Media literacy also means knowing what to ignore

Speculation and prediction isn't news and mostly isn't valuable

The actual news is just through there

For all the ranting online about traditional and legacy media, a surefire way of keeping yourself stupid is to ignore it completely and instead rely on heavily partisan alternatives, shouty bloggers, YouTubers and Rumblers for your information.

The arguments for this are well-made. Traditional media (as I prefer to call it) has its biases and policies to amplify or exclude certain perspectives, but it does retain certain guardrails for quality.

You can wiz through the cases that can be made for continuing to pay attention to traditional media.

Richard Hanania's provocative (he is, after all, a master at trolling his former compadres on the hyper partisan right) Why the Media is Honest and Good.

Rarely Certain's Understanding Media Bias and why it isn't worth worrying about and The Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect and not noticing that news is a consumer product explain some personal checks and balances to get the most utility from ordinary media.

Also, this week, Dan Williams, The media very rarely makes things up, offers a reasonable perspective on some of these issues.

And one that Dan quotes from, Scott Alexander's The media very rarely lies, addresses the important fact that even the most ludicrously partisan outlets tend to base their reportage and commentary on at least a grain of truth.

Yes, legacy media is infuriating, but so is queuing at the supermarket check-out. If we rid our lives of everything annoying we aren't necessarily any better off. Clearly we would prefer to be confident that what we are reading or watching is always a 'true' representation of how things really are, but media cannot ever be like that.

This is why I'll often look at the same event and see how they're reporting it on the World Socialist Website and France's Mediapart all the way right to Breitbart News, via titles like The Guardian, The Daily Mail and broadcasters like Sky News.

Often they seem to be seeing and processing entirely different events. Just like the rest of us. But I feel significantly better informed than if I only looked at one source.

Most of us focus our ire on traditional media in particular because it used to be much more highly respected and trusted and we now feel let down. And the more you dig into the issues there, the more frustrating it can be.

It's a sadly broken ecosystem, filled with egotistical and anxious people driven by social desirability bias and so on. But to dismiss it entirely is stupid, if you care about information quality.

It has long seemed to me that media literacy is the kind of skill that could be taught in school. Instead of all the chatter we now have about 'defending democracy' by encouraging people to stop paying attention to 'far-right' information sources, teaching us from an early age about the blindspots encouraged by various editorial policies would be more honest and useful.

Instead, our information consumption choices are left to a market that plays to our deepest-rooted cognitive fallibilities by providing all the things we like (reinforcing our prior beliefs) and ignoring all the things that we also ought to know about (leaving us secure in our prior opinions).

The typical Guardian and Daily Mail reader starts out with their specific prejudices and the papers tighten the ratchet on those, mostly by leaving out the inconvenient parts. Which means readers of both are left ignorant of important facts. But they rarely print outright untruths, whatever the partisans who hate them think.

Although I'm sanguine about these biases I recognise a separate issue that really does seem to be an overlooked and unhealthy problem.

Call it 'what happens next' or, to be frankly honest about it, 'soothsaying'.

This is most prevalent in TV news, at least in the case of mainstream broadcasters such as (from my personal British/European perspective) the BBC, ITN and Sky News, France24 and the news segments of French broadcasters.

Important to note that this does not apply to fiery partisan 'cable-style' broadcasters like Fox News, MSNBC or GB News, who are making no attempt in the first place to position themselves as standard news providers.

But this doesn't mean you'll be well informed by bingeing on TV news.

When Iran attacked Israel this week I made a point of watching the coverage by a couple of broadcasters, early on, when there really wasn't very much information except that Iran had attacked and Israel had mostly succeeded in blocking the attack.

Partly because there wasn't much hard information beyond this, the lions share of airtime was devoted to correspondents opining on what will happen next.

We've grown so used to this, especially since rolling news began, that the ubiquitous soothsaying and speculations of correspondents and knowledgeable observers probably mostly goes over our heads.

But what I noticed was a creeping anxiety brought about by this relentless speculation. Literally none of which has been borne out by subsequent events.

The massive conflagration that they were speculating on was truly awful to imagine and it might happen yet. But it hadn't started by the time I wrote this, which makes me speculate that the time I spent watching and listening to their opining was time wasted.

Scale this up to millions of people passively absorbing this alarming chinwagging and that's a lot of anxiety being provoked for no better reason than broadcasters wanting to look like they're across every angle of a story.

Doubtless, too, it will have provided another turn of the screw on everyone's prejudices about the justice or otherwise of Iran hurling missiles and drones at Israel. Israel might respond in kind!!!! How dare they. It's time we destroyed Iran. That would sort it out. None of this is edifying and it was a good reminder of why I stopped paying attention to that kind of 'news'.

