Animosity Toward Journalists & Journalism Is Spreading

The Washington Post describes a alleged incident of hostility toward journalist Ben Watson by a Customs and Border Control (CBP). The CBP is investigating the incident. The officer involved may wind up denying the story. WaPo reports that the journalist has filed a complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services and he has published an article in Defense One, the news organization the journalist works for, describing the incident. WaPo writes:

It took a moment for Ben Watson to realize the officer was not joking.

Watson had just told the Customs and Border Protection staffer reviewing his passport that he works in journalism. Then the seemingly routine Thursday encounter at the Washington Dulles International Airport got tense.

“So you write propaganda, right?” Watson, the news editor at the national security site Defense One, recalled the CBP officer asking.

“No,” Watson says he replied. He affirmed again that he was a journalist.

The officer repeated his propaganda question, said Watson, who was returning from a reporting trip in Denmark.

“With his tone, and he’s looking me in the eye — I very much realized this is not a joke,” Watson told The Washington Post on Friday. Watson said he got his passport back only after agreeing with the “propaganda” charge.

The CBP officer made Watson state that he writes propaganda twice before letting him go.

Watson writes in his Defense One article: “Over the past year, several journalists have reported being harassed and even detained by U.S. customs agents. In February, CBP officials apologized to a BuzzFeed reporter who was aggressively questioned upon entering New York’s JFK Airport. In June, freelance reporter Seth Harp described his hours-long detention by CBP officers in the Austin, Texas, airport. .... Update: In an email, a CBP spokesperson said that the agency is aware of and is investigating the “allegation about an officer’s alleged inappropriate conduct at Washington Dulles International airport,” adding that the agency holds its employees accountable and does not tolerate inappropriate comments or behavior. The spokesperson declined to be identified.”

Does a president bear any responsibility for demagoguery and authoritarian behavior?

Most or all authoritarian leaders throughout history have relied on dark free speech[1] to some extent to gain acceptance and power. In recent centuries, demagogues and tyrants focus on censoring the press, sometimes forcing it to put out propaganda or go out of business.

The president’s hate of the professional press is well-known and undeniable. The effect of a leader’s rhetoric to influence public opinion and behavior is also well-known and undeniable. Are incidents of journalist harassment due to some non-trivial degree to the president’s anti-journalism rhetoric and behavior? Or, (1) does a president’s rhetoric and behavior have no cause and effect linkage in matters like this, or (2) what the president says is protected free speech and thus any effects the speech may have on people is justifiable or otherwise does not reflect badly on a president in any way?


Footnote:
1. Dark free speech: Constitutionally or legally protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse, polarize and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide inconvenient truths, facts and corruption (lies and deceit of omission), and (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism. (my label, my definition)

Dispelling the Myths About Sexuality Education

All girls and boys – and all women and men, for that matter – can benefit from comprehensive knowledge about safe sexual behavior. Yet opposition to sexuality education is loud, persistent, and widespread, often because critics lack an accurate understanding of what it entails.

By Helen Clark, a former Prime Minister of New Zealand, is a former Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sexuality-education-benefits-opposition-by-helen-clark-2019-10

NEW YORK – Sexuality education empowers people to make informed choices about their own bodies and sexuality – and to stay safe in the process. It is therefore an essential element of a quality education. Yet, far from promoting comprehensive sexuality education, many are fighting to limit it. The consequences – especially for young people – are serious, lasting, and sometimes deadly.

As “Facing the Facts,” a new policy paper by UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report, reminds us, each year some 16 million girls aged 15-19 (and two million under 15) give birth – a development that often marks the end of their formal education. Another three million girls aged 15-19 undergo unsafe abortions each year.

These numbers are linked to a lack of education about sex, sexuality, and the human body. For example, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, according to WaterAid, around one-half of girls think that menstruation is a disease. In Afghanistan, 51% of girls know nothing about menstruation before experiencing it themselves. In Malawi, that figure jumps to 82%. If girls – let alone boys – do not know what menstruation is, how can they possibly be expected to protect themselves against unwanted pregnancy?

The same goes for sexually transmitted infections like HIV. Young people aged 15-24 account for one-third of new HIV infections among adults. This is partly because only one-third of young women in most low- and middle-income countries know how to prevent the transmission of the virus.

But, contrary to popular belief, sexuality education is not just about sex. As “Facing the Facts” highlights, it also includes lessons about families and social relationships. These can benefit children as young as five, not least by enabling them to differentiate between appropriate physical contact and abuse.

Moreover, sexuality education offers important lessons about gender dynamics, including issues such as consent, coercion, and violence. Some 120 million girls worldwide – slightly more than one in ten – have experienced forced intercourse, forced sexual acts, or other forms of intimate partner violence at some point in their lives. This helps to explain why violence is the second leading cause of death among adolescent girls globally.

