How to fix newspapers

I have added a section to my critical page on the Mass Media, with regards to newspapers and cheap sensationalist journalism, and their negative effects on individuals and society. Here is a bit of the next text, view the rest by clicking on the title, above!

• Stronger international laws against the public spreading of disinformation. Broadcasters should be placed under extra legal obligation to check facts. Many journalists avoid legal trouble by claiming that they don't know what stories are true or not. So, if it is scandalous and it will sell, then, they publish it without checking (or admitting) their sources. There needs to be an international body that specifically deals with mass-media outlets, proscribing to them a greater responsibility to check their facts, with the ability to suspend printing or publication once a certain amount of abuse has built up.
  
  
• Journalists should be required to be a member of a journalist association, which they get kicked out of if they produce very low quality information. Many developed countries already have such associations. It should especially be the case in wire agencies, from which most other news outlets get their news.

Some methods of curbing the press's abuses are good-hearted, but occasionally dysfunctional:

• "In 2008 the Slovak parliament introduced one to guarantee the subject of a story the right to reply, of the same length and prominence as the original" - this sounds good, because the idea is that the press will have to print criticisms of itself in its own papers with such frequency that they will be compelled only to publish accurate information. There is however a very unfortunate second part to that law - the right to reply stands even if the facts were correct. This would seem to me to lead to a barrage of responses from politicians and lawyers that abuse the right-to-reply principal, in effect, ending the ability of the press to be critical. In a healthy democracy, the press must free to be critical of governments and institutions.
  
  
• In Poland, an old law gives sources the authority to withdraw or edit quotations right up until the point of publication41. So when a paper tries to quote someone out of context, as they are often eager to do, the subject can withdraw their quote. Unfortunately, it seems like it can again be abused by officials to ruin newspaper stories in order to hide truth.
  

In short, it appears to be very difficult to concoct laws that allow individuals to protect themselves against ridiculous press stories, but where instititons and democracies are still subject to critical journalism without fear of recriminations. What would be an ideal is a world where consumers, as pointed out above, avoid the more outlandish papers, and where editors and journalists only try to produce responsible pieces. Unfortunately, neither is likely to happen.

The Creation of an International Military Force and the Fear of Progress

I've added some text to "Uniforce: An International Military Force" based on stuff I've written in "General Neophobia in Everyday Life: Humankind's Fear of Progress and Change" which traces a few historical battles between progress in defence (such as wearing camouflaged uniforms) and those who worried that changes in defence were too dangerous to contemplate. Experiments in pooled defence have so far proved successful and stabilizing, but, there are few attempts to explain this to the general public.

“Despite the advantages of pooled military defence, there is much public concern about things such as combined European defence, even though the advantages far outweigh the theoretical disadvantages. Because it is big, and new, there is much opposition to it even though the status-quos in international defence are widely acknowledged to be broken. [...]

Media coverage of the ESDP (common European defence policy) has been entirely negative, despite the commendation of senior military experts and diplomats in Europe. In the future, when a European or International military force exists, historians will look back and puzzle over what our problems were.
”
From "General Neophobia in Everyday Life: Humankind's Fear of Progress and Change" by Vexen Crabtree (2009)

There must be more effort to explain to the public the massive costs and disadvantages of having nearly every nation maintain world-faring military forces, to explain that some developed countries only have a defensive force (look at Switzerland) and have not been immediately invaded by their neighours, and that the African Union proves the principal of pooled defence. In practice, NATO and Europe are operating as if they had a unified worldwide force, and deploy it where is necessary. It makes sense to formalize this, so that it can be strengthened and made more dependable. But the public do not hear anything of these ideas or debates - they exist only in specialized military journals. While the mass media, which is inherently sensationalist and nationalist, is the main voice on international military issues, most people receive reactionary information that is biased against intra-national accords.

Neophobia and the Irrational Fear of 'Radiation'

I've added some text to "General Neophobia in Everyday Life: Humankind's Fear of Progress and Change" by Vexen Crabtree (2009):

We saw that in zombie films and other hollwood products often used the idea of 'radiation', sometimes in a very simplistic manner, to sow the seeds of fear and horror. There exists as part of the fear of the invisible and the unknown, a fear of 'radiation'. This is despite the fact that the colours of the spectrum and radio signals are both forms of radiation, along with infra-red light (all are merely different frequencies on the electro-magnetic spectrum). This general fear of immaterial waves plays a part in the unfounded fears of mobile phones. Dr Frank Barnaby, a specialist on military technology and nuclear physics, points out that this fear is also a weapon in the hands of terrorists:

“
'The true impact of a dirty bomb would be the enormous social, psychological and economic disruption [...]. It would cause considerable fear, panic and social disruption, exactly the effects terrorists wish to achieve. The public fear of radiation is very great indeed, some say irrationally so.'

The effect is that, in the dirty bomb, terrorists have a particularly dangerous weapon only if the media continue to mislead people into believing it is particularly dangerous.”

From "Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies (2008)

Nick Davies, a journalist and media analyst, warns that as long as the media publish sensationalist articles and news that is not checked for scientific accuracy, such fears will continue to be spread in a self-perpetuating cycle.

Life is Mostly Procrastination

All those things that you pursue to make yourself happy... such as good food, nice music, adorable pets... all those things are just placeholders.

The things in life that make you happy are generally not the things that give your life worth.

In other words: Watch out for all those addictive little pleasures that take up lots of time, but will be completely forgotten as soon as you die!

United Kingdom: National Successes and Social Failures

I have redesigned my website on the UK; it still has the same-old pages on British trash culture; religion, secularisation and religious minorities; UK immigration, and summaries of why others in the world might dislike us British, and what the UK gets right as a country (our down to Earth nature lets us avoid extreme politics and fundamentalism, for example).

Humans and Food!

I have added some to "The Food Chain" by Vexen Crabtree (2007):

Dr Richard Wrangham of Harvard University notes that cooking is a behaviour found universally in human societies. Only very few single individuals attempt to live without it. Some have theorized that this radical behaviour formed a major factor in our rise to stardom. Dr Wrangham investigated the effect it has on food, and finds that it hugely improves the efficiency of the energy gain from the food cycle. Commentary was published in The Economist:

“Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It "denatures" protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it. [...] Cooking increases the share of good digested in the stomach and small intestine [...] from 50% to 95%.”
The Economist (2009)

The full page contains much more!

The UFO Craze: Media exaggeration and hoaxes!

Although it is common sense that the popular press play up and exaggerate stories, it wasn't until I read the research of Martin Gardner that I realized just how much of a role imaginative newspaper editors had played in the creation of the UFO craze. It started in 1947, when Kenneth Arnold saw 9 small weather balloons that were strung together, 'flying' in formation in the sky. The papers came up with the idea of 'flying saucers' on their own, and henceforth, enthusiastically published hyped-up articles attributing all unidentified flying objects to mysterious advanced technology and aliens. It was a science-fiction decade, with a popular press to match.

The contents of "Alien Life and Planet Earth" by Vexen Crabtree (1999) is now:

1. The Chances of Life in the Universe
2. UFOs Are Probably Not Aliens
   1. Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?
   2. The UFO Craze Was Created by Sensationalist Media and Hoaxes
   3. What We Learn From Skyhook Balloons
3. Communication With Aliens
   1. A Very Slow Affair
   2. Our Transmissions into Space Already Span 100 Light Years