Media
clock | February 7, 2009When I see news on MSM I check with trusted bloggers if the news is to be believed. Trusted bloggers? Takes time and work to find out who.
I automatically do NOT believe anything coming from corporate media. I check blogs to see what they say if I catch some news on MSM first (rarely these days). Some blogs can be trusted 100% of the time, some 90%, some occasionally, some never. It takes time and effort to figure out who is who, but that effort is worth it - you get immunized from MSM lies. You also learn the skills of critically reading between the lines of MSM and evaluating their "news"…
clock | February 7, 2009Who has power?
Elected officials: they write, vote for and sign laws, they decide how much money will be collected from whom and how it will be spent, they decide on starting and stopping wars, i.e., lives and deaths of people.
Who else has power?
Anyone who can affect the decision of an elected official, e.g., to change a vote from Yes to No or vice versa.
How does one do that?
By having money and using it wisely.
How does one use money to affect policy?
One: by directly lobbying the elected officials. Two: by buying off the media.
I understand how One works, but Two?
Elected officials…
clock | February 7, 2009If Huffington Post wants to have credibility and gain its vaunted #1 spot as the most trusted online new source, there is only one thing it needs to do - ditch the woomeisters Chopra and RFK Jr., and get in their place some people from the reality-based community.
People are sick of conservative, emotion-based, gut-feeling decision-making that screwed up the country over the past 28 years. Why allowing the Left fringe equivalents into the mix? It is them that make a lot of people untrusting of Huffington Post.
Will Huffington Post publish and defend this piece about the potential fraud…
revere | February 7, 2009It turns out that we were not the only ones musing on the relationship between the news business and the flu business. Dr. Michael Osterholm, is the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy (CIDRAP), and also Editor-in-Chief of the CIDRAP Business Source, a subscription newsletter offered to the business community on pandemic (and similar) matters. Dr. Osterholm's name has appeared here often, perhaps most memorably as the author of the "We're screwed" observation. A couple of weeks before my recent post he had written to the business community:
The collapsing…
clock | February 6, 2009Jay Rosen and Glenn Greenwald, two of the shrapest bloggers ever, were on Bill Moyers's Journal on PBS tonight.
You SHOULD watch the video and read the transcript here.
clock | February 5, 2009Apparently, the Washington DC press corps is peeved at the Obama White House because Press Secretary Gibbs is stonewalling them. They thus equate Gibbs to Fleischer/Perino/McClellan and equate Obama to Bush.
But they are myopic and wrong. And Jay Rosen explains why.
Bush dissed the press by suppressing information. Obama disses the press by giving information directly to the people (just you wait, these are early days, but they are preparing for some serious two-way communication between the WH and the people).
From press' point of view - both are dissing them. From the point of view of…
revere | February 5, 2009The question of reporting on flu comes up here from time to time and one of those times was a few days ago. In a post on the low path bird flu outbreaks in British Columbia's Fraser Valley we raised a number of questions we thought should have been asked by the Canadian Press's reporter. We drew a comparison with the exemplary reporting for the same wire service (Canadian Press) by Helen Branswell, generally regarded by flu folks as the best reporter on the subject (there are also other extremely good reporters, among them Maggie Fox at Reuters and John Lauerman at Bloomberg, to name just…
clock | February 4, 2009From Michigan Daily: University professors turn to the blogosphere, for classes and recognition:
In recent years, academics across the country have started using blogs to relay information and ideas. Many are now incorporating the medium into their classes, asking students to take to their keyboards and post thoughts or resources on course material.
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The time commitment means professors need to prioritize when it comes to blogging. Those who write personal blogs do so outside of their teaching requirements, but as blogs become more popular, the question of their role in…
pharyngula | February 3, 2009There are days when you just want to slap a few journalists. The latest absurdity comes from the LA Times, in which an ignorant reporter waxes snarky over the fact that the vice president's wife is addressed as "Dr. Biden", since she has a doctorate in education, and snootily claims that:
Newspapers, including The Times, generally do not use the honorific "Dr." unless the person in question has a medical degree.
And then she trots out Bill Walsh of the Post and the vapid little god-bunny, Amy Sullivan, to agree that you only call medical doctors "Dr."
Yeah, right. How many appendectomies…
grrlscientist | February 2, 2009Have you read the latest piece of anti-intellectualism to come out of the LATimes? Apparently, their so-called journalists are showing their ignorance by stating that Jill Biden, who earned her PhD in Education -- and who also happens to be the wife of Senator Vice President Joe Biden -- cannot be referred to as "Doctor Biden". What have they been smoking??
