Andrew L. Urban
A recent survey (Skeptic Research Centre) in the US showed that 44% of liberals (lefties) believe that white police killed 1,000 or more unarmed black men in 2019. The factual figure is 25. In 2020 it was 18; and 24 unarmed white Americans.
Information is power. So is misinformation. The former helps societal objectives, the latter hurts them. How do we tell the difference?
Who can we trust in this epidemic of ignorance and fear? Not (most of) the legacy media, who have failed western democracies with their craven surrender to the woke; not the politicians, who (with honourable exceptions) are as uninformed as the public on key issues; not the institutions nor the corporations, cohorts who have surrendered to the socialist, woke ideology of the left; not the experts whose advice has too often been found to be shabby; not the scientists who have mischaracterised data to suit an agenda; not academics, GAWD, especially not academics! Not even the courts, where some judges seem vulnerable to ideology and justice is slow, expensive and at times unreliable.
It should be the public broadcaster, and once upon a time it was, reliably reporting facts without bias as a matter of course. Those were the days…
Like the ABC, once pillars of reliable news & analysis such as The New York Times, have become utterly useless as organs of reliable information. Author Douglas Murray lamented that paper’s uselessness in one of his columns last year: “Some time ago I became aware that I no longer trusted it even on issues that I didn’t know about. Because on every issue I did know about, I discovered that the paper was spreading untruths and lies.”
FACTS! FACTS? #FACTS
Facts kill fake news. Facts unmask lies by omission. Facts embarrass suppression of unwanted news. Facts blast biased broadcasting. Facts shame social media misinformation. Facts remedy the denigration of unwoke opinions. Facts defy destructive, negative myths. But where do we – the general public – find reliable, non partisan reporting of facts? We can’t even trust video news footage when it can be edited with the purpose of falsifying it – secretly. (Refer twerking clip on ABC and see list of ABC apologies, the tip of the dishonesty iceberg. See ABC’s Ghost Train Fire doco wrongly implicating the late Neville Wran …)
Ignorance is not bliss in today’s world; it’s dangerous. The misinformation spruiking man made global warming is the most obvious and egregious example of just how dangerous and reckless. In 30 years or so, the false, unproven narrative of carbon dioxide as the culprit in excessively warming our planet has taken hold so strongly that decision makers don’t question it, political activists repeat the unsubstantiated claims – and (the majority of) the legacy media has never bothered to ask the searching questions that it is duty bound to have asked.
If all the vehicles of news and communication – traditional media, digital media, social media, government media – are unreliable, or positively dishonest, it’s clearly necessary to sidestep those platforms. How? Desperate measures may be required….
Q: What media platform could be openly visible to the public, not subject to big tech control or cancel culture?
A: The independently published crawler, AKA news ticker, scrolling text in lights …. It’s old media, literally: according to Wikipedia, the method of using electric lights to spell out moving letters was invented by Frank C. Reilly (August 20, 1888 – April 10, 1947) and patented in 1923. Reilly called his invention the Motograph. It’s often used to keep track of changing stock prices, and it’s also used to provide weather information, real-time sport scores and yes…. news.
In 1928, when it was still a trusted source, The New York Times installed a Motograph to display news headlines on the sides of Times Tower. The Martin Place Headquarters of Seven News, also incorporates a ticker that wraps around the building.
Many countries have made use of a ticker’s visibility and practicality. Placed high on a building, a news ticker can disseminate information into the public square. A sort of giant, grown up Twitter without the sewer…
Installing centrally fed ‘fact tickers’ in selected locations in all our cities (and country towns, dammit) could feed news and information that may otherwise be subject to tampering by ideologically motivated actors. By providing reliable and factual information, the ticker would gradually build trust; and it would challenge the false narratives that fill our media. One of its primary objectives would be to disable the panic buttons constantly pushed by the media and politicians. Its content would also be spread by that powerful phenomenon known as word of mouth. Likewise by talkback radio.
But who could possibly be trusted to select/publish/edit the content (apart from me, obviously)? And that head scratching question demonstrates how necessary trust is to society, and how universally it has been torn up, depleted, trampled, destroyed. All right, so it has to be me. What sort of messages would I ‘ticker’?
News Corrections & True Facts:
eg
ABORIGINAL DEATHS IN CUSTODY 2018-19: 16 / DEATH RATE 0.13 PER 100 LOWER THAN NON-INDIGENOUS DEATH RATE, 0.23 PER 100
NO RAPE ‘CRISIS’ ON CAMPUS: JUST 0.8% CLAIM SEXUAL HARRASSMENT
TOTAL CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE: 0.04% / HUMAN CONTRIBUTION 3% OF 0.04% / AUSTRALIA’S CO2 EMISSIONS 1.3% OF 3%
99% OF COVID INFECTIONS ARE MILD, NON LIFE THREATENING
97% CONSENSUS ON GLOBAL WARMING DISHONEST, MISLEADING
BLACK LIVES MATTER CO-FOUNDER CALLS SELF ‘TRAINED MARXIST’
CARBON DIOXIDE GREENING THE PLANET – STUDY SHOWS
EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS NOT INCREASING – DATA SHOWS
DEATHS FROM EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS DOWN 98% IN PAST CENTURY
I know, next you’ll be asking who’s paying for all this? Well, maybe there is enough fat in the ABC’s $1 billion annual funding to forego a few million (cut suggestions freely available via Speccie writers). The tickers around the country would represent another form of public broadcasting, without punters having to endure the pain of a rogue bureaucracy pissing on Australia’s values and giving many of their paymasters the finger. Just a thought, Minister … do you have the ticker?