An even better reason the “just report the news and let the readers decide for themselves” argument is crap is that it leaves no way whatsoever for a news organization to choose what to report in the first place. By the above argument, the news should just be a camera standing on the sidewalk. That may count as “absolute reality” and “100% objective,” but it would not be the news. If we are going to complain about any and all ’slant’ on news articles for the sake of complaining about ’slant,’ why watch or read them in the first place?

What I meant to say earlier is that it is not biased or unreasonable for an news piece’s “slant” to be based on supportable premises (especially the subject it is reporting!) and for its conclusions to follow logically from those premises.

It does not matter if you are liberal, conservative, moderate, libertarian, democrat, or republican. The fact that the police in the case we have been discussing had their dog sniff a huge handful of bills from the ’suspect’ and only 7 from the police IS an invalid test, and for the judge to support this obviously bad investigating and unjustified restriction of civil liberties (arresting the man on false premises) IS more than a quirk, and deserves more than a passing acknowledgement. This is because the consequences of what the news was reporting on truly does have the potential to lead down a slippery slope of abuse by police forces.

I just re-read the linked article. Damnit, they just reported it but did not elaborate on why it is significant and dangerous. Damnit, it doesn’t even point out the studies on how all American currency has trace amounts of cocaine on it. This article doesn’t even do the minimum of what we should expect from good journalism. The things I explained in the above paragraph are just the kinds of things we should expect to hear from a good news organization –> because they follow logically from what we know happens when civilians authorities get excuses to arrest and abuse each other by runaway legislation.

That they left this out is not just an ‘editorial slant,’ it is cowardice. “Gee, isn’t this interesting?” does not cut it, and “Uncle Sam Keeps Grip on Man’s Seized $124K” does not capture the essence of the story.

You should write them a letter. NPR very often reads letters on the air from people who approve and disapprove of the way they handled different stories. Given that you are a gifted writer, I’d say you have a substantially better than average shot at getting your message on the air.

You wrote, “It sounds like you’re unhappy with a news story for not having an editorial slant.”

Really, I am unhappy that the story seemed completely unaware that there is a serious controversy at all here. I am unhappy that they pitched this as a human interest story, a surprising — yet unproblematic — quirk of Our Wonderful Legal System. That’s what I’m unhappy about.

By ignoring the obvious problems that civil libertarians have with actions like these, the story in question was distinctly slanted — but in a way that made it look as though it were not. That’s why I’m unhappy.

I don’t know if it’s possible to present a story with absolute neutrality. (And in some cases, as you note, absolute neutrality may be a type of bias of its own: imagine a holocaust documentary that took no sides.) And since I didn’t hear the NPR piece I don’t know whether it went beyond the pale in displaying a pro-Drug War bias. But a couple of notes on bias through omission, or through bad facts:

1. There are always more facts than can fit in the time allowed for the story, so everyone will leave out some facts. The question is how impartant the facts that get left out are.

2. NPR neglected to mention that a healthy majority of bills have cocaine on them. But Jason neglected to mention the very low level of cocaine on the average “contaminated” bill. Perhaps NPR concluded (rightly or wrongly) that the low level of average contamination meant that it was best to just leave that whole angle out. I assume that Jason concluded that the aggregation of the bills (or an outlier bill resulting from the large amount of bills) would be enough for a false positive, and so did not go into a discussion of just how much cocaine we can expect to be on a given bill. Whose omission was biased, if either of them were?

3. Facts can be omitted due to a lack of knowledge. So the omission may be due to sub-par investigation or a short deadline, not bias. I certainly wouldn’t have known about the large percentage of bills with cocaine traces on them without Jason discussing it.

I will also note that your illumination that “the fact that all bills are known to have cocaine on them” is an exaggeration of the empirical evidence. Are we to discount your comment due to its demonstrated bias?

You’re right: I neglected the aggregation angle. But if we assume they had an average of 16 micrograms, then, depending on the denomination ($20, $50 or $100) there would have been between 0.02 and 0.1 grams. I honestly don’t know if that’s in the range of what a reliable police dog can detect, but it’s certainly not a lot of cocaine.

Once again, though, I don’t construe this to mean that the prosecutors’ case should hold up in court. Since the money certainly passed through the hands of other people (and since there is no evidence that the men charged have had anything to do with drugs of any sort) there is plenty of room to believe that the cocaine (even if it’s a suspiciously large amount of it) got on the money through the actions of a third party.

That’s one of the big flaws in the way the police tested for the presence of drugs. They had the dog sniff a huge package of cash, then sniff a total of 7 bills taken from the wallets of the cops. You’re right, the average amount found on a few bills is too small to gain notice, but bundle $125,000 in bills together and guess what? Now there’s more than enough.

I know many people who routinely carry large amounts of cash around - yes, even amounts that large. They are professional poker players.

I’m not sure I would call NPR fully objective, but it is closer than most news sources. I also like that they (not infrequently) have people on to give some pretty libertarian commentary.

Jason,

The snopes article says that a healthy majority of currency has testable traces of cocaine, but I don’t see anywhere in there that the majority of currency carry enough cocaine to alert a dog in a sniff test. The average amount of “contamination” was 16 micrograms of coke. Do you know if that’s in the range that a dog would detect? If so, then drug-sniffing dogs should be pretty useless, since we would expect them to turn up a hellacious number of false positives due to their extreme sensitivity.

Of course, given the large number of bills the guy was carrying, it’s not unreasonable to expect that one or a handfull of them had enough to alert the dog’s olfactory nerves. But I’m not sure that the mere fact that most bills have drug residue proves your point.

Needless to say, given the total lack of all other evidence, I don’t think the money should have been confiscated. And in a perfect world the cops would have dected the residue via the dogs, tested the driver to make sure he wasn’t driving while high, then sent him on his way with a lighthearted “Have a nice day, sir. Enjoy your cocaine when you get home.”

While I share your outrage over this travesty of “justice”, I am quite puzzled by your jab at NPR. It sounds like you’re unhappy with a news story for not having an editorial slant. Shouldn’t a news story simply report the facts and let listeners form their own opinions? Don’t you think the facts speak sufficiently for themselves that NPR listeners would be outraged?

I’m also puzzled by your parsing of this issue as a left vs. right issue. Why would you expect a “left-leaning” organization to not look critically at a low-income ethnic-minority individual being legally shaken down by the “police state”? Why would you expect a “right-leaning” organization to look critically at good old law-and-order prosecution of the war on drugs?

I once heard a story about a gay and lesbian mixer, where some men were heard to come away complaining that “it was mostly women”, while some women were heard to come away complaining that it was “dominated by men”, and when in fact there were exactly the same number of men and women present. NPR strikes me like that. I’m constantly amazed at the charges of both left-leaning and right-leaning that are leveled at NPR, when I find it one of the few good objective news sources around.

My understanding was that the funding came from the government (a minority) and from left-leaning charitable foundations (the large majority). They aren’t getting much of their funding from anyone who would look critically at this type of thing.