There are serious kinds of political activism, and there are less serious ones. And then there are those that don’t take any effort, and don’t make one jot of difference. Online petitions, such as this one which appears to express concern about media freedom, are among the latter. So I signed it. Sort of. Read on at ITWeb.

While everyone is saying all the right things, and making all the right arguments, they’re losing the battle on media freedom. As long as the ANC’s base remains unconvinced, it will side with the ANC, and the ANC will claim a legitimate mandate to push through draconian laws that will, in effect if not in intent, stifle a free media.

Read my Daily Maverick column on the subject here: Why the media will lose this battle.

This could have been a mildly interesting story. US house prices are falling and credit is becoming more expensive, which is not exactly the way many consumers bet a few years ago. They were taking a calculated gamble that their asset value would reliably go up, and interest rates would remain low, thereby covering a home loan they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. They bet wrong. Result? Foreclosure. And the result of a spate of foreclosures? Many unoccupied houses, repossessed by banks, now find themselves going cheap in a buyers’ market.

So far, this is elementary stuff, although Democrats are trying hard to complicate matters by outbidding each other with dumb populist promises, funded with money they expropriate from responsible borrowers who didn’t bet wrong.

But now, what happens to these empty properties, besides depressing market prices? As you can imagine, vandalism and looting is becoming a bit of a problem. Metals and expensive fixings such as airconditioner units left in empty houses are tempting targets, after all.

Here’s how one Jason Szep from Reuters spins the story:

Some homes worth less than their copper pipes

BROCKTON, Massachusetts (Reuters) - Shards of broken glass outside the basement window of 31 Vine Street hint at the destruction inside the three-story home.

Thieves smashed the window to break in and then gutted the property for its copper pipes — a crime that has spread across the United States as the economy slows and foreclosed homes stand empty and vulnerable.

Perhaps the looters figured that the house would be slightly harder to fence than copper. Which makes them smarter than this reporter.

It should be noted that this article was published on 1 April. However, the feature’s length, the perfectly serious vein in which the rest of it continues, and the Massachusetts dateline suggests this is mere coincidence. Jokes only work if you consciously intend to make them.

The story talks about houses being sold for “$100″. Granted, that would be less than their copper pipes, assuming that they had any. It’s not like the story gives further detail on such bargains, such as what condition the house is in, where it is located, whether there are any buyers in the market, whether it was sold in a firesale at auction, or whether it includes the mortgage. If it’s a gag, it’s braindead. My bet is that it’s either a misprint or a misquote, and if I had to choose, I’d wager it’s a misquote.

If that was the basis of a joke, however, consider this:

In Brockton, which suffered 400 foreclosures last year, blamed largely on predatory lending [sic], and which is bracing for another 400 this year, Charney said the thieves inflicted about $15,000 of damage on the home on Vine Street. […] After haggling, the bank shaved $5,000 off the $105,000 price.

Clearly, Reuters reporters are not beyond parroting partisan political rhetoric, such as “predatory lending”. Last time I checked, predators use force against prey, but mortgages are voluntary contracts in which one party stumps up a great deal of cash, and the other party vouches for their ability and intent to pay off the loan. If one party were to breach that contract, the other party can only make the best of a bad situation, and exercise whatever rights they have to compensate for their losses. Reuters calls it “predatory lending”. I’ll see them and raise them “greedy borrowing”. And I’m not bluffing when I say I might throw in “fraud”.

Not that Reutervillians would understand elementary economics, to judge by their arithmetic. Not that Reutervillians understand the difference between reporting and editorialising, judging by their ability to draw sweeping conclusions from a sample of one. Not that Reutervillians grasp the complex nuances of the conditional value and positional magnitude of the zero digit in our numerical notation, judging from the fact that the very house used in the example is worth $105 000, which, according to the headline, is less than the $15 000 in damage caused by the looters. Perhaps they were referring to the actual price of the stolen copper, but then they’d surely report on the fellow walking down the street with 13.5 tons of copper wiring in his hands. And that would be funny.

Thanks to some straight-up, hard-nosed, unbiased reporting, we now know that when it suits the political leanings of the reporter, $15 000 exceeds $105 000. Nice to know Reuterville still has its share of village idiots.

A classical education is incomplete without Homer. He noted, for example: “English? Who needs that? I’m never going to England!”

