The Boy Who Could Change the World

by Aaron Swartz

  This is most evident in their political coverage. Before Ohmy News, conservatives controlled 80% of Korea’s newspaper circulation. Then OhmyNews gave a voice to progressives, inspiring massive nationwide protests against the government. The protests, in turn, led to the election of reformist Roh Moo Hyun, now known as “the first Internet president.” The furious conservative National Assembly responded by voting to impeach Roh on technical grounds. OhmyNews readers again organized and overthrew the Assembly in the next election, reinstating Roh. There’s no reason why what happened in South Korea can’t happen here. Overcoming the tide of misinformation is hard work, but working together committed citizens can make amazing progress, even when up against the most powerful interests. Our society has an extraordinary level of freedom and openness. Whether we use that freedom to seek out the truth or remain content with conventional platitudes is up to us.

  What Journalists Don’t: Lessons from the Times

  http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001677

  April 10, 2005

  Age 18

  Speech to the Bay Area Law School Technology Conference blogs panel, as prepared.

  So I was asked to speak about bloggers and journalists—it seems like people are always finding an excuse to talk about this. In fact, the National Press Club had a panel on it just yesterday. Most of the discussion focuses on what bloggers do—is it trustworthy? Is it right?—but I’d like to take a different tack. I’d like to discuss what journalists don’t.

  Last summer, during the election campaign, I decided to take on a little project. Every day for a month I would read all the political articles in the New York Times and take notes on them on a blog. A number of things stood out and I thought I would discuss them. Keep in mind that this is the New York Times, widely recognized to be the most serious of newspapers. So everything that applies to them applies to an even greater extent to all the lesser newspapers, the evening news, the talking-head shows, and so on.

  The first was the extreme conservative bias. One day, they ran a front-page story that claimed Kerry was, quote, like a caged hamster. Another, claiming, quote, life is like high school, decided to interview various Kerry classmates. So they got two quotes. On the right was the guy who thought Kerry “seem[ed] ruthless” and on the left was the one who insisted “hatred is too strong a word” for what his classmates felt. These are just fun examples—I found hundreds of these things in just a month. And many were on more serious issues as well.

  The constant theme was that Times reporters would repeat Republican talking points and images and so on. Kerry was elitist, Kerry was a flip-flopper, the Kerry campaign was failing. One reporter even had his own cottage industry in stories of that last type. Adam Nagourney ran 22 consecutive stories claiming Democrats were worried about themselves.

  But we shouldn’t forget the more important things as well. The Times was, of course, one of the major outlets for false claims that Iraq had WMDs. My understanding is that it’s a sort of cardinal rule in journalism that if you’re going to make a claim, especially a big, important front-page claim, you get two sources. Well, the Times didn’t do that on WMDs—they just printed whatever the administration said. And when the administration used their bogus reporting to go to war, the Times did its best to ignore the fact that the war was a blatant violation of international law.

  In all these areas, the blogs bested the Times. Some tracked the spreading meme that Kerry was elitist, others pointed out that Bush wasn’t much of a down-home cowboy himself, still others carefully debunked each new right-wing myth. Blogs pointed to people like weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who correctly pointed out there were no WMDs, or the Iraqi defector who explained they had all been destroyed. Blogs 1, Times 0.

  The second thing I noticed during my study was that reporters rarely pointed out Bush was lying, corrected his lies, or even conceded that an objective reality containing a truth existed. You don’t have to trust me on this one; I spoke to Washington Post campaign reporter Jim VandeHei about it when he visited Stanford. Some things are undoubtedly true, he said—he got very animated—but editors won’t let reporters print the facts. He wanted to do a piece where he compared Bush and Kerry’s stump speeches to see how many lies they contained, but editors just wouldn’t let him.

