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7

Australian journalists can’t count, can’t think

By
Josh
– 8 January 2012Posted in: damned lies and statistics, media

The Sun-Herald today revealed the shocking fact that the number of Australian tourists being arrested for crimes overseas has doubled in the past decade.

Bogans abroad. Photo: nineMSNThis plays into well-worn stereotypes about cashed-up bogans misbehaving drunkenly on football team trips to Bali, and a handful of recent, high-profile cases of Aussies charged with drug dealing, murder and espionage. Clearly we are meant to believe that our fellow countrypersons are going overseas and behaving badly — indeed much worse than ever before — or that foreign police increasingly putting Australians in the slammer at the slightest provocation.

Except. Has the number of Australians travelling overseas remained fairly static over the past 10 years? If so, this is a clear indication of growing boganisation of, or foreign law enforcement hostility to, Aussies. But if, say, the number of Australians going on overseas trips also doubled over the same period, then this statistic would be wholly unremarkable.

Let’s say 10 years ago, 100 Aussies went overseas and one was arrested. Then last year, 200 intrepid travellers boarded a Qantas jet for foreign shores and two were arrested. Whoop-de-fucking-do, you would have to say.

But for an overworked journalist writing a scare piece about how you’re twice as likely to end up being sodomised in Kerobokan Prison the instant you leave our fair shores, that’s all a bit of hard work.

If you Googled, say, ‘number of Australians travelling overseas‘ and clicked on the top link, you’d come to the Australian Bureau of Statistics publication 4102.0 – Australian Social Trends, Sep 2010 : Holidaying Abroad. Scroll down to the last chart on the page, ‘Total short-term arrivals and departures’, which I have copied here.

ABS: Total short term arrivals and departuresWhat this looks like to me is that in 2003, the number of Australians going overseas was a bit above 3 million, and in 2010 it was pretty close to 7 million. And thanks to a strong Aussie dollar, outbound tourism surged in 2011. So at least double. Probably quite a bit more.

So. Number of Australians being arrested overseas: double. Number of Australians going overseas: more than double. In other words, Australians are LESS LIKELY to be arrested overseas than they were a decade ago. Not more. Less.

Australian journalists make this kind of error all the time. They state a scary-sounding statistic without taking into account the population growth, inflation or a dozen other factors that provide context and usually rob the number of its shock power, because it actually shows that things are about the same or getting better.

That makes them either sensationalist or stupid. Either way, they’re doing a shit job.

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8

Australian journalists should give up and let someone competent have a go

By
Josh
– 8 December 2011Posted in: damned lies and statistics, media, money, politics

Father Chris Riley, founder of charity Youth Off the Streets, drew some flak yesterday for appearing in a Clubs Australia flyer endorsing the clubs industry’s opposition to the Government’s proposed poker machine regulations.

Riley has been an enthusiastic supporter of the clubs industry for many years, and works in partnership with them to do good charitable work. The clubs, in return, have been enthusiastic supporters of Youth Off the Streets. But just how enthusiastic have they been?

To counter the criticism that Riley is a shill for the clubs, he came prepared with a statistic to show how minimal their involvement was. Clubs’ donations to the charity were variously reported as 0.5% of total donations or 0.2% of the total budget. Insignificant, right? In a radio interview with Adam Spencer, he said the figure was 2%. Funny that it’s not the same figure, but it’s still no big deal.

In his submission to the Productivity Commission’s gambling inquiry, Riley proudly revealed his charity had received more than $3.5 million in funding from the clubs industry in the eight years from its inception to the submission in March 2009. That’s about $435,000 a year. Suddenly it’s not such small change.

For this figure to be 0.5% of total donations, Youth Off the Streets would have to be pulling in around $87.5 million a year. Sounds like a lot. And it is. In the 2009 financial year Youth Off the Streets received $8.3 million in donations and $6.8 million in 2008. One assumes they were lower in previous years, rather than higher.

It took me about five minutes of Google and high-school maths to discover, by its own figures, Youth Off the Streets did not receive 0.5% of total donations from the clubs industry. In fact, it was more than 5%. (I’m indebted to blogger cyenne for the link to the Productivity Commission submission.) If someone threatened to take away more than 5% of your income, you’d think twice, wouldn’t you?

So let’s be clear. Riley is spruiking for the clubs industry and lying about the extent to which said industry bankrolls the charity he runs. The information that proves he is lying is publicly available and easy to find. Does any of this get a run in the Australian media? Of course not.

Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has used the Big Four banks’ current (at time of writing) silence about cutting interest rates in line with the Reserve Bank’s cash rate as an excuse to beat up the government.

“(The banks) should be passing on rate cuts in full,” he said. “That’s what happened under the former government.”

