News not views

In a blog entry, Neha Paliwal points out that food prices after all have not been so much of a trigger for Arab Spring. Earlier Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed had declared food price volatility a fundamental trigger for political instability. Neha points out that inflation-adjusted prices have in fact not gone up in the middle-east – so it's difficult to assert that food prices had a big role to play in the Arab Spring.

It just goes to show that we lack the standards which can let us measure the accuracy of political analyses. Some scrutiny is needed before fiction can make it to the public masquerading as analysis. The conclusions which journalists and writers often draw on economy and politics are subjective – even fictional. Although our institutions – law and governments - don't run on subjective grounds yet somehow a wide gap seems to exist between law and media when it comes to ed-pieces and commentary on economics or politics. It's not just that media stories read a lot different from documents of law. It's that what media offers as analysis is often a selective medlee of laws and data.

Such gaps won't be a problem if entertainment is all that media was offering. But unfortunately truth is claimed to be offered in those sweeping conclusions drawn on politics and news. The interpretation of data – whether it be that of Mr Ahmed, Paul Krugman or Jim Cramer - seldom receives scrutiny. We assume the truth in extrapolation of data judging by the repoutation of the author or the journal.  Stating the extrapolation or adding scatter plots often don't sell the story - so what we're sold instead are prose of doom or self-appraisal written by people who we trust. This may not offer us consistency or semlbance of a truth but allows us to choose our news the way we swtich channels on TV.