RTFP: Crunchy frog at the NYT

Has it really been just a month since the NYT joined BusinessWeek (dutifully reported, once again, at Romenesko, and echoed meanwhile at Conde Nast Portfolio) in publicizing the handful of magic beans known as SpinSpotter? Well, who would know?

Online watchdog sniffs for media bias
If you don’t trust the news media, what are your options? You can fume about bias, wonder what you’re missing and suppress the urge to throw things. Or ignore some sources and turn to those whose slant you like. (NYT, 10/15)

Start-Up Attacks Media Bias, One Phrase at a Time
SpinSpotter, a new start-up, could send shivers across many a newsroom. The Web tool, which went live Monday at the DEMO technology conference in San Diego, scans news stories for signs of spin. (NYT, 9/8)

You can't expect even the argus-eyed Times reporting corps to read everything, but the point of the RTFP rule is that at least you read your own paper. That should mean, minimally, that you don't swallow the same implausible claims whole:

But what if there were a device that objectively flagged questionable elements in online news articles, poking and parsing words and phrases, and letting you contribute your own critiques? Well, a Seattle company called SpinSpotter has produced a piece of software — a free download that works within a Web browser — that tries to do just that.

More broadly, it should mean that you think twice about whether to write about the thing at all. (One way of phrasing this is: How are you going to write the SpinSpotter lede next month?) But SpinSpotter has apparently been busy refining its algorithms and advisory panels (and explaining its earnest good intentions at SpinSpotterBlog), so it seems to have earned another plug in the eyes of the Times.

Have things gotten any better? Well, not really. The Times's second iteration is a little more open in admitting that the thing doesn't really work and that there's no indication of when or whether it will. We learn a bit more about the human side of things. (Missouri journalism grad students will critique the critiques, o joy!) And the Times manages not only to correctly identify the passive voice -- "four people were killed in an accident" -- but to note that it has no consistent correlation with "spin."

Which -- where's the dead horse graphic when you need it? -- underscores the essential futility of the project. There's a "spin" case to be made around the morning fishwrap's treatment of the ACORN story ("Obama's ties to voter registration group questioned") and the treatment offered yesterday by McClatchy ("Fox News alone has mentioned Acorn stories 342 times in recent days"). One's passive, one's active; both are a form of "spin," but one of them is the form of spin that actually contributes to a better understanding of how the political world works. Guess which?

And it would be self-defeating for SpinSpotter to point out how much free publicity it's getting from the inherent biases of news routines. News likes stuff that claims to be new (and deeply fears being last with the story about the Next Big Thing). News is biased toward conflict. By defining the novel (in the man-bites-dog sense), news helps create a narrow definition of what's "normal" -- which is why some armed robberies are serious and some are just a laugh a minute. No wonder the founders say they don't intend to purge the news of spin entirely. So far, it's their best resource.

So the real burden here isn't on SpinSpotter; it's on the Times, which needs to start (a) reading its own product more consistently and (b) doing a better job on the Truth In Packaging front. At some point, when you're peddling chockies, "crunchy frog" just doesn't cut it anymore. Next time the Times writes about SpinSpotter, we need to see some mention that it the product contains crunchy raw unboned real dead frog. Garnished with larks' vomit.

RTFP: Not just for breakfast anymore

And this just in from the Let's Keep Running It Until We Get It Right Department. The lede from Friday's story:

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan jolted the race for the White House on Thursday, sending candidates in both parties scrambling for political advantage.

And from Saturday's:

For the presidential candidates, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto has emerged as a ghoulish sort of test: a chance to project leadership and competence -- or not -- on a fast-moving and nuanced foreign policy issue.

You sort of wonder how long it'll take to sink in. A story that the AP covers doesn't become a new story when the Times gets around to it a day later. It's the same story with more adjectives. There's nothing in the Times piece that makes the thing worth repeating. (If you're going to point to the appearance of Biden and Richardson, don't; both were quoted in the AP story that ran on Friday but were left on the cutting-room floor in this edited version.)

There's plenty of election-related news that has yet to see the light of day here, Ohio's newfound revulsion for high-tech ballots being but one example. How about we make sure everything gets said once before we circle back and say stuff twice?

Another chorus of the RTFP blues

Granted, it's hard to imagine a worse lede for a news brief than this sort of weird participial sandwich. It's all context and no who-what-when-where -- more or less exactly the opposite of what a brief ought to be.

There's so little news, apparently, that the poor copy editor couldn't even figure out who was visiting whom in what country. That's a charitable way of looking at it, because otherwise we seem to be leaving the international news in the hands of people who don't seem to have paid attention to the "news" all day (let alone looking at a wire budget) before sitting down to work. If the rest of the nation and world is going to be permanently relegated to three columns at the bottom of the editorial page, could we at least try to get the basics right?

