If newspapers are dying, maybe in part it’s because they are relying upon AP for their articles and AP is providing articles like this one, alarmingly headlined that “spies have hacked into the U.S. electric grid.” It’s a lengthy article which contains precisely one asserted actual fact; a fact which is stated in the headline and is provided by (wait for it) an official but anonymous source.
Well, that’s a minor canard. Actually it was a “former U.S. government official” who “wasn't authorized to discuss the matter and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.” Note the “former” in that.
Other than the one assertion from a single source that a hack was found in one electric company grid, a fact which has not been verified even by a second “anonymous source,” there is not one other fact in the article. There is no assertion, and presumably no evidence, that the hack penetrated beyond the one electric company. There is assertion that is was planted by hacker intrusion, but since it was simply found in place, they do not actually know that; it could have been planted there from within by an employee, for instance.
The article is a mashup of suppositions and probabilities, mostly from yet more anonymous sources, and many of them worded so as to make them sound like vaguely threatening and scary facts. Words like “could” and “probably” abound throughout the article, along with phrases with “can be” and “might begin.”
The one person quoted and actually named says that “The severity of what we’re seeing is off the scale.” The person speaking is VP of a computer security technology company, and I suspect that he is speaking about viruses Internet-wide since his quote is not apropos of anything contained in the article. Of course he wants you to be frightened of the miscellaneous viruses that are attacking the computer network that controls our electric grid. The same viruses are attacking my computer network as I type this and, notably, are not bringing down either network.
After the nonsensical stenography that passed for journalism in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, the news media did much breast beating and claimed to have learned something. Part of what they claimed to have learned was to avoid anonymous sources and to stick to factual reporting. This article does neither, and it is all too typical of the current major media process.
The San Diego Union-Tribune, like local newspapers everywhere, is a failing paper, shrinking steadily, providing less and less content, and becoming less and less of a significant advertising medium. Part of the reason is that it has abandoned news reporting and turned that function over to “services” to which it subscribes; services which perform that function with a mixture of sloppy ineptitude and political deception.
No comments:
Post a Comment