I refer to the great Homer Simpson, of course, not to the Greek fellow who wrote funny stories about fantastic characters in fictional settings.

This virtual language lesson from Richard Nordquist might be aimed at school kids, but it is pretty amusing.

In what is perhaps the most shameless column I’ve ever read, Steve Outing advocates media advocacy in trade rag Editor & Publisher. He claims that the alternative to “objectivity” is “truth-telling”. The cause in which he says newspapers should ditch this objectivity? Why, climate change, of course.

I’ve … been thinking about the newspaper industry and global warming. And frankly, I don’t think newspapers are doing enough. Indeed, newspapers’ fabled commitment to “objectivity” has been a detriment to efforts to combat global warming.

The industry still has a lot of power to influence people. How about if newspapers abandon their old way of doing things when it comes to the issue of global warming, and turn their influence to good? It just might be that through this issue alone, newspapers revive themselves to some extent. Editors are shirking their responsibility to improve our world, in my view, so let’s change that.

What follows is a tortuous explanation of how the opposite of objectivity is not subjectivity, as simpletons might think. In fact, it is “truth-telling” and “advocacy.” I kid you not. This isn’t a publication defending its own editorial slant. This is a media trade publication recommending that newspapers in general abandon impartiality, and consider the often complex, often speculative debate on the causes, impact, severity and extent of climate change as settled fact. The issue now, he says, is what newspapers can do.

Outing is apparently unaware of embarrassments such as the Newsweek column that took the original global cooling advocacy mag’s more recent cover story on global warming to pieces as “vast oversimplification of a messy story” and “a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading”. He sustains his argument for some time, before making just a teensy weensy mistake:

Advocacy has gotten a bad name in modern news media. I would argue that climate change is too important of an issue squander the power of the news media. Newspapers can and should not only educate people about what they can do, but pro-actively lead and encourage behavior change. That will mean setting aside a time-honored journalistic practice — for this one vital issue.

If his argument held any water at all, why would newspapers need to “get over objectivity”, but only “for this one vital issue”?

Along with a few dozen other writers, the Mail & Guardian Online has invited me to blog for their new opinion section, called Thought Leader. Not sure about the leader bit, but I sure have a surfeit of thoughts. What follows is an extract from my first post, which went live last week during beta testing:

The upside of an unfree press

Like the charred oak of a toasted wine barrel, an acute struggle for liberty imparts rich vitality to an oppressed media. The all-enveloping mix of peace and violence, calm and trauma, relief and fear, elation and despair creates in reporters a sense of history, and of the role and responsibility they have in its unfolding.

During the last days of South Africa’s own fight for freedom, the then Weekly Mail and the ill-fated Vrye Weekblad were both famous for their fearless, fresh, and gritty reporting. At these papers, many a young reporter learnt the rigours of research, the importance of accuracy, the grave duty to be unbiased.

There are distinct echoes of these papers to be found in The Zimbabwean, a weekly newspaper aimed at the estimated 25% of that country’s citizens who live in exile. On sale in South Africa for just R4 an issue, it puts many of today’s South African newspapers to shame. …

Read the rest over here. Do comment, rate posts and browse around on the site. It’s a pretty cool evolution of the opinion/editorial page idea.

It didn’t take Randall Hoven long to update the list of journalistic frauds, liars, plagiarisers and hoaxters I mentioned a few days ago.

William F. Deedes — Bill to his friends, and Lord Deedes to the rest of us mortals — has died, aged 94, after more than three quarters of a century as a working journalist, columnist and part-time politician. He filed his last copy on 3 August.

He once wrote about Nelson Mandela: “Only revolutionaries… draw reverence from their supporters. As soon as they embark on the endless adventure of governing men, they descend to earth and encounter critics.”

Mere days before his death, on 14 August, the Daily Telegraph published a letter: “Sir - May I put forward W F Deedes for Prime Minister in a Fantasy Government? What he has to say in his weekly column makes more sense than all the politicians put together.”

His own quip upon receiving copy for editing seems sadly apt: “I’m infinitely grateful. Your reward will not be in this world.” The Telegraph as a long obituary for a remarkable life.

Some lists are more important than others. Randall Hoven has compiled a list, from various sources, of journalists or media houses that have been caught in lies, plagiaries, conflicts of interest, fraud, or explicit bias. It makes for sobering reading.