Guest Post: Once were journalists
A guest post by Jamie Whyte:
In April last year, I left New Zealand to take up a position as the Director of Research at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. As part of this job, I sometimes write opinion articles in the UK press.
On Monday last week, the Daily Telegraph published an opinion article of mine concerning a proposed ban on plastic straws in the UK. Somehow, this became a news story in New Zealand. Not the ban; the fact that I had written an article criticising it.
My article was not news-worthy, for reasons I’ll soon explain. But the Newshub story about it, run under the title “Ex-ACT leader says ‘pleasure’ of using plastic straws more important than the ocean”, is worth attention for what it reveals about modern journalism.
To tell readers my position on the topic, the author, Dan Satherley, quotes a sentence in which I say “When they use plastic straws, the world is made an altogether better place.” The “they” in my sentence refers to the increasingly few people who value drinking from a straw more than avoiding the harm to the environment that may result from disposing of the straw.
Anyone familiar with the idea of “external costs” – costs borne not by the person doing something but by third parties – will know that this isn’t quite right. Even when a straw user cares nothing for the environment, the net effect may be harmful because of the costs to other people who do care about the environment.
That’s why my very next sentence was “That’s not quite right”. From which I went on to say that if a tax were applied to straws, equal to the external cost of the environmental damage done by them, then plastic straws would be used only when the total upside exceeded the total downside.
This is a pretty standard view in environmental economics. In fact, it’s the position of the Green Party of New Zealand on carbon emissions.
Since no such tax is now applied to plastic straws, I can’t know if anyone would still be willing to pay for them at the higher price – if only because I don’t know what that price would be. So I couldn’t possibly say if using plastic straws is ever worth the damage they do. That’s why I said no such thing, contrary to the headline of Satherley’s article.
Satherley claims that the position of my article is summarised by a sentence which I followed with “That’s not quite right”. He then fails to say anything about the view expressed after that qualification, which is my actual position.
Following his crass misrepresentation of my position, Satherley quotes a few tweets. Alan Gregson asked “Why does Jamie Whyte’s desire to continue living trump our pleasure from having less twats wasting our precious oxygen”. Paul Stollery suggests that “Jamie Whyte can get in the f**king sea. Where I hope he gets a straw stuck up his nose”.
The article is nothing but misinformation and abuse.
I do not know Satherley, so I cannot be sure of his motivation. But the only one I can think of is political. He peddles foul-mouthed fake news as a way of discrediting the liberal political position I am associated with.
Why else would he fabricate a story about something said by a former New Zealand politician in a newspaper in the UK?
Why else would the article be laced with apparently irrelevant references to my incest “gaff” in a 2014 interview, when I accepted the logical conclusion of something that almost everyone believes: namely, that the state should not stop adults from engaging in consensual sex. Look at the dirty pervert who would destroy the ocean for the sake of a plastic straw!
I was a useless politician. As Satherley points out, when I led ACT into the 2014 general election, we got only 0.69% of the party vote. But part of the reason I was useless is that I failed to adapt properly to journalists like Satherley.
In 2013, when deciding whether to run for the leadership of ACT, my wife advised me against it. “Disgusting” and “corrupt” were her favourite words for conveying her disapproval of politics. I still think she was wrong – at least, about the politicians. The 2014 campaign gave me a generally favourable view of them. And of most of the journalists I encountered.
But a corrosively large minority of journalists seemed more concerned with “getting” politicians – especially the ones with whose policies they disagreed – than with providing their audience with information.
Edmund Burke (perhaps apocryphally) described the press as the “fourth estate” of society, adding it to the clergy, the nobility and the commoners. This fourth estate was supposed to keep the other three informed and honest.
Journalists have never played this role perfectly. How could they, being human? But journalists who write articles like Satherly’s, who seem to be increasingly common, are not even trying to play their “fourth estate” role. They are engaged in an altogether different business, in which keeping people informed and honest plays no part.