Today in clickbaiting

Doesn't the headline just fill you with the urge to click on through and see what the answer is? That seems to be the mission, at least; the Fox News website has discovered the magic of clickbaitery and is jumping in with enthusiasm.

Not too artfully, though. If you're going to have a cliffhanger in the No. 5 spot on the homepage for Super Bowl Sunday, it probably shouldn't be the same one that was in the No. 5 spot on the homepage last Monday:

 You might even think a lede that refers to the Super Bowl as "next Sunday" was a bit of a giveaway:

Whether the New England Patriots win or lose Super Bowl 53 against the Los Angeles Rams next Sunday, Tom Brady is not ready to ride off into the sunset just yet.

When asked during an interview with ESPN that aired Sunday if there was any chance his ninth Super Bowl would be his NFL swan song, Brady said: "Zero," curling his thumb and fingers into a "0" shape to emphasize the point.
 
And there's always that pesky label over the story noting that it was posted "6 days ago":

So Fox seems a little slow in getting the hang of the whole clickbaiting thing. Maybe it should put the starters back in or preach the gospel of RTFP more loudly or something.

Being of the generation for which the whole point of the headline is to tell people something they didn't know, I have a deep dislike for clickbaiting in all its forms and guises. I'm not at all sure how widely that feeling is shared. Attitudes toward headlines seem to be shaped by the routines that readers are familiar with. If the flying verb or the noun pile looks weird to you, it's probably because you haven't scarfed down half a dozen before breakfast each day for the past 20 years.

The evidence so far is that the up-and-coming wave of news consumers isn't especially bothered by clickbaiting, though there is (hey, it's clickbaiting) This One Weird Trick: Traditional heds do better on error-heavy stories, but clickbait heds do better on well-edited stories. Clickbaiting also seems to be associated with better memory for story details. You don't even want to hear about what the photos do.**

* I'm trying really hard not to say "grownup" and apparently failing.
** Yes, you do. Film at 11.

Parade of headline silliness

Preliminary thoughts on the morning papers. Funny, both seem to be discussions we've had before:

1) Why do we avoid reaching for the first cliche in the Big Bag of Heds? As in this tennis tale on 1B Sunday?
Bruins serve up district win
How about: Because somebody probably reached into the same bag for a tennis story a week or so ago!
Bruins serve up Kewpies (1B May 3)
Moral: RTFP. And if you think your favorite cliche is new, it ain't.

2) Insurgents bomb holy Shiite shrine
Didn't this one come up last month? Whether we like it or not (and we probably ought to be welcoming readers anywhere we can find them), we have a certain proportion of Beaves and Buttheads among the readership -- enough, certainly, to make "Holy Shiite" a construction that we ought to avoid. We could have skipped the entire discussion, of course, if the hed writer had remembered that shrines are pretty much "holy" by definition and spent the space on something less redundant.

While we're at it, it's time to rethink the "WAR & TERROR DIGEST" flag under which this yarn appears. Let's make sure now that readers can keep the two concepts separate in case it, erm, becomes necessary on short notice in the near future.

Fun with a purpose

Now that your correspondent is officially procrastinating on three term projects and a one-off, it's time to take a closer look at a burst of journalistic nonsense from last week's screed. Picking on a story this bad is fun, of course, but as the folks at Highlights For Children like to say, it's Fun With A Purpose. Three purposes, actually:

1) Copyeds will almost always lose arguments about whether ledes sound good or bad. They're more likely to win when they can point to specific errors of writing or reasoning.
2) There's a difference between treating sources with respect and courtesy, on the one hand, and sucking up to them on the other.
3) Experts don't get to make things up. It doesn't matter if the expert at hand is your "religion" "editor" and has been covering the subject for 15 years. It doesn't matter if the writer is the pope of Rome.* If the data don't support a conclusion, the conclusion is effectively fiction.

Ready? Here we go, editor's comments in italics:

The latest Charlotte Observer/WCNC News Carolinas Poll confirms what we've known for as long as packed sanctuaries have graced the Carolinas.
Ahem. As noted here last week, that's essentially the lede from the September 2001 take on this annual poll, except then it confirmed "what many believe." Now it's something "we" "know," which is worth some dissecting. Who's "we"? How long have there been packed sanctuaries in the Carolinas -- in other words, have "we" actually known this since the late 18th century? But painful illogic and smarmy self-plagiarism aside, there's a more worrisome point here, which is the writer's (and thus the paper's) belief that packed sanctuaries are unquestionably a good. Given the sorts of things that "packed sanctuaries" have tended to correlate with -- witch-burning, racial intolerance, blowing oneself up in crowds of civilians and the like -- that's a risky conclusion. Not to mention one that suggests an open bias on the part of the writer (and the paper).

