Journalism continues to falter

George Rebane

Journalism is a lost trade (art?), attested to by the justifiably low esteem journalists are held in by the reading public.  Jacob Gallagher attempts to make this point in his ‘Journalism Is Faltering but ‘Content’ Is Thriving’, and in the process makes a self-referential blooper.  His main thesis is that content - like editorials, movies, TV shows, commentaries, …, the stuff for which you access media - will survive in spite of the palpable deterioration of the journalistic wrappers in which they are delivered.  For proof, one need only to read a newspaper or listen to a news program (yes, even Fox News) to see the loose logic relating propositions and the liberties taken with language – today no one seems to know the structure of an unambiguously communicating grammar or the definition of the words used. 

(Even RR’s comment streams contain the lamentations of some readers who eschew the semantic compactness of what to them are ‘big words’, especially in previously unencountered sequences.  As reflected in the longitudinal studies on literacy available at the National Center for Educational Statistics, most of our fellow citizens would like to avoid complex concepts, instead demand simple thoughts in simple sentences, and not even too many of those strung together, thank you very much.)

And then Gallagher steps in it by claiming that “the concept of ‘content’ rose alongside social media, beginning with the launch of Facebook in 2004.”  Well no.  The man shows the deficit in his journalistic acumen, no doubt due to his inexperience and/or recently attempted education.  In fact, the notion of content was already mature at the birth of interactive multi-media products (remember PC controlled laser-disc players?) in the early 1980s, when we were developing content (the ‘payload’) ensconced in metadata along with new and delightful UIs (user interfaces or ‘wrappers’).  For broadcasts, the metric of Content Factor was also born, measuring the time fraction of content divided by the advertised duration or time slot length of the show.  (Today CFs for most entertainment programs on commercial TV are in the 0.55 to 0.75 range.)

Comments

[Gregory]

Gallagher is the men's fashion editor at the WSJ ... need I say more?

[Bill Tozer]

Meme

https://m.facebook.com/RowdyConservatives/photos/a.217983685002343/1536016709865694/?type=3&source=48

[Riley]

Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness (a big word to describe people who habitually use big words that fall outside of normal patterns of speech) is one of a satellite of markers for Aspergers, OCD, and . . . you can look it up so I won't be accused of poking fun at someone with personality disorders.

[Gregory]

It's OK, "Riley", we all know you are trying to paint someone you don't even know as having a difficult to diagnose psychiatric disorder, without the training to recognize it even were you to be chosen as a clinician for the person you're denigrating.

Normal patterns of speech vary with education, and it has been established that while self described liberals talk down to people with less education, self described conservatives do not. I'm neither but I expect libertarians would be lumped in with conservatives in this matter.

[The Estonian Fox]

Gregory @ 11:45AM.
Don't be too hard on 'Riley'. After all, even the American Psychiatric Association can't come up with a difficult diagnosis all the time. So they make up stuff & write it into the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now at DSM-5). And then they expect everyone else to follow along. I hear they are planning to add "gender dyslalia" into the next edition.

[George Rebane]

Sometimes you just can't win for losing - 'Plain-Spoken Fed Chairman Sometimes Leaves Markets Confused' - "Jerome Powell has taken a conversational tone, but his communications haven’t always been understood. ... Early in his term as Fed chairman, beginning in February last year, Mr. Powell received praise from lawmakers on Capitol Hill and market watchers on Wall Street for bringing a plain-English approach to communicating about policy. But the more recent flubs demonstrate the risks of Mr. Powell’s more conversational style as the central-bank head."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/plain-spoken-fed-chairman-sometimes-leaves-markets-confused-11548757801

[L]

A rich and ever growing vocabulary is one great advantage of the English language. It allows complex and nuanced ideas to be communicated concisely instead of requiring "wordiness." The problem for the complainants is that for this to be of use, the listener must know the vocabulary words being used. Modern education doesn't seem to be doing a very good job on that front. L

[Russ]

My wife, Ellen’s father, was the renowned Social Scientist Dr. A.B. Holingshead who chaired the Department at Yale for almost three decades. I once asked him why sociologists were always inventing new words to describe human traits that were easily described with existing words. His answer, it is a form of gatekeeping, academic job protection, to keep your average reader from knowing the code words of the profession. The head of the Engineering Department at the University of Nebraska told me that my sociology degree was not sufficient to get a Masters in Micro-Electronics even though I had passed the first 4 courses with excellent grades. He said I would not understand the nuances of all the engineering terms unless I spend 4 years in the engineering school. In other words, I need to learn the code words of the engineering profession. My current solution to mastering science and engineering terms — the Kindle Reader. Read books on a Kindle and when a strange word comes up press on the word and a dictionary pops up and explains the term. Awesome! I am still working on how to get some of George’s writing into my Kindle.