What might happen isn't news, if you really think about it. Yet we've been conditioned to think of it as such. And not really notice all the things that might have happened that never did happen. This is closely related to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. We watch some pundits speculating and we watch them speculating again and again when little that they said previously really added any substance to our understanding.

It's an aspect of the genre driven by the format, rather than the information value received by the consumer.

When I joined regional BBC TV news, long ago, we had a format that we had to stick to religiously. One of the BBC's regular management reshuffles had ushered in a 'serious news' format.

The evening news programme (Look North) had been anchored by a couple of presenters on sofas and now it was anchored by a couple of presenters at desks.

Each day we had to determine what the 'top' story was and that would always be treated in the same way, regardless of whether the story was really significant enough to warrant it.

• Film package (inevitably involving a ‘piece to camera’ for a few seconds)

• Backgrounder

• ‘Two-way’

Every single evening, including at the end of a slow news day.

The film package would be a reporter-led 2 minutes, with pictures and voiceover telling everyone what had happened. The backgrounder was another few minutes on whatever we could find to explain what had led up to this (even though this had been adequately explained in the preceding package). The ‘two-way’ was either a chat between the reporter and someone in the studio about what everyone had just seen or maybe an interview with someone connected with the story.

Inevitably this was often somewhat laboured, because a good reporter can always tell the important aspects of the story in the opening package and would always have used the most salient material already. This made the backgrounder mostly wallpaper and the two-way often just a repeat chat around what we'd just seen.

The only person this was really good for was the man who insisted on it, who is now a Baron in the House of Lords.

This personal memoir serves as a reminder that format often trumps information value in broadcasting. A kind of news by numbers template approach.

Rolling news was supposed to make everyone better informed, but if you ever pay close attention you'll quickly realise that it doesn't.

But my intuition is that it clutters the information environment with more noise than signal.

Describing what was known of Iran's attack on Israel was signal and yet noise was what dominated the coverage. Israel said it would respond. That was news. Israel now seems to have responded. That too is news. None of the speculation about these things before they happened was useful.

Much is said about the incentives in play for media. The need for eyeballs demanding the most stimulating headlines. The desire of journalists to out-do each other on social media on how pro or anti liberal progressivism they are.

The desperation to predict the future is less often mentioned, but seems to me to be as unhelpful as anything.

News is generally worth knowing about and - with many caveats about blind spots and editorial skew - you can take steps to be quite well across it all in a way that makes you less stupid. I've no time for the oft-repeated suggestion to 'never trust the msm', because that is objectively a way to be less well informed.

But if you're interested in maintaining better media literacy (arguably a responsibility we all have in a democracy) you won't improve it by listening to speculation and soothsaying. It's simply best ignored.

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A bit of a call to arms …

My heroes turn up in the tiny place of Valcanville, June 21 1944

Someone asked why I've become so obsessively determined to tell the story of WW2's 24th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, Mechanized.

Fair question. There are, after all, countless books and websites devoted to the war. And I've never been anything like what you'd call a war or military buff. What's going on here?

Reflecting on it I realised that it's not just a great story that's never been told. The 24th Cav Recon are a kind of Big Star to me. Should have been way more famous and celebrated than they were.

There's a kind of 'justicey' vibe going on with it. Due recognition insufficiently paid.

Reading through the squadron's field records (which I had to pay a professional American archives researcher to copy for me) the journalist inside says this fantastic story demands to be told and the softy human inside says it's wrong that these men are forgotten by all but their families.

This struck me when I visited a little place where six of them were killed and the squadron earned France's Croix de Guerre. And when a woman I was chatting with there said she'd never heard of them I was faintly offended for those men.

I remain faintly offended that there is little interest in supporting the project, which is not cheap to maintain. This is illustrated by the pittance so far raised on a GoFundMe I started this week. One donation from the nephew of one of the men who never went home again. Nobody else who has been dropping care emojis under the posts I share on FB recounting their exploits and profiling the men cares enough to contribute to preserving their names. I could only laugh when I realised that the squadron FB page suddenly became tumbleweed when I announced the crowdfunding.

Awkward, indeed. They all like that someone cares about it, but everyone disappeared sharpish when showing that they might care a bit more became an option.

So, no apologies for importuning here. I can't currently upgrade the Google workspace that me and the volunteers are collaborating in, or buy hosting to create a landing page, without spending money that I don't have. Websites and books don't make themselves. So if you'd like to make my day and help to accelerate a project to immortalise some fantastic yet unrecognised people and their outsized contribution to freeing Europe 80 years ago, that would be lovely.

Read the case for why it matters here https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-to-honour-the-24th-cavalry-reconnaissance-squadron

Alternatively, proceeds from BuyMeACoffee are also being saved toward research costs right now. After the platforms take their cut and the French state takes its slice I've just about accumulated this month's Ancestry/fold3/newspapers subscription cost.