Initiating Coverage: Confirmation Bias Pensamento Único Noise Machine Watch

Disney’s “Small World” attraction: Interchangeable robots dressed up in different stereotypical costumes. A metaphor for GVO’s pensamento único?

I get David Sasaki’s update from Global Voices Online every morning, but I hardly ever look at it.

Why not? After all, it offers an alluring proposition to the reader hungry for international news of a globalized world. Which I am, like, totally into, dude.

On Blogging Conflict Regions – As a subscriber to this newsletter, it can only be assumed that you have an interest in reading the thoughts and observations of writers whose voices and regions rarely catch the eye of mainstream media. Yet bandwidth and cost of access leave much of the world shadowed from the blogosphere as well. Joshua Goldstein laments this fact, but applauds the emerging bloggers describing the desperate situation in Northern Uganda and hopes they are only the beginning of a new movement.

He who assumes makes an ass of you and me.

Lamentations, applause and hope that someday everyone will get their news from blogs instead of the MSM: The usual salves to the conscience of the armchair liberal who wants to do good while doing well, with that self-congratulatory note worked in, to the effect that only the blog revolution — those corrupt, unionized rank-and-file journalists of the evil MSM are beyond redemption — can bring the truth to the masses.

I have explained my disdain for this brand of innovation journalism in a number of counterblasts from the point of view of traditional — I prefer the term “time-tested” — principles of public information quality assurance.

See “Fair & Balanced”: Harvard Law Bloggers Give Equal Weight to Disinformation, Brazilian Elections Post-Mortem: The Whole World is an Episode of “Crossfire”, GVO’s Innovation In Journalism: Edit the Ethics and Public Mission Out, and et etectera ad nauseam.

We really ought to get together and mount a formal, multilingual anti-GVO shadow government that tracks back to as many of their posts as we can stand to read, baixando o pau where they deserve it — which is often — and handing out grudging praise in the rare event that they earn it.

I submit to you that this is not a trivial exercise, or merely the product of a personal grudge on the part of this nasty little troll, yours truly.

Now that the U.S. State Dept. picks up GVO feed and channels it out to the huddled masses yearning to blog free as part of the Bush II approach to “democracy exportation” — Jack Abramoff … Now that it funds the iCommons and other “democratization of the media” projects … and given that so many of the key Berkman people have a background in government agencies like USAID, with long histories of questionable actions in the shadows that need clarifying …

Somewhere here on this quarter-terabyte metal box of data I brought with me I have the State “public diplomacy” plan that describes its plans for the increased use of “citizen media” and increased cooperation with NGOs for that purpose.

GVO does not exactly account for every dime it gets — did I read that Harvard may soon account more fully for the billions in government grants it gets? — but its activities do seem to fit the bill.

Not sufficient evidence for an indictment — one senses, but cannot confirm, the existence of funky confidentiality clauses in GVO’s contracts with the corporate and possibly government sponsors that it laments cannot be named — but definitely enough for a search warrant.

Take this item, which caught my eye today as a candidate for baixando o pau, for example: India: Cornershops in the era of big retail stores.

Wal-mart’s entry in India along with other big retail plans elicits quite a few reactions from those who feel it might threaten the traditional kirana stores (cornershops). The Indian Economy Blog on why that’s not likely. “A vast majority of middle class India still shops from one of the millions of tiny kirana stores for precisely these reasons. And there is no way Walmart or even the local big retailers like Foodworld, Big Bazaar or Reliance can lure away a chunk of the middle class big enough to make the kirana store go out of business for at least another few decades.”

Look here: The IEB has been part of the NMM open-source Bloomberg box for quite a while now, along with a lot of the great econoblogs being written around the world these days.

I learn stuff from the IEB. The IEB post linked to is quite interesting. I have the greatest respect for the IEB as an interlocutor in the econoblogosphere, which is a groovy place to read up on the latest debates.

And I really am interested in reality-testing the talking points designed to move global public opinion in the anti-WalMart direction.

It seems every article I read in the Harvard Business Review uses Microsoft and Wal-Mart as best-practice case studies, after all. They are, in the eyes of the follows of Jim Moore, the consummate business ecosystems.

But please, remember this simple journalistic principle: if you are going to give those poor, humble global citizens at Wal-Mart equal time to reply to what they see as a specious argument, please attribute that position to concrete individuals so I can go and see what they actually have to say.

… those who feel it might threaten the traditional kirana stores (cornershops)

is not a proper attribution. This is basic. Buy yourself a copy of the AP Stylebook — or you can subscribe to it online now, which I do, but I also keep a backup hard copy in case they change it on me without redlining the changes — and read the section on attribution.

This post is typical of what we rhetoricians call the “straw man” fallacy: Attribute a vague contrarian position to a vague sector of public opinion — “Hippies want to overthrow the American way of life!” — in order to frame your “rebuttal” as part of the “debate.”

Spiro Agnew was a master of this technique.

Wal-Mart spends billions defending itself in the court of public opinion, and is constantly getting caught with its pants down, sodomizing the ethics of the PR professsion.

So please do not try to convince me that it deserves to be treated as a member of the poor, voiceless, downtrodden global civil society.

Look, we are having this same debate in Brooklyn at the moment, and here in Grande São Paulo as well, where Wal-Mart is opening up in Guarulhos.

I have read up on this issue, as we say in Brooklyn, up the wazoo.

So please, stop trying to bullshit me.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Get yourself a good guide for dummies to informal fallacies — Olavo de Carvalho’s “How to win an argument without being right” is a good Portuguese-language translation of Schopenhauer’s treatise on the subject — and see how many you can identify in each GVO post.

Confirmation bias does not count: it is a rhetorical strategy, not a rhetorical tactic, which is what we are after here.

High scores get free beer, as in “free as in beer.”

For further study and an alternative approach to social communications from the distinguished Harvard faculty: