Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Politics (Page 11 of 57)

The 'Marketplace of Ideas' Probably Doesn't Exist. What Does That Mean For Free Speech?

20 July 2017 / / 6 Comments

Amid all the concern about ‘Fake News’ and the increasing polarisation in politics, there is a psychological insight that I have seen explained and shared in many forms: when presented with a fact that contradicts a strongly held belief, people often reject the fact and double-down in their belief.
This is the Backfire Effect, a phrase coined by the American academics Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler. Here’s part of the abstract to their 2006 paper ‘When Corrections Fail‘:

Can these false or unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? Previous studies have not tested the efficacy of corrections in a realistic format. We conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from a politician, or a misleading claim and a correction. Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.

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Five Quick Thoughts On The General Election Result

9 June 2017 / / 0 Comments

Here are five thoughts I had while watching the election results last night and this morning.
1. The Conservative Party’s coronation of Theresa May as their leader last summer looks, with hindsight, to have been a mistake. Mrs May only had to win over her fellow MPs and not party members. She did not have to do any debates or unpredictable public appearances. Had she done so, her weakness in this area may have been exposed. Or, if you prefer, her experience of a months long leadership campaign against Andrea Leadsome might have made her a more confident campaigner in 2017.

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Theresa May: Undermining British Values and Doing Nothing To Keep Us Safe

7 June 2017 / / 2 Comments

To all those who Tweeted messages of love after the Manchester bomb.
To all those who posted Facebook messages of defiance after the London Bridge attack.
To all those who shared pictures of the Jewish woman praying with the Muslim man, and to those who clicked ‘like’ on that video of the policeman dancing.
To those who spread about the Keep Calm and Carry On posters, and reminded everyone about London’s ‘Blitz Spirit’. To those who Tweeted banter and funny hashtags about the things that make Londoners really afraid.
To those who offers a cup of tea or a bed for the night to anyone stranded in Southwark. To those who offered a lif home to the kids stuck in central Manchester. And to all those who shared these stories and these memes, whose heart was warmed by the idea that we have ‘more that unites us than that which divides us‘. To those who said, over and over, that we would not let a few murdering idiots affect our liberal values or our democratic way of life.
To all these people I ask: how do you feel about Theresa May’s pathetic, ahistorical and opportunistic statement that she will weaken our human rights laws? Continue reading

Framing

5 June 2017 / / 0 Comments

A simple twitter bot made by Russel Neiss does one thing: convert each of President Donald Trump’s tweets into the format of an official presidential statement. Here’s one where which confirms that his Executive Orders are indeed intended to be a ‘Travel Ban’ (which is odd because his own Justice Department are currently embroiled in a court case arguing that they are not).
https://twitter.com/RealPressSecBot/status/871674468896194560
This speaks to last week’s post about content shorn of attribution. How information is presented is crucial to how the message is interpreted. And tweaking the way in which something is presented might actually reveal an hypocrisy or two. Continue reading

Blind Trials For Politicians and Journalists?

2 June 2017 / / 2 Comments

Tee hee: Defence Secretary Michael Fallon was caught out by Krishnan Guru-Murthy last week. The politician assumed that the journalist had read out a Jeremy Corbyn quote, and so dutifully proceeded to attack the words spoken. But Guru-Murthy then revealed that the quote was actually something that Boris Johnson, a Conservative colleague of Mr Fallon, had written in 2005.
There has been much anger expressed by the Corbyn-supporting left this week, after the Labour leader made a gaffe in a BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour interview. He could not remember the financial figures attached to a childcare policy. Many people (including myself) felt that Mr Corbyn was treated unfairly in subsequent media pile-on: its not as if he and his policy team have failed to publish any figures (which would be genuinely shocking) or that the figures they published did not add up. Rather, he simply did not remember the precise figure that the party had published. This kind of ‘gotcha’ journalism says nothing of interest about the man, the party or the policy. There, but for the grace of God, walk you and I. Continue reading

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