It costs about $84,000 to attend the prestigious Columbia Journalism School MS program. There are businesses you could buy for less.

So even if your blood is printer’s ink, if you need to make a living, we need to look at the situation calmly and clearly. The Economist provides some sobering recent statistics about your chances of surviving as a journalist today.

According to “The State of the News Media 2013”, a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Centre, the deteriorating financial state of news organisations has hurt their output. Newspaper staffs have shrunk by around 30% since their peak in 1989, and newspapers collectively now employ fewer than 40,000 full-time professionals, the lowest number since the mid-1970s.

Nearly a third of Americans told pollsters that they have stopped paying attention to a news source whose quality they perceived to be in decline. They might be on to something there. When half of local TV news stories come in at under 30 seconds, we are lucky if they show us pix of eye-catching cloud formations, cute puppies, and giggling grads, and don’t imply who or what we should vote for. But do you want to spend your life producing that fluff?

(On the right, above, the first mass-produced television set, late 1940s, courtesy Fletcher 6.)
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The free fall to fishwrap  is certainly a historic story though we must stand back a bit, to see why.

I used to live in a city (Toronto, Canada) where real estate prices went up and down, the latter event made to sound like a street-level apocalypse. But when I mentioned the doomsaying to an old-timer years ago, he muttered, “Yes. But the long term trend is always up.” Indeed. Toronto properties you could buy for a few thousand dollars in the 1950s were selling for over half a million dollars in 2012, way beyond the rate of inflation.

So some dooms, like that one, are just timeouts. Others are time’s-ups. Newspaper circulation in the United States has dropped 0.7% in only six months. This is only one news blip in a steady drumbeat of declines. Advertising revenue, the lifeblood of newspapers, is in free fall too, with inflation-adjusted earnings lower than in 1950, when standards of living were much lower. So we are probably looking at a time’s-up for that medium as a public news source. No wonder Barry Diller regrets buying Newsweek, doubtless unlike the proprietors of newspapers of old, pictured right.

If people are not learning what to buy or where from newspapers, they also aren’t learning it from TV either. The ongoing decline of TV is best captured by this still-relevant 2005 stat: Read more »

Probably not, and here is why: The move to institute new paywalls (where you have to pay to read the article/see the TV show) is usually a frantic effort to stem the rising tide of red ink.

Generally, readers have never covered anything like the costs of traditional print media. In the movies, the newsboy hawks a big story, right, and our hero tosses him a coin, grabs a paper, and rushes off to death or glory:

The nickel pays the newsboy. Does anyone believe that, even multiplied thousands of times, it covers the costs of the news desks, the foreign bureaus, the presses, the vans, the lawsuits? Read more »

Recently, some friends were discussing the falling reader and viewer stats of traditional mainstream media. I commented that a sign of their growing weakness is the increasing number of simple, disastrous errors in reporting.

A friend offered, “They can’t really help it though; they have to compete with Facebook and Twitter.” I retorted, “If that is true, then it’s definitely all over for them.”

The original reason a medium of record wasn’t quite as swift as just anybody armed with a platform and an old-fashioned bullhorn has been the need for accuracy. The medium of record held off telling us things until they were confirmed. Whether we agreed or disagreed with the medium’s “take” on a story, the selection of information provided was expected to be factual. Most of us can wait to hear about a crime long enough to be sure that our source is right about who is dead, wounded, wanted for questioning, or in custody.

It’s one thing for the Twittersphere to get key details of the Sandy Hook massacre wrong. The Twittersphere is full of people who, in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon terror attack, couldn’t distinguish between Chechnya (the bombers’ country of origin in the Caucasus) and the Czech Republic (an unrelated country in central Europe). And if we have no reason to trust a particular source’s accuracy, we shouldn’t.

But traditional media’s supposed news gathering experts got basic Sandy Hook details (like the name of the shooter) wrong, identifying his innocent brother instead. And that was not unique. As one key media pundit put it, “We are getting big stories wrong over and over again. Read more »

Don’t pretend it’s mainstream journalism.

Mainstream journalists are increasingly believers in increased power for government to force attitudes, values, beliefs, and lifestyles on citizens, and are often apparently willing to help. That may include suppressing or manipulating news if necessary.

