You can't entirely trust the media, no really
The respectable, reputable media present a version of what has happened in the world that can be as misleading as possible without being actionably wrong about what actually happened. (The disreputable media just make it up, but you know that.)
Have a look at these lovely photographs of the day, from teh Graun. In particular, look at the one before last, captioned "Farmers making hay while the sun shines. The race is on to bale the cut grass before the predicted thunderstorms arrive."
The specific facts are indeed true: this was near Bury, hay making was being done, the sun was shining, and they wanted to get the hay in before any rain.
You might reasonably infer that the person in the shot is a farmer by occupation, working in the deep rural countryside, making hay in a very traditional, non-mechanical way. All pretty rustic. That's the story the photo is telling. It's a good story, and makes a great picture.
But that story - that you naturally assume from what is presented - is materially misleading. If the photographer had been pointing the other way, you'd have seen the back gardens of a housing estate in a suburb of Greater Manchester. In fact, if you look closely, you can see some of it peeping through the trees in the right-hand side of the photo. And you'd also have seen the tractors, rower upper (the machine that gathers cut grass in to rows), and baler. Being driven by the actual farmers.
The man in the photograph is in fact my brother Andrew, who is not a farmer but a full-time FE maths teacher. He's the sort of person who thinks answering difficult Haskell questions on Stack Overflow is a fun way to spend his free time. I love him like a brother, but even I would have to say that the sun does not shine out of his arse. Even the actual farmers are only part time: the older one is semi-retired, and the younger has downshifted from an intense City sort of job and helps his Dad out between running a small business doing decorating and building work. To be fair to the Guardian, my brother is part of the extended family of the actual farmers (they're his in-laws) and he chips in now and then when he's free and they have a big urgent job on, like getting in the hay.
No actual farmers in Britain rake up grass by hand. We do it a bit on my Marie Antoinette Farm, but that's because we are terrible, useless dilettantes who aren't safe with large machinery. We are volunteering our labour so we treat it as free and squander it. But even so, we only ever do the orchard where it's hard to get a tractor in, and it takes forever.
I see this over and over with news stories where I know the background. Almost never is the story written how I would present what has gone on, except where they've simply republished a press release I helped put out. Which seems even worse.
I need to bear this in mind when I'm making my mind up about the world from stories where I don't know any more than what the media is presenting. The compelling picture they are painting may well be not entirely accurate, while still being not too far from the empirical facts. Media don't report facts, they tell stories.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/322493.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.
Have a look at these lovely photographs of the day, from teh Graun. In particular, look at the one before last, captioned "Farmers making hay while the sun shines. The race is on to bale the cut grass before the predicted thunderstorms arrive."
The specific facts are indeed true: this was near Bury, hay making was being done, the sun was shining, and they wanted to get the hay in before any rain.
You might reasonably infer that the person in the shot is a farmer by occupation, working in the deep rural countryside, making hay in a very traditional, non-mechanical way. All pretty rustic. That's the story the photo is telling. It's a good story, and makes a great picture.
But that story - that you naturally assume from what is presented - is materially misleading. If the photographer had been pointing the other way, you'd have seen the back gardens of a housing estate in a suburb of Greater Manchester. In fact, if you look closely, you can see some of it peeping through the trees in the right-hand side of the photo. And you'd also have seen the tractors, rower upper (the machine that gathers cut grass in to rows), and baler. Being driven by the actual farmers.
The man in the photograph is in fact my brother Andrew, who is not a farmer but a full-time FE maths teacher. He's the sort of person who thinks answering difficult Haskell questions on Stack Overflow is a fun way to spend his free time. I love him like a brother, but even I would have to say that the sun does not shine out of his arse. Even the actual farmers are only part time: the older one is semi-retired, and the younger has downshifted from an intense City sort of job and helps his Dad out between running a small business doing decorating and building work. To be fair to the Guardian, my brother is part of the extended family of the actual farmers (they're his in-laws) and he chips in now and then when he's free and they have a big urgent job on, like getting in the hay.
No actual farmers in Britain rake up grass by hand. We do it a bit on my Marie Antoinette Farm, but that's because we are terrible, useless dilettantes who aren't safe with large machinery. We are volunteering our labour so we treat it as free and squander it. But even so, we only ever do the orchard where it's hard to get a tractor in, and it takes forever.
I see this over and over with news stories where I know the background. Almost never is the story written how I would present what has gone on, except where they've simply republished a press release I helped put out. Which seems even worse.
I need to bear this in mind when I'm making my mind up about the world from stories where I don't know any more than what the media is presenting. The compelling picture they are painting may well be not entirely accurate, while still being not too far from the empirical facts. Media don't report facts, they tell stories.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/322493.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.