"My feeling is if you can't heal the sick, we don't call you doctor," said Bill Walsh, copy desk chief for the Washington Post's A section and the author of two language books. (He apparently agrees with the LATimes' stupidity, because…
revere | February 2, 2009Yesterday there was a fairly long story from the wire service Canadian Press that wasn't written by their ace flu reporter, Helen Branswell. It carried the byline of Greg Joyce. I'll come back to why I mention this at the end of this post, but first, here's what it was about:
Three of four of the most recent avian flu outbreaks in Canada have broken out in British Columbia's Fraser Valley but despite years of trying to figure it out, they still can't explain why the valley attracts the virus.
In the latest outbreak, 60,000 turkeys were culled on an Abbotsford, B.C., farm last week.
Tests so…
revere | February 1, 2009I like newspapers and we subscribe to two dailies at our house. But in truth I find myself reading the news online, not in dead tree form. We all know the newspaper business is in big trouble. Which is why there is something just a little creepy about this 1981 news story on San Francisco TV station KRON (hat tip Boingboing):
clock | January 31, 2009...but some people knew waaay back then that news will, one day, move from expensive paper to cheap internet:
From here
TechCrunch surfaced this look at a story that ran back in 1981 that covered
how internet news would someday be delivered. At least watch the last 30 seconds. The reporter remarks it would take more than 2 hours to deliver the digital text needed to read the "online newspaper." She added the per minute (i think) charge was around $5 and comments about the difficulty the new approach would have when competing with the .20 cent daily.
What's in store for us over the next 30…
clock | January 28, 2009
Will Bunch of Attytood recently published an interesting and important book - Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future.
On his blog, Will provides an excerpt and commentary:
Twenty years gone - but Reagan still matters. About this time one year ago, unceasing Reagan idolatry hijacked the race for the White House. Sometimes it was voiced in the name of policies on immigration or toward Iran that were the exact opposite of what really happened a generation ago. The power of this political fantasy - expressed mainly, of course, on the GOP side…
clock | January 25, 2009There.
How's the taste of your own medicine?
Yup, there was an editorial meeting. Coturnix, coturnix, @coturnix, BoraZ, Bora Zivkovic and @borazivkovic were there. I was there, too, and I could have said something, but I decided to remain silent as the traffic of this blog, which - cha-chink - means more money, is more important than accuracy.
Very few readers will read your article. But everyone will see the cover.
Very few people will read this post to the end, especially the links on the bottom that really contain the meat of the argument. But everyone will see this post title in their…
clock | January 1, 2009The Psychology of Cyberspace is a course taught by John Suler in the Department of Psychology at the Science and Technology Center at Rider University. The website is a collection of a large number of thought-provoking essays on various aspects of human behavior online:
This hypertext book explores the psychological aspects of environments created by computers and online networks. It presents an evolving conceptual framework for understanding how people react to and behave within cyberspace: what I call "the psychology of cyberspace" - or simply "cyberpsychology." Continually being revised…
clock | December 30, 2008On the Hopebuilding's Weblog, Rosemary wrote:
When I was a journalist, many years ago now, it never really occurred to me that we spent much more time on "bad news" than on "good news". In fact, sometimes people caricatured the "good news" attempts as being Pollyanna-ish; they thought "good" news was not really news.
But these days, as I spend so much time on the web, I really appreciate the "good news" sites. It provides a healthy balance to the daily diet of so much "bad news" in the media - what my friend Jim Lord calls "deficit thinking", and what he replaces with "appreciative thinking…
clock | December 30, 2008
And what Joe says in response? He claims that he got his information from NYTimes and Washington Post, not realizing that those two publications are just as superficial as he is. Yes, Joe, throw those out and call Zbig if you want to get educated, not that he does not have his own agenda and his own perspective, but it's a start, the first baby-steps from just not knowing anything yet saying it on TV with smug self-adoration....
clock | December 29, 2008Some guy named Mulshine, who is apparently an ancient journalist (remember: generation is mindset, not age), penned one of those idiotic pieces for Wall Street Journal, willingly exposing his out-datedness and blindness to the world - read it yourself and chuckle: All I Wanted for Christmas Was a Newspaper:
This highlights the real flaw in the thinking of those who herald the era of citizen journalism. They assume newspapers are going out of business because we aren't doing what we in fact do amazingly well, which is to quickly analyze and report on complex public issues. The real reason they…