Hold the good news
One of the themes in my forthcoming book is that there are huge vested interests trying to prevent good news reaching the public. That is to say, in the ruthless free-market struggle that goes on between pressure groups for media attention and funds, nobody likes to have it said that `their' problem is not urgent and getting worse.
The lengths that acid rain alarmists in the EPA went to to prevent the result of the NAPAP study reaching Congress before crucial votes in the early 1990s is well documented, and this was when this phenomenon first dawned on me. But now I see it everywhere.
Journalists rarely challenge pressure groups' claims of urgency and deterioration, because those are the two things that get editors' attention, too.
This week saw a pleasing exception: a newspaper that was prepared to lift the lid on the pessimist cabal. The New York Times ran a front page piece about the worldwide decline in maternal deaths reported in the Lancet. The piece revealed that the Lancet's editor, Richard Horton, had come under pressure to delay the paper lest it reduce funding opportunities for pressure groups.
But some advocates for women’s health tried to pressure The Lancet into delaying publication of the new findings, fearing that good news would detract from the urgency of their cause, Dr. Horton said in a telephone interview.
Maternal deaths had been declining steeply till the early 1990s when the improvement stalled -- chiefly because of the African HIV epidemic. It has recently resumed in earnest and is now dropping steeply:
Yet some people did not want you to know this:
Dr. Horton said the advocates, whom he declined to name, wanted the new information held and released only after certain meetings about maternal and child health had already taken place.
He said the meetings included one at the United Nations this week, and another to be held in Washington in June, where advocates hope to win support for more foreign aid for maternal health from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Other meetings of concern to the advocates are the Pacific Health Summit in June, and the United Nations General Assembly meeting in December.
This is wrong on all sorts of levels. First, because it shows a staggering arrogance among pressure groups about who should be allowed to know the facts -- almost amounting to attempted fraud. Second, because the way to encourage people to fund projects is to show evidence that they work , not that they are futile and ineffective. One might almost suspect that these groups would prefer maternal mortality to remain high.
Or, as a prominent climate scientist said in another context,
If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster.
Comments (15)
I think it is very important that the 1,000,000,000+ people around the world living on $1 a day get this good news. I suspect they don't get the New York Times though.... maybe you could go and personally deliver this good news to them... and then report back to us on how that went.
Matt Ridley is the new John Stossel ...
John Stossel "got mugged by reality" in exactly the same fashion.
Matt, have you read Stossel's autobiographical discussions of his exactly similar transformation as a newsman?
What do you mean muirgeo? That poor people don't care if their children live or die? I have lived many years among the absolutely poor and I assure you they cry bitter tears at their children's deaths just like we do. How dare you sneer at the annual salvation of hundreds of thousands of tiny children.
You must be on of those people rooting for things to get worse.
Is there any better illustration than Muirgeo as to the shallowness of the pessimist (likely the pessimistic Left). What do you say, Muirgeo...how about if we abandon all attempts at reducing maternal mortality because, after all, it won't make the desperately poor happy? Should we also abandon all attempts at improving the economic status of the poor because some women still die in childbirth as well? Just how many ways do you like your non sequitur's sliced and diced, Mr. Mopey?
I just found this site; a blog at last, Mr. Ridley? Excellent. I hope it will be as good as your books. BTW, no RSS feed?
Anyway, on the topic at hand, I think there is a generic problem at work here: Any single-interest group is behaving rationally, from a single-interest point of view, to behave as it does, up to and including massaging, suppressing or even falsifying information. If one is only interested in one thing, then by definition all else is, and should be, subservient to that goal.
For most any problem, either it can be solved or it can't. Either way, the results-oriented crowd will soon be done and and will move on, leaving those who are there primarily to address their own psychological needs. This is the real goal, of course, the cause itself providing a plausible platform.
Given that, such groups can rapidly become a p***ing match to prove who cares the most and is most willing to go to extremes to prove their dedication. We end up with the situation(s) you described in this post.
My own approach to countering it would be to have such groups make their presentations - when seeking funding - in the context of balance: i.e. the funder should first state how much they have available, list all the causes asking for money, and then have each group, essentially, fill out their proposal for a complete, balanced budget on these matters as a condition of their submission being considered. To do so, they would at least need to consider/acknowledge issues of balance.
excellent suggestions.
yes, i need to add rss feeds. first i need somebody to explain how!!
Matt
Another disturbing aspect of this is that the more a group engages in this the more susceptible they become to falsehood. Not only do they undermine their credibility, they undermine their ability to have traction with reality. The Soviet Union collapsed in part because they believed their own "facts".
Dissidents to a movement are born out of the sudden disillusionment that comes from realizing that people you thought were morally superior betrayed your trust.
"yes, i need to add rss feeds. first i need somebody to explain how!!
Matt"
It depends what system you're using for your blog... is it one of the popular Content Management Systems like Wordpress or Drupal?
Tom
(has done web development for opendemocracy.net & other sites)
Is that Richard Horton Editor of the Lancet you quote or Robert his evil twin? A science journalist should know one of the most influential people in health publishing ..
I'm told we do have a rss feed. it's the little radio signal top right on the main blog page. is that a help?
Matt
``Is that Richard Horton Editor of the Lancet you quote or Robert his evil twin? A science journalist should know one of the most influential people in health publishing ..''
thanks! corrected.
matt
"1,000,000,000+ people around the world living on $1 a day"
Maternal deaths are not necessarily their only problem: disease is also a problem, as are repressive govts, natural disasters, wars etc.
An over-allocation of resources to a declining problem means an under-allocation elsewhere. On balance, the misrepresentation of problems causes more pain than gain.
If the goal is to pose as a tribune of the people in order to increase one's status, then those who misrepresent the problem, and those who defend such behavior, have chosen the correct strategy. But if the goal is to actually help others, rather than just pretend to do so, then the misrepresentation is both wilful and cruel.
Matt Ridley is the new John Stossel ...
John Stossel "got mugged by reality" in exactly the same fashion.
Matt, have you read Stossel's autobiographical discussions of his exactly similar transformation as a newsman?
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[...] briefly a key tenet from his latest book, The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley looks at how and why pressure groups limit the amount of good news reaching the general public and those in d...: There are huge vested interests trying to prevent good news reaching the public. That is to say, [...]
Not that I'm saying it's right, but I think this is a more a problem of psychological perception. I think it's just plain ol' regular people who care more about something when a disaster happens. Nuclear energy is in the news -- no one wants it anymore -- after the Japan disaster.
I don't think information should be withheld, but I think it's good intentions gone awry. People WILL care more if they think something is a huge problem. News reports that say: this is getting better can cause people to think the problem is solved. Improvement doesn't mean you stop working towards it, but that's what can happen. Wanting to delay a report until after a meeting isn't outright withholding information, and it does come from a good place -- the groups want the most funding for what is a genuine and serious problem which can benefit from the funding they would potentially use if people thought it was less of a problem.
Again, I'm not necessarily endorsing this ... but the post seems to leave out everything I said. This isn't pure evil, it's just misguided.