You ain't got enough edjiccashun to vote

(From Jason Lefkowitz)

Herbert Block (Herblock) for the Washington Post, December 10, 1958.

Democracy dies in darkness

 David Horsey

The Washington Post. R.I.P.

By Clay Jones 

Does the news reflect what we die from?

 From Our World in Data

More than 80% of people — including surveyed Americans, Brits, Germans, and Italians — say they follow the news because they “want to know what is going on in the world around them.”1 It’s not just that people expect the news to inform them about what’s going on in the world. Most think that it does. When asked what emotions the news generates, “informed” was the most common response.2

This is what media outlets themselves promise to do. Here are several quotes from the New York Times’s mission statement:

“We seek the truth and help people understand the world. [...]

We help a global audience understand a vast and diverse world.”

However, as we’ll see in this article, the media focuses on a particular sliver of our world, leaving much of the “vast and diverse world” largely out of their reporting. We’ll investigate this through the lens of health, looking at causes of death and reporting in the United States.

As we’ll discuss, our point is not that we should want or expect the media’s coverage to perfectly match the real distribution of deaths, although we’d argue that it would be better if it were less skewed. We wrote this article so that you, the reader, are aware of a significant disconnect between what we often hear and what actually happens.

It’s easy to conflate what we see in the news with the reality of our world, and keeping this mismatch in mind can help you avoid falling into this trap.

We focused on causes of death and media coverage in the United States in 2023.

The full list of all causes of death is very long, and since many causes are very rare, we didn’t investigate all of them. But our analysis accounts for 76% of all deaths in the US in 2023.3 It includes the 12 leading causes of death in the US, plus homicide, drug overdoses, and terrorism, since they receive a lot of attention in the media.

We used data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to calculate each cause’s share of the total.4 We then compared this to the relative share of articles that mentioned these causes of death in three media outlets: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the news website of Fox News. We selected these three because they are among the biggest national news organizations, are extremely popular, and are seen as being on different parts of the political spectrum.

To count the number of mentions, we relied on Media Cloud, an open-source platform regularly used for media analysis. In an extended methodology document, we provide many more details on how we constructed the data. Two things are important to mention here.

• For each cause of death, we included synonyms in our search. So, when searching for mentions of “homicide”, we also included mentions of related terms such as “murder”, “killer”, and other terms. For “heart disease”, we included terms like “heart attack”, “cardiac arrest”, “heart failure”, and many others.
• We only counted articles where a cause of death — or its related terms — was mentioned more than once. This ensures that our analysis is focused on reporting on causes of death rather than just articles that mention a cause of death in passing. Additionally, this approach reduces the number of false positives and noise in our results.

You can see the results of our analysis in the chart below.

There are two big takeaways from this analysis. The first one is that the actual distribution of deaths shown on the left is very different from the causes of death that the media talks about.

The second insight is how similar the distribution of coverage is between the three media outlets. While there are some differences (Fox News was a bit more likely to mention homicides, for example, while the NYT did the same for terrorism), these are much smaller than we might expect. While right- and left-wing media might differ in how they cover particular topics, what they choose to write or talk about is similar.

The insight in this comparison, then, is not about differences between partisan media. It’s about the difference between actual causes of death and what the news tells Americans about. Those differences — as we can see in the chart — are huge.

Heart disease and cancer accounted for 56% of deaths among these 15 causes, but together they received just 7% of the media coverage. Other chronic issues, such as strokes, respiratory problems, diabetes, and kidney and liver disease, were also very underrepresented in the news.

Rare — but dramatic — events such as homicides and terrorism received more than half of all media coverage, despite being much smaller causes of death in the US. Terrorism, in particular, is a very rare cause of death, with 16 deaths in 2023.5

click on the graphic to enlarge

Of course, news media are all about news --- and engagement. We're not interested in routine stuff. But an earthquake is news. A murder in your town is news. And so on. But we would do well to remember that the obsessions of the media do not really show what matters,

Wrong number

 Herbert Block for the Washington Post, January 20, 1950.

Whatever you say, Mr Bezos

 By Tjeerd Royaards

Why I'm quitting The Washington Post

by Ann Telnaes

I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.

The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.

While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.

Over the years I have watched my overseas colleagues risk their livelihoods and sometimes even their lives to expose injustices and hold their countries’ leaders accountable. As a member of the Advisory board for the Geneva based Freedom Cartoonists Foundation and a former board member of Cartoonists Rights, I believe that editorial cartoonists are vital for civic debate and have an essential role in journalism.

There will be people who say, “Hey, you work for a company and that company has the right to expect employees to adhere to what’s good for the company”. That’s true except we’re talking about news organizations that have public obligations and who are obliged to nurture a free press in a democracy. Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press— and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press.

As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, “Democracy dies in darkness”.

Thank you for reading this.

The newspaper which moved from being a not-very-famous Washington newspaper to a national great one through its coverage of Richard Nixon and Watergate is finished.  Compare how the Republican Party behaved then, and how is it kowtowing to Donald Trump, a convicted felon, now.  Not only is a great newspaper finished, but the United States is turning into a banana republic.

