Googling something once does not make you an expert on it: Blur by Kovach and Rosenstiel

This is a sort of book report on Blur by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. The problem they are trying to solve is nicely summarized in the subtitle: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload. They propose six steps to evaluating news, regardless of medium of delivery:
1. Determine what kind of content you are looking at.
2. Determine whether the account is complete.
3. Assess the sources.
4. Assess the evidence.
5. Question the reporter's explanation or understanding of the evidence.
6. Explore whether the news is meeting real needs.

The writers identify four kinds of content:
-Verification, which asks whether the material is accurate and fairly contextualized. In this model, it is the reporter's job to fact-check, to know his beat, to distinguish between fact and analysis, and to know what he still doesn't know.
-Assertion, which just passes on as much raw information as possible without evaluation. In this model, there is usually no time to fact-check, analytical statements are tossed off by sources as if they were facts,  and not challenged, and sheer quantity substitutes for story.
-Affirmation, which chooses content that will confirm the opinions of its audience. This is distinguished from  opinion journalism, as found in, say, The National Review,  which does not expect to be your source of news but of news analysis. Affirmation expects you to "hear it here first," but only if it matches what you were expecting to hear.
-Interest-group journalism, which is designed to look like news but is dedicated to serving only the purposes of the funding group. Look for shady funding sources or for repetitive themes and conclusions in every story.

These models can be combined in an aggregate, such as The Week, that collects and edits news and opinion, attempting to tell you both what happened and what people thought about it, but the very act of editing is an act of filtering that can be driven by a desire to inform, affirm, or propagandize.

We all remember the 5 Ws and an H, but here's something that is often missing from reports of all kinds: the Q-- Questions that remain unanswered or that were raised by the info in the story. If the news doesn't even give the who, what, where, when, why and how, it is certainly not complete and is not a good example of verification journalism. If it does answer those questions, it may legitimately go on to try to make sense of those answers. It may also try to authenticate things stated in previous reports. It may even be assembling information in such a way as to draw attention to new paradigm. For example, this article I just read today in the New York Times magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/magazine/the-kids-who-beat-autism.html?_r=0 introduces facts that suggest that there may be a cure for autism available to some children. This is certainly a new idea. Do the facts presented in the story support it? That is what the authors are challenging us to discover.

Wow, see why this is the book I wanted to read? It's not exactly relaxing, but it is very clear and easy to follow and discusses a challenge that I deal with every day: the information that is coming at me. So often those who act like they know what they are talking about get the credit they expect, but really, all they did was Google something-- it's just raw, random, uncontextualized data, or it's spin, or it's sheer fabrication, and it's a big project to really tell which is which. Now I'm going to read about how to evaluate sources.

70-79: Journalism, Broadly Defined

The 70's are meant to focus on newspapers. However, the bulk of the books on offer seemed to be memoirs. Maybe they were journalistic in that they had originally been blogs? Or maybe they were by or about journalists, or about people's interactions with newspapers? I wasn't sure, but I picked up MWF Seeks BFF, a "stunt biography" about a woman going on 52 "first dates" with different women in her new town, looking for a new BFF. It looked entertaining and similar to other books I have read and enjoyed, but I wasn't sure what it had to do with journalism or how it achieved my goal of forcing myself to learn about a wider variety of topics, so I also selected Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload, which seemed more like a "real" 070s book.

Well, less like a book I would read like a novel, anyway. I'm a little ways into it and really appreciating it, but I have been keeping the Book Darts (TM) handy, because it does require some study and attention. They are addressing the problem of over information

What would Piaget have said.... (Robert's Rules of Order)

... about the 704 pages of Robert's Rules of Order, which are full of disclaimers about the precedence of one rule over another, exceptions that may or may not be codified elsewhere, and the impossibility of providing for every contingency? Piaget wrote a book (The Moral Judgement of the Child) studying the way boys played marbles and girls played hopscotch, and noted that the boys spent time amplifying the rules while the girls complicated their playing field. I always remembered that observation, because I spent a lot of time listening to my three boys debate the fine points of rules they made up for their board games. Calvinball also exemplifies this principle. So, if debate is a game, good ol' General Robert and his heirs are playing it just like Piaget's boys played marbles.