This is a region whose residents take religion seriously:
Rule 1 of survey reporting: Polls measure only what they measure. This poll doesn't measure how seriously people take religion. It measures self-reported attendance at religious services. They are not the same thing. Ask a preacher.

• Forty-six percent said they attend a church or other house of worship very often. An additional 23 percent said they attend somewhat often and 22 percent not that often, with only 9 percent saying they never attend.

Though the question was worded differently, the Carolinas Poll in August 2001 found active devotion as well: Fifty-four percent said they attended a service within the past week.
Once again, the poll didn't measure "active devotion." It measured self-reported attendance at a service within the past week. RTFP.

• Worship attendance in 2005 varies little from county to county. Forty-eight percent of those living in the eight-county Mecklenburg region said they attend a house of worship very often, compared with 49 percent in the balance of South Carolina and 45 percent in the balance of North Carolina.
Here, a bit of overstretch turns a usable fact (there's no significant difference between self-reported attendance in the core region and either of the two states as a whole) into a false statement. There's no way of telling from the data whether worship attendance varies "from county to county" (this should be obvious, given a sample size of 923 and 146 counties total). County-by-county rates could vary drastically -- say, 10 percent in County A and 80 percent in same-sized County B -- and still yield an overall mean of 45 percent. You can't guess the range from the mean. Put another way, the normal temperature in St. Louis in October is 58 degrees: What should you wear this afternoon?

Moral: Never go beyond the data. No errors are good, but this one's particularly useless. The writer doesn't even get to ingratiate himself with his sources.

• Women generally worship more than men: Fifty percent of women said they attend a house of worship very often, compared with 43 percent of men.
Three faults here:
* First, sampling error for subgroups is larger than sampling error for the whole. Judging from the original n=923, this difference between subgroups isn't going to be statistically significant.
* Second, we're committing several sins against the numbers:
a) Confusing categorical data with continuous data. "Very often" is probably more often than "somewhat often," but not certainly: your "very" could be my "somewhat," but your "3" can't be my "2."
b) Ignoring the rest of the answers. What happens to the results above if 40 percent of women also report "not that often," but 40 percent of the men report "somewhat often"? Again, since there's no measure of the difference between "somewhat often" and "not that often," we don't know, but we'd at least want to scratch our heads.
* Third, back to Rule 1: The poll doesn't measure how much people worship. It measures (sort of) how much they say they worship. Again, if you can't tell the difference, go ask a preacher.
Here's a better way to state the result: "The survey found no significant difference between the proportions of men and women who report attending services very often." It doesn't sound as interesting, but it has the advantage of being true.

• African Americans worship more than whites: Fifty-four percent of blacks said they worship very often, compared with 46 percent of whites.
Same three offenses. Broken record time: It doesn't matter what your title is. You can't make the statistics say things they don't say. That's called "making stuff up."

• The older you are, the more you go to a church, mosque or synagogue: Fifty-eight percent of those ages 55 and over said they worship very often, compared with 47 percent of those 35 to 54, and 34 percent of those 18 to 34.
Our old friend the fallacy of division. "You" is a specific person, and you can't predict one person's behavior from a poll. Again, a properly reported poll would include margins of sampling error for subgroups, but these differences might be significant. If so, you could say "Respondents ages 55 and older were more likely to report worshipping 'very often' than younger respondents." In any case, please avoid addressing the reader directly (see below).

• The person beside you on the pew is more likely a Democrat or Republican than an independent: Fifty-two percent of Republicans and 51 percent of Democrats said they worship very often, compared with 35 percent of independents.
Not to be tacky, but so is the "person beside you" at the Harris-Teeter or the football game or the cross-burning. In North Carolina, about four times as many voters are registered Republican or Democrat as are registered unaffiliated. It might be an interesting finding (depending on those subgroup stats!) if unaffiliated voters are less likely to report worshipping "very often" than party members. It'd be even more interesting to tease out views on political issues held by "very often," "somewhat often" and the like. But this datum in itself is about as interesting as saying the sun was likely to have risen in the East before you headed off to your church, mosque or synagogue.

Someone also should have protested the use of the second-person pronoun. Has it not occurred to the Observer that some of its readers might not attend services and might consider this particular bit of sucking-up to be, well, exclusionary? That respect and pandering are not the same thing?

