The Full Press podcast includes Tara Henley, Peter Menzies and Harrison Lowman. All three are hardass realists about journalism, holding no hope for renewal or reform. Around 17 minutes in this episode, Henley gives one MAGNIFICENT rule.
TRUTH SHOULD BE REPLICABLE.
Best observation on journalism I’ve ever heard, and the FIRST time I’ve heard a current or former journalist treat journalism as science and metrology. Most of them are just mindless DNC slaves, and even the “independents” have a mythical notion that journalism used to be better. Radio and TV were somewhat better from 1934 to 1984 because the CENSORSHIP of the Fairness Doctrine FORCED them to stick with facts. Newspapers were corrupt from the start and never relented.
From an engineering or neurological point of view, a reporter should be an extension of our senses, just as a wrench is an extension of our fingers. A reporter should be a remote sensor, ideally well calibrated and trustworthy.
Here’s a simple reporter:
An outside thermometer tells us how cold it is BEFORE we go outside, so we can prepare. Online weather radar is an even better reporter. It tells us where the precipitation is and how it’s moving, so we can shut the windows or get out the shovel and deicer.
These reporters DO NOT PROTECT THEIR SOURCES and do not cooperate with their sources. A thermometer that takes bribes from the cold front is useless, and a radar that refuses to show certain types of precipitation is useless.
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The weather metaphor struck me a few days ago when discussing unemotional realists like McAfee and Shkreli. For them, prison is just part of the weather. Rain and snow and prison are things that Nature throws at you. “Justice” and “punishment” do not exist.
The metaphor also works for our responses to the ideal reporter’s information. A thermometer tells us when to put on a coat or turn on the heater. A demonometer would tell us when the demons are about to launch a new “emergency” or “crisis”, so we can put on our mental and emotional coats. Like radar, it would also show the back edge for an All Clear signal. It would tell us when the demons are effectively DONE with this particular storm.
We wouldn’t respond to a cold front by protesting, and we wouldn’t respond by “holding the Arctic accountable” with “investigations” and “laws”. Carbon cultists think they can propitiate the weather gods by sacrificing millions of peasants. It doesn’t work. Sane people know that protests and prayers can’t alter the sun’s cycles. (The real goal, of course, is killing the peasants.)
We also shouldn’t respond to a demon front by protesting or “accountability”. Those actions are worse than irrelevant because they excite the demon into killing more peasants.
The old astrometeorologists recognized that temperature and rain and wars and tyrannies are cyclones spun up by the same permanent cycles. They were trying to detect and learn the resonances of the universe’s field, to serve as a thermometer AND a demonometer all at once.
They also intuited that an individual’s developmental genefield was partly shaped by the local resonances of the universe’s genefield at the moment of conception. This intuition was memoryholed when Mendelian genetics smashed epigenes. Horoscopes, a stupid fake version of the intuition, helped to make the real concept look horrible. Now that official science recognizes epigenes again, it’s time to relegitimize and redevelop the old intuition.
Unsurprisingly, Soviet scientists were thinking along these lines. Lysenko was right about epigenes, just as Stalin was right about language.
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Henley’s rule says that reporters, like thermostats and oil pressure sensors, can be calibrated. Two thermometers in the same situation should give the same reading. One may move faster, and one may be easier to read, but the numbers should be equal. Two reporters in the same location should give the same essential facts. One may give more explanation, and one may be easier to understand, but their statements should reduce to the same truth.
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