Wicked Problems - Climate Tech Conversations How Journalism Could Survive AI (w Mic Wright)
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Mic Wright is the madman media survivor behind one of this show’s second-favourite newsletter, Conquest of the Useless . So when we heard he has a new book out in a couple of weeks we were delighted he could give us a few minutes to talk meeja matters in the age of AI and climate consequences.
Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t and Why that Matters - despite my inability to stop obsessing about whether it is missing an Oxford comma in the title - is the magnum opus of Britain’s best observer of all things media since Christopher Hitchens went from Trot to Neocon.
Two years before the Brexit referendum, a year long inquiry by a UK parliamentary select committee concluded that BBC news teams consistently engaged in false balance when reporting on climate change stories. So for a senior news journalist to suggest that they weren't familiar with the concept felt like a very stark confession.
Head back even further to the misty, almost unimaginable, past of 2006, and you find Rob Corddry on the Daily Show, parodying journalists who bent over backwards to establish balance where there is none:
“How does one report the facts? When the facts themselves are biased from the names of our fallen soldiers to the gradual withdrawal of our allies to the growing insurgency, it's become all too clear that the facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda.”
Meatless speech was rightly praised for highlighting the influence of Conservative Party appointees on the BBC, but it also contained a series of confessions about missing the elephant in the room. Even as the stench of dung must have been stifling.
In Conversation
00:35 Introducing Mic Wright
01:31 Technical Challenges and Interview Preview
03:13 Mic Wright's Dramatic Reading
04:16 Discussion on False Balance in Journalism
13:07 The Rise of Churnalism
15:14 Media Ownership and Influence
19:39 Tech Enthusiasm and AI in Journalism
32:14 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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