks, if you have already seen them.  But if you have not, it's interesting how his trips to Malawi, South East Asia, etc. put poverty in a flesh and blood, rug on the floor of the mud hut, context.

He starts with his trademark audience quiz.  This time it's not multiple choice, and only 3 questions.

1. How many people (out of 10) have electricity?

The audience answers average around 40% of people in the world have electricity, which was the rate in 1960.  The actual rate with electricity today is over 80% (I have read it's 87, but he rounds to 8).

2. How many children (out of 10) are vaccinated against measles? 

Highest audience response was 3 (followed by 1, 2 and 4).  The right answer, 83% of the world's children are vaccinated.

3. How many girls (out of 10) go to primary school?

Most of the audience answers range from 3-6.  But it's 90%.

Rosling is facing the same challenge that used electronics traders face in addressing "#ewaste policy".
Simple. The Press reports "if it bleeds, it leads".  Consumers buy bad news.  And one of the biggest concerns those of us working with Agbogbloshie face is that if the "Ewaste Scare" is a hoax, does Agbogbloshie just fall off the map?  Is there a way to harness these western eyeballs to achieve something good for the people who live in or near the slums of Old Fadama?

Rosling is doing a good job of correcting the exaggerated perceptions, but seems to also struggle with the temptation, therefore, to shrug.   So he emphasizes this time that while 12% extreme poverty is an amazing improvement over the past 3 decades, that it still represents a BILLION people.

How would Rosling react if he was in the audience, and the leader of an NGO was on stage, telling everyone the exact opposite of the truth, that things are getting "worse"?  How would he feel if an NGO called him a "poverty denier", comparing him to climate change skeptics?

Fortunately, the discourse over economic statistics is more civil than in the Waste business, where stock in defamation lawsuits is rising faster than scrap metal and plastic prices.