Media
pharyngula | August 16, 2006Neddie Jingo has an appalling example of the kind of presentation used to promote our strategic plan in Iraq. Go take a look and weep—it's one of those meaningless godawful PowerPoint-style assemblages of boxes and arrows. You know what I mean: a nightmare of chartjunk that distracts everyone into contemplating the relationships of graphical abstractions on a screen rather than actually dealing with the substance behind them.
I'm actually very impressed that he managed to also put together a paragraph actually explaining what the graphic is supposed to mean, and that the paragraph makes sense…
revere | August 13, 2006You shouldn't be reading this, because the blogs are fluorishing but poor network TV is languishing. The middle of July saw its least viewed week in the history of broadcast TV in the US (via Boingboing):
CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox averaged 20.8 million viewers during the average prime-time minute last week, according to Nielsen Media Research. That sunk below the previous record, set during the last week of July in 2005. (AP)
The network news shows didn't do that great, either:
"World News Tonight" averaged 7.3 million viewers and "Nightly News" had 7.2 million (both 5.1 rating, 11 share). The "…
pharyngula | July 27, 2006I keep waiting for the padded ambulance to roll up and men in white coats to leap out, shoot these bozos with a trank gun, wrap them up in a straight jacket, and go howling off to the nearest sanitarium, but no…instead, they get invitations to appear on cable news and babble about the apocalypse. And it's not just the airhead news media…
…Rosenberg is just one of several conservative media figures who have identified and expounded upon the purported signs of the Apocalypse to be found in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. During his appearance on Live From…, Rosenberg claimed that he had been…
pharyngula | July 24, 2006Oh, good. I saw this WaPo article with a morphing animation of a lemur into SJ Gould, and I was mildly appalled—it's a very badly done gimmick that doesn't say anything about how evolution works, and actually grossly misleads the viewer on the morphological transformations that had to have occurred. Fortunately, I don't have to deepen my reputation as a cranky internet curmudgeon by complaining about it— Carl Zimmer has done it for me.
Transforming grid coordinates is an interesting tool in describing the transformations between forms—D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson did it well—but you need to…
clock | July 24, 2006Including screwing with the people who touch themselves for a charitable cause:
"Overall I think a well-intentioned event has been hijacked by a corporation who don't really care if we have good sex and enjoy masturbation, but just want more viewing figures. I hope people do join in and support the event, but I worry that it'll invite more sex-negative discussions than stories that encourage masturbation.
The masturbate-a-thon most certainly has had more coverage in one day than it's got in the past five years that it's been running. Call me old fashioned, but I preferred it when it truly was…
clock | July 22, 2006Link found on Ed Cone's blog: The Fog of Cable:
As someone who lives and breathes Middle East politics and media, I have had the bizarre -- and frustrating -- experience of watching the current conflict play out on U.S. cable television, and I am reminded once again why many Americans have such a limited -- and distorted -- view of the world.
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There is plenty of room on cable television for politicized talk shows of all stripes. But in allowing -- or, rather, ordering -- its respected news correspondents to appear on such shows, the networks are trading credibility…
signout | July 20, 2006This is why people who don't know science shouldn't write about it as if they do. I don't care how much she's "mulled it over"-the author of the recent New York Times opinion piece about compulsory vaccination of girls with the vaccine against HPV makes some dangerous assertions here based on totally unscientific thinking and some seriously lame perspective.
And if this lady is SERIOUSLY going to suggest that in the face of other preventive options, we choose to rely on the often-imperfectly-used condom for prevention of STD's, especially among adolescents whose access to them is determined…
revere | July 14, 2006Whenever we talk here about immunity from lawsuits for Big Pharma I hear a lot about so-called frivolous lawsuits. Those aren't the lawsuits that are clogging our court system since only about 10% of lawsuits are tort actions. But I'll concede one thing: there is such a thing as a frivolous lawsuit.
Two of the biggest practitioners of frivolous lawsuits are Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). RIAA has sued more than 20,000 music fans allegedly for file sharing. Grandmas, sub-teens and people who don't even own computers have…
pharyngula | July 13, 2006A reader sent in a quote from this month's Playboy. They understand.