  So instead you get the results so perfectly parodied by Paul Krugman, who commented that if the administration announced the Earth was flat, the lead story in the Times the next day would be “Shape of Earth: Views Differ.” In fact, we don’t really need to leave that sort of thing to the imagination anymore. The other month ABC ran a show which balanced people who claimed they had been abducted by aliens against respected doctors who explained that their experiences resulted from a condition called sleep paralysis. Who was right? ABC refused to say.

  Even when facts are reported, they don’t seem to stick. Just last month, a Harris poll found that 47% of adults think Saddam helped plan 9/11 and 36% think Iraq had WMDs. But if the media sends the message that it’s unnecessary to check your beliefs against the facts, should we really be so surprised that so many Americans don’t?

  Blogs suffer from no such compulsions. They’re happy to tell you the facts and show you the evidence. They’re happy to tell you that some things are just wrong and often furious against those who dare to lie. The incredible blog Media Matters, for example, diligently tracks right-wing lies spread through the media, citing all the sources that prove them false.

  But the most important thing, and the thing that nobody really seems to talk about, was how completely empty the Times’s coverage was. It was entirely focused on who the candidates were giving stump speeches to or what ads they were buying this week.

  The only time an actual policy proposal was mentioned was deep inside a discussion of how a candidate played with a certain group. You know, “Kerry has had problems with the Teamsters, even though they support his health care plan” or something. That was basically it. And this is supposed to be the high point of journalism! If the Times won’t talk about policy then no one will.

  And if nobody talks about policy then nobody votes on the basis of it. A September 2004 Gallup poll found that only 10% of registered voters said that they voted based on the candidates’, quote, agenda/ideas/platforms/goals—6% for Bush, 13% for Kerry.

  And it’s at this point that you really have to ask yourself: “Is this really a democracy?” It’s the most contested election of our time, coverage is lavished on the topic, the nation is closely divided, and yet the media completely ignores the issues. There’s no policy debate. And if the media doesn’t report the policy proposals and the media doesn’t report the facts, then we’re right back to my first point: vague emotional claims about Kerry being a rich elitist flip-flopper, or, from the other side, Kerry was a brave soldier who blew stuff up in the Vietnam War.

  This wasn’t your grand democratic election: The people didn’t get together and look at the facts and have a debate about issues. They didn’t look at facts and they didn’t discuss issues at all! They sat in their houses, watched a bunch of fuzzy TV commercials, and took in news coverage that recited the same vague themes. And then they voted based on which fuzzy image they liked the best. There’s a word for stuff like that. It’s not pretty, but I think it’s appropriate. It’s called propaganda. This was an election on the basis of propaganda.

  And so I believe blogs are important insofar as they help us move away from this sorry spectacle and towards a real democracy. Blogs, of course, can help spread propaganda—and no doubt, most do—but they can also help stem it. Political blogs can help pull people into politics, tell them things they wouldn’t otherwise hear, and lead them to organize their own projects—like building support for Howard Dean or trying to save Social Security.

  One of the most important things I think blogs do, though, is teach people. The media, as I’ve noted, is supremely unintelligent. But I don’t think the people of this country are. And one of the most striking things about blogs
to me is how they almost never talk down to their readership. Indeed most seem to think higher of their readership than they do themselves.

  Atrios doesn’t hesitate before explaining some piece of economics that the Washington Post finds too complex. Tim Lambert will teach you the statistical theory you need to understand why some right-wing claim is wrong. And Brad DeLong has taught me more about what it’s like to be an economics guy in the government than I got from Paul O’Neill’s book.

  The media isn’t going to come save us from this nightmare. But maybe blogs can. Or at least they can help. The more people learn, the smarter they become. The smarter they become, the more they understand the way the world really works. The more they understand, the more they can do to fix things. And that is the truly important goal. Thank you.

  ***

  So, what I did was I took the above speech, bolded the key words and numbers, and printed it out. Then I gave it mostly from memory, occasionally looking down to get the next bolded word or a particularly well-worded phrase. It worked really well, I think.