Is that right? Not according to George Megalogenis, who wrote in today’s Australian:

The banks have consistently short-changed home borrowers over the past decade. The pattern of meanness repeats whether the Reserve Bank is easing or tightening monetary policy – some of the cuts are held back, while the increases are passed on with a premium.

One of them has to be wrong. Who do you believe?

Aside from George Megalogenis’s very roundabout criticism of Tony Abbott’s statement, no one in the media appears to have questioned it. They all quoted what Abbott said, because he said it, and that’s news. But is it true? Not my department, say the journalists.

And here’s the point, Australian journalists. If your entire intellectual value is being able to cut and paste from press releases and prepared statements in an interesting order, you’re doing a bang-up job. But if your job includes things like checking facts and doing research, even to a small degree, you should all be sacked, because you’re really shit at it.

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2

Sloppy, vague sentences are ‘the new normal’ for Australian newspapers

By
Josh
– 8 August 2011Posted in: media, politics, wordy things

Australian journalists either no longer know how to write clear, concise and grammatical sentences, or they no longer care.

Every day, in ever newspaper in the land, we read sloppy, vague sentences written in the passive voice with hazy attribution and bad grammar.

I’m going to pick on one example in particular, but if you think this is the exception, I’m happy to provide many others.

Kate Bracks and Michael Weldon celebrate. Picture: Channel 10

Kate Bracks and Michael Weldon celebrate. Picture: Channel 10

In the article ‘Viewers desert MasterChef finale amid programming backlash‘, Amanda Meade writes:

The third series of MasterChef Australia was decided last night with Bracks outperforming Adelaide film projectionist Michael Weldon to take out the title thanks to her version of a carrot sorbet snowman from Copenhagen’s famed Noma restaurant, considered the world’s best restaurant.

(Curiously, the same sentence appears word-for-word in this earlier article by Leo Shanahan and Michael Bodey. But newspapers often steal from themselves. Why reinvent the wheel?)

What’s wrong with it? Obviously it’s an unnecessarily long and complex multi-clause sentence that uses the weak ‘with’ to connect clauses. The second ‘restaurant’ is redundant. But the cracker is it actually contains not one but two passive verbs. In the one sentence! That’s talent.

You may argue that passive sentences are no big deal. ‘Lighten up, grammar head, it’s just the way people write nowadays, like, move with the times,’ you may say. And you are dead wrong. Idiot.

Passive verbs are not evil per se. But for a journalist, a passive sentence should be a crime because it deliberately conceals information.

Let’s take the first one: “The third series of MasterChef Australia was decided last night”. By whom was it decided? The judges, obviously; we can work that one out for ourselves without too much effort. But how much harder would it have been to say “Bracks won the third series of MasterChef Australia last night, outperforming Adelaide film projectionist …”? Just like that, disposing of the passive sentence, the vagueness about who decided the competition and the ugly ‘with’ connection, and saving two words in the process.

The second passive verb is the cracker. Noma is “considered the world’s best restaurant” by whom? Approximately 2.5 seconds of Googling gave me the answer to that: by the S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, published by Restaurant magazine. In fact, Noma has won this award two years running (a fact the MasterChef judges may even have mentioned on the show). But the author(s) was evidently too busy and important to add this detail, instead opting for the vague ‘considered’.

This is simply lazy. But worse, by eliminating attribution, it allows the author to editorialise. Instead of “considered the world’s best restaurant”, she (they) could just as easily have said “considered a rat-infested tourist trap which serves live slugs in engine grease”. By whom? Who knows? The journalist assumes we don’t care.

Journalists use the same trick all the time to insert opinions into what should be straight reporting. “The government program, considered to be a debacle…” or “The minister, considered to be an incompetent boob and serial child molester…” It doesn’t take long, reading Australian political journalism in particular, before you start seeing this happening again and again.

Which makes one wonder if firing all those sub-editors, and having editors whose only talent appears to be firing sub-editors (as opposed to editing articles), has been such a great idea.

(Obviously, Muphry’s Law dictates that there will be at least one grammatical or spelling error in this post.)

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8

The ten types of comments on news articles

By
Josh
– 1 August 2011Posted in: marketroids, media, techno-wankery, wordy things

One major criticism of reality TV shows, especially in the pre-MasterChef era, was they profited from encouraging and rewarding all the worst aspects of human behaviour. I think it’s time we recognised comments on online news and opinion websites have exactly the same problem.

It doesn’t take long before you start seeing the same people making the same kinds of comments over and over. The value to the publisher is obvious, in that it encourages readers to come back, click more articles, view more ads, buy more stuff. But what value, really, does it add for the reader?

