Media Watch-Dunning Kruger in action

The Australian report on Media Watch Ineptitude. A case study of Dunning Kruger effect...

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.

Legal move threatened over Media Watch report ACOUSTIC expert Steven Cooper is considering launching legal action against the ABC’s Media Watch program for its portrayal of him and his research on the effect of the Pacific Hydro wind turbines on local residents.
On the February 16 edition of Media Watch host Paul Barry dished out a stinging criticism of Mr Cooper’s seven-month study conducted at Cape Bridgewater in southwest Victoria — and the ­reporting of it by The Australian’s environment editor Graham Lloyd and Network Seven’s Today Tonight.
However, in damning the report, the Media Watch team hand- picked a group of pro-turbine ­“experts” — with no real expertise in the field — ignored submissions from genuine acoustic experts, misrepresented Mr Cooper, ­selectively and incorrectly quoted the National Health and Medical Research Council, ignored balancing quotes in the newspaper ­reports and made a number of factual mistakes.
Following his utter disbelief at Media Watch’s misrepresentation, as well as pending legal action, Mr Cooper has also sent a letter to the ABC demanding a retraction.

And

In response to the Media Watch report about The Australian’s coverage of wind farms
THE Media Watch report of February 16 (“Turbine torture: do wind farms make you sick?”) is littered with mistakes, omissions and misrepresentations from the opening scenes.
The program represents blatant advocacy for commercial interests over the widespread concerns of a genuine minority group who deserve thorough investigation of their complaints.
The Australian provided balanced, factual reporting of a national issue of public interest where Media Watch indulged in what amounts to little more than ad hominem, ideological propaganda.
The Media Watch program misrepresented the National Health and Medical Research Council position that the quality of existing research into the possible health impacts of wind turbines is poor and that it will fund more high quality research.

what you get when you pay peanuts

A good article in The Australian by Hedley Thomas looking at errors made by the ABC's Fact Checking unit about Clive Palmer...

ABC Fact Check unit's Palmer report riddled with errors

THE ABC's Fact Check unit has made a series of factual mistakes in its analysis of Clive Palmer's business interests, wealth and companies and relied on accounts that are almost 17 months out of date. 

It just goes to show that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

Ignoring history-Thatcher and Climate Change

ABC's environment website is a type example of bias and mis-information. Their propaganda playbook straight out of Orwell's 1984. No surprise there, given it's run by environmental activists who enjoy trouncing ABC's editorial policies.

The latest piece of mis-information; an op ed titled "How Margaret Thatcher led the way on climate change"

Amazingly this piece omits Thatcher's comments made in her 2003 book "Statecraft" in which she almost completely recants the views contained in ABC's op ed. ABC's writer and editor willfully ignore the facts for the sake of spruiking their own agenda. Once again ABC's audience left in the dark.

Here are a few choice quotes from Statecraft, from the section "Hot Air and Global Warming" (P.449)

"The doomsters favourite subject today is climate change."

"Indeed, the lack of any sense of proportion is what characterises many pronouncements on the matter by otherwise sensible people."

"Ït would, though, be difficult to beat for apocalyptic hyperbole former Vice-President Gore." (ed. MT not aware of the dire pronouncements of our own Climate Commission!)

Culling the Archive

Some screen shots below showing the effect of the cull of reports from ABC's News Archive:
 The Wayback Machine, the Internet archive, has preserved some glimpses of ABC's Archive for posterity. We looked at June 16, 2008 when ABC News posted a record 392 reports. The Wayback machine archive captured on 2 February 2011 confirms our earlier count, showing 15 pages with 25 reports each, with the 16th page containing 17 reports. As of this morning the ABC's achive shows just 10 pages, each with 25 reports for a total of 250 reports, meaning access to 142 reports through the archive have been removed, effectively culled (see comparison of screen shots below-click to enlarge). It seems that reports prior to about midday, in this case, have been sent down the memory hole. 

The missing stories such as this one (Skiers take advantage of alpine snow) still appear to be available if you know the URL.

Why the ABC have placed a limit on the number of stories in its archive remains a mystery. It seems at this point that attempts to thwart our productivity survey at least one possible reason, incompetence always another.

ABC's Man from Snowy River

ABC Environment's impression of the Man from Snowy River

With this in mind Banjo Patterson's Man from Snowy River may have had a slightly different ending...