  The speech touched quite a nerve, as I hoped. My two conservative co-panelists (Zack Rosen failed to show) immediately demanded a chance to respond and then cut off my rebuttals. One of them (Mike) started insisting there was no such thing as objective truth, at which point I cut in and said, “Well, I can see why Republicans would want to deny that truth exists since it often cuts against them!” which was hailed as the best line of the night.

  After the talk I got a lot of compliments and a guest blogger for Daily Kos said he’d talk to Markos about getting me an occasional spot on Daily Kos, which is something like the liberal blogger equivalent of a regular gig on the Tonight Show. So I think it went well. (:)

  Rachel Carson: Mass Murderer?

  http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/Rachel-Carson,-Mass-Murderer/

  October 2007

  Age 20

  Originally appeared in Extra! The magazine of FAIR, September/October 2007

  Sometimes you find mass murderers in the most unlikely places. Take Rachel Carson. She was, by all accounts, a mild-mannered writer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—hardly a sociopath’s breeding ground. And yet, according to many in the media, Carson has more blood on her hands than Hitler.

  The problems started in the 1940s, when Carson left the Service to begin writing full-time. In 1962, she published a series of articles in the New Yorker, resulting in the book Silent Spring—widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement. The book discussed how pesticides and pollutants moved up the food chain, threatening the ecosystems for many animals, especially birds. Without them, it warned, we might face the title’s silent spring.

  Farmers used vast quantities of DDT to protect their crops against insects—80 million pounds were sprayed in 1959 alone—but from there it quickly climbed up the food chain. Bald eagles, eating fish that had concentrated DDT in their tissues, headed toward extinction. Humans, likewise accumulating DDT in our systems, appeared to get cancer as a result. Mothers passed the chemical on to their children through breast milk. Silent Spring drew attention to these concerns and, in 1972, the resulting movement succeeded in getting DDT banned in the U.S.—a ban that later spread to other nations.

  And that, according to Carson’s critics, is where the trouble started. DDT had been sprayed heavily on houses in developing countries to protect against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Without it, malaria rates in developing countries skyrocketed. Over 1 million people die from it each year.

  To the critics, the solution seems simple: Forget Carson’s emotional arguments about dead birds and start spraying DDT again so we can save human lives.

  Worse than Hitler?

  “What the World Needs Now Is DDT” asserted the headline of a lengthy feature in the New York Times Magazine (4/11/04). “No one concerned about the environmental damage of DDT set out to kill African children,” reporter Tina Rosenberg generously allowed. Nonetheless, “Silent Spring is now killing African children because of its persistence in the public mind.”

  It’s a common theme—echoed by two more articles in the Times by the same author (3/29/06, 10/5/06), and by Times columnists Nicholas Kristof (3/12/05) and John Tierney (6/05/07). The same refrain appears in a Washington Post op-ed by columnist Sebastian Mallaby, gleefully headlined “Look Who’s Ignoring Science Now” (10/09/05). And again in the Baltimore Sun (“Ms. Carson’s views [came] at a cost of many thousands of lives worldwide”—5/27/07), New York Sun (“millions of Africans died . . . thanks to Rachel Carson’s junk science classic”—4/21/06), the Hill (“millions die on the altar of politically correct ideologies”—11/02/05), San Francisco Examiner (“Carson was wrong, and millions of people continue to pay the price”—5/28/07), and Wall Street Journal (“environmental controls were more important than the lives of human beings”—2/21/07).

  Even novelists have gotten in on the game. “Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, Ted,” explains a character in Michael Crichton’s 2004 bestseller, State of Fear (p. 487). “[DDT] was so safe you could eat it.” That fictional comment not only inspired a column on the same theme in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald (6/18/05), it led Sen. James Inhofe (R-Ok.) to invite Crichton and Dr. Donald R. Roberts, a longtime pro-DDT activist, to testify before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

  But other attacks only seem like fiction. A web page on Junk Science.com features a live Malaria Death Clock next to a photo of Rachel Carson, holding her responsible for more deaths than malaria has caused in total. (“DDT allows [Africans to] climb out of the poverty/subsistence hole in which ‘caring greens’ apparently wish to keep them trapped,” it helpfully explains.) And a new website from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, RachelWasWrong.org, features photos of deceased African children along the side of every page.

