| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
When we go public
Friday, March 10, 2017 6:58
% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.
40-50 Years ago you had so search hard to find really stupid people in the media, now they pop up all the time. What happened ?
The Badger - WUWT comment
If anything has happened then perhaps it was inevitable. Many of us will know what an availability cascade is, but for those who don’t this is how University of Chicago Law School explains it.
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse.
For an example of availability, suppose you are asked ‘who is the most beautiful woman in the world?’ It is likely that a range of celebrity candidates will come to mind and this is what is meant by ‘availability’. Our responses tend to cluster around what is publicly available.
A cascade is obvious, so an availability cascade occurs when an issue hits the headlines, becomes available to a large number of people and gains self-reinforcing traction. We select from what is available and the media create both the availability and the cascades because it is their business to do so.
Obviously availability cascades are an unreliable window on the real world but they dominate the media for equally obvious reasons – to have public debates we must direct our attention to the same issues. Unfortunately that requirement is wide open to manipulation and is bound to limit the range and quality of any public debate. Also obvious.
For example – as the BBC produces daily news shows it has to use availability cascades. Not entirely because it can slip in stories about shortages of elk meat in Siberia or a unicycling plumber, but in the main its news has to be drawn from what is available and currently cascading. Apart from a few exclusives it cannot report major news items which avoid availability cascades because to a large extent availability cascades are the news.
Whatever the BBC adopts as its ethical pretensions, this is bound to lead to biased reporting and worse. Availability cascades do not do nuances, uncertainty or detail because that would interfere with the cascade. Even basic veracity may interfere. News outlets are biased because they have to be, because bias is a feature of the game, because it embodies an aspect of what we are when we go public.
Source: http://akhaart.blogspot.com/2017/03/when-we-go-public.html
