Posts by Dr. Boli
WHAT’S THE MOST UNETHICAL THING IN JOURNALISM TODAY? THE ANSWER MIGHT SURPRISE YOU.
Governor Vetoes Measure to Raise Salaries of Judges
Here is a headline from a news site yesterday:
This common phrase is widely misused. Is it worth salvaging?
Can you spot the difference in technique?
The first headline is designed to give you all the information you might need, in as few words as possible, to decide whether you want to read the article.
The second headline is designed to obscure the information you would need to decide whether you want to read the article. You must click on the headline to be taken to the article before you know whether it lives up to your expectations.
The first puts the reader in charge. The second is pure manipulation. It is designed to make you do something you might not do if you had enough information to make an informed decision.
We did not pick an especially egregious example of clickbait. We picked an example nearly at random, but one that demonstrates the technique.
The economics of Internet advertising have brought us to this point.
In a printed newspaper, if you are seeing the headline, you are seeing the page with the article and any advertisements the newspaper has sold on that page. If it is the front page, and you are reading one of those newspapers with no ads on the front page, then the articles will probably continue on an inner page. But by that time, the headline itself and the top-down structure of traditional newspaper articles guarantee that you know you want to read that article. Ad revenue depends mostly on one figure, which is the circulation of the newspaper. How well people like the paper as a whole determines how valuable the advertising space inside it is.
In an online news site, ad revenue depends on individual clicks. The more times you make a reader go to a separate page, the more ad space you have to sell, and the more likely the reader is to click by accident on one of the ads and earn you a penny. Some readers may perhaps even deliberately click on an advertisement—but even those readers have more advertisements to click on if you make them go to a separate page.
With profit, and indeed mere survival, at stake, news sites need you to click on that headline. They begin to learn what makes you more likely to click. They take note of which headlines were most effective at bringing in the clicks and try to distill the essence of clickability from them. Detailed statistics show them what works and what leaves readers cold and clickless. Slowly the editors learn how to manipulate readers into doing what the editors want the readers to do. Slowly, by imperceptible stages, their profession changes from journalist to con artist.
Eventually the contrast with the old way is stark. A printed newspaper offers its readers something to read: they can choose how they want to inform themselves, to entertain themselves, to exercise their minds in their own way. A news site manipulates its readers, and must manipulate its readers to survive.
That necessity has grave implications for the whole business of journalism. The most effective way to manipulate readers is with strong emotions; and long experience has proved to the clickbait artists that, once the cute-animal stories of the day are exhausted, the most effective emotion at producing the clicks is anger. Bit by bit, the editors of news sites learn how to make their readers angrier. With click revenues constantly in front of them as a scorecard, they learn how to make us hate each other. They herd us into hostile packs of extremists. They become angry extremists themselves, and their readers applaud them, because the general-interest newspaper that appeals to all sides has been killed by clickbait. Eventually the headlines reach a peak of clickbait perfection: “These Jews Held a Secret Meeting. What They Decided Will Turn Your Stomach.” We didn’t start out to become Nazis: we were forced into it by economics.
What can we do? The dollar is God; it decrees whether news sites live or die. But we, as individuals, control the pennies that make up those dollars. “If we could change ourselves,” as Gandhi said (in a phrase that is usually mutilated into bumper-sticker quotability), “the tendencies in the world would also change.”
The way to change ourselves is wonderfully simple. When we see clickbait, we don’t click on it. The next time you see a headline so intriguing that you can’t possibly resist clicking on it, resist it. Remember that it was crafted specifically to make you do something you would not otherwise do. It is as important to resist this as it is to resist the telephone con man who tells you there’s a warrant out for your arrest or that someone has ordered an iPhone on your Amazon account. Then, once you have passed it by, the sun will shine and the birds will sing, and you will realize that the world is more beautiful without whatever article it was that you didn’t read.
By the way, what was the common phrase that is widely misused? Dr. Boli has no idea. He didn’t take the bait.
CALL FOR ARTISTS.
BE THOU ELIZABETHAN.
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Jane Lumley, who translated Euripides into English and Isocrates into Latin, which is just the sort of thing an Elizabethan would do.
Today, therefore, Dr. Boli has a suggestion for all his readers, and if they were to take it, the world would be a more pleasant place to live in. The suggestion is that we should all imitate the Elizabethans.
The Elizabethans—by which, of course, we mean the ones we remember—lived in a dream-world of fantasy and imagination. They imagined themselves the cleverest and most refined ladies and gentlemen since classical times; they played at being great wits and deep philosophers. And because they kept that vision before them constantly, they imprinted their fantasy on their universe, and the world became in reality what they had imagined it to be. Their lives were filled with wit and thought and color; they could be dirty and vulgar, but their very vulgarity bore a stamp of genius.
