Category: Metablogging

Misquoted or badly edited?

John Quiggin18 Comments

As anyone who’s dealt with the mainstream media knows, any time you’re directly involved in a story, you’re likely to see that it’s been misreported.

I was interviewed recently about the economic problems facing the new government and said, several times, that we would be better off if both parties had not committed themselves to large tax cuts on the basis of optimistic projections but that, having made the commitment, the Rudd government should honour it. This is how it came out in the news.com story

Some economists believe the promised $31 billion tax cuts should be abandoned.

“The country would be much better if we hadn’t had these tax-cut promises from both sides in the election campaign,” University of Queensland professor John Quiggin said.

“It was irresponsible to promise such large tax cuts where the fiscal situation needed more flexibility than that allowed.”

But Mr Swan insisted the tax cuts would be delivered.

You could argue that the report is accurate. Some economists do believe the tax cuts should be abandoned and I did make the remarks quoted. Perhaps the reporter submitted a story in which these two facts weren’t run together as they have been here, and it was cut in a way that produced this misleading impression. Or maybe the original report was wrong.

Either way, it confirms negative impressions about the mainstream media. Of course, bloggers make plenty of mistakes too, but it would be nice to think the professionals could do better.

Update I got a phone call this morning from news.com.au and I’m happy to say the story has been rewritten with my views reported correctly. Blogging gets results!

Get well

John Quiggin30 Comments

A slightly belated get well to Tim Blair, one of the pioneers of Australian blogging, who recently underwent surgery for cancer. Tim and I have had our differences, to put it mildly, but this is a time to put such things aside. I’m sure everyone here will join me in hoping for a full and rapid recovery.

Weird (search) Al Gorithms

John Quiggin5 Comments

While I was attending to the long overdue task of cleaning out the spam filter, I came on a comment from reader Malcolm Lambe, whose comment was unsurprisingly caught since it reads (with added asterisks)

Malcolm Lambe welcometowallyworld.com

I don’t understand why this post of yours shows up on the first page of Google under “l*sbian s*x v*deo�? Bizarre. Maybe your webmaster has some explanation?

You can check for yourself and there it is. Sad to say, my attempt to despam didn’t work and this comment, along with a couple of others from Katz and Gerard on more recent posts, was consigned to perdition.

It hardly seems likely that anyone would go to the trouble of Googlebombing this post. Any other explanations?

Blogging knols and wikis

John Quiggin2 Comments

After reading lots of discussion of Google’s knol initiative, I finally got around to actually looking at the example screenshot, which is about insomnia. Naturally, I was interested to look at the competition provided by the Wikipedia article on the same topic.

The Wikipedia article starts with a cleanup-needed tag (maybe Google’s choice of example topic wasn’t accidental in this respect), but doesn’t look all that bad. What’s startling is that wiki and knol disagree on some fairly basic points.

The knol, written by Rachel Manber states, without citation, that insomnia affects about one in ten US adults, which I would guess to be about 25 million people. Wikipedia says ’60 million Americans suffer from insomnia each year” and supports this with a link to the NIH which says “About 60 million Americans a year have insomnia frequently or for extended periods of time, which leads to even more serious sleep deficits.” . This WebMD article says “In a 1991 survey, 30-35% of adult Americans reported difficulty sleeping in the past year and 10% reported the insomnia to be chronic, severe, or both” again consistent with Wikipedia. It looks as if the knol introductory sentence should have stated “chronic or severe”.

There’s also disagreement over classifications of transient, acute and chronic insomnia. The knol classification is purely on duration, while the Wikipedia article offers a rather confusing mix of duration and causative indicators. A quick search of the web suggests that there’s lots of different definitions out there.

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