The viral failure of journalism

The sole purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, and their governments. Media has been called the fourth pillar of democracy. But in this crisis, the media has fallen far from these standards.

 

If we can agree on the above that the purpose of media is not to create sensationalism, then let us dive deeper into what the media has been showing us. These caught up late with the virus and came up with more conspiracy theories about bats than facts. The first case in our country was reported towards the end of January. As late as the second half of February, there was no ripple in the news. They were more involved with the Namaste Trump event.

 

For the Covid outbreak, they should have reported only the numbers. They did that, with a bias - selective truth. They reported the number of deaths each day, but not the number of recoveries. If they had done that then the scale of panic would have been far reduced. More than eighty percent of patients have only mild or no symptoms and might never seek a diagnosis. Why do you need to add adjectives like ‘deadly’ over the virus? The fatality rate in India is 2.8 percent (from Wikipedia). As of today, there have been a total 8,498 deaths due to the virus; the normal death rate in India is 26,000 a day! During this period, did the other diseases come to a stop? Has no one died of a heart attack, cerebral stroke, or cancer? These facts have been completely obscured. People are beating their chests over the fact that the number of deaths is a record - it is increasing every day. Now calm down and try to think rationally, there have been a hundred deaths already, and five people died today. The total number of deaths is now one hundred and five. This number is certainly increasing and it is bound to increase. How odd would it be if the total death count started decreasing instead? Yesterday, there were a hundred dead and today there are ninety - what happened to the ten? Did they come back from death?.

   

The impact of these actions is that people are depressed and scared to death even after the onset of Unlock 1.0. A friend of mine is obsessed with Covid updates and possible cures for the virus. In his own words, 'The truth is that I have never been so scared before. There have been instances when I've lost my sanity momentarily but this is a more prolonged phase. And it's continuous.' Is the media responsible for this feeling of impending doom? Yes, it is.

 

This is one fault of the media. There are several others. For example, when the Tablighi Jamat incident occurred, all the channels got busy in spreading Islamophobia. The incident indeed was careless and the people should be punished strictly. I agree with that. But I do not side with hatemongering. The irony is, recently one of these channels was found to have flunked all the lockdown rules. That resulted in twenty-nine employees contracting the virus and spreading it around. The tables have turned. Should they not be painted under the same light as they painted the Tablighi Jamat? 

 

When the lockdown was announced, the citizens were given only four hours to prepare. Naturally, most of the migrant workers were stuck in the cities they were working in. Two hundred people died due to the lockdown in the first week. In the past few weeks, more than a hundred have died due to the lockdown - hunger, dehydration, exertion. That news is also missing. How can the media ignore the plight of thousands of people? Not everyone has their hands dirty, a few news channels and websites are reporting facts. I obtained the above facts from these sources. 

During the Covid outbreak, has everything reached a standstill? Why is there no news about other problems(for example, politics)? Much less hubbub has been created for the cyclone, Amphan, that hit Bengal, killed 85 in forty-eight hours, and destroyed a million homes. There has been complete silence of the cruel communal violence in Telinipara, Hoogly in Bengal. 

 

The masses don’t usually think rationally, they respond to the opinions that are hammered into their heads. According to a recent ICMR study, the numbers of the people infected in some cities could be 100-fold or even 200-fold the numbers of the confirmed cases there. These people are asymptomatic; they are so unaffected that they never even know it happened to them. This fact is being presented as something to worry about, that might lead to the return of the lockdown. Let us look at the other side; this also means that a small percentage of the population is being affected by this virus, and a far smaller percentage is dying of this virus. If presented properly, this fact ought to reduce panic.   

 

The media has been so blinded by its pursuit of sensationalism that when the Covid hype dies down, they will be crying over Hantavirus, earthquakes, and asteroids. Overall, as I said earlier, media has had a far negative impact during this pandemic. They have blown this to ridiculous proportions. It has been more of a panic-demic than a pandemic. 

 

Feynman - physics with a human face

Traditionally, scientists have been portrayed as the brain without the heart, a calculating machine. This physicist was above all, human. Richard Philips Feynman was a scientist, a legendary teacher, a skilled storyteller, an amateur painter, and a drummer. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb, expanded the understanding of quantum electrodynamics, translated Mayan hieroglyphics, and cut to the heart of the Challenger disaster. He also held patents for rocket-propelled aeroplanes and enriched uranium. His books Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman and What do you care what others say? are very well known. Here I have tried to supply stories that are not much known.