Another thing I find weirdly amusing about this book is the way it treats deliberative bodies as if they had wills and opinions, for example in this sentence: "Parliamentary procedure enables the overall membership of an organization...both to establish and empower an effective leadership as it wishes, and at the same time to retain exactly the degree of direct control over its affairs that it chooses to reserve to itself." (10th ed, p. XLVII) No wonder the Supreme Court thinks corporations are people!

Finally, I realize in reading this book that although I have been in plenty of meetings where motions were offered, seconded and voted on, and where people were recognized and had the floor, I have never in my life been in a meeting truly run by Robert's Rules. Nor, after reading just the preliminary comments to this tome, is that an aspiration of mine. Whew! So much work just to have an argument!

60-69: This Meeting Will Now Come to Order

The only thing in the 60s in either of the libraries I checked was Robert's Rules of Order. Don't see why some book about the founding of the Rotarians or something couldn't have also been included, but no, I have to read Robert's Rules of Order. So far my favorite part was when they said in the introduction that you only have to read the first 5 chapters and skip anything you don't immediately understand. I do like the main goals, though:
1- to make sure you only talk about one thing at a time
2- to give each side of the question alternating time to speak
3- to put a stop to rude or irrelevant comments
4- to provide for dividing a question into smaller parts so that each can be considered on its own.

Seems like Congress could benefit from the last idea. Certainly is irritating how many bills are a big amalgamated mess of amendments.

Extra Credit: Cheat Sheet: How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read

Apparently this book usually is found in 809, but obviously I couldn't wait that long, and I would have put in the 30's, along with the other books about reading. Or not reading. Turns out there is a case to be made, by Umberto Eco (among others who are extensively quoted here), for making the choice to not read books. Skimming them, or indeed just hearing other people talk about them, may be just as good as actually reading them, especially given the high probability that in 10 years you will have pretty much forgotten them anyway. I think of James Joyce's Ulysses. I've heard a lot about it. I've read a page of it. I read ALL of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pretty much to my regret. And, based on all that information, I cannot imagine the circumstance which would cause me to regret not actually having waded through all of that notorious experiment in the abuse of English! So I'm glad I now have some theoretical justification for this stance.
  What's your favorite book to talk about without reading?

Still Reading Despite Slim Pickings! (Shocking True Story)

Okay, I could have chosen a more serious tome, but I didn't. The history of Confidential was an easy read and thoroughly explained the origin of the scandal sheets we still buy today, complete with their weird mix of celebrity abuse, consumer scare stories, and occasional forays into party politics (The National Enquirer will be happy to dig up dirt on presidential candidates as well as on actors and poor little rich girls). Confidential was successful as long as it employed fact-checkers to make sure every bit of mud it slung was grade-A, and that the stars so besmirched would have more to lose than to gain from a libel suit. When it got sloppy, it went down, but the book doesn't explain how or why a whole new generation of similar rags managed to take its place. I would have liked a little more historical perspective along with my boffo headlines. But now I know that magazines, if shelved, live in the 50's.

50-59: Serial Readers

My trip to 50-59 contained a little more angst than usual; the topic is Magazines, and the pickings are slim. Technically, collected volumes of the New Yorker should count, I guess, but they live in the Periodicals room, so all I had in front of me was memoirs of magazine employees, deconstructions of the social import of assorted publications, and the history of various rags. I ended up with Shocking True Story, which is the history of the country's first celebrity gossip sheet, Confidential. I'm not hurting myself. Sure, the history of Hollywood in the 40s and 50s touches on everything from unionization to the Red Scare, but the chapters are short, and each one starts with a (surprisingly literate) excerpt from an original article. Did Rita Hayworth neglect her children? Did Desi cheat on Lucy? By now, with most of the participants safely located where what anybody says about them can no longer ruin their lives, it's pure entertainment. And the 50's definition of "shocking" is a little different from ours, so it's rather mild entertainment at that.

PS: Why are so many famous people so spectacularly miserable? I don't think anybody's ever figured it out, but an occasional reminder that the grass is not in fact greener is always welcome.