Vanity Fair reporter freak-out

This is a good example of why specialists shouldn't talk to the media. Generally, the interests of (for example) the New York Times are opposed to the interests of (for example) a particle physicist. The incentive structure of mainstream dead-tree media is aligned against producing accurate summaries of specialized information. There are some good parts and some bad parts to this. The bad parts, though, are sufficiently bad that if manipulating the media isn't your actual job, you're probably better off outsourcing that task to a trusted third party. This is basically the same as talking to lawyers and the police: they will lie to you. There will always be some technical exception so that they can tell themselves and the people higher in their authority structure that they weren't really lying, but no, from the perspective of a layperson, they're liars. They lie all the time. So you need to either be the sort of person who can cope with that and tell them the lies in return that will get something resembling your actual views and statements into their publication, or you need a specialist - just like with talking to lawyers - on your side to do that job for you.

Never count on a reporter to act in good faith any more than you would count on that from the police or from a lawyer. They will disembowel you.

This advice is much less applicable, happily, to technical publications in your field, or to 'citizen journalism,' but you still have to be cautious there. The major difference is that with technical publications or citizen journalists, you may have some actual leverage, and they may have some idea what you're talking about. You have no leverage, as a specialist, over the NYT, so they don't care what harm they do to you - what the heck are you going to do to them? And the average reporter for, say, Fox News, doesn't know what the heck, say, Bruce Schneier is talking about. They are worse than laypeople, actually, because they have an incentive to misunderstand.

Don't talk to the mainstream media. They will lie to you, and they are not your friends.

My absolute favorite example of a reporter willfully twisting words is the following.

A reporter was trying to interview my mother about my sister. My mother said, "It's not that we don't think you're important but ...". This wound up in print as, "It's...that we dont think you're important."

Remember, it is the job of the media to get a compelling story out there. They don't care about the truth. They don't care about informing people. They want to create interesting stories that suck people in, and punish people who fail to give them access to information that they wanted (whether or not they had any right to pry).

When we see subjects that we understand misreported in the media, we invariably cringe. When you see subjects you don't know anything about reported in the media, your default assumption should be that if you knew the subject better, you would cringe, and the only reason you're not cringing is that you don't know better.

Here's the graf in the VF piece that has Langner so upset:

“If I did not have the background that I had, I don’t think I would have had the guts to say what I said about Stuxnet,” Langner says now, finishing his second glass of wine during lunch at a Viennese restaurant in Hamburg. Langner studied psychology and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Berlin. He fell into control systems by accident and found that he loved the fiendishly painstaking work. Every control system is like a bespoke suit made from one-of-a-kind custom fabric—tailored precisely for the conditions of that industrial installation and no other. In a profession whose members have a reputation for being unable to wear matching socks, Langner is a bona fide dandy. “My preference is for Dolce & Gabbana shoes,” he says. “Did you notice, yesterday I wore ostrich?” Langner loves the attention that his theories have gotten. He is waiting, he says, for “an American chick,” preferably a blonde, and preferably from California, to notice his blog and ask him out.

This looks bad in isolation. But the piece is enormous; more than 60 grafs long. Langner's complaint makes it sound like a hit piece. It's not; it's simply using those (apparently misleading) details to add some color. The article is ostensibly not even about Langner, even though it quotes and discusses him warmly throughout.

I don't want to sound like I'm defending bad reporting, but the VF articles has substantive concerns about Langner as well --- for instance, his prevalence as a authoritative source for lots of other journalism about Stuxnet --- and one way to dodge that is to redirect attention to stupid stuff like what kinds of shoes he really prefers.

"My experience is that journalists report on the nearest-cliche algorithm, which is extremely uninformative because there aren’t many cliches, the truth is often quite distant from any cliche, and the only thing you can infer about the actual event was that this was the closest cliche. I should write a separate post on this at some point.

It is simply not possible to appreciate the sheer awfulness of mainstream media reporting until someone has actually reported on you. It is so much worse than you think."

-Eliezer Yudkowsky, http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/predictible-fakers.htm...

This mirrors the story of McChrystal's treatment by Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-runaway-genera...). In both cases reporters pull specialists who are unaware and unprepared for the perils of such interviews to uncharted territory and then benefit from the results. I bet they can't pull such a fast one to one who's seasoned, e.g. Lady Gaga.

Google Cache -- English roots of langner are returning blank pages: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPFggJc...

I've seen similarly bizarre malfeasance by a reporter from one of the most famous newspapers.

Their fact checking is completely useless. They don't check any of the most important or fundamental claims, only the very trivial. Editors apparently don't care or are incompetent.

In the case I'm intimately familiar with the reporter made no claim or attempt at impartiality. He was actively hostile and came close to threatening. He was on a witch hunt and continued his vendetta over a couple years of trumped up articles until he realized no one else bought his bullshit.

I pray for the day when shitty journalists can't hide under the umbrella of a "respected" brand like Vanity Fair. It's too much power with no effective checks or balances.

For future reference: If you think you're being set up in an interview, in many cases you can legally record the interview using a voice recorder app on your phone without telling the other party.

The only US states that require all-party notification of a conversation being recorded are:

California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington.

All other states allow you to record a conversation without notifying the other party provided you are party to the conversation. If the conversation crosses state lines, Federal law applies which only requires one party to know the call is being recorded.

http://www.rcfp.org/taping/

We rag on PR people a lot, but this is definitely a case where a tech company needed a good PR person or good PR company to back them up.

A PR rep being in the room during the interviews never would have let this get out of hand in the way that it did, and they would have framed the interview better to suit the tech company. This is just a case of an unsophisticated tech guy being trodden on by an experienced journalist in order to suit the journalists goals for the story.

PR might be 90% useless now, but there are good PR people out there who could have helped in this case.

Btw I am a huge fan of VF but I thought the Stuxnet piece was weak. I am surprised that some of the more experienced tech journalists are not all over the story releasing articles, books, touring lecture, etc. the mainstream mass market would eat up this story in a hurry (movie deal!)

The article in question, A Declaration of Cyber-War:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/stuxnet-2...

And its HN submission (1 comment):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2284385

There have been times in the distant past where I was contacted by people from the mainstream media for interviews or TV appearances on well known shows. I always politely turned them down, because I feared similar exaggerations and distortions to those described in this article. Anything connected with AI or robotics tends to be reported on very poorly and in a highly sensationalised manner, and I didn't want to end up being misrepresented or be portrayed as a crude stereotype.

There is a good book, Mediasmart,

http://www.amazon.com/Mediasmart-How-Handle-Reporter/dp/0964...

by a reporter whose work I used to see on my local TV news, explaining how subjects of news stories can turn the tables on reporters by understanding more of the news business. The tips in the book are frank and useful--including sometimes declining to be interviewed.

Here's the article formatted in ViewText: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwebcache.google....

More interesting (in my mind) is - why are we reading this out of the google cache? The original site doesn't seem to be up. What's the back-story there?

There's a remarkable amount of "dramablogging" on HN lately.

I wonder how commonplace this is across media outlets.

gotta be a little oblivious to think that vanity fair is interested in stuxnet

How gross of Gross.

This is what happens when the "perception is reality" maxim gets to people's heads.

Vanity Fair: Fact or Fiction?