The poll is based on 923 confidential telephone interviews conducted Aug. 25-Sept. 19. The maximum sampling error is 3.2 percent.
No it isn't. Margins of sampling error are expressed in percentage points, not "percent." That's a small amount of type, but it isn't a small thing. It's a building block, and if your doubts about the writer's ability to handle numbers had been growing all along, it's kind of the icing on the cake.

Taken together, what we have here is a chunk of marginally interesting data about self-reported religious behavior in the Carolinas. Under better circumstances, it might have added something to the sum of human knowledge. Instead, thanks to expert intervention, it makes the paper look not only stupid but biased. That's a bad outcome.


* Or the pope of Alexandria. HEADSUP-L is all about diversity.

Coffee with the Missourian

A few quick impressions from this morning's effort -- not the Web version, which isn't up at this writing, but the paper one, which miraculously landed in the neighbor's driveway instead of under his truck. But we're going to talk about content, not delivery.

COY CORRECTIONS: "A photo caption in the June 12 edition contained incorrect information." News flash. That's what "corrections" means. A correction shouldn't repeat the error it corrects, but it needs to say what the error was: date, number, name? Try something like "A photo caption June 12 reported an incorrect number." And cut it out with "the June 12 edition."

ALBOM ALERT: One of the best ways to set yourself up for a fall is to proclaim what the weather "will" do ("Short rain will bring relief from heat," 1A). You can say what it's expected to do, or what the experts hope it will or won't do, but don't tempt nature by being definite.

Farther inside but of greater importance, never -- yes, to repeat a point, that means never, never, never -- say "is being held on $200,000 bond" ("Woman faces charge," 4A). You know what was true Wednesday -- "was being held Wednesday on $200,000 bond" -- but you have no way of knowing what will be true Thursday morning. This is a really simple rule, and we need to follow it without fail.

RTFP: Speaking of "Woman faces charge of assault," what's in that headline that wasn't on Wednesday's front page? If this story's in the paper because bond was set, or to update the victim's condition, that's what the hed needs to reflect -- not old news.

SAVE IT FOR USA TODAY: "As the temperature rises, so does our desire to water our lawns" (1A). Don't talk about what "we" want unless you have some data to back it up. Come to think of it, don't do it then either. Save the "we're eating more beets" bit for your robot masters at Gannett, once you're hired there.

LONG DISTANCE, LOCAL STORY: "Taliban" is a plural noun, so don't use it with a singular verb ("Taliban claims responsibility," 3A). Since this looks so weird, better to use "Taliban" to modify a noun -- Taliban leaders, a Taliban spokesman -- that can then govern number.

Macro point: That hed might be true, but there's no way to tell from the story. When you're cutting, whether on the screen or the page, don't cut the part of the story that the hed comes from. If it's far enough down in the story to cut, you should question why it's the hed.

And yeah, that being one of the country's two Current Unpleasantnesses, I'd say it qualifies as a local story. There's more here for me, at any rate, than in another featurized lede about Mizz Thistlebottom's third-grade science class.

AND YOUR DEGREE IS FROM ...? Watch out for gee-whiz ledes like "Two MU researchers are changing the face of autism diagnosis" (1A). A statement that sweeping needs a lot of backup -- for starters, where does this step fit in these folks' research program, and how do other autism researchers characterize it? Science tends to be a back-and-forth process, and one refereed publication doesn't make a summer. There's a good story in here, but -- at least from the evidence we present -- nothing that can hold up the lede. (Time for another plug for HEADSUP-L's current favorite columnist, Ben Goldacre of Bad Science fame. Read him every week for strong bones and teeth.)

There's lots more, but real work calls. Next up?

desk notes

HOW NOT TO WRITE C-DECKS: If the main hed says "Investigation: Officer's shot accidental" (5A Thursday), can't we find anything better for the C-deck than "The investigation concluded officer's shot was accidental and improper"? C-decks are supposed to supplement heds, not repeat them. Yes, they use articles and forms of the verb "to be" and the like. That's why they're called "C-decks." If you're going to ignore that rule, at least be consistent -- don't put the article before "investigation" but not before "officer."

DETAILS: The piece the constable fired through the floor is a "12-gauge," not a ".12 gauge," shotgun. See the "weapons" entry in your stylebook (which even explains why the style for a .410 is .410). And the folks who released the name are Columbia police, not Columbia Police. Isn't there a list over the copydesk spelling out the capitalizations we use on cop references?

RTFP: "Travelers declining at airport" (5A Thursday) is, by all appearances, true -- but why read this story if you read the same numbers in last Friday's 1A centerpiece? This one's about a meeting to discuss whether anything will be done about it. That's what the hed needed to reflect.

