It's all about who makes the rules
 | Rob Crowe
Columnist
|
Several years ago, after finishing my engineering coursework at the University of Minnesota - Duluth, I was able to get an internship at a foundry. The foundry used a vacuum forming process to produce hard surface wear castings for the mining industry.
The work was interesting. I worked with several aspects of the operation but my primary duty was to look at the cooling process and come up with some ways to improve the process. I worked there for a summer and figured out a way to track the temperature of the castings as they cooled, collected the data on many different sized castings and used some high level mathematics and a spreadsheet to predict cooling times for new castings.
As with all processes, there were a couple of difficulties, one being that not all the people involved in the process necessarily thought it important. The casting temperatures needed to recorded every two hours but somehow or other one of the shifts would neglect to collect the data. I did what I could to ensure good data, since I was working with cooling curves some of the data could be extrapolated but I did note the problem in my internship report.
The report was well received by my college instructor and he wanted me to work with the company to improve my computer modeling and present the report at an engineering conference. I had sent the internship report to the company, so contacted them with the proposal. They refused. The excuses they used seemed a little, let's say, childish, so I pursued the matter with them.
I ended up talking to an interim manager, and he informed me that he had read my report, and since I had mentioned that there were some internal problems of the company, the report was no good. Evidently, I had offended one of the middle managers in a discussion so it was determined by the management clique fair game to submarine the research, thus the lack of attention to data collection and vilification of the report.
I've found this a common occurrence in the workplace and also see it often in the media. Often the persons in power pretty much make up the rules with little regard to the truth or the rules of fair play.
The New York Times is probably the prime example of this on the national media scene. If they decide that Karl Rove is involved with a leak, they print material favorable to having him frog marched out of the White House in handcuffs for leaking. If their reporter goes to jail to protect a Bush Administration source, fire the reporter. If leaked information they possess they think may make the Bush Administration look bad, leaks are good, print the stuff even if it will help the enemies of the United States. If leaked information overwhelmingly supports a view contrary to what they want, but one little segment contains detrimental findings, trumpet that little segment to the exclusion of all else.
This last scenario played out over the last week. On Sept. 24, the Times printed an article by Mark Mazetti referencing a couple of leaked sentences in a classified National Security Estimate put out in April, 2006. Mazetti's article says things like "(the report) asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe" and "... the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse."
Pretty devastating, but nearly totally misleading. President Bush, upon learning of the leak, de-classified the Key Judgements section of the report, and it paints a different picture. The report starts out with this: "United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa'ida and disrupted its operations." Funny that the Times reporter didn't think that a significant finding. The report, as I'd guess all reports of this kind do if they are to be effective, lists both positives and negatives, the tendency of the Times to embellish only one aspect of the report is despicable, but totally in line with what I've come to expect of them.
The tendency of the Times to ignore the truth and trash ethical and journalistic standards in its pursuit of its own agenda has damaged its credibility, if it doesn't change it will topple itself.
Rob Crowe chairs the Aitkin County Republicans and raises kids and cows on a farm near Hill City.
|