Meanwhile they sinned great sins and filled their world with atrocity, just as we do today, and just as every generation since Cain has done. But a fallen world with gorgeous colors is more delightful than a fallen world without them.
We miss those colors today, but we could bring them back. The number of readers of this Magazine is not large, but it probably exceeds the number of memorable Elizabethans. If we keep the Elizabethan fantasy constantly in our minds, we can live in the Elizabethan world. We can remember that every speech we utter should be sharpened to a keen edge before we open our mouths. We can exercise the forms of courtesy we learned from our mothers, or learn forms of courtesy if we were not so fortunate as to have that sort of mother. We can think and arrange our thoughts before we let them loose on the Internet; and once we have let them loose, we can look at them again and resolve to do better tomorrow.
If the Elizabethan age is not to your taste, you might take another age as your model. There have been many ages in human history when extraordinary people built a real world of wit and color out of their fantasies of what the world might be. Just to mention the European and American tradition, we might point to the Athens of Pericles, or the Harlem Renaissance, or the English Restoration. The principle is the same: we resolve to expect the most of ourselves. We never consider ourselves finished; there is always polishing to do. We live our lives as if the world expected us at our best.
Nothing we do will end sin and injustice and suffering in the world. Certainly there was enough misery in the England of Good Queen Bess for anybody who cared to look for it. We have the poor always with us. But we have choices, and we can make the right ones. It costs us nothing to choose beauty over ugliness. It demands nothing but effort to look at mediocrity and say that it is not good enough. The effort itself becomes a joy, and by constant exercise our better selves can become our natural selves. This is the Elizabethan way, and it could be our way just as well.
From DR. BOLI’S UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY.
Lords Temporal (noun, plural).—In the British constitution, the members of the House of Lords who are mortal and thus will eventually make way for new members, as opposed to the Lords Eternal, many of whom date to the time of the Conqueror and cannot be extinguished by any means so far attempted.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: In the last few decades our country has made great advances in gun rights. Gone are the days when guns could be “controlled” the way we control legitimately dangerous substances like added sugar. Our enlightened Supreme Court has enforced a strict interpretation of the Second Amendment, which states, and I quote, “Blah blah blah something something the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Yet the visible progress on the right to keep and bear arms is nullified by a complete lack of progress on the right to use them. In every state of the union, Florida and Texas excepted, outdated laws remain on the books that make murder illegal, and sometimes punishable by a term of several months if not years in prison.
Of what use is the right to keep and bear arms if we still have not gained the right to use them for their intended purpose? It is time for our legislators to wake up and see that the job is only half done. It is time to get rid of those archaic medievalistic laws against murder. It is time at last to give life to the glorious vision of freedom our Founders saw before them when they drafted the Second Amendment.
Fortunately our legislators are in a receptive mood. At least I saw State Senator Cardoon in Krzrnski’s last night, and he was drunk out of his mind. So now is the time for citizens to let their legisators know that now is the time. Write your state representative or senator now, and enclose a bottle of good Monongahela rye, and let the sun of liberty shine at last on our glorious Commonwealth.
–Sincerely, Angus Platter, President, Armed Cranky Old Men of America (ACOMA).
Advertisement.
HISTORY IS NOT FUNNY.
We mentioned that the article is twelve years old. Dr. Boli always leaves the comments open for every article, no matter how old. Many sites close comments after a week or so, but we would miss a lot if we did that. For example, the Free Blank Sheet of Paper is like flypaper for commenters, and we have learned much about the American mind from those comments.
The article in question was called “Popular Misconceptions About the Civil War,” and here is the comment in full:
There is nothing funny about this so-called “Celebrated Magazine.” I think the man who wrote it is the only one who is enthusiastic about it. To compare slavery with modern-day corporations is despicable and shows a lack of intelligence. For people to make excuses for what this man wrote and state that his comments were a joke or a parody is just as bad! How about we all stand up and say slavery was horrific and should never have happened? There aren’t many things in history to laugh about; instead, we learn how to not make the same terrible mistakes that ruin others lives. THINK: is it thoughtful, helpful, necessary or kind? If it isn’t, please don’t say anything.
Having read the last sentence, Dr. Boli went back to the sentence in which our commenter called him despicable and lacking in intelligence and tried to fit it into one of the four categories—thoughtful, helpful, necessary, or kind. Necessary was probably the one the comment was intended to fit.
But to Dr. Boli, the most interesting sentence in the whole comment was this one:
There aren’t many things in history to laugh about; instead, we learn how to not make the same terrible mistakes that ruin others lives.
