I gradually took in the massive fact that journalism is not an exact science.

The Atlantic sends out one of its marketing e-mails this morning with this lead.

Click to enlarge.

I don't disagree that Zelensky has put on a remarkable performance and defied expectations.  This is not a criticism of either Zelensky or even Nyce in particular.

But the brevity of the heading almost cannot help but force a recognition that journalists are in the same position as almost every intelligent consumer of mass information.  Possibly with better one-to-one access to some pertinent individuals and possibly with superior access to subscription services.  

But that isn't a particularly significant differentiator from your average infovore.  What insight does Nyce have that an informed infovore might not?  Indeed, being younger and within the mainstream media bubble, she possibly has materially less insight than those accustomed to working in the complexity of the free market where nothing is ever as it seems, nothing ever goes quite according to plan and where the only certainties are death, taxes and eventual accountability for the quality of your decisions.

Ukraine is suddenly the focus of the mainstream media and suddenly people in mainstream media are making judgments and forecasts with even less knowledge and context than a surprising number of the intelligent public.  This is the flip side of Crichton's Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

As articulated by Crichton, he pointed out that the individual reader often knew when journalists were wrong in their reporting when those journalists covered something with which the reader was directly knowledgeable.  The amnesia effect was that the reader would be exasperated by all the errors in the single article which the reader could effectively quality check and knew how frequently it was incorrect but then read all other articles as if they were accurate.

The corollary of Crichton's Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is that most journalism is likely to be erroneous to the point of being flat out wrong.  

Is Zelensky a great leader?  Quite possibly.  But there are also many reasons to critique that assumption as well, not least based on the fact that he was discounting the probability of a Russian invasion even a few days prior to the invasion.  How well informed and weighted is Nyce's opinion about the Ukraine as opposed to the conclusions reached by the well-informed and diligent infovore?

Possibly she is well informed but there is nothing in a quick search of LinkedIn or the web to suggest that Ukraine is not merely another in the ever changing constellation of things upon which she is paid to have an opinion.

The second thought arising from that Atlantic magazine marketing letter was that journalists today are functioning somewhat like the haruspices of the ancient world, and shamans more generally, who read the entrails, cast bones, and read the signs in nature to divine some current condition or future occurrence.  They do not actually know a lot but they infer much, based on little.  

Perhaps I am being too jaundiced having read the ever-entertaining H.L. Mencken at bedtime last night.  Specifically, The Synthesis of News in his Newspaper Days from 1941.

De Bekker and I and the reporter for the Sun-paper (I forget his name) attended all these public events together, and since de Bekker was the eldest of the trio, and had a beard to prove it, he set the tone and tempo of our endeavors.  If, on an expedition to the iron wilds of Locust Point, he decided suddenly that it was time for a hiatus and a beer, we downed tools at once and made for the nearest saloon, which was never more than a block away.  Unhappily, the beers of those days, especially along the waterfront, ran only a dozen or so to the keg, and it was thus sometimes difficult for us youngsters, after two or three of them, to throw ourselves into gear again.  At such times de Bekker's professional virtuosity and gift for leadership were demonstrated most beautifully. 

"Why in hell," he would say, "should we walk our legs off trying to find out the name of a Polack stevedore kicked overboard by a mule?  The cops are too busy dragging for the body to ask it, and when they turn it in at last, maybe tomorrow or the day after, it will be so improbable that no union printer in Baltimore will be able to set it up.  Even so, they will only guess at it, as they guess at three-fourths of all the names on their books.  Moreover, who gives a damn what it was?  The fact that another poor man has given his life to engorge the Interests is not news: it happens every ten minutes.  The important thing here, the one thing that brings us vultures of the press down into this god-forsaken wilderness is that the manner of his death was unusual — that men are not kicked overboard by mules every day.  I move you, my esteemed contemporaries, that the name of the deceased be Ignaz Karpinski, that the name of his widow be Marie, that his age was thirty-six, that he lived at 1777 Fort Avenue, and that he leaves eleven minor children." 

It seemed so reasonable to the Sun reporter and me that we could think of no objection, and so the sad facts were reported in all three Baltimore morning papers the next day, along with various lively details that occurred to de Bekker after he had got down another beer. This labor-saving device was in use the whole time I covered South Baltimore for the Herald, and I never heard any complaint against it.  Every one of the three city editors, comparing his paper to the other two, was surprised and pleased to discover that his reporter always got names and addresses right, and all three of us were sometimes commended for our unusual accuracy.  De Bekker, I should add, was a fellow of conscience, and never stooped to what he called faking.  That is to say, he never manufactured a story out of the whole cloth.  If, under his inspiration, we reported that a mad dog had run amok down the Point and bitten twenty children, there was always an actual dog somewhere in the background, and our count of the victims was at least as authentic as any the cops would make.  And if, when an immigrant ship tied up at the North German Lloyd pier, we made it known that fifteen sets of twins had been born during the voyage from Bremen, there were always some genuine twins aboard to support us.  

Thus, in my tenderest years, I became familiar with the great art of synthesizing news, and gradually took in the massive fact that journalism is not an exact science.