The man from Snowy River is a household word today, 

And the stockmen tell the story of his rice.

Who's Ho?

Credit Ho New (Reuters) 

Screen shot of the offending item taken from ABC Environment's Site 25/10/2011

We have had some fun with ABC environment's woeful attempt to automatically link news headlines to stock images (see this effort for instance), however this time the incompetence relates to attribution of a photo in an opinion piece on its website (shown above).

The correct attribution is shown below in an article from MSNBC. As to who "Ho New" is, we asked Reuters and they indicated the Ho refers to "Handout".

Attribution of MSNBC article reads "Dennis Sarrazin  /  ArcticNet/Centre d'Etudes Nordiques"

You can see more amazing photos by Dennis Sarrazin at his page at the Centre d'Etudes Nordiques. The photo ABC incorrectly credited to a "Handout" from Reuters was taken in on the 20/08/2008 and shows Disraeli fjord, Ellesmere Island, Northern Canada. In Dennis Sarrazin's slideshow it's about the 20th photo in.

In regard to the content of the op ed piece, if you look up "Alarmist" in the dictionary it now simply shows a Lissajous curve. In regard to its author, based on a recent critique by Roger Pielke Jnr, I believe the label "cherry picker" is appropriate.

Update from Reuters received 29/10/2011:
Thanks for the note, and sorry for the delay. The HO is actually an internal code which is added to a picture when its put into our archive. It most likely was a technical glitch.


No, just ABC incompetence.

ABC Environment mutilate wallabies

Update Nothing abnormal about NT fires

ABC provide the reply below to our complaint regarding their claims CO2 releases from NT fires are abnormal. Tainted as it is by a groupthink mentality, lack of balance and failure to live up to normal journalistic standards on environmental reporting, ABC's exceptionally low standards are fast becoming the norm. (To see how totally normal this year's fire season is, skip to the links below ABC's response-title in red).

Here's their response (in italics) received October 11, our comments in bold:
Thank you for your email of October 7 concerning the story "Science counts carbon cost of Red Centre fires".
As your correspondence raised concerns of a lack of accuracy, your email was referred to Audience and Consumer Affairs for consideration and response. The unit is separate and independent from ABC program areas (as separate as Chang and Eng) and is responsible for investigating complaints alleging a broadcast or publication was in contravention of the ABC's editorial standards (by providing a big rubber stamp for ABC's errors and misleading reports). In light of your concerns, we have reviewed the story and assessed it against the ABC’s editorial requirements for accuracy, as outlined in section 2 of the ABC’s Editorial Policies:http://www.abc.net.au/corp/pubs/edpols.htm. In the interests of procedural fairness, we have also sought and considered material from ABC News.

Your complaint is that the use of the “abnormal” in relation to the fires is a “gross distortion” of the facts. The story carefully and accurately described the fact that these fires are part of the natural cycle in the Northern Territory but are, none the less, far from common.  (In the story Dr Ashley Sparrow indicates it is "an example of the boom-and-bust ecosystem in the Red Centre at work". Only activist reporters at the ABC could construe this as abnormal. It is clearly part of a well known common natural cycle.)
That you had to go back 60 years to find reports of equivalent fires, demonstrates this.
(This is a demonstration of the ignorance and laziness of ABCs respondent. I found the news articles on the National Library Newspaper site in about 2 minutes. The Archive ends in the 1950s. A fuller account of bushfires activity in the NT is provided below, this located in about 2 mintues. It seems that large fires in the NT are quite common.)
Describing such events as “abnormal” is only intended to indicate their infrequency, which is quite clear when read in context. The story is not misleading. 

(Based on the evidence of fire activity in the NT use of the term "abnormal" is indeed misleading, sensationalist and inaccurate).