Democracy dies in darkness

By Ann Telnaes of the Washington Post (her own newspaper, which has declined to endorse Kamala Harris despite Trump's plans for a dictatorship, on the orders of Jeff Bezos)  The Washington Post's motto is "Democracy Dies in Darkness".  How we laughed.

It was a peaceful transfer of power

 By Ann Telnaes

Pollution caused 1 in 6 deaths over last 5 years

 From The Washington Post

Deaths from fossil fuel burning and lead poisoning have risen by 66 percent in the past two decades

In 2015, 1 in 6 deaths worldwide stemmed from poor air quality, unsafe water and toxic chemical pollution. That deadly toll — 9 million people each year — has continued unabated through 2019, killing more people than war, terrorism, road injuries, malaria, drugs and alcohol.

The new findings, released Tuesday by the Lancet Planetary Health journal, shows that pollution continues to be the world’s largest environmental health threat for disease and premature deaths, with more the 90 percent of these deaths taking place in low- and middle-income countries.

Richard Fuller, the report’s lead author, said in an interview that “a lack of attention” accounts for why this grim tally continues unabated.

“There’s not much of an outcry around pollution … even though, clearly, 9 million people dying a year is an enormous issue to be concerned about,” he said.

The analysis, which used 2019 data from Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors, found that air pollution accounts for the vast majority of premature deaths, at 6.7 million. Water pollution accounted for 1.4 million deaths, while lead poisoning took close to a million lives. The report is an update of a similar analysis done by Fuller and his colleagues in 2015, which also found air and water pollution as the top offenders.

While the total number of pollution-related deaths has not changed in the past five years, the sources have shifted in some regions. In the past, most pollution deaths stemmed from indoor and household air pollution, caused by fine particles of soot released from indoor stoves burning wood or dung. Unclean water and untreated sewage also took more than a million lives.

Fuller said this source of pollution has decreased in recent years, as many households in China and India have switched to gas for cooking.

But that was about the only good news in the report. Instead of those traditional pollutants, fossil fuel burning, automobile combustion and toxic chemical pollution now pose a greater health risk in the developing world.

More than half of the countries and nations worldwide experienced more deaths from outdoor air pollution and toxic chemicals in 2019 than indoor air pollution and water contamination. More than 2 million people died from industrial and chemical pollution in China, for example, compared with about 367,000 from traditional sources.

In Africa, traditional pollutants still rank as the main cause of pollution-related disease and death, although industrial pollution is on the rise.

“When we’re seeing this increase in industrialization, we’re seeing increased urbanization, more people living in cities, and an aging population who are more vulnerable to the health impacts of air pollution,” said Neelu Tummala, a physician and co-director of the Climate Health Institute at George Washington University who was not involved in the study. “All of this sort of combined together just really increases the amount of associated mortality.”

A boy disposes of raw sewage into a stream in the sprawling Kibera slum in Nairobi on Aug. 26, 2011. (Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)

Northern hemisphere heat wave infestation

 

An American model simulation of high-altitude weather patterns Tuesday shows five heat domes spread around the Northern Hemisphere. (WeatherBell)

From The Washington Post

As viewed on a weather map of the globe, no fewer than five powerful heat domes are swelling over the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere. These zones of high pressure in the atmosphere, intensified by climate change, are generating unforgiving blasts of heat in North America, Europe and Asia simultaneously.

The heat domes, in a number of instances, are the source of record high temperatures and are contributing to swarms of wildfires in western North America and in Siberia. In recent days, all-time record highs have been set in Turkey, northern Japan and Northern Ireland.

Lined up like a parade, the heat domes are also part of a traffic jam of weather systems that instigated the flood disaster in Europe last week.

Heat domes like this are normal at this time of year, the hottest point of summer, but it’s unusual to have this many this intense. Every one of these heat domes is generating exceptional weather.

Starting in the western United States, temperatures in Montana climbed more than 20 degrees above normal on Monday. Glasgow, Mont., spiked to 110 degrees, matching its third-highest temperature on record since 1893. Billings hit 107 degrees, tying its second-highest temperature recorded since 1934. The heat is worsening exceptional drought conditions in both the western United States and Canada, creating tinderbox conditions for wildfires that are spreading smoke all over North America.

Across the Atlantic, the heat dome lodged over the British Isles brought Northern Ireland its hottest day on record Sunday, which was then broken four days later.

The heat dome has hardly budged, prompting the Met Office, Britain’s meteorological agency, to issue its “first ever” extreme heat warning Monday. The warning, in effect through Thursday, calls for prolonged unusually high temperatures over “a large part of Wales, all of southwest England and parts of southern and central England,” the agency wrote. Temperatures may reach the low 90s in this zone.

Farther east, the heat dome parked over southeastern Europe and Western Asia has also produced exceptionally high temperatures. On Tuesday, the thermometer in the Turkish city of Cizre, near the border with Syria, surged to 120.4 degrees, the country’s highest temperature ever observed.