Certain topics are guaranteed to bring out particular brands of loonies – think climate change or religion. But even reader comments on relatively innocuous topics are an incredibly effective stupidity concentrator.

Essentially, all reader comments on any article ever can be boiled down to one of the following:

  1. I had an opinion before I read this article. Since this article agrees with that opinion, it is an unbiased, worthy and well written article.
  2. I had an opinion before I read this article. Since this article disagrees with that opinion, it is illogical, biased nonsense.
  3. The parts of this article I disagree with are illogical nonsense. The parts I agree with are worthy points, well argued.
  4. Some completely irrelevant thing I am obsessed with surely proves this article correct/incorrect.
  5. This article surely proves some completely irrelevant thing I am obsessed with.
  6. Personally abusing and/or expressing sexual admiration for author, subject(s) of article and/or other commenters.
  7. The affiliations of the author who wrote this article allow us to discount anything it says.
  8. The bias of the publication in which the article appears allows us to discount anything it says.
  9. Immensely long and off-topic rant containing wild conspiracy theories and LARGE SECTIONS OF ALL CAPS.
  10. Repeating the same point five dozen other commenters already made and clearly demonstrating this commenter didn’t read any of the previous comments before mouthing off.

And…

  1. I had an opinion before I read this article. Because the article is logically argued and presents the evidence clearly and without bias, I am willing to concede I was wrong about this subject previously. [Note: this never happens]
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2

Why South American magic realist novelists shouldn’t write IT case studies (part 2)

By
Josh
– 20 July 2011Posted in: techno-wankery, wordy things

The story so far…

Grupo Nacional de Chocolates S.A invested heavily in technology for its food manufacturing business, but the machinery was beset by diabolical difficulties.

Solution

One clear and chilly winter morning, a flight of brightly coloured macaws circled the factory. After they had completed their one hundredth circuit of the high-walled compound, there arrived at the gates Desarrollo Sostenible, an elderly, wrinkled man with wispy white hair but eyes as clear and sharp as an infant’s. For as long as anyone could remember, he had travelled from village to village in his rickety cart drawn by a flea-bitten mule, dispensing knick knacks and folk remedies.

At the gate, he asked to speak to Marco Estratégico para el Actuación Corporativa, the company’s Director of Information Technology.

“I said, ‘Go away old man, we don’t need your witchcraft here’,” recounted Estratégico. “But he replied, ‘So, you don’t need help with your coffee beans turning into beetles? Your corn flakes becoming porn flakes? And your sausages that look like … you know what they look like.’

“I knew then that this old man had corporate learnings we could assimilate into our knowledge-based strategies moving forward.”

“Even 150-year-old wandering wise men need to visit the supermarket occasionally,” Sostenible said.

Estratégico and Sostenible ascended the four hundred steps to the company datacentre, at the top of the stone tower from which Colonel Sistemas Legado and his men held out in a heroic last stand against the army for 15 days and nights at the end of the revolutionary war.

“As soon as Desarrollo Sostenible entered the datacentre, the servers doused their flames, though the heat was still palpable,” said Estratégico.

Sostenible rummaged in his threadbare carpet bag and withdrew a small paintbrush and set of paints. He then proceeded to paint an uncannily accurate picture of an eye on the production control server. He repeated the process with the database server. He then began to chant in a deep voice that reverberated throughout the datacentre and over the whole factory.

“I couldn’t make out all the words he was saying, but it was something like ‘la ecología, la población local, el futuro’,” said Estratégico.

“Gradually a thick fog crept out of the forest to surround the datacentre tower. It started to seep through the cracks in the walls and settled around the servers.”

As this misty wet blanket smothered the passion of the servers, they began to work properly again.

“You don’t have to be a 250-year-old wise man to know you need two virtual eyes to prepare your datacentre for cloud computing,” explained Sostenible.

Business benefits

Sausages shaped like...With the servers no longer overheating, the production lines gradually resumed their normal operation, aside from the occasional flocks of butterflies from the pasta machine.

Grupo Nacional de Chocolates successfully expanded its operations into Ecuador and Venezuela. Estratégico then developed an innovative new product for the Brazilian market.

“The bonus payment and royalties I received for inventing deep-fried butterflies helped me gain my financial freedom,” he said.

“Finally I was able to marry my second cousin Estrategia de Comunicación, who I had loved in secret ever since I saw her swimming naked under the waterfall in the forest when we were teenagers, but our family forbade us to see each other and promised her to Barón de Ladrón.”

Having finished his work, Desarrollo Sostenible fed a few chocolates to the mule and packed up his decrepit cart, piled high with packets of sausages.

“They may not look appetising, but they are the most delicious sausages I have ever eaten in my 347 years,” he exclaimed.

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