Accordingly, while noting your concerns, Audience and Consumer Affairs are satisfied the story was in keeping with the ABC’s editorial standards for accuracy (In other words it as woeful and as tainted by Groupthink as the rest of ABC's environmental reporting). Nonetheless, please be assured that your comments have been noted and conveyed to ABC News management (As the same mistakes keep on occurring in ABC's echo chamber one doubts that much notice is paid to any criticism).
Thank you for taking the time to write; your feedback is appreciated (I'm sure it is).
End Response

Some further information on NT Bush fires 
from Understanding bushfire: trends in deliberate vegetation fires in Australia-Northern Territory

Few people are aware of the role, the process or the scale of burning (controlled and uncontrolled) that occurs in the tropical savannas of northern Australia. Bushfires are a ubiquitous feature of the Northern Territory dry season, with the territory having the most frequent, largest and more poorly documented vegetation fires of any part of the continent. When considering Northern Territory bushfires it is necessary to discard all preconceptions of size, frequency and even harm, based on southern vegetation fire regimes, as they are simply not translatable to the savannas that dominate Australia’s north. 

Area burned: The frequency and area burned in any one year varies considerably. Nevertheless, by
southern standards the total and the proportion of land burned in any given year is extraordinarily large. In the higher rainfall savanna woodlands of the northern Kimberley, the Top End and Cape York up to half of the total area may be burned either every year or every second year (Anderson 1996, Dyer et al. 2001, Press 1998, Russell-Smith et al. 1997). Many of these fires are intense and therefore pose the most danger in terms of their capacity to devastate populations of fire-sensitive native plants and animals, to be costly and disruptive to pastoral operations, and to pose a threat to communities and property. The frequency of fires tends to decrease further south for a number of reasons. They include reduced rainfall and therefore vegetation density, reduced grass reserves due to intensive use of these savannas for grazing, and greater efforts to suppress fires to prevent destruction of valuable fodder resources.

Intense fires commonly started by lightning strikes during particularly dry seasons have occurred
throughout the Northern Territory’s modern history. The amounts of land burned in these events are extraordinary. The Council of Australian Governments report (Ellis, Kanowski & Whelan 2004) lists four major bushfire seasons in the territory since the late 1960s that collectively burned 168,000,000 ha. In 2002, approximately 38,000,000 ha burned in planned and unplanned fires. This represents 29 percent of the Northern Territory. In comparison, the January 2003 fires burned ‘only’ 226,000 ha in the Australian Capital Territory and 1,000,000 ha in Victoria. See Table 1 above.

So nothing "abnormal" about large bush fires in the NT!

See also this animation of fires around Central Australia for the period May 1999 to April 2004:
http://www.nt.gov.au/nreta/natres/bushfires/research/desertfire.html

NASA image from 2007...Below Huge fires scorched grassland and savanna in the Barkly Tableland region of Australia’s Northern Territory in October 2007. 

Based on ABC's story one wonders where Fred Williams got the inspiration for this series of paintings?...

Bushfire in Northern Territory 12) (1976)

How much of Kakadu Burnt each year? Did I hear an average of 46%? And that's abnormal?

Abnormal? According to the paper...Fire frequency and biodiversity conservation in Australian tropical savannas: implications from the Kapalga fire experiment

Every year large proportions of northern Australia's tropical savanna landscapes are burnt, resulting in high fire frequencies and short intervals between fires.

Austral Ecology

Volume 30, Issue 2, pages 155–167, April 2005

From...Fire and Sustainable Agricultural and Forestry Development in Eastern Indonesia and Northern Australia Proceedings of an international workshop held at  Northern Territory University, Darwin, Australia, 13–15 April 1999. (Link Here) From Russell-Smith et al, on page 95... In northwestern and northern Australia, and possibly also on parts of Cape York in the northeast, intense wild fires typically late in the dry season burn vast tracts annually. 


Vast Tracts! And to the ABC this year's fires are somehow "abnormal"!

Image mix up - Animal Special

Slow posting this month, so here's a selection of recent mixed messages from ABC Environment to make up for it. Add your own commentary!

 

 

   

 

New Dolphin Species!

ABC Environment report on the discovery of a new species of dolphin in Victoria...

Can anyone suggest a name for the new beastie? Yertle, perhaps?
I guess that image problem left in the too hard basket.

working on a solution

Seems ABC innovation are still working hard, battling those image problems on the ABC's environment news page...

We initially advised ABC of the issue on the 4th of April. According to those in the know..."ABC Innovation has advised that stories from across the ABC that are filed with no image are randomly assigned an image on the Environment portal from a pool of images. I understand relevant ABC Innovation staff are aware of the discordant match-ups that this system has produced and have been working on a solution. The examples published on your website have been brought to the attention of ABC Innovation management."