This seems to be the implicit assumption in many arguments today, and our commenter has done us a great favor by articulating it clearly and expressing it economically.
Now, it is probably unfair to bring logic to a moral argument. There is, after all, no logical way to prove that something is funny, or that something is offensive.
However, if there is very little to laugh about in history, then there is very little to laugh about. All laughter is suspect, because we are living in history. This is the puritan ideal: laugh too much and you’ll find yourself in the stocks.
We can admit that it is logically possible to say that we are not living in history. You could in theory make a meaningful distinction between the present and the past, between current times and history. If you believe that the world was perfected at some point in our own lifetimes—if you believe that the Millennium has arrived, and we are the righteous who have inherited the earth—then you can draw a line at the point where the world became perfect, and say that history was what happened before that. After that line is goodness and joy and laughter; before that line is wickedness and misery and pain. To transport joy and laughter back into those miserable times would be a fallacy.
That would be a logically consistent belief. It would also be stupid; that probably goes without saying. To believe that everything in the modern world is fundamentally right would require a more-than-Panglossian optimism. So we are left with a simple syllogism: we are not permitted to laugh at history; history is our entire existence; therefore, we are not permitted to laugh at all.
But it may be that we are permitted to laugh at a few things, even in history. Laughter of approval is sometimes allowed by the more relaxed sort of puritan, though the purest puritan would renounce it. We might laugh, for example, at bad people getting the punishment they deserve.
That would put us on the side of the tyrants.
What will tyranny look like when it comes to your country? For most people, tyranny will look like bad people getting what they deserve. Dictatorship is democracy run rampant. It almost always begins as the majority getting what they want right now, without having to put up with delays like people filing lawsuits and courts deciding whether it’s actually legal and blah blah blah. If you are in that majority, then as the dictatorship takes root you will be cheering. At last you have freedom: you are free from the tyranny of laws and bills of rights and sour-faced judges telling you you can’t do that. As the secret police raid your neighbors’ houses, as people you didn’t like very much disappear, you will laugh. Bad people are getting what they deserve. It’s funny because it’s right.
But here is where our commenter’s suggestion about the use of history seems absolutely correct: “we learn how to not make the same terrible mistakes that ruin others lives.” If we remember that this is how the world looked to respectable Germans as the Nazi night was falling, then we can recognize the larval tyranny and squash it now. If we remember that fugitive slave laws made anyone who so much as helped a free Black citizen a suspect, let alone someone who gave aid and comfort to an escaping slave, then we may recognize similar laws when our legislators try to foist them on us today.
But this vigilance requires a certain assumption. It requires us to assume that we might, possibly, be just as bad as our ancestors. It requires us to look back at history and see the Holocaust, slavery, the Inquisition, the Crusades (looking at them from both sides), and every war and atrocity there ever was in the world, and think to ourselves, “I wonder what we’re doing now that will make our descendants curse us.”
If you are really so self-assured that you believe our age has figured it all out, that we are invariably the moral superiors of our antebellum ancestors, then you will not be on the alert for evil today. You will leave your door unlocked, and evil will walk right in. And you will not even recognize it for what it is, because you will believe that evil cannot possibly take up residence in your own home. Who is that fellow in the expensive suit who wears horns on his head and smells like brimstone? We don’t know; he just appeared in the parlor one day, and he seems very nice.
In other words, you will be in exactly the same position as your antebellum ancestors, who grew up in a world with slavery and for the most part simply accepted that this was the way the world worked. After all, they were living at the peak of human civilization. They had learned the lessons of history; they were better than their ancestors. And so they left the door open, and Satan walked right in.
One-third of the white population of the South before the Civil War owned slaves. (Mark Twain’s family was among them.) Were all those millions of people evil? Yes, without a question. But were they more evil than we are? That is the question we must constantly have before us. The answer at any given moment, just as a matter of statistics, is probably no. As it is written, There is none righteous, no not one.
But how do we exercise that vigilance most effectively? Well, we laugh. We laugh at evil, because the sin of Satan is pride, and laughter is the one thing he cannot endure. And while we are laughing at history, we are always on the alert for analogies to our own time. To laugh at history is not just permissible; it is our moral duty. To believe that we are capable of the same mistakes, and that we are probably making mistakes just as big right now, is the only sane way to apply the lessons of history to our own time. This implies, of course, that it is our moral duty to laugh at ourselves. And Dr. Boli takes that moral duty very seriously.
From DR. BOLI’S UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY.
Unmoor (verb).—1. To remove the heath and similar growths from a wasteland, transforming it to a desert or parking lot or some such phenomenon.—2. To exchange one’s Moorish nationality for some other nationality, such as Maltese, Algerian, or Episcopalian.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
