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| newsrooms not longer believe in Santa or the Tooth Fairy but they still believe that BIG PEOPLE are always telling the truth... |
Consider this : we invented the non-stop 24 hours a day 365 news cycle - on multiple media formats - and then we threw away most of the journalists.
Very very busy.
They are also smart: but not very very smart.
So when these very very busy individuals read two science reports that directly contradict each other, what do they do 99% of the time ?
They look at who authored the piece and the bigger the names (s) the more likely they are to feel that their version is the one true account.
They won’t even bother to read each article very far, to compare the results in their minds and settle the dispute intellectually.
They are, I repeat, very very busy.
So out goes a very superficial gatekeeping of the news, to readers and listeners that may number in the billions ultimately.
The New York Times along with Atlantic Magazine have offered up - free - very thoughtful examinations on just what went wrong and what is still going wrong on how the smartest people in the Universe handled the emerging Covid crisis.
The latest from the NYT is all about two sets of very smart doctors in Germany disagreeing, around the edges, about how likely it is that people who have covid but show no obvious symptoms can spread the disease to others, silently.
The smaller, lesser known set of doctors were right but tragically the wrong (bigger) set of doctors were much better known and had very powerful - and very stupid - allies among our planet’s biggest doctors and scientists.
Covid was always going to kill people : but whether it had to kill 500,000 and counting is the reason why you and I should care a damn about this arid academic debate in far off Germany.
I do not doubt that even with Trump & Trudeau & Johnson at the helm (The Three Idiots of The Apocalypse), that the world would NOT have seen a half mill dead, if the smaller set of German doctors’ evidence had been considered on its merits, rather than most journalists believing that the Big People are ALWAYS smarter than the smaller people.
Now here is where citizen journalists can come in.
No, we are not ‘professional’ : we freely and I would advocate , proudly, admit to that.
”Professional” journalist is just a dog whistle word for “very few in number, stuck in an never-ending news cycle, and hence badly over-worked”.
We citizen journalists are not badly overworked - many of us are retired or off duty.We do not have to feel enslaved to a never ending 24 hour news cycle.
So we have plenty of time.
Now combine that with our sheer numbers.
So we have both plenty of time and plenty of numbers to slowly but thoroughly looked at both articles - published in big medical journalists and readily readable - and then to have raised the analysis that the smaller set was more likely correct.
We could have - we should have - raised a twitter and social media storm - but at a higher intellectual level than most such twitter storms.
We could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
If only the Tooth Fairy-believing journalists finally grew completely up and gave small news sources and small journalists ‘a fair go’ ...
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