[OPE] BBC E-mail: Free market flawed, says survey

I try to look at it from the BBC's point of view as well, I mean, I can also
admire the efforts of the news crews. Working for a statistics department
taught me, among other things, that you can have a data set and you could
tell hundreds or maybe thousands of stories about the same data set, all
true. Question then is, what story are you going to tell, how are you going
to tell it, who are you telling it to, why are you telling it, and where are
you going to tell it... and what ability you have to tell it. That's a
science, an art and a philosophy. People laugh at phenomenology these days,
but in practice you use it, because you are not just interpreting meaning
but creating it.

In the end, the media just hold up a mirror to society according to what
they think people will pay attention to, but, this is the point, it could be
a warped mirror. You might write a great story, and it ends up being edited
out of existence, all you can do is make a new story. There's people who
want to place strictures on the behaviour of other people, and there's
people who want to alert you to different possibilities, different
alternatives, how things could be. How are the limits set, and who sets
them? For what purpose, and why?

"A question of the day shares a common lot with any other question justified
by its content, and hence rational; namely, that not the answer but the
question itself is the chief difficulty. True criticism, therefore,
analyses the questions and not the answers. Just as the solution of an
algebraic equation is given as soon as the problem is posed in its purest
and sharpest conditions, so every question is answered as soon as it has
become an actual question. World history itself has no other method than
answering and disposing of old questions by posing new ones. The riddlewords
of each epoch are therefore easy to discover. They are questions of the day,
and while a given individual's interests and insights play an important role
in the answers, and it takes a practised eye to separate what belongs to the
individual from what belongs to the era, the questions, on the other hand,
are the frank, uncompromising voices of the era, embracing all individuals;
they are its signposts, they are the most practical proclamations of its own
frame of mind." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/05/17.htm

J.

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Received on Thu Nov 12 14:29:34 2009