Image problem continues

About our inquires about it's problem coordinating headlines and images on the ABC environment site ABC recently replied (on 13/5/2011)
"ABC Innovation has advised that stories from across the ABC that are filed with no image are randomly assigned an image on the Environment portal from a pool of images. I understand relevant ABC Innovation staff are aware of the discordant match-ups that this system has produced and have been working on a solution. The examples published on your website have been brought to the attention of ABC Innovation management."


We initially advised ABC of the issue on the 4th of April. It's now July and the problem is still not fixed!

ABC's collared dingos

image problem - on the back burner

About our inquires about it's problem coordinating headlines and images on the ABC environment site ABC recently replied (13/5/2011)
"ABC Innovation has advised that stories from across the ABC that are filed with no image are randomly assigned an image on the Environment portal from a pool of images. I understand relevant ABC Innovation staff are aware of the discordant match-ups that this system has produced and have been working on a solution. The examples published on your website have been brought to the attention of ABC Innovation management."


We initially advised ABC of the issue on the 4th of April. It's now June and the problem is still not fixed!

ABC's lobster harvester in action.

Can you define exclusive Sir Humphrey?

ABC find a new definition of "exclusive".

Thank you for your email of 29 March (see our post Exclusive opinion).
In response to your first query, I understand the Environment portal is an aggregation site which draws in content from other ABC websites, and also publishes some original material not found elsewhere on the ABC. ABC Innovation has advised that audience feedback suggested there was so much content from across the ABC that the original pieces were lost. I am advised that the 'Exclusives' tab was set up as a navigation aid to assist users to find content which has been published on the portal and which does not appear anywhere else on the ABC; that is, content that is exclusive to the portal in the sense that it did not come from elsewhere on the ABC. This was the case for the opinion piece 'Why I think climate change is real', which appeared in the 'Opinion' and 'Exclusives' sections of the Environment portal and nowhere else on the ABC. (This article first appeared on The Conversation-ed)

In response to your second query, I am advised that ABC Innovation does not commission original news stories for the Environment portal. However, I understand there have been many feature stories and opinion pieces published exclusively on the portal.

Your feedback, including your request for the 'Exclusives' section to include only news stories which are exclusive to the ABC, has been conveyed to relevant staff in ABC Innovation. (Received 13/5/2011)


That's "Innovation" for you!


A slightly different definition of exclusive: "a piece of news, or the reporting of a piece of news, obtained by a newspaper or other news organization, along with the privilege of using it first."

Image problem

ABC provide the following explanation for the image problem with ABC Environment 's Online News Section
Received 13/5/2011
ABC Innovation has advised that stories from across the ABC that are filed with no image are randomly assigned an image on the Environment portal from a pool of images. I understand relevant ABC Innovation staff are aware of the discordant match-ups that this system has produced and have been working on a solution. The examples published on your website have been brought to the attention of ABC Innovation management.



This mixed up headline published the same day suggests work is proceeding at the usual rate. Note that we first informed ABC on 4 April, 2011.

Not sure if that's Robyn or Fran (or Julia) under that hat.

ABC Environment: the insults continue

ABC Environment continue their visual insults to Vietnamese farmers. We look forward to their apology.

 

The wrong hat?

ABC Environment continue mixing headlines and images. No surprise considering the way they confuse propaganda for news ...

Are ABC Environment closet racists?

ABC Environment continues to insult Asian Australians and our neighbours by juxtaposing this image and headline.

Your tax dollars at work. 

Breaking news - ABC reveal Nation's true traditional owners

YOUR taxes at work.

Additional mix ups between headlines and images immediately below and see HERE for some examples from last week. 

Friday Funny

ABC Environment still mixing up images with headlines, here's a selection:

Something fishy...

The Mr Big of Abalone

 

Smugglers foiled by Sydney Traffic

 

I caught a fish...this big! 

Easy to catch, not so easy to clean.

  We miss Kevin

Julia Gillard reveals her true self.

 Sandbaggers go too far!

More from ABC's "rice paddy guy" 

Vietnamese rice farmers breath sigh of relief

Promise from now on to use real crash test dummies

Because ABC thinks all migrant workers look like this.

 

Vietnamese rice farmer sighs...not again.