This American Life Retracting "Mr. Daisey & The Apple Factory"

Actually, I've learned a lot of interesting things about the startup culture (specifically that of Silicon Valley) from reading HN comments (seriously, it's fascinating). There's probably a story there, one that hasn't been told yet.

A lie is still a lie.

http://ethics.npr.org/

Journalists report. Pundits opine.

You're one, or the other. You cannot be both. Or act like one while claiming to be the other.

No journalist should lie, even pundits, and it is indeed a reporter's job to report rather than opine, or, as I prefer to call it, "pass judgement". However, even when reporting, and especially in long-form non-fiction pieces (be it a magazine feature or a documentary film) it is is the unintelligent reporter who limits his audience's perspective to the clearly observable facts. The camera, as the saying goes, truly does lie, if only because the viewer cannot see what lies beyond its field of view. The mere selection of which facts to report (as you cannot report all of them unless you want to turn your audience into reporters) is the first act of building a model of reality. A lie is indeed a lie, but sometimes just reporting a few facts is a bigger lie (i.e. a worse approximation of reality) than completing the picture with the experienced reporter's gut instinct. It is not the reporter's job to pass judgment - that is indeed the realm of the pundit - but it is his job to reconstruct a good model of reality.

A reporter is not supposed to be merely a sensor, transcribing measurements. It is his job to try and extract meaning from those measurements as well; meaning, though not judgement. When you actually go out in the field, there is valuable meaning that you just sense even though you can't waive a piece of hard evidence to support it. A reporter that decides to spare that meaning from his audience betrays both his audience and the truth.

You might say, well, if that's the case, two reporters going out there might tell a very different story. That is true. That would also be true if both were simply reporting the hard facts. That would be true even if they both were to place a camera and let it stream images directly to your screen without any human intervention.

Those are imperfections more than the sign of some ideological motive. Presumably, the NPR hosts know very little about guns, so they misuse some terminology. Would be better if they were more educated but journalists are generalists, they can't know everything. They're not the gun network.

The climate change thing is totally different, Fox News will spend significant airtime harping on global warming, like we're talking many mentions per day, and the point isn't that they're not climate scientists (I'm not either), it's that they have no desire to listen to what climate scientists say. At all. Unless it agrees with their pre-conceived narrative. There are miles of distance between that and ignorance on the technicalities of the subject.

Let me paint a fictional picture for you. Say there's this island that's been ravaged by natural disasters and famine, and its entire population is starving. Rich people from a nearby country realize the islanders are in real distress and will be willing to do a lot for anyone who will save them from certain, horrible death, so they decide to use them as workers. So the rich people set up shop on the island, and the locals start working for them. Some of the rich people pay the workers (each of them producing, say $100's of product a day) with one loaf of bread, oh, and they also rape the women. Some pay their workers $2 a day, and they don't rape the women. Naturally the locals love the latter group, while that group of rich people from the mainland describe how they've saved the poor islanders from certain death and have even treated them rather humanely - well, at least compared to some others. They praise the wisdom of the market who let them gain from the islanders' cheap workforce, while letting the islanders survive.

Now, this (fictional) story is not about China. It's about anywhere an impoverished population, or anyone under extreme duress, lives. Speaking about choice under such conditions is preposterous. People will choose a quick death over slow mutilation. People will choose enslavement over annihilation. Believe me, there's no "free will" at work here, and whether or not the rich people from the mainland have done any good to the island, they certainly have nothing to brag about because they're exploiters who've saved a population merely to enslave it.

My story is extreme and I am not making any direct comparisons. I am saying that poor people are not "free" and they most certainly can't "choose", and if they do have a sliver of choice in their miserable lives (akin to the choice an innocent man might have for his last meal before execution), there is certainly nothing for anyone here to be proud about - certainly not about providing them with "alternatives" (like commuting the innocent's sentence to a life of forced labor).