Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

An incomplete list of newsletters about journalism (Compiled by Joseph Lichterman, Lenfest Institiute for Journalism, joseph@lenfestinstitute.org)

Fifty-eight (58) newsletters as of today.

Some you will recognize, some you won’t.

Anything you see missing?

Full Fact is developing two new tools for automated fact-checking by Mădălina Ciobanu.

From the post:

…

The first tool, Live, is based on the assumption that people, especially politicians, repeat themselves, Babakar explained, so a claim that is knowingly or unknowingly false or inaccurate is likely to be said more than once by different people.

Once Full Fact has fact-checked a claim, it becomes part of their database, and the next step is making sure that data is available every time the same assertion is being made, whether on TV or at a press conference. “That’s when it gets interesting – how can you scale the fact check so that it can be distributed in a much grander way?”

Live will be able to monitor live TV subtitles and eventually perform speech-to-text analysis, taking a live transcript from a radio programme or a press conference and matching it against Full Fact’s database.

…

The second tool Full Fact is building is called Trends, and it aims to record every time a wrong or false claim is repeated, and by whom, to enable fact-checkers to track who or what is “putting misleading claims out into the world”.

Because part of Full Fact’s remit is also to get corrections on claims they verify, the team wants to be able to measure the work of their impact, by looking at whether a claim has been said again once they have fact-checked it and requested a correction for it.

…

The work on Live and Trends has just been funded and the tools are scheduled to appear in 2018.

They are hiring, by the way: Automated Factchecking at Full Fact. Full Fact is also a charity, in case you want to donate to support this work.

I wonder how Full Fact rate stories such as Crowdstrike‘s, a security firm that lives in the back pocket of the Democratic Party (US), report claiming Russian hacks of the DNC? A report it later revised.

Personally since the claims were “confirmed” by a known liar, James Capper, former Director of National Intelligence, I would downgrade such reports and repetitions by others to latrine gossip.

In case you haven’t read in detail the various reports, there have been no records produced, but much looks like, “in our experience,” etc., but a positive dearth of facts. That interested “experts” say it is so, in the absence of evidence, doesn’t make their claims facts.

Looking forward to news on these projects as they develop!

The State of Automated Factchecking by Mevan Babakar and Will Moy.

From the webpage:

The State of Automated Factchecking is an in-depth report looking at where we are with automated factchecking globally, and where we could get to with the necessary funding.

It sets out Full Fact’s roadmap for our own work on automated factchecking, and our design principles for the tools we are building.

We propose principles of collaboration for factchecking organisations, researchers and computer scientists around the world.

We hope that it will be the beginning of many fruitful conversations.

It’s split into two parts:

Part One: A roadmap for automated factchecking
Part Two: What we can do now and what remains to be done

Summary

• We can scale up and speed up factchecking dramatically using technology that exists now.
• We are months—and relatively small amounts of money—away from handing practical automated tools to factcheckers and journalists. This is not the horizon of artificial intelligence; it is simply the application of existing technology to factchecking.
• Automated factchecking projects are taking place across the world, but they are fragmented. This means factcheckers and researchers are wasting time and money reinventing the wheel.
• We propose open standards. Automated factchecking will come to fruition in a more coherent and efficient way if key players think in terms of similar questions and design principles, learn from existing language processing tasks, and build shared infrastructure.
• International collaboration is vital so that the system works in several languages and countries.
• Research into machine learning must continue, but we can make serious progress harnessing other technologies in the meantime.

Read the full report

Read The State of Automated Factchecking (pdf, 6Mb) and sign up below to keep up with the latest.

Stay up to date

To stay updated on our progress subscribe to our automated factchecking mailing list, or for any specific questions email Mevan Babakar at mevan@fullfact.org

I mention this report as background reading for the latest efforts by Full Fact to develop automated fact-checking tools.

Enjoy!

The need for “novelty” in a 24 x 7 news cycle, identified by Lewis and Marwick in Megyn Kelly fiasco is one more instance of far right outmaneuvering media comes to the fore in coverage of the recent shooting reported in Capitol Hill shaken by baseball shooting.

