All Half-Truths: How the Media Misunderstands, Misuses, and Abuses Statistics
It is ironic that the United States looks to the awards made possible by the endowment of Joseph Pulitzer for their standard of excellence in journalism (and, indeed, beyond journalism), given that at the height of the war between Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal in 1895–98, the two papers could be found competing over which of the two of them could most quickly drive context, research standard, accuracy of portrayal, balance and reason — all of the things that make reporting worthy and vital — out of the news cycle to make room for the purest concentration of sensationalism as a single issue of a newspaper, in America or elsewhere, could reasonably expect to contain.
It should not be contended that Pulitzer’s rough and competitive pursuit of circulation supremacy made his papers entirely hostile to great feats of journalism, nor should it be contended that similar feats have not been accomplished or recognised in Pulitzer’s name since; but it does suggest that the nature of Pulitzer’s name as a shorthand for universal excellence in that field is, as it were, a half-truth.
Fake News was one of our most flatulent and perennial of companions throughout the 2010s, a Falstaffian figure which charmed and disarmed (before subsequently re-arming) many, and…
