If you want to sell news, at least get it right

I've mentioned the worldwide drop in violence previously, and I've occasionally touched on the role of media in distorting the perception of violence, crime rates and the perception of risk in general.

Here is a fresh new example, from both Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun, based on a white paper from the ministry of justice¹. They report that "40% recidivism rate among youths released from juvenile facilities". Repeat crime rate among all arrested minors have risen to almost 32%, and has been increasing for the past 14 years! In 2004 the total rate was only about 27%; it's risen 5 points, or almost 20% in these eight years! Panic! Mayhem! Blood on the streets! Mass Hysteria!! Cats and Dogs Living Together!!!

Except, well, not.

Take a look at the graph from Asahi (reproduced here, as newspaper links have a tendency to disappear):

See something interesting? The rate of repeat offences — the red graph at the top — have indeed gone up. But look at the dark blue bar at the bottom: the number of repeat offenders have dropped, from around 4 minors in 10000 in early 2000's down to about 2.7 minors last year. That's a drop of 30%! Let me say it again: the number of repeat juvenile offenders have dropped by a third in ten years. This is good news.

And look at the light blue bars, with total juvenile arrests: from around 14 per 10000 in 2000-2002 down to about 8.5 last year. That's a drop in arrested minors of 40%! So, the proportion of arrested repeat offenders have dropped, but the total number of arrests have dropped even more. That's how the repeat offender rate has been rising — not from any worsening trend, but from two good trends, with one improving even faster than the other.

That's nowhere to be found in the Asahi article though. Even with their own graph in plain view, the text discusses only the repeat offences and never mentions that the total rates are down, not up. Yomiuri notes in a single sentence that the total number of offences has been dropping, with no further comment or any attempt to connect it to the rate.

Why the alarmist treatment? One reason can be that a bad news angle sells more papers, and the editors are more interested in their sales numbers than in the accuracy of their reporting. That, or the reporters at both Asahi and Yomiuri are so innumerate that they do not even realize what these figures are telling them.

I've been interested in the Asahi online subscription, where you get the full paper online at another 1000 yen over the subscription we already have. I'd happily pay for factual, balanced, well-researched news, but shoddy pieces like this are putting me off the whole idea.

#1 I've ben browsing their site but I can't seem to locate the white paper itself; it's either not obvious from the title, or it is obvious but my Japanese is insufficient to understand it. This is unfortunate, as Asahi talks about 40% youth repeat offenders while Yomiuri seems to talk about repeat offenders in general, though possibly about juvenile criminals that get arrested again as adults. I can't check this without the original report. Why can't media put links to their source material now that it's so easy to do?

API invokes Godwin's Law

The EU foreign correspondents in Brussels has come up with an interesting notion: Open government and free information access leads to despotism. Yes, we're in "1984" land, apparently, where war is peace, freedom is slavery and openness is repression. You think I'm joking? Here's a quote from the article:

"This is a totalitarian dream," [Mr. Consoli of the API] told EUobserver. "Every dictator who has ever lived has dreamed of communicating directly with the public without questions from a troublesome press."

They seem to believe their own readers are so utterly stupid, so dull, so dumb, so completely bereft of anything resembling analytical thought that they can not see a press release for what it is, and can not be trusted to form an actual informed opinion on their own. Some in the EU press corps wanted to restrict access to press releases only to accredited journalists, forcing all information flow to go through them only; instead they are calling for a mandatory embargo, giving them information ahead of everyone else.

What a heaping pile of dung.

The real reason for this over the top reaction has nothing to do with freedom of information, but with the shrinking number of EU correspondents. They want a monopoly on EU information in order to safeguard their own jobs. Why are their numbers decreasing? After all, if the press corps are doing a lot of valuable legwork and analysis, why would their editors ax their jobs? Partly it's the recession of course. But part of the answer may come from a Australian study showing more than half of all news reports are based on PR - on press releases, prepared media packets and so on.

Of course, taking a press release as a starting point for investigating a piece is fine. But basing your work entirely on competing press material from different interests is not. And that, unfortunately, happens far too often. So perhaps one reason the EU press corps is shrinking is that too many of those people never did enough of that independent reporting and legwork they keep talking about, and instead just repackaged the press material in their own words. When a cash-strapped editor realizes he can get the same material right over the web he'd have a hard time to motivate keeping an expensive foreign correspondent around.

Do I believe journalists in general are lazy or unskilled? No, of course not. Nor do I believe that journalism isn't important, or that it can be completely replaced by hobbyists writing blogs. But while journalists in the abstract do work that is both important and professional, the work done by specific journalists is all too frequently neither. I like newspapers - we take two at home - and I really want to continue liking them. But they're really making it difficult, with distasteful self-serving propaganda like this.

The way for quality journalism to survive is to produce journalism of good enough quality that people want access to it. But this attempt to scare people with a coming dictatorship unless you get privileged access or first dibs on evaluating information is not quality journalism or professional conduct. In fact, this transparent attempt at intimidation smells of exactly the same kind of partisan gutter journalism that is putting me off the paid-for media to begin with.