IT'S A START: Glad to see Gaza City getting in the paper (7A Monday) without being relocated to Israel. Relocating it to the West Bank, unfortunately, isn't much better, but at least it's a start. Copyeds, you might not believe this, but one of the best things you can do to keep corrections out of the paper is to have the atlas at your side and open every time you edit an international story. Judging from the staff ledes this week that have mentioned "Copper County" (7A Thursday) and "Roger Street" (1A Tuesday), it wouldn't hurt to apply a similar practice to local stuff as well.

JUDGE THE CONTENT, NOT THE BYLINE: Supplemental news services are great for offering readers something that isn't available from the fishwrap across town and for providing stuff -- usually context, depth and connections -- that the AP doesn't. The flip side is that a story that's chosen for context or scope needs to be given space to play. The LA Times piece on 3A Tuesday, "U.S. inquiry exonerates soldiers in fatal shooting of Italian agent," is, at three paragraphs, a brief for all practical purposes. And briefs should never -- right, that's NEVER -- have 67-word ledes. Note how much ground the AP manages to cover in 31 words next door to that one.

ALMOST: Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation isn't the "official name" for the School of the Americas (1A Thursday). It's the new name of the thing that used to be the School of the Americas.

More thoughts and comments?
fev

Just another day at the office

It might be an overstatement to say that Fox News lies about everything, but it's fair to suggest that Fox News will lie about anything, because nothing is too small for Fox News to lie about in service of the cause. So this story -- starting its career at the No. 2 spot on the Fox homepage Saturday, then taking a few cycles off, then returning to the same position Sunday afternoon -- isn't an example of the extraordinary; it's literally just another day at the office.

As usual, the homepage headlines are a tad bit livelier than the ones on the story itself, so let's start with Saturday's: Not "Bitter pill," which is just there to remind you of the deserts of sinners, but the subhed: "Fauci roasted for new paper pushing debunked Trump claim, COVID origin theory." Let's say three things have to be true for the hed to be true: Fauci has to have been roasted; his new paper has to have pushed a claim and a theory, and at least the claim has to have been "debunked." (Under a distributed reading, "debunked" could apply to the theory too, but the lede suggests the narrow reading.)

There are some different twists in the Sunday subhed, "Fauci scorched over new 'scientific' paper riddled with 'false claims.'" Scorching is also a fairly low bar to clear, but "riddled" is going to need an extra step: at least some degree of counting and judgment over and above a couple of angry tweets from conservative influencers.* Fox is asserting "riddled" on its own hook (hint: it's the same two claims), but the quote marks are murky. Is Fox explaining that this is a scientific (as opposed to a popular or trade) paper, or is it nudging you with scare quotes? In US practice, the quotes around "false claims" mean those are the exact words someone used, but in UK practice (Fox headlines often have a strong redtop flavor), they could be "claim quotes": placed around a phrase to indicate the substance of an assertion but not a direct quotation.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the public face of the federal government's coronavirus pandemic response, is facing criticism on social media over a manuscript published in a top journal where he maintains his position that the virus originated in nature and cites a debunked claim that President-elect Trump told Americans to inject themselves with bleach to stop the virus.

Well, there's your scorching and roasting.** "Criticism on social media" in this case means two regular contributors to the pool of right-wing Twitter accounts that Fox draws on when a Harris or Walz or Biden needs to be slammed, mocked or blasted, plus one newcomer from the National Review stable. No scare quotes around "top journal" (fair enough; the Oxford Academic homepage lists its impact factor as 8.2). And Fauci's offenses? He "maintains his position" on the virus's origin and "cites a debunked claim that President-elect Trump told Americans to inject themselves with bleach to stop the virus." The claim has been debunked, but Fauci doesn't make it. (Nor does the phrase "false claims" appear in the story, so that's a headline invention.)

Fauci, along with researcher Gregory Folkers, published a paper in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal this week with the title, "HIV/AIDS and COVID-19: Shared Lessons from Two Pandemics."

Fauci, who faced intense criticism for his handling of the pandemic, was critical of Trump’s handling of the pandemic in the paper.

Oh, stop the press.

"With COVID-19, the role of political leadership at the highest level – or the lack thereof – was again shown to be critical," the authors wrote. "As COVID-19 exploded globally and in the United States, President Donald Trump frequently minimized the seriousness of the pandemic, repeatedly claiming that COVID-19 would just ‘go away’ In the first full year of the pandemic (2020, the last year of his presidency) he failed to use his bully pulpit to encourage people to use available ‘low-tech’ tools such as masks/respirators, better ventilation, and physical distancing to reduce the risk of infection."

All true. But here comes the scary part, still quoting Fox quoting the article:

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