This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no.” The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.
Ian Betteridge, “TechCrunch: Irresponsible journalism”, Techechnovia.co.uk, 2009-02-23. (Link goes to archived page at the Wayback Machine.)
June 17, 2019
QotD: Betteridge’s Law of Headlines
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May 17, 2019
Was Shakespeare really an illiterate illegal immigrant disabled asexual woman of colour?
Oliver Kamm discusses the most recent “Was Shakespeare really …?” article, this one published in The Atlantic by Elizabeth Winkler:
This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.
[Winkler] accuses what she calls orthodox Shakespeare scholars of “a dogmatism of their own” on the issue, whereby “even to dabble in authorship questions is considered a sign of bad faith, a blinkered failure to countenance genius in a glover’s son.” Armed with this tendentious premise, along with the less contentious one that Shakespeare depicts female characters with unrivalled sympathy and insight, Winkler spins a hypothesis that Emilia Bassano, born in London in 1569 to Venetian immigrants, is a viable candidate for the true author.
Even as I read Winkler’s piece, I expected a denouement that it was all a piece of fiction, analogous to the enjoyable 2009 caper St Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold, which ends with buried treasure under the Globe Theatre and the discovery of Shakespeare’s true identity. It never came. The article was presented as a serious contribution to a debate in which Winkler has made a potentially historic discovery.
In British newspapers, there is a longstanding technique of obscuring a paucity of evidence in support of a preposterous thesis by posing it as a question. It’s been dubbed by the political commentator John Rentoul “Questions to Which the Answer is No” (QTWAIN). Winkler’s article employs the stratagem liberally. “Was Shakespeare’s name useful camouflage, allowing [Bassano] to publish what she otherwise couldn’t?” “Could Bassano have contributed [to literature] even more widely and directly?” In a moment of self-knowledge, Winkler asks: “Was I getting carried away, reinventing Shakespeare in the image of our age?” Yet she immediately supplies not the correct answer but yet another QTWAIN: “Or was I seeing past gendered assumptions to the woman who — like Shakespeare’s heroines — had fashioned herself a clever disguise?”
Feminist readings of Shakespeare have enriched literary criticism and scholarship in, among other areas, reconsidering genre distinctions and examining the effects of patriarchal structures on relations between the sexes. There is no decorous way of saying that Winkler’s article, by contrast, is a farrago that should never have been conceived, pitched, commissioned or published. Winkler credulously retails a series of purported mysteries about Shakespeare’s authorship that are no mystery at all, and repeats claims derived from Shakespeare denialists that any capable scholar would have been able to correct. She places particular stress on the work of a “meticulous scholar” Diana Price, who claims: “Writers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England left behind records of their professional activities. Shakespeare left behind documentation of his professional activities, but none is literary… He is the only alleged [emphasis added] writer of any consequence from the time period who left behind no personal evidence of his career as a professional writer.”
Price is neither meticulous nor a scholar (she designates herself “an independent scholar,” which should have caused Winkler greater wariness). As Alan Nelson of Berkeley University has put it, Price knows how to put a sentence together but she doesn’t know how to put an argument together.
We in fact have unimpeachable evidence of Shakespeare’s activities as a writer, far more than we do for, say, his fellow-dramatists John Webster or Cyril Tourneur, but by a series of rhetorical sleights-of-hand Price rules it all inadmissible. To give a single but weighty example: Shakespeare’s fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell assembled the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, published in 1623, with Shakespeare’s name on the title page and his engraved image in the frontispiece, and with a laudatory poem by Ben Jonson referring to the author as “Sweet Swan of Avon.” Price dismisses this as evidence of authorship because it’s posthumous, coming seven years after Shakespeare’s death, even though the planning and publishing of the book must have taken years, and Heminge, Condell and Jonson all knew Shakespeare personally. This isn’t scholarship but sophistry.
A noteworthy example of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. (As is, of course, the headline on this post.)
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January 2, 2019
In violation of Betteridge’s law of headlines, this question can clearly be answered “yes!”
A few days back, Ted Campbell posted under the title “Is it time to get rid of the CBC? Should we?” Betteridge’s law says the answer should be “no”, but in this case the answer is more like “Why haven’t we sold that thing off already?”:
OK, the source of this cringeworthy video clip, Rebel Media, may be suspect to many ~ I do not follow them ~ but it does bring up a question: is this what we expect for the $1 Billion plus we pay for the CBC?
