Woz on the Media

 "The Media doesn't respond to education." Steve Wozniak, founder, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.)

(source)

More of Woz on the media overleaf, with some attempts to generalize from this one instance. 

 The full quote:

"The media doesn't respond to education. They respond to sales which respond to hysteria and sensationalism. The audience would have to be educated. But the audience doesn't understand technology well enough to judge what is 'good' hacking and what is 'bad' hacking. Most people don't find the humor and laughter in pranks to be a good thing. Most people are too old to play pranks themselves and oppose other people having fun in ways that they can't. The press makes them sure that they are right and they don't have to ask deep and skeptical questions about such things to discover the real truths. "

I think the onetime teen hacker gets it more than anybody at the Poynter Institute or the Columbia Journalism Review. The media in the US (and therefore the world) are not in the journalism business, they're in the entertainment racket. This insight of Woz's (which has also been uttered by many others, I'm sure) is dead on target. 

All the pretentious journalism stuff is just imposture. 

A related insight is that, the more you know a subject (Woz here is talking about hacking), the more dissatisfied with media coverage of it you are. The reason is, of course, that coverage of your own subject is superficial, sensationalistic, and slanted. 

But most people have a deep knowledge of only one or a few subjects, and they are unlikely to generalize their unhappiness with the media; instead, they only distrust the media on the subjects they know best, and accept uncritically media adumbrations on the subjects they know least. There's an irony, or at least an illogic, here: when you find them wanting where you can fact-check them, what can you expect where you can't fact-check them. 

What you can do, of course, is see how other experts think their fields are covered. If you ever find yourself among doctors, or scientists , or pilots, or CEOs, or soldiers -- or hackers, you'll discover that most of them think media coverage of their niche is dreadful and dishonest. Yet most of these people, when asked, wryly admit that they only reject the media's coverage of their little world, accepting all the nonsense that's written about everybody else. 

If the media do a poor job on all the above, do they do a good job on anything?

If you are a polymath, you don't need others' input. On your own, you will develop a general distrust of the news media. 

Turn on TV. How can you tell if the anchor is lying? Her lips move.

More Woz (same source) on a slightly different subject: 

"I think that character is not enforced by what you can and can't do technically. Bad guys will steal. Technology or hacking is just the tool they use to do it. They will steal in other ways too. "

Funny, that sounds like the argument that libertarians use against gun control. But Woz is dead right, and his point here is perfectly extensible to a generality: character is what you do, not what you have that you might do it with.