Etienne Kapikian, a meteorologist with Meteo France, the country’s meteorological agency, tweeted he expects this heat wave to produce additional record-challenging temperatures into Wednesday in adjacent areas, including in Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan and Russia.

Farther to the east and north, record heat has also invaded northern Japan, where all-time highs were set on Sunday and Monday. In Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island known for its ski resorts and abundant winter snowfall, “the heat was so intense that the train rails were distorted,” tweeted Sayaka Mori, a meteorologist based in Tokyo.

The exceptional heat also bled into eastern Russia and Siberia, where a siege of wildfires has torched the landscape.

Finally, crossing the Pacific, much warmer-than-normal temperatures cover Alaska. The responsible heat dome is the least intense of the five affecting the Northern Hemisphere. Even so, it pushed the mercury to 81 degrees in Anchorage on Sunday, a record for July 18 and tied for the city’s 16th-warmest day ever observed, according to Alaska-based climatologist Brian Brettschneider.

The heat over the Last Frontier has helped fuel unusual thunderstorm outbreaks in recent days, including some over the Arctic Ocean sea ice north of its border.

Scientists have determined that climate change is increasing the intensity of heat domes and making heat waves hotter than they would have been without human influence. This explains the frequency at which temperature records are being set every summer. Already this summer, seven national high temperature records have fallen.

But the current weather pattern, in which these heat domes are not only intensified but also prolonged, may also be linked to climate change.

Climate change is expected to decrease the strength of steering currents as the high latitudes warm more quickly than the mid-latitudes, reducing the north-to-south temperature differences that drive the wind. According to a 2018 study from climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, weaker high altitude winds will produce a slower jet stream with more wavy peaks and troughs, which he ascribes to a process known as “quasi-resonant amplification.”

The more wavy peaks are the breeding grounds for intensified heat domes, like we see spread around the Northern Hemisphere, while the troughs are the low-pressure zones that can set the stage for floods like we just saw in Germany and neighboring countries.

The configuration of heat domes we see at the moment looks like a “classic” example of a pattern “associated with wave resonance,” Mann wrote in an email.

Loyalty to Trump

A cartoon by Tom Toles of the Washington Post.

Baked Alaska

There's been an incredible heatwave in Alaska.  Again.

Before the heatwave, the Washington Post reported the prognostications of the weather boffins:

All-time heat records are at risk in Alaska in coming days as a massive and abnormally intense area of high pressure locks in and strengthens over the region.

This heat dome is expected to produce temperatures near and above the highest values ever recorded for multiple days, particularly in southern parts of the state. It’s the latest in a slew of record-shattering heat events in Alaska.

Anchorage is predicted to test or best its highest-temperature ever recorded of 85 degrees (set in 1969) on five straight days between July 4 and 8. It could even flirt with 90 degrees.

The National Weather Service in Anchorage wrote that most of southern Alaska will be “downright hot with many locations in the 80s and even low 90s.”

Anchorage’s nighttime lows may settle only in the mid-60s during this hot stretch, which is close to its average high at this time of year.

“This 7-day forecast contains the warmest 1-day, warmest 2-day, warmest 3-day, warmest 4-day, warmest 5-day, warmest 6-day, and warmest 7-day period on record for Anchorage,” tweeted Alaska climatologist Brian Brettschneider.

This heat wave is the latest in a nonstop barrage of warm weather for the northernmost state. It comes right on the heels of a June that was well above average and filled with wildfires that are persisting and/or growing into July. Spring was disturbingly warm before that, and so was winter.

It also follows a historic heat wave in Europe, which shattered records.

Alaska’s temperatures have shifted abruptly higher in the past few years, and it’s a similar story across the Arctic more broadly because of climate change.

[Read more here]

Alaska: forecast high pressure and temperature.  Source: The Washington Post

Alaskan sea temperatures 5 degrees C above normal.  Source: Rick Thoman

Annual average temperatures in Fairbanks used to be below freezing.
This year, the average is above freezing.  The last time was the El Niño of 2016.
The last six years have been among the 10 hottest ever.
Source: Rick Thoman

The BBC reported what actually happened.  And it was hotter than expected.

The US state of Alaska, part of which lies inside the Arctic Circle, is sweltering under a heatwave, with record temperatures recorded in several areas, including its largest city.

Temperatures reached 90F (32C) in Anchorage on Thursday, shattering the city's previous record of 85F.

Several other places in southern Alaska also set all-time or daily records.

Anchorage's record temperature of 90F was recorded at its airport at 17:00 on Thursday (01:00 Friday GMT), according to the National Weather Service. The previous all-time record for the city was in 1969.

Other areas in Alaska also reached similar temperatures amid the heatwave, and several recorded daily and all-time records.

[Read more here]


What sort of evidence will it take to convince the denialists that global heating is happening and that our emissions of greenhouse gases is responsible?  There was a time when the Right was cautious, evidence-based, pro-science,  and well, conservative—keen to preserve the status quo.  Now the Right has degenerated into swivel-eyed loons, unwilling to face up to the greatest crisis our civilisation faces, convinced that global heating is some sort of socialist plot.  Sad.