[George Rebane]

Russ 302pm - https://www.google.com/search?q=How+to+enter+a+text+file+into+Kindle?

[Scott O]

Riley 11:06 - "Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness (a big word to describe people who habitually use big words that fall outside of normal patterns of speech) is one of a satellite of markers for Aspergers, OCD, and . . . you can look it up so I won't be accused of poking fun at someone with personality disorders."
As Gary Pruner, my art teacher in high school, used to say - "Big words? You mean like hippopotamus?"
The problem for Riley is that 'normal' patterns of speech are all over the map.
I have found that George uses a word I'm unfamiliar with about once a month. Might be a technical term - might just be a 'big word'. And that brings up one of the nice aspects of the internet. Just open a new tab, copy and paste the word into the search engine and you have several options for the pronunciation and meaning.
Try reading books written a hundred years ago. What was a 'normal' speech pattern then isn't normal now, but it's written in English and the words carry the certain meaning that makes for good reading and clear communication.

[Don Bessee]

Ooops the fakenews keeps trying to convince us the President can not give botox Nancy the finger but then....

BROOKS: I want to direct your attention to 10 United States Code § 284 which authorizes President Trump to deploy the United States military to the southern border to build fences and to do a lot of other things, and for clarity, if you look it up in the dictionary the word fence includes the word barrier and the word barrier includes walls made of a wide variety of different materials.
So that having been said, it seems to me that 10 U.S. Code § 284 can be used by the President of the United States to direct the United States military to build a wall. Now as of today, you’ve mentioned military forces along the southern border, have any of them been deployed pursuant to 10 U.S.C. § 284?

ROOD: Congressman, I don’t believe any of our forces have been deployed pursuant to 10 U.S.C. § 284. You are correct, however, that that use of authority would authorize the secretary of defense to erect barriers, roads, fencing, those types of materials to disrupt drug smuggling.

BROOKS: Does 10 U.S.C. § 284 as you understand it, require the declaration of a national emergency before it is implemented?

ROOD: No.
BROOKS: It does not?
ROOD: No.

BROOKS: Has President Trump, to your knowledge, ever used 10 U.S.C § 284 to direct the military to build the wall that is necessary for border security?
ROOD: No, not to my knowledge, Congressman.

BROOKS: If President Trump were to direct the Pentagon and the United States military pursuant to 10 U.S.C § 284 to build such barriers as are necessary to secure our southern border from drug trafficking and international crime cartels would the United States military obey that order?
ROOD: If we judge it to be a lawful order, yes sir. And I assume it would be.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/01/29/watch-defense-official-nothing-stopping-trump-from-authorizing-military-to-build-border-wall/

;-)

[Scott O]

Don at 7:50 - Trying to remember when the military had to have any sort of special permission to erect whatever barriers were deemed necessary to effect a defense of our sovereign nation. 'Barriers' in the full sense of the word. The idea of border security being catch and release of the perps in flagrante delicto wherein they soon become de facto citizens complete with 'rights' according to nothing more than their continued presence (illegal, but so what?) on our soil.
I'll ask again just in case some one new has joined the 'conversation' - what laws can I openly break and thereby be rewarded for by the govt?
Gee - I thought we had a Constitution or something written by dead white guys that said something about "equal application of the law"?
Probably had a lot of 'big words' in it, so who cares?

[Gregory]

Russ 302pm

Regarding code words as a barrier to entry to engineering and science: in a word, no.

Sociology may well have a changing vocabulary as a barrier to entry, I'd not second guess your late father-in-law.

"Education" is another field of study with made up words for the sake of obfuscation... a sad but funny article on term paper ghost writing was published a few years ago, the journalist tracked down multiple people who wrote "research" papers ready to be turned in for college credit. People with Masters or better who loved doing research and writing papers... for money. A twinge of regret about the fraud being perpetrated by the student paying them for the "research" they performed, but hey! Someone was going to do it and as long as they signed their name to it, they weren't the liar. Plus, they got to be paid to learn something new.

Unfortunately, it wasn't all fun. One stated that they absolutely hated writing papers for Education majors and grad students... while every complicated subject had jargon, most had jargon to make complicated subjects easier to handle. Education as a field of academic study had jargon to make simple concepts appear to be complex.

Math, physics, chemistry, engineering... don't. There's enough complexity in the real world to not have to invent more to keep life interesting.