Media
pharyngula | September 5, 2007This is appalling. How dare a mere blogger do the research, write up a detailed account, and break an important health story before the NY Times writes it up without recognition of the source? Some will demand that the NY Times retroactively acknowledge the work and expertise of the blogger, but nay — that is not the one true way. Bloggers should proactively acknowledge the possibility that the NY Times might someday use their research and rewrite their stories for them.
— grateful acknowledgment —The NY Times hasn't published anything about this article yet, but if they do, this post was the…
pharyngula | September 5, 2007The managing editor of a small town newspaper in Wisconsin, Rose Eddy, is very upset with certain vicious hate groups, so she made up a list for her staff and announced that they will not be accepting ads or information from them, ever. And then she publicized it, declaring her unimpeachable moral probity in the pages of her newspaper. Here's her list of awful, terrible people who must not appear in print:
The Nazi Party. Bad, very bad. I think this one has been condemned by history well enough.
Al Qaeda. A known terrorist organization that wants to destroy America — the very symbol of…
revere | September 5, 2007Yesterday we did a post on a breaking story about popcorn lung. It's not just workers. Consumers are also at risk, although how much risk is hard to say. Casual consumption of microwave popcorn using the artificial butter flavoring diacetyl is probably not very risky, but day in and day out consumption may be. You can read about one such consumer in this story in the New York Times. What you won't read about in the Times is that the story was broken by a blogger, our colleague Dr. David Michaels over at The Pump Handle. As a result of Michaels' blog post the story was picked up by major media…
sb admin | September 5, 2007I haven't read the study— it would take some digging to find, after all!— only the CNN Article, but the title sums up half of the results: "Men want hot women, study confirms."
In a nutshell, the study found that in a speed-dating test, men, despite what they said they were looking for, almost always went for the most physically attractive women (measured I am not sure how). Women, meanwhile, went for a man whose "desirability" (again, measured I am not sure how) matched their own assessment of how attractive they are.
The conclusion the article claims is that humans, despite high-minded…
pharyngula | August 28, 2007Scott* has uncovered another slick media effort by creationists: the Seventh Day Adventists are putting on a four-part series called Out of Thin Air to trumpet their fundamentalist lunacy.
What I want to know is … where are the slick media people willing to put together lovely dramatic stories of the scientists — the brave minority fighting uncowed against a wealthy and ignorant majority? Come on, there's a real story here. We do cool stuff! We're passionate! We are probing reality! Our stage is the entire freaking universe! We don't have money for PR, and our support organizations are…
pharyngula | August 23, 2007Aaargh. When will the media learn? National Geographic is running this ridiculous headline right now: New Fossil Ape May Shatter Human Evolution Theory, in which the reporter claims a discovery of some teeth could "demolish a working theory of human evolution." It's not true. Where is this nonsense coming from?
I read the article. It's titled "A new species of great ape from the late Miocene epoch in Ethiopia." The exciting news is that the "combined evidence suggests that Chororapithecus may be a basal member of the gorilla clade, and that the latter exhibited some amount of adaptive and…
scientificactivist | August 23, 2007In response to Michael Skube's freewheelingly critical opinion piece about the blogosphere in Sunday's LA Times, the paper has published a response entitled "The journalism that bloggers actually do" by Jay Rosen, NYU journalism professor and PressThink blogger, via its online Blowback feature. For more information on the Skube affair, check out A Blog Around the Clock. I don't have a problem with Skube's assertion that blogs are no substitute for the mainstream media--I agree--but Skube is just so contemptuous and dismissive toward the blogosphere (a phenomenon he doesn't seem particularly…
clock | August 22, 2007On Sunday, LATimes published a viciously uninformed piece about blogging by some Skube guy (who appears to be here in NC though I have never heard of him before). The blogosphere, as expected, responded with laughter and dismay.
Today, LATimes published a response by NYU J-school professor (who I have most definitely heard of, and even met in person once) Jay Rosen - The journalism that bloggers actually do:
Blowback! That's what you're in for when a great American newspaper runs a Sunday opinion piece as irretrievably lame as "Blogs: All the noise that fits" by Michael Skube...