During the Manhattan Project, Niels Bohr said that the only person who would not be carried away by his 'crazy ideas' was Feynman. That was the first time the big-shots of science started noticing him.

At the turn of the twentieth century, physics was in crisis. Old laws were being thrown into question by new discoveries. Even the father of quantum electrodynamics, Paul M Dirac, was foxed. Quantum mechanics implies that all reasonable possibilities do take place at the same time. A moving particle can take all the paths available to it. Feynman's path integral adds up the contributions from all the infinite possibilities to give a very finite probability. One of his best-known contributions is Feynman diagrams, pictorial representation of complex processes. A single diagram can represent a lot of different processes. Thus, a single expression counts the effects of several processes. This led to him winning the Nobel Prize in 1965. But he didn't want the Nobel Prize. For him "the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation of other people using it" were the real things; the honours were unreal. He had a strong disrespect for authority and epaulets. Feynman is also known for his work in the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. 

Though he was a theorist, he was never a pen-and-paper man. What if a sprinkler was made to suck water instead of ejecting? How would it move? He designed an experiment for it. The experiment resulted in damage to the apparatus and he was banished from the lab. I would not bore you with more science, let's take a look at the other stories.      

In 1964, Feynman selected science textbooks for children. He was annoyed when he saw a textbook mention a toy moves on energy. To him, it was as well as saying that God made it move. "The children should be shown the mechanism inside the toy", he said.

Once he took a sabbatical year and pursued biology. He was interested a lot in nanotechnology, has even given lectures on it. At Los Alamos, he took up safe-cracking. He would playfully open safes that held the secrets of the nuclear bomb.  

When his son, Carl, pursued a career in supercomputers he signed up for a summer job. He was asked to find applications of supercomputers in physics. He said that sounded like a bunch of baloney and wanted to do something real. So they sent a Nobel laureate to buy the stationery of the company. Feynman helped the young men to organize themselves in facing a problem. He gave lectures on computer heuristics. "Don't say 'reflected acoustic wave' say echo", he would say.  Nothing annoyed him more than making something simple appear complicated.

This was his most fundamental approach to teaching. He was perhaps the greatest science communicator who ever lived. His lectures on physics for undergraduate students are legendary. 

Feynman delivering the Messenger Lectures

In 1965, he gave The Messenger Lectures for the ordinary people which were televised. He appeared in many BBC documentaries where he talked about science, the fun in imagining science, and the pleasure of finding things out. He would simplify everything and state it in a way everyone could understand. He used analogies, examples, and jokes; the audience gently stepped on his magic carpet which carried them over to mystery lands. Bill Gates described Feynman as 'the best teacher I never had'.

He always said, "there is a difference between knowing the name and understanding it", he understood physics better than anyone else. His passion for physics approached reverence; yet he once wrote to a student's mother "Physics is not the most important thing, love is".

Feynman with his classic demonstration of the O-ring

In the Challenger disaster investigation, a lot of people did not want the facts to be disclosed, saying that it would be too dangerous for NASA's image. In the conference, he was seen harshly ridiculing NASA's story. He dumped a rubber o-ring in a glass of ice water to demonstrate how the o-rings allowed the rocket exhaust to burn a hole in the rocket. He was a thorough and direct man who preferred looking at the original data rather than read someone's idea as to what the data meant. In his appendix he said "reality must take precedence over public relations; for Nature cannot be fooled."

Feynman had a unique sense of humour and mischief. When at a restaurant he would spell his name as ‘BJØRK’ and wait gleefully for the name to be called. He would pretend to be fluent in a foreign language when met with a foreign guest. In some cases, his confidence would make the guests believe that the gibberish was actually an old dialect of their language. He bought a van and had Feynman diagrams painted all over it. He invented a song called Orange Juice which he would sing on his bongos after lectures.

He would like to disagree with a lot of scientists today. He explained the basic statement in science, saying that if the experiments don't agree with the consequences of the law, it is wrong. "It doesn't matter how beautiful you are or what your name is; if it doesn't agree, it is wrong." Something which hasn't been experimentally verified is not a theory. It is a hypothesis at best. Well, string theorists wouldn't like this.

When asked about the Theory of Everything, he said, "if there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything then so be it.  Nature is going to come out the way she is. We shouldn't pre-decide what it is we're trying to do, except to find out more about nature."

If you are genuinely interested in Feynman you can watch his documentaries The pleasure of finding things out, Fun to imagine, The world from another point of view, and The Fantastic Mr. Feynman.

(This was initially published on my other blog on Feynman's birthday.)