Comprehensive sexuality education can go some way toward countering the warped messages about masculinity that encourage male sexual dominance and so often lead to exploitation and violence. It can also assist in breaking the silence on such experiences among victims, potentially inspiring them to seek help.

All girls and boys – and all women and men, for that matter – can benefit from comprehensive knowledge about safe sexual behavior. Yet opposition to sexuality education is loud, persistent, and widespread. Some call for it to be banned outright. Others insist that schools should teach only abstinence, despite evidence showing that such programs often provide medically inaccurate information.

Like critics of LGBTQI+ education, opponents of comprehensive sexuality education seek to justify their stance on cultural, religious, social, or even political grounds. But, whatever the apparent motivation, their opposition often reflects a lack of knowledge about what such education entails. Improving the public’s understanding of sexuality education could therefore help to neutralize the negative hype and open the way for more young people to benefit.

Leaders worldwide must stand up for comprehensive sexuality education, by touting its clear, evidence-based benefits and dispelling harmful myths. An informed news media and advocacy by civil-society groups must also contribute to this process. With accurate information, the public is far more likely to accept sexuality education.

But for such education to be meaningful, it must be of high quality. Teachers must therefore be given the knowledge, resources, and, thus, confidence they need to teach these lessons effectively. Scripted lessons, like those introduced in Namibia and Chile, or online resources for teachers, as Tanzania provides, can go a long way toward fulfilling that need.

Furthermore, sexuality education should ideally be provided as a standalone program, rather than integrated into other subjects (a common practice that diminishes its impact). And it must be complemented by widely accessible, youth-friendly sexual and reproductive health services.

It is time to face the facts: humans have sex, often long before they reach adulthood. And it is immoral – perverse, even – to withhold potentially life-saving information from young people. After all, knowledge is power. By giving today’s youth, and girls in particular, a better understanding of their bodies, we can give them the power to protect their health – and their futures.

Hiking the Pawn Trail This Morning

The Pawn Trail is a 0.75 mile loop trail through genuine old growth forest in central Oregon, about 20 miles inland from the ocean. It's my favorite fungus finding spot. It was raining today. I had my old camera, so the picture quality isn't up to snuff.

Questioning the MSM

“Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives. They are controlling what we can & cannot see.” Donald Trump tweet, 2018

The mainstream press and other professional media outlets (MSM) are under sustained attack by authoritarians throughout the world. The US president refers to the press as the enemy of the people, apparently believing negative coverage of him is fake news consisting of lies and otherwise unreliable content. Many people reject most or all MSM content and consider the MSM to be so inaccurate and/or biased that it is worthless or nearly so. Is that true? This is the first of several discussions that will focus on that question.

A June 2019 article in the Economist, Google rewards reputable reporting, not left-wing politics, examined the veracity of the factually unsupported president's claim. They concluded: “Our statistical study revealed no evidence of ideological bias in the search engine’s news tab.”

Google said it uses 10,000 evaluators to rate sources for its search engine. The company claimed they assess expertise and trustworthiness, but not ideology. The data above shows a bias to rely on sources with higher fact accuracy and lower political ideological bias.

The data the Economist obtained shows that if Google favored liberals, left-wing sites would appear more often than their model predicted. Right-wing sites would be cited less often. The Economist summarized the bias: “We saw no such trend. Overall, centre-left sites like the New York Times got the most links—but only about as many as our model suggested. Fox News beat its modest expectations. Because most far-right outlets had bad trust scores, they got few search results. But so did Daily Kos, a far-left site.”

The Economist points out that their study did not prove Google is completely impartial. For example, there is a possibility that fact-checkers were partisan. That would tend to inject bias into the model. Some keywords suggested bias, but in both directions. The data suggested that Google’s bias increases hits for “viral articles.” Incendiary Trump stories tend to come from leftist sources, while gory crime coverage is more common on rightist sites. People click on links like that. That is where most bias toward viral articles appears to come from.

MSM -- Worthless or Not?

What this does not directly address is the question of whether the MSM is basically worthless. Although Google searches are, or appear to be, biased toward sources having a higher fact accuracy and lower ideological bias, that says nothing about what standard of accuracy and bias constitutes a very low, low, moderate, high or very high level of reliability for (i) a source, (ii) any individual article or broadcast segment from a source, or (iii) any series of related articles or broadcast segments. It also does not shed light on how to assess reliability for clusters of ideologically related sources or issues, assuming that is a factor at all.

It does appear that is it hard to objectively define the relative degree of objectivity and reliability for the MSM as a whole and for individual sources and clusters of related sources. It may be the case that professional print media is significantly more reliable than cable news. In view of the complexity, the concept of “reliability” of the MSM or any single source is probably an essentially contested concept and no universally accepted definition can be articulated. Many or most supporters of the president firmly believe that most or all of the MSM is or almost completely unreliable, i.e., worthless at best and probably harmful.