Helping neutrality along

Journalistic neutrality aint what it used to be. Just about everywhere I looked carried the story of the doctor being reprimanded for supplying someone with lethal drugs with a headline about how he "helped" them. Now without coming down on either side of the argument I think you can see how that takes sides. Not necessarily because journalists are pro-euthanasia, tho more likely than not many are, being urban intellectuals of a certain class, but because it's a more interesting story that way. Where is the true news to be found these days? Dead and stuffed behind a radiator because it was too boring to look after. Choosing the emotionally stimulating word may be good story-writing procedure, but it certainly doesn't make for factual reporting.

Entertainment/News?

So Tony Blair raged at the news coverage of Katrina as Anti-American. What he doesn't understand is that it's not about politics any more. Not there isn't likely to be a majority in the BBC who dislike America: they advertise their jobs in The Guardian after all. But the PM doesn't realise that the primary risk to news isn't political bias any more -- it's the desire to entertain. John Humphrys has been defended by his friends for the past week or two for his marvellous lack of bias, his even-handedness. 'He's nasty to everyone', they say. What is being missed is that, when a news program is driven by the desire to entertain and not to discover and disseminate truth it will always choose the most exciting angle. What could be more boring than news that said, 'actually, the US isn't a vicious persecutor of black people: it's more complex than that'? And attacking everyone as if they were a seasoned liar is not the route to truth -- it just degrades the public discourse and encourages popular paranoia. Truth is hard work, and only entertaining by accident. We have to decide whether we want news or entertainment. You can't have both.

Kanye believe it

Kanye West demonstrates the state of truth in our civilisation. He believes that because it feels true to him that blacks are being persecuted it is true. I heard Bonnie Greer on Radio 4's 'Any Questions' yesterday saying that Whitey needed to realise how viscerally black people felt the truth of persecution in what they saw in New Orleans on their TVs. Now Kanye's just a singer trying to make a lot of money. What's appalling is how intellectuals like Bonnie get behind that sentiment. Let me explain it again, Bonnie. It's true if it's true; feeling's got nothing to do with it. But this has been going on for a long time -- a friend once explained to me he'd been taught that sexual harassment had happened if a woman felt it had. Who can defend themselves against the vindictive or the paranoid under this kind of politically correct nonsense? Funny too that those who peddle such muddleheaded garbage will generally be the first down the throats of the religious for valuing their spiritual experiences. Our civilisation rests on the existence of a single, external truth. The world has one way that it is. Facts are accessible to reasoned investigation. Forgetting that delivers us into the hands of demagogues -- and then real persecution begins. The made-up kind, we can live with.

When the camera lies, people die

Mona Charen: The lie heard round the world

Know-nothing Donkey Good; Smart-alec Humans bad

"It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe in nothing than to believe what is wrong." Thomas Jefferson

Water makes a real difference

We see the condition of Africa and it is hard to know where to begin. Aid sent out indisciminately may salve our consciences but do little good, or even harm. One of the best ways to give money is to support drinking water infrastructure. Not only does contaminated water bring an enormous amount of suffering through disease, the lack of a convenient source of water is economically crippling as women have no choice but to walk extraordinary distances on a daily basis to meet their family's most basic need. Studies have shown water infrastructure has the most powerful impact on development. Support health, women's rights and development -- give to Water Aid, or Pump Aid, who have won the St Andrew's Prize for the Environment for their pump design that can be easily repaired without importing expensive parts. Use the links to visit them. And then get Aquaid to supply water to your office.