What is the difference between “information” and “intelligence”, in the military sense?

This was the first question I would put to trainee newspaper subeditors; and it contains the complete answer to all the questions you are asking about training people in media literacy.

Conventionally, what defines “intelligence” is: a piece of information, plus some assessment of the reliability of the source.

Rule 1 of subbing: Every story must have a source. No source; no story. This is the very first thing you look for as you pick up the article.

Rule 2: Assess the reliability of the source. Is this a newbie reporter? An agency story? An editorial written by a notoriously slapdash editor who likes to shoot from the hip? As time goes by, you very quickly learn who can be trusted and who can’t.

Rule 3: Apply triage. Chances are that the agency story can pass with very little editing, just cut it to fit. The newbie’s copy may be so hopeless that you spike it; generally, these will not be main stories, so don’t waste too much time on it, just patch it up and bang it through. But make damn sure you allow enough time to check out every single “fact” that your editor throws into the leader article, nothing is more embarrassing to the paper than having to apologise for something outrageous your editor has said that turns out to be completely false.

I told each sub: you are, in truth, an intelligence agent: your most important task is to use your nose to detect fishy stories, unsourced and unverified “facts”, anything that might cause trouble down the line.

This is old-school intelligence methodology, of course. Modern American intelligence work consists of going out to find, or if necessary manufacture, “facts” to fit the needs of the politicians. Find or manufacture evidence of chemical weapons in Iraq, might be one such directive.

However, the old-school training still works. In 12 years on the desk, I never made a single slip. When I left one newspaper, the farewell party was informed that I had saved the paper tens of thousands of dollars: this was the ballpark of their average legal costs per year for defamation suits, and in three years, we had not had a single case, the costs had gone down to exactly zero.

This bears out my own little joke: What is the opposite of a lawyer?

The opposite of a lawyer is a subeditor. While lawyers are paid large amounts of money to take the simplest issue and put it in language that no one but another lawyer can understand — and amass as many billable hours in the process as possible — the subeditor is paid very little to take any kind of language, including the most abstruse legal gobbledygook, and turn it into something the person in the street can understand. And to do it under stringent daily deadlines, you are fired if you take too long. No billable hours for us.

The world would be a much better place, with far more mutual understanding and harmony, and far less conflict and confusion, if there were more subeditors and fewer lawyers at work.

So you can read how they have been gutting newsrooms all over the world, particularly the UK, and firing all the subs. I survived as a temp, a “dash” sub as we were known in South Africa, making quite a thriving living as they cut newsrooms to the bone: there was always work for me when someone got sick or went on leave. They were always trying to exterminate me, kill the “dash” budget. I told them over and over: we are like weeds, we thrive in chaos and instability. As long as you keep cutting the newsroom staff, you are just creating more work for me.

Eventually, the group created a single subbing unit for all their publications around the country. The link between journalists and subs — always a difficult one — became even more tenuous. And I moved on, actually to a business wire, where I ended my mainstream journalism career writing the occasional maize report that went on Dow Jones, I got a real kick out of that, even if they stripped my byline.

Now I am a freelance writer: and the more nonsense that swirls around the world, the more I return to basic old-school intelligence protocols. Check the source; check the source’s source; check the source’s source’s source, until you know exactly where the story came from. And then: assess the reliability of the source and act accordingly, depending on the urgency of the story. That’s the entire sum of what you need to know about media literacy. Please pass it on to your students.