  Developing Resistance

  At one level, these articles send a comforting message to the developed world: Saving African children is easy. We don’t need to build large aid programs or fund major health initiatives, let alone develop Third World infrastructure or think about larger issues of fairness. No, to save African lives from malaria, we just need to put our wallets away and work to stop the evil environmentalists.

  Unfortunately, it’s not so easy.

  For one thing, there is no global DDT ban. DDT is indeed banned in the U.S., but malaria isn’t exactly a pressing issue here. If it ever were, the ban contains an exception for matters of public health. Meanwhile, it’s perfectly legal—and indeed, used—in many other countries: 10 out of the 17 African nations that currently conduct indoor spraying use DDT (New York Times, 9/16/06).

  DDT use has decreased enormously, but not because of a ban. The real reason is simple, although not one conservatives are particularly fond of: evolution. Mosquito populations rapidly develop resistance to DDT, creating enzymes to detoxify it, modifying their nervous systems to avoid its effects, and avoiding areas where DDT is sprayed—and recent research finds that that resistance continues to spread even after DDT spraying has stopped, lowering the effectiveness not only of DDT but also other pesticides (Current Biology, 8/9/05).

  “No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored,” Carson wrote in Silent Spring. “The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. . . . Resistance to insecticides by mosquitoes . . . has surged upwards at an astounding rate.”

  Unfortunately, her words were ignored. Africa didn’t cut back on pesticides because, through a system called the Industry Cooperative Program, the pesticide companies themselves got to participate in the United Nations agency that provided advice on pest control. Not surprisingly, it continued to recommend significant pesticide usage.

  When Silent Spring came out in 1962, it seemed as if this strategy was working. To take the most extreme case, Sri Lanka counted only 17 cases of malaria
in 1963. But by 1969, things had once again gotten out of hand: 537,700 cases were counted. Naturally, the rise had many causes: political and financial pressure led to cutbacks on spraying, stockpiles of supplies had been used up, low rainfall and high temperatures encouraged mosquitoes, a backlog of diagnostic tests to detect malaria was processed, and testing standards became more stringent. But even with renewed effort, the problem did not go away.

  Records uncovered by entomologist Andrew Spielman hint at why (Mosquito, p. 177). For years, Sri Lanka had run test programs to verify DDT’s effectiveness at killing mosquitoes. But halfway through the program, their standards were dramatically lowered. “Though the reason was not recorded,” Spielman writes, “it was obvious that some mosquitoes were developing resistance and the change was made to justify continued spraying.”

  But further spraying led only to further resistance, and the problem became much harder to control. DDT use was scaled back and other pesticides were introduced—more cautiously this time—but the epidemic was never again brought under control, with the deadly legacy that continues to this day.

  Instead of apologizing, the chemical companies went on the attack. They funded front groups and think tanks to claim the epidemic started because countries “stopped” using their products. In their version of the story, environmentalists forced Africans to stop using DDT, causing the increase in malaria. “It’s like a hit-and-run driver who, instead of admitting responsibility for the accident, frames the person who tried to prevent the accident,” complains Tim Lambert, whose weblog, Deltoid, tracks the DDT myth and other scientific misinformation in the media.

  Front and Center

  Perhaps the most vocal group spreading this story is Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM). Founded in 2000 by Roger Bate, an economist at various right-wing think tanks, AFM has run a major PR campaign to push the pro-DDT story, publishing scores of op-eds and appearing in dozens of articles each year. Bate and his partner Richard Tren even published a book laying out their alternate history of DDT: When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story.