This sort of thing didn’t used to be so big a problem because, when the traditional media were the only source of information about a major event, they had to get stuff right (at least in any situation where the true story could become generally known). Now they need only get their spin in ahead of others, which inevitably lowers the demand for accuracy.

Journalists today will necessarily have a weaker attachment to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution than characterized the journalist of yesteryear (speaking of which, at left is a newspaper from 1721). The Amendment reads,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Suppose your object as a journalist is mainly to get a certain spin on an otherwise well-reported event accepted (for example, you want people to accept that the Boston marathon bombing is best explained by teen angst rather than indoctrination in an ideology that promotes violence)? You will not value your own “freedom of the press” nearly as much as the ability to dominate the airwaves with a monolithic message and hinder the efforts of others to present an alternative message, even if their message features is a more accurate description of events, motives, or situations.

Indeed, the less your message relates to reality, the more you will feel this way. And the more your organizations and relationships will be tied in to coercive powers, if only to secure your own well-being and safety. Read more »

It can be more interesting than one might suppose. Prominent physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University has recently discussed the question of whether nothing is just the absence of something on NBCNews.com (in connection with his recent book on the subject):

“Is that really nothing?… There’s no space and there’s no time. But what about physical laws, what about mathematical entities? What about consciousness? All the things that are non-spatial and non-temporal.”

– Lawrence Krauss, Arizona State University, on whether nothing is just the absence of something, NBCNews.com, March 24, 2013.

Astronomer Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe has conveniently listed the many ways in which physicists, astronomers, philosophers, and theologians have understood the concept of nothingness in Why the Universe Is the Way It Is (Baker, 2008). It can mean “a complete lack of:  Read more »

Steve Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent, is a sociology professor who holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, England. He was educated at Columbia University where he graduated cum laude in History and Sociology in 1979. In 1981 he received a Master of Philosophy degree in History and Philosophy of Science from Clare College, Cambridge, and then a Ph.D. in History and the Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in 1985.

Dr. Fuller’s research interests include his main area of study in sociology and technology but also the controversial subjects of science and religion, in particular Intelligent Design Theory, which Dr. Fuller describes as being the study of the idea that “biology is divine technology.” Exploring the concept of the future of humanity, he has also written about what he feels is the next step in human evolution. Dr. Fuller calls this concept “Humanity 2.0.”

Our interviewer is journalist and researcher Ryan Cochrane.

Ryan Cochrane: Why does Darwinism pose a much greater threat to the future of humanity than religion? Isn’t this the exact opposite of what people like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens are saying?

Steve Fuller: Yes, it is the exact opposite. Dawkins and Hitchens betray a remarkable sociological ignorance. They treat ‘religion’ as if it were some sort of anti- or pre-scientific ideology, when in fact it is simply the generic name for any complex social organization that is held together over large expanses of space and time without depending on the existence of the nation-state. Not surprisingly, ‘religion’ in this properly broad sense has been responsible for enormous good and evil in the course of history. Once this is kept in mind, it should be clear that there is no specifically ‘religious’ gene or bit of the brain to be found (which then one might treat as a pathology in need of cure).

In particular, religions do not require belief in a deity, let alone one that is transcendent of the natural world. To be sure, belief in a transcendent deity is an interesting thing to explain, and may have an important basis in our genes and brains. However, this belief is not specifically ‘religious’ but is also common to modern science, especially in its quest to acquire what Thomas Nagel has called ‘the view from nowhere’, which is a fair characterisation of the Newtonian project and all its subsequent revisions in the history of physics. Read more »

Terry Scambray, a Fresno, California–based writer, offers a review of prominent philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos, in which he challenges his thesis a bit:

Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Thomas Nagel. Oxford University Press, 2012. 128 pages. $24.95

In Mind & Cosmos, the highly regarded philosopher Thomas Nagel can’t make up his mind about how to explain his own mind and the minds of the rest of us. However, he is sure that the materialist explanation of mind is, well, merely a mental construct or as he writes, it “is almost certainly false.”