Boiled down to the essentials, James Hodgkinson, 66, of Illinois, who is now dead, wounded “House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and four others in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Va.,” on June 14, 2017. The medical status of the wounded vary from critical to released.

That’s all the useful information, aside from identification of the victims, that can be wrung from that story.

Not terribly useful information, considering Hodgkinson is dead and so not a candidate for a no-fly/sell list.

But you will read column inch after column inch of non-informative comments by and between special interest groups, “experts,” and even experienced political reporters, on a one-off event.

A per capita murder rate of 5 per 100,000, works out to 50 murderers per million people. Approximately 136 million people voted in the 2016 election so 50 x 136 means 6800 people who will commit murder this year voted in the 2016 election. (I’m assuming 1 murderer per murder, which isn’t true but it does simplify the calculation.)

One of those 6800 people (I could have used shootings per capita for an even larger number) shot a member of Congress.

Will this story, plus or minus hand wringing, accusations, counter-accusations, etc., change your routine tomorrow? Next week? Your plans for this year?

All I see is novelty and no news.

You?

PS: Identifying the “novelty” of this story did not require a large research/fact-checking budget. What it did require is a realization that everyone is talking about the shooting of a member of congress means only “everyone is talking about….” Whether that is just a freakish event or genuine news, requires deeper inquiry.

One nutter shoots a member of Congress, man bites dog, novelty, not news. Organization succeeds in killing 3rd member of Congress, that looks like news. Pattern, behavior, facts, goals, etc.

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) normally has great headlines but the editors missed a serious opportunity with: Megyn Kelly fiasco is one more instance of far right outmaneuvering media by Becca Lewis and Alice Marwick.

Lewis and Marwick capture the essential facts and then lose their key insights in order to portray “the media” (whoever that is) as a victim of far right trolls.

…

Indeed, research suggests that even debunking falsehoods can reinforce and amplify them. In addition, if a media outlet declines to cover a story that has widely circulated in the far-right and mainstream conservative press, it is accused of lying and promoting a liberal agenda. Far-right subcultures are able to exploit this, using the media to spread ideas and target potential new recruits.

A number of factors make the mainstream media susceptible to manipulation from the far-right. The cost-cutting measures instituted by traditional newspapers since the 1990s have resulted in less fact-checking and investigative reporting. At the same time, there is a constant need for novelty to fill a 24/7 news cycle driven by cable networks and social media. Many of those outlets have benefited from the new and increased partisanship in the country, meaning there is now more incentive to address memes and half-truths, even if it’s only to shoot them down.
…

Did you catch them? The key insights/phrases?

1. “…declines to cover a story that has widely circulated…it is accused of lying and promoting a liberal agenda…”
2. “…less fact-checking and investigative reporting…”
3. “…constant need for novelty to fill a 24/7 news cycle driven by cable networks and social media…”

Declining to Cover a Story

“Far-right subcultures” don’t exploit “the media” with just any stories, they are “…widely circulated…” stories. That is “the media” is being exploited over stories it carries out of fear of losing click-through advertising revenue. If a story is “widely circulated,” it attracts reader interest, page-views, click-throughs and hence, is news.

Less Fact-Checking and Investigative Reporting

Lewis and Marwick report the decline in fact-checking and investigative reporting as fact but don’t connect it to “the media” carrying stories promoted by “far-right subcultures.” Even if fact-checking and investigative reporting were available in abundance, for every story, given enough public interest (read “…widely circulated…”), is any editor going to decline a story of wide spread interest? (BTW, who chose to reduce fact-checking and investigative reporting? It wasn’t “far-right subcultures” choosing for “the media.”

Constant Need for Novelty

The “…constant need for novelty…” and its relationship to producing income for “the media” is best captured by the following dialogue from Santa Claus (1985)

…
How can I tell all the people
about my something special?
Advertise. Advertise?
How do I do that?
In my line,
television works best.
Oh, I know! Those little picture
box thingies? Can we get on those?
With enough money, a horse in a
hoop skirt can get on one of those.
…

In the context of Lewis and Marwick, far-right subculture news is the “horse in a hoop skirt” of the dialogue. It’s a “horse in a hoop skirt” that is generating page-views and click-through rates.

