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Adrift in the parkways of our minds?

Not far from where I write this is a very nice park, a true urban oasis: one of those elongated greenbelts that, together with the sweeping peripheral roads on either side, particularly lends itself to the description "parkway." For the past quarter-century, the park has been inhabited by a gentleman named Earl. It follows th at this gentleman, now nearing 70, bears the whimsical/romantic labe l "Ea r l of the P a rkway." Earl's exploits have been much-chronicled , such that he is today something of a f olk hero, albeit a melancholic one, among those who live in areas adjacent to the park. Strictly speaking, Earl doesn't have to live in the park. He has options. Many would thus say he chooses to live there. (Or, if we prefer not to use terminology that evokes issues of free will vs. determinism, we could posit simply and neutrally that Earl continues to live there, regardl ess of whether alternatives objectively exist.) You might say that based on that de

What we should expect from our news.

From time to time since February 2008, when my long article on journalism and the news media first appeared in the online version of Skeptic * , people have asked me for more specifics on what I regard as the building blocks of valid, serious-minded news coverage. This is going to be a lengthy post, so I'll dive right in without further preamble. The News must be apolitical. This line of thought reached critical mass in 2001 with the controversy over Bernie Goldberg and his muck-raking book, Bias ** , which savaged the mainstream media for its strong (and unapologetic) left ward tilt. It's a familiar argument by now and there's no need to go into it at any great length. I think we'd get a fairly universal buy-in—at least in principle—on the idea that the News should never have a specific political agenda, Left or Right. That consensus is likely to crumble a bit when you g et to a more pointed discussion of implementation. For example, we'd have no trouble finding

Innocent till jurors start to really dislike you?

Here's yet another case , tragic in countless senses, where overzealous prosecutors jumped the gun and focused on the wrong suspect — the father, who spent eight months in jail — before learning six years later that someone else, in this instance a convicted sex offender, had done the grisly deed. The remarkabl e work of The Innocence Project teaches us that these episodes are hardly a rarity. All told, as of this writing, Scheck, Neufeld et al have freed 254 convicts who were wrongly (and, too often, wrongfully) co nvicted. This is why I've said many times that the standards of evidence, or what we call evidence, are way too lenient. (See particularly here and here . If you're a glutton for punishment [no pun intended], you might also want to read my long September '09 piece for Skeptic , " Criminal Injustice .") I am gravitating more and m ore to the position that if there isn't verifiable physical evidence linking someone to a crime scene, no charg

The folly of forensics: lessons from my egg roll.

If you made it all the way through my very long Skeptic article on the criminal-justice system, you know that eyewitness identifications — once viewed as the gold standard of guilt in criminal cases, especially rapes — are now being revealed as the shaky evidentiary tool that law-enforcement officials a lway s p rivately knew them to be. In fully 75% of the DNA-based exonerations wrought by the In nocence Project , there had been a positive ID at trial . Tonight I got a lesson from my egg roll in why so-called "forensics science" should probably be the next to go out the window. Some background. Sunday night after dinner I swept and vacuumed, and this morning my wife and I were both out of the house early without eating breakfast. In other words, nothing took place on the kitchen table all day until dinner. I was the first to arrive home, and in fact, when I walked into the house at about 4: 30, with the sun streaming through the blinds and across the hardwood floors of t

Why real news is, indeed, fake.

I've taken three lengthy Uber trips in the past month. All of the drivers got around to asking what I did for a living. When I replied, “I teach journalism,” two of the three exclaimed, “Ahh, fake news! ” It took the third driver a few extra lines of conversation, but she eventually got there too. For those of us engaged in showing young people how the media are supposed to work, there is no escaping the sturm und drang over fake news. Needless to say, the term has itself acquired a patina of inauthenticity, given its most celebrated user's tendency to invoke it to mean, “This news makes me look bad...ergo it's fake.” (Though I doubt that Trump uses, or even knows, the word ergo .) In fairness, however, those of us who deal in the foundations of journalism understand that the fake-news meme cannot be dismissed simply as red meat that a pathologically insecure president tosses into his supporters' den with discomfiting regularity. Actually, fakery is endemic to the ge

Our American Demeritocracy

Preamble: You're going to be inclined at first to think this is mean-spirited. As is often the case, I urge you to set aside any kneejerk reactions and think about what I'm saying here. _________________________________ After batting practice one afternoon I took my 16-year-old grandson to Burger King, where we encountered a queue of cars that stretched well back beyond the drive-through, clogging the entrance to the adjacent strip mall. This struck me odd, as it was 2:45, not normally a peak time in the land of fast food. The reason became clear, however, once we'd inched our way to that familiar first window where the money changes hands. The young man in charge of the transaction stuttered so badly that it took him fully five minutes to confirm our order—one burger, fries—and narrate the exchange of funds. He spent an eternity on the word “bacon” alone. (It was not unlike that classic scene in My Cousin Vinny , where the alternate defense attorney struggles to get thr