In his longest chapter called “Consciousness,” Nagel, a professor of philosophy and law at New York University, recounts how the “mind-body problem” arose out of the 17th century scientific revolution, which necessarily involved reducing things down to their tiniest physical and chemical parts and then discovering what made them tick.

But can such “scientific” reductionism be applied to the mind and consciousness ? Not really because applying quantitative measurements to the unquantifiable is actually a misapplication which results in a degenerative form of science sometimes called, “scientism.” And “scientism” is but another example of the adage: If you are devoted to using a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

Yes, it remains paradoxical that science has never been able to objectify something essential to its entire enterprise, mind or consciousness, which, as Nagel writes, is that “aspect of mental phenomena that is evident from the first person, inner point of view which tells you how sugar tastes, red looks or how anger feels,” and how to fairly and accurately evaluate a scientific experiment.

Of course, the mind/body conundrum is a perennial issue which thinkers found puzzling even a long time prior to the 17th century. Nonetheless, Nagel (left) yearns for a “unified world picture” which would necessarily have to include the mind and the cosmos, a goal which he oddly refers to as “utopian.”

Perhaps he thinks of this goal as “utopian” because as he concedes, “theories of everything” are restricted because science currently limits itself to material causes whereas the mind is an immaterial, immeasurable, unrestricted free agent.

Despite this limitation, Nagel ambitiously remarks that “the more encompassing a theory is, the more powerful it has to be.” For this reason he hopes that “a major conceptual revolution at least as radical as relativity theory or the original scientific revolution itself” will be discovered which will make the mind and consciousness amenable to scientific inspection. Read more »

Philosopher-photographer Laszlo Bencze commented recently on the film The History of the World in Two Hours:

He writes,

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In terms of computer graphics, it was quite impressive. In terms of explanations of life, it was the usual: The great myth of our times presented uncritically in the vaguest of terms:

Chemicals form on the early Earth which “combine” to cause life. Life “gets” more complicated as time goes on. There is an “explosion” of complexity in the Cambrian. Etc.

When it comes to our hominid “ancestors” we are given the usual pablum. The visual is a group of chimps in a tree. (These are real chimps, not CGI.) The announcer intones that it’s getting crowded in the tree and there’s less food due to the competition. But (thank evolution!) a few of the more “adventurous” chimps decide to climb down out of the tree onto the flat savannah where they “develop” a bipedal gait. The advantageous of a bipedal gait on a savannah landscape are numerous and these lucky bipedal hominids thrive (depicted by CGI bent over chimps walking).

There’s nary a hint that any of these evolutionary steps might be very complicated or difficult to explain. Everything is easy. Evolution gets reified into some sort of vaguely purposeful entity that guides life along, always responding perfectly to environmental catastrophes and opportunities.

Just once I’d like to see one of these shows actually dare to say something like, Read more »

The human brain does not differ in organization from the ape brain, yet is capable of so much more. So clearly, physical organization is where human uniqueness apparently does NOT lie …

Recently, a Reading University research team has used statistical models to suggest that “Ice Age people living in Europe 15,000 years ago might have used forms of some common words including I, you, we, man and bark, that in some cases could still be recognized today.”

Their hypothesis is that some words “would have changed so slowly over long periods of time as to retain traces of their ancestry for up to ten thousand or more years.”

This story, as such, is typical “human evolution” hype, as can be seen clearly from grammatical constructions like “might have” and “would have.” That said, evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel’s team may be on to something. Their starting assumption—that words used frequently in everyday speech are less likely to change over long periods of time—is probably correct, but they are surely taking their conclusions too far.

Here is a line  (1132) from Beowulf, the oldest epic in the English language tradition, composed some time between 700 and 1000 A.D. (first page of a surviving manuscript, above),

won wið winde, winter yþe beleac

and here is a translation into modern English:

lashed by the winds, or winter locked them

I suspect that you will recognize only two words in the original, “wind[e]” and “winter.”

Large comprehension costs may be expected from changing words like “wind” and “winter”—or “water,”and “fire” readily. Indeed, that was the point of a famous folk tale in which a man orders his maidservant to use a new special language when talking to him, and then a fire breaks out, and she dutifully reports: Read more »