The Missed Headline

I’m partial to my headline but the CJR aims at a more literary audience, I would suggest:

The Media and Far Right Trolls – Imitating Alessandro and Napoleone

Alessandro and Napoleone, currently residents of Hell, are described in Canto 32 of the Inferno (Dante, Ciardi translation) as follows:

When I had stared about me, I looked down
and at my feet I saw two clamped together
so tightly that the hair of their heads had grown

together, “Who are you,” I said, “who lie
so tightly breast to breast?” They strained their necks
and when they had raised their heads as if to reply,

the tears their eyes had managed to contain
up to that time gushed out, and the cold froze them
between the lids, sealing them shut again

tighter than any clamp grips wood to wood,
and mad with pain, they fell to butting heads
like billy-goats in a sudden savage mood.

“The media” now reports its “butting heads” with “far-right subcultures,” generating more noise, in addition to reports of non-fact-checked but click-stream revenue producing right-wing fantasies.

Protecting Your Sources When Releasing Sensitive Documents by Ted Han and Quinn Norton.

From the post:

Extraordinary documentation can make for an extraordinary story—and terrible trouble for sources and vulnerable populations if handled without enough care. Recently, the Intercept published a story about a leaked NSA report, posted to DocumentCloud, that alleged Russian hacker involvement in a campaign to phish American election officials. Simultaneously, the FBI arrested a government contractor, Reality Winner, for allegedly leaking documents to an online news outlet. The affidavit partially revealed how Winner was caught leaking by the FBI, including a postmark and physical characteristics of the document that the Intercept posted.

The Intercept isn’t alone in leaving digital footprints in their article material. In a post called “We Are with John McAfee Right Now, Suckers,” Vice posted a picture of the at-the-time fugitive John McAfee, complete with GPS coordinates pinpointing their source’s location, who was shortly in official custody. In 2014, the New York Times improperly redacted an NSA document from the Snowden trove, revealing the name of an NSA agent.

The first step with any sensitive material is to consider what will happen when the subjects or public sees that material. It can be hard to pause in the rush of getting a story out, but giving some thought to the nature of the information you’re releasing, what needs to be released, what could be used in unexpected ways, and what could harm people, can prevent real problems.
…

Han and Norton cover document metadata, which I omitted in Are Printer Dots The Only Risk? along with some of the physical identifiers I mentioned.

Plus they have good advice on other identifying aspects of documents, such as content and locations.

Despite my waiting and calling for a full release of the Panama Papers, is there a credibility aspect to the publication of sensitive documents?

Another era but had Walter Cronkite said that he read a leaked NSA document and reported the same facts as the Intercept, his report would have been taken as the “facts” contained in that report.

To what extent is journalism losing credibility because it isn’t asking to be treated as credible? Merely as accurate repeaters of lies prepared and printed elsewhere?

WikiLeaks offers $10,000 to get Intercept reporter fired by Joe Uchill.

From the post:

WikiLeaks offered a $10,000 bounty Monday aimed at getting a reporter for The Intercept fired, following the arrest of a government contractor who allegedly leaked an NSA report to the site.

The Justice Department announced earlier Monday that it had arrested Reality Leigh Winner, a 25-year-old government contractor, for leaking classified documents to a news organization. It has been widely reported that Winner allegedly leaked documents from the NSA to The Intercept about Russian attempts to hack U.S. elections officials.

Investigators were able to find Winner in part, according to a government court filings, because of clues gained when an Intercept reporter showed the leaked report to the government.
…

The Intercept article lists four reporters:

• Matthew Cole
• Richard Esposito
• Sam Biddle
• Ryan Grim

From the affidavit for Reality Leigh Winner’s arrest:

…
12. On June I, 2017, the FBI was notified by the U.S. Government Agency that the U.S. Government Agency had been contacted by the News Outlet on May 30, 2017, regarding an upcoming story. The News Outlet informed the U.S. Government Agency that it was in possession of what it believed to be a classified document authored by the U.S. Government Agency. The News Outlet provided the U.S. Government Agency with a copy of this document. Subsequent analysis by the U.S. Government Agency confirmed that the document in the News Outlet’s possession is the intelligence reporting. The intelligence reporting is classified at the Top Secret level, indicating that its unauthorized disclosure could reasonably result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security, and is marked as such. The U.S. Government Agency has since confirmed that the reporting contains information that was classified at that level at the time that the reporting was published on or about May 5, 2017, and that such information currently remains classified at that level.