The complete interview, which I watched. looks, as someone else said, more like an advertisement for one of those online dating sites than news. It certainly caused a small storm about the CBC’s bias … which, in this case, especially when compared to CBC journalists’ question and comments directed to e.g. Andrew Scheer and Maxime Bernier, seems over the top, even by the CBC’s standards. And that begs the question: is the CBC living up to its mandate? The Broadcasting Act says (§3(1)(d)(i), inter alia, that “The Canadian broadcasting system should serve to safeguard, enrich and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada.” I suspect that someone will want to make a case that the CBC, as a network, at least in it’s English language ‘news’ services, has crossed a line and looks too much like a 24 hour a day informercial for the Laurentian Consensus as represented by the Liberal Party of Canada.
[…]
What does the CBC do? Basically it provides, in both English and French, three services:
- Radio Canada International ~ this is Canada’s voice to the world, it is, today, entirely on the internet. In 2012 the Harper government imposed a 10% cut on CBC/Radio Canada ~ then CBC/Radio Canada decide that RCI, which is little known, would have its budget cut by 80% from $12+ Million to just over $2 Million. That ended the era of RCI‘s shortwave, world wide service. It was a criminally stupid decision that, in my considered, professional opinion, should have caused the government of the day to summarily dismiss the entire CBC/Radio Canada Board and all of the most senior managers for cause. Every country needs a “voice,” RCI was ours … the gold standard for international broadcasting is found in the BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle, both still provides near global coverage using nearly jam-proof shortwave and satellite radio stations. Both, of course, make extensive and intensive use of the internet;
- CBC Radio ~ CBC Radio has a big, integrated network of stations covering most of Canada. You can see a list of transmitters on their web site. If you live in Arctic Bay, in Nunavut, population 850±, you are served by radio station CKAB-FM which is a community-owned CBC North rebroadcaster that gets its programming from CFFB in Iqaluit; if you live in Prince Rupert, BC, your are served by CBC Radio 1 (a national network which has a mix of local, regonal and national programmes) broadcasting on 860 KHz and if you live in Shilo, MB you are also served by CBC Radio 1 on FM from Brandon, the people in Twillingate, NL are served, again by Radio 1 from Grand Falls which is rebroadcast on 90.7 MHz from a transmitter in Botswood. In short, CBC Radio is doing a first rate job of serving most Canadians, even if you find some of the content banal and biased. I think it is, by and large, money well spent because in many, many, many communities the CBC provides the only news and weather; but
- CBC Television is, in my opinion, a near total waste of taxpayer’s money. As you can see from this list (you have to select the province you want) the CBC has only 14 English language TV broadcast stations which serve about 25 urban ‘markets’ and serves less than 10% of the Canadian market in prime time. (Rex Murphy, in a talk to the Manning Centre, quipped about the low audience levels of the CBC at about the 2’50” mark.) It used to have hundreds of transmitters providing near national coverage but in 2012, when Canada converted to digital TV, it closed all but 14 because only a tiny number (certainly less than 5%, likely less than 2%) of Canadians want to watch CBC and do not have cable or internet access. Electing to not serve Canadians with many, many local TV stations was a smart business decision because, as you can see from this listing, Canadians from Kamloops, through Kenora and on to Halifax and St. John’s are served by other networks.
I think that Radio Canada International should be upgraded; CBC Radio should remain about the same, government funded and commercial free, and CBC TV should be closed, completely and the money saved should be used to directly subsidize TV, film and radio production in Canada based on Canadian content rules: n% for the production company being Canadians and using Canadian studios, x% for using Canadian talent ~ on screen and in in the studio, y% for using Canadian locations and so on.
Some, at least half, I suspect, of the CBC’s 14 television licences will sell, at auction, for a tidy sum, making room for new, innovative, probably ethnic, services in larger cities ~ Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal and a couple of others. The CBC”s excellent production facilities will also sell for a good sum to private entrepreneurs who will then host dozens of independent radio and TV programme producers. There’s nothing wrong with Canadian production values and in a more open market I suspect that Canadian drama, public affairs, education and political commentary programmes can survive and even thrive, each on its own merits.
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