[whiteperil] Sean: What you don't know

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Posted by Sean:
What you don't know
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1176464726.shtml


   Via [1]Instapundit, Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project makes an
   unsettling discovery:

     Wonder why so many of the news articles you read, or steam over,
     are lacking essential information or perspective? Wonder no longer.
     Knowledge and experience of the subject is only a "plus."
     Would the AP advertise for a sports reporter for whom knowledge and
     experience with baseball, basketball, football, soccer, hockey,
     tennis, and so forth is only a "plus," rather than essential and
     primary?
     So, why should the AP believe that knowledge and experience of
     intelligence, or medicine, or any other important and technical
     subject only requires a "plus"?

   I love America, but we do have a tendency to believe that you can
   learn absolutely anything on the fly. And it's not just "technical
   subjects" in the hard-science sense that cause people to trip up.
   You'll have noticed that many of us Westerners who blog from Asia
   expend a lot of energy complaining about the clueless reporting of
   foreign correspondents here. Or not necessarily clueless, but rote and
   tending to default to one of a dozen or so stock perspectives on the
   Mysterious Far East. ([2]Simon World is the best overall resource if
   you want that kind of commentary.)
   It's not all the fault of the reporters themselves, I imagine, since
   editors like stories that are to the point and readily comprehensible.
   It must be difficult to write genuinely nuanced, searching analyses of
   cultural differences when the best way to please the boss is to turn
   in yet more column-inches-by-numbers about those crazy
   prematurely-sexualized teenagers hanging around Shibuya.
   And yet, I've met Tokyo personnel for several of the major news
   outlets informally, and in several cases--not most, mind, but enough
   to be disturbing--I've been appalled at their elementary lack of
   understanding of the environment they're supposed to be reporting
   authoritatively on. It's one thing to have some learning to do;
   everyone has to start somewhere, after all. It's quite another not to
   know where your defects of knowledge lie and therefore what should set
   off your BS detector when you hear it from an interviewee, are fed it
   by your own translator, or read it in the local press. If you can read
   the local press without asking your Japanese sig. oth. for help, that
   is.

References

   1. http://instapundit.com/archives2/004111.php
   2. http://simonworld.mu.nu/