13. The U.S. Government Agency examined the document shared by the News Outlet and determined the pages of the intelligence reporting appeared to be folded and/or creased, suggesting they had been printed and hand-carried out of a secured space.
…

Why on earth?:

The News Outlet provided the U.S. Government Agency with a copy of this document.

How sloppy is that?

Do you trust the “U.S. Government Agency” given a copy of the document to out the reporter in question?

Or does this give them a free shot at a good reporter and blackmail evidence on the real culprit?

Suggestions?

New York Times public editor Liz Spayd on decision to eliminate her position by Pete Vernon.

From the post:

THE DECISION THIS MORNING BY THE NEW YORK TIMES to eliminate the position of public editor touched off a debate over the value of a position established in the wake of the Jayson Blair fabrication scandal to hold the paper’s editors and reporters accountable to industry standards and reader concerns.

Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. explained the move in a memo to staff: “The responsibility of the public editor—to serve as the reader’s representative—has outgrown that one office.”

According to Sulzberger, “When our audience has questions or concerns, whether about current events or our coverage decisions, we must answer them ourselves.” To that end, the paper will rely on an expanded comment section and social media feedback, as well as a new “reader center,” which was announced yesterday.

Relying on social media critiques and angry voices in the comment sections is a curious way of replacing an experienced journalist who could offer nuance and perspective while writing with the institutional backing of the nation’s most influential newspaper. The move comes at a moment when public confidence in the media is at an all-time low. In a time when the value of introspection and transparency is at a premium, cutting a position designed to provide both smacks of self-satisfaction and a misreading of the current media landscape.
… (emphasis in original)

Vernon’s post deserves your attention but the adage:

Everyone’s Responsibility Is No One’s Responsibility

answers Sulzberger the best.

Can you name a single reader of the New York Times for who holding reporters and the editorial process of the New York Times (NYT) accountable is their day job??

That’s the trick isn’t it?

If it’s not your day job, with resources commensurate to the task and access, how will you “hold” the New York Times accountable?

Will you post to Facebook or Twitter? Exactly how many people do you think will see/consider your “speaking truth to power?”

The public editor, publishing in the NYT, had a voice at least as loud as the editors and reporters.

That was Sulzberger’s real problem with the public editor. He wants the appearance of accountability but not its reality. Critics should be unfunded, isolated, powerless voices that can be easily ignored.

Sulzberger needs to go down on your list of enemies of journalism and the public in general.

Data journalists, start tracking NYT contents for your degradation of journalism stories two or three years hence. (I not presuming an outcome of silencing the public editor, that’s a forecast.)

How Not To Be Wrong by Winny de Jong.

From the post:

At the intersection of data and journalism, lots can go wrong. Merely taking precautions might not be enough.

“It’s very well possible that your story is true but wrong,” New York Times data journalist Robert Gebeloff explained at the European Investigative Journalism Conference & Dataharvest, which was recently held in Mechelen, a city 20 minutes outside of Brussels.

“When I work on a big story, I want to know everything about the topic.” To make sure he doesn’t miss out, Gebeloff gets all the data sources he can, examines it in all relevant ways and publishes only what he believes to be true.
…

The best part of this post is the distillation of Gebeloff’s presentation into a How Not To Be Wrong Checklist.

De Jong’s checklist is remarkably similar to requirements for replication of experiments in science.

It would make a great PDF file to share with data scientists in general.

From a tweet by @onthemedia, see their website: onthemedia.org.

If you follow #2:

2. Don’t trust anonymous sources.

Skip political reports in the New York Times and Washington Post.

Is there a market for delayed news?

I ask because I understand there was an explosion in Manchester Arena in England, 10:35 PM their local. Even as I type this, mis-information is flooding social media channels from any number of sources.

What if there was a news service with a variable delay, say minimum 7 days but maximum of 14 days, that delivered a coherent and summarized version of breaking events?

As opposed to the click-bait teasers that get shared/forwarded/re-tweeted without anyone reading the mis-information behind the click-bait.