The…
clock | August 21, 2007My Scibling Tara Smith together with Steven Novella, published an article in PLoS Medicine last week that all frequent readers of science blogs will find interesting:
HIV Denial in the Internet Era:
Because these denialist assertions are made in books and on the Internet rather than in the scientific literature, many scientists are either unaware of the existence of organized denial groups, or believe they can safely ignore them as the discredited fringe. And indeed, most of the HIV deniers' arguments were answered long ago by scientists. However, many members of the general public do not…
scientificactivist | August 21, 2007Although he took some flack for a similar stance in last month's CNN/YouTube Democratic Presidential Debate (see video at bottom of post), Barack Obama has an opinion piece published in The Miami Herald today in which he stresses the need for bilateral talks with Cuba and promises to "grant Cuban Americans unrestricted rights to visit family and send remittances to the island."
The primary means we have of encouraging positive change in Cuba today is to help the Cuban people become less dependent on the Castro regime in fundamental ways. U.S. policy must be built around empowering the Cuban…
clock | August 21, 2007Here are a few pertinent quotes, but read the entire articles as well as long comment threads.
Ed Cone:
Skube published an opinion piece about blogs that, with the help of his editors at the LA Times, failed to uphold the journalistic standards he preaches.
It's not the first time that Skube has opined out of ignorance on this subject. I called the Pulitzer winner's previous column for the N&R a "virtually content-free rant, citing no blogs, showing no signs he did any research by reading blogs...crap." Then I phoned Skube and found he had said little because he knew little and cared…
scientificactivist | August 11, 2007August 9, 2007, will go down in history as a great day for global warming denialism. On Wednesday, the 8th, well-known global warming denialist Steve McIntyre published a post on his blog about NASA finding a flaw in some of its temperature data that led to a minor reordering of the list of the hottest years on record. Not surprisingly, the conservative media and blogs went hog wild the next day. The mainstream media even got a bit carried away... despite the fact that we're talking about changes of hundredths of degrees here and that these numbers are only for North America (and don't…
angrytoxicologist | August 8, 2007Reading my Chemical and Engineering News (nerd alert!), I came across the article: "Toxicity Testing Without Animals" by Celia Henry Arnaud. "Oh no, here we go again", I thought. It may come as a surprise to some of you but cells in a dish don't equal whole bodies and even more shocking, we don't know everything about how bodies work and how they are disrupted.
So what does the article have to say? It starts off with the normal animal testing is long, expensive, a pain in the butt, and restrictive to the number of chemicals that can be evaluated. Fair enough. Then it points out that
The…
angrytoxicologist | August 7, 2007So I'm looking around at news stories and I find one on Eurekalert about neurodegenerative disease entitled "Researchers link metal ions to neurodegenerative disease". My first thought: "Wow." Then I read the article. Then I thought: "Wow. Eurekalert screws it up (again)."
According to the news snippet: researchers from Emory have found that a certain way that metal ions bind to amyloid fibrils in the brain appears toxic to neurons. (The build up of Amyloid fibrils in the brain is linked primarily to Alzheimer's but also to Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome and Parkinson's disease.) So I'm thinking…
signout | August 3, 2007As part of my efforts to multitask, I read while I work out. It works well for me: if the reading material is interesting, I hardly even notice I'm schvitzing while reading. An unfortunate consequence of this habit is its magnification of my tendency to talk to my reading material, as when I yelled "Oh, no you didn't!" at the article on workplace discrimination against caregivers in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. I was provoked by the part where the author, Eyal Press, unflinchingly writes that "becoming a parent is a choice."
Let's be clear: In the United States, half of all…
pharyngula | July 30, 2007I think Bill O'Reilly needs to pick on the big blogs more often. It's incredibly entertaining.
clock | July 26, 2007Michael Hopkin interviewed Al Jean, the executive producer of The Simpsons show, about math and science, sometimes central, sometimes hidden, in the episodes of everyone's favourite show...
pharyngula | July 24, 2007The Weekly World News, source of many an idle moment's entertainment while waiting in the grocery store checkout line, is about to become an ex-tabloid. Bat boy will be homeless. Ed Anger will have no outlet for his rage. Fox News will have no competition.
American Journalism has lost a shining beacon, an ideal to which it could have aspired.
(via Decorabilia)
pharyngula | July 10, 2007Phil reveals his man-crushes, and I have to respond in kind. Fortunately, it's easy. I've just seen something that endears one particular gentleman to me…
Michael Moore.
He batters that smug silver-haired rodent, Wolf Blitzer. I wish he'd been given a chance to kick Lou Dobbs' ass. He rakes the entire American news media over white-hot coals for their continued failures to investigate and report honestly on the war as well as on health care. C'est magnifique.