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University receives $750k of federal funds to stop reporters from creating “negative unintended outcomes”

The government continues to get involved with shaping journalism

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | October 24, 2021

Researchers at Temple University received $750,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a tool that warns journalists that they are about to publish polarizing content. The NSF is a federal government agency focused on supporting research and education in non-medical fields of engineering and science.

The initiative is part of NSF’s “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems.” It is called the “America’s Fourth Estate at Risk: A System for Mapping the (local) Journalism Life Cycle to Rebuild the Nation’s News Trust.”

The focus of the project, according to a report on Campus Reform, is creating a system that alerts journalists that the content they are about to publish might have “negative unintended outcomes” such as “the triggering of uncivil, polarizing discourse, audience misinterpretation, the production of misinformation, and the perpetuation of false narratives.”

The researchers hope that the system will help journalists measure the long-term impact of their stories, that go beyond existing metrics such as likes, comments, and shares.

One of the researchers involved in the project, Temple University’s professor Eduard Dragut, said that the system will “use natural language processing algorithms along with social networking tools to mine the communities where [misinformation] may happen.”

“You can imagine that each news article is usually, or actually almost all the time, accompanied by user comments and reactions on Twitter. One goal of the project is to retrieve those and then use natural language processing tools or algorithms to mine and recommend to some users [that] this space of talking, this set of tweets, which may lead to a set of people, like a sub-community, where this article is used for wrong reasons,” he added.

Journalists and other players in the news industry will be involved with the project, which already includes researchers from other universities including Boston University and the University of Illinois-Chicago.

“We want journalists to be part of the process, not just the mere users of the product itself,” Dragut said. “So you can imagine sort of an analytics tool that informs the journalists and editors and other people involved in this business how their products or how their creative act is used or misused in social media.”

He added that the project is attempting to “create a collaborative environment with both social media platform[s] and other organizations like Google” because of their expertise.

“We have some preliminary conversation with Bloomberg, for instance, and we will have to define exactly how they are going to help us. Google has an initiative to help local news, and we are working to create a relationship with them, and there are others,” Dragut told Campus Reform. “This product will not work unless we are successful in bringing some of these high tech companies into the game.”

Another researcher involved in the project, professor Lance Holbert, said that, for now, the misinformation the project is focusing on is that of the spread on local media.

“Certainly some topics over time will become more versus less interesting, but also we’re focused here initially on local media as well, so each locality may have different topics or particular points of interest that come up in the news,” he said. “We’re trying to keep this generalizable across topics.”

Holbert noted that misinformation is not “happening in the political spectrum” alone.

“[It’s happening] in sports, it’s happening in economics,” he said. “Like a few years back, I know, an example from Starbucks where there was a sort of a campaign on Twitter [saying] that Starbucks is targeting, in the wrong way, African Americans, which was wrong.”

The NSF is expected to further fund the project when its first phase becomes successful.

October 24, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 1 Comment

NYTimes & Zika: a brief case study on climate change hype

By David Wojick | Climate Etc. | September 20, 2016

The folks who make their living by hyping the supposed threat of runaway global warming use a lot of scary language in the process. Here the ever creative New York Times has set what may be a new standard in scary climate change hype, by tying it to the Zika outbreak.

In our Framework Analysis of Federal Funding-induced Biases we point to the press exaggerating unproven scientific hypotheses that support government policies. Policies that depend on scaring people are especially subject to this kind of press bias. The NYT has provided a fine example of this sort of scientific distortion, one that is worth analyzing to see just how the game is played. Not surprisingly, they do this in what they call a “Science” article.

It begins with this ever so scary headline:

In Zika Epidemic, a Warning on Climate Change

Zika itself is pretty scary, so that sets the stage. They then combine this with “epidemic” and “a Warning on Climate Change.” So instead of unsubstantiated possibilities we now have warnings and threats. This is a rhetorical flourish that we have not seen before, especially warnings.

Note that most people will only read this headline, which contains no science whatsoever. They will be told, falsely, that the Zika outbreak is a warning of a supposed climate change threat.

Beyond the scary headline, the article itself is a study in rhetorical structure. It begins with innuendo and ends with standard speculation, but in between it manages to provide some solid science regarding several mosquito borne diseases. The latter is to the effect that these various disease outbreaks and increases are likely due to increased urbanization. You would never guess this from the headline or the first paragraph, which uses a question to make an accusation, a classic form of innuendo:

“The global public health emergency involving deformed babies emerged in 2015, the hottest year in the historical record, with an outbreak in Brazil of a disease transmitted by heat-loving mosquitoes. Can that be a coincidence?”

The answer turns out to be probably, but it takes a lot of reading to realize this. Even worse, the article simply assumes that there will be extensive future warming, all due to human emissions. None of this is known to be true, or even likely. In fact this is a standard rhetorical set piece. Assume great human-induced global warming and prophesy the worst.

Not surprisingly the key prophesying quotation comes from an activist-scientist at the National Science Foundation-funded Nation Center for Atmospheric Research. NSF is the Obama Administration’s leading proponent of the unconfirmed hypothesis that human emissions are creating dangerous global warming. NCAR has even issued a Zika forecast for 50 US cities, based as usual on an unverified computer model.

We also get a juicy quote from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which assumes that a warmer and wetter world lies ahead. What happened to those pesky droughts?

They even throw in a picture of a sick baby and a Brazilian with dengue (not Zika). In our view tying this hyperbolic “climate change threat” rhetoric to the real misery created by Zika and related diseases is simply despicable.

September 23, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | 1 Comment