As politics go, we're surprised so many readers expect us or any publication to provide "balance," which reflects a belief in the fallacy that there are two equally valid sides to every story. You see this in the debate over global warming and evolution. Thousands of scientists stand on one side of the issue, recognizing that global warming is a problem and that evolution is firmly established, while only a few detractors stand on the other.
Move over, NY Times. Playboy has a more principled journalistic philosophy than you…
pharyngula | July 12, 2006Jodi Rudoren née Wilgoren, whose views on journalistic responsibility to accuracy and truth were encapsulated in this comment,
I don't consider myself a creationist. I don't have any interest in sharing my personal views on how the canyon was carved, mostly because I've spent almost no time pondering my personal views -- it takes all my energy as a reporter and writer to understand and explain my subjects' views fairly and thoroughly.
has been promoted at the NY Times.
pharyngula | July 10, 2006Revere and Tara make fun of a silly guest commentary from a very silly man who thinks them evilutionists are cheating by using the term "mutation"—that changes in the virulence of a disease are examples of a "population shift," which has nothing to do with evolution.
Just a note to any journalists or newspaper editors who might read this: the Panda's Thumb has a useful list of scientists and other defenders of evolution who are willing—no, overjoyed—to vet these kinds of strange anti-scientific tirades. We're also willing to help with any pro-science articles you might be moved to write. It's…
scientificactivist | July 8, 2006On the 29th of June, the Senate finally announced an upcoming vote on HR 810, a bill which would overturn President Bush's current prohibitions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. As I reported before, the announcement has been anticipated for some time, and many were disappointed when the one year anniversary of the passage of HR 810 in the House of Representatives (on May 24th) came and went without any progress in the Senate.
The media coverage of this event has mostly been unexceptional, not particularly good or bad, although probably overly optimistic considering the…
scientificactivist | July 6, 2006Yes, it's true. I've been called a "budding Matt Drudge." In a post on the recent Nature science blog rankings, The Tech Chronicles wrote:
And Nick Anthis is a budding Matt Drudge. His revelations about a NASA official who was accused of squelching interviews about global warming contributed to the official's resignation.
I'm not really sure what to make of that, especially since The Scientific Activist, as a site dedicated to exploring the complexities of the issues, is basically the complete opposite of the Drudge Report. I guess I wouldn't mind it so much if I was getting a cut of the…
pharyngula | July 6, 2006The most amusing coverage of the Nature top science blogs article comes from The Technology Chronicles, which begins by calling scientists "sober, dispassionate, precise" and suggests that we've abandoned "Olympian impartiality" to compete with Cute Overload. I get the impression the author hasn't ever met a real scientist. Nick will love being called a "budding Matt Drudge."
We need more cute, huh? OK, I can do cute. I had to run my photo through a face transformer to do it, but here I am, rendered a bit more adorably than in real life.
Now I just sit back and wait for the fans to roll in…
purepedantry | June 26, 2006Matthew Yglesias has a great satire on the hysterionics in the MSM about blogging:
The world, then, has recently been dangerously lacking in "-ofascist" (or perhaps O'Fascist, like in Ireland) threats. Thankfully, New Republic culture critic Lee Siegel has now uncovered the most insidious threat of all: Bloggers. "The blogosphere," he told us last week, "radiates democracy's dream of full participation" but is, in fact, "hard fascism with a Microsoft face." Some thought Siegel was engaging in a little ill-advised overstatement. But no. The bold truth-teller was all-too-serious, as he revealed…
purepedantry | June 26, 2006Ed Brayton and Mike Dunford have been talking about a Washington Post article on a study that is concerned with the ill effects the Daily Show and Jon Stewart are having on our democracy. Basically people who watch the Daily Show are more cynical:
Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart's faux news program, "The Daily Show," develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.
That's particularly dismaying news because the show is hugely popular among college students, many of whom already don't bother to cast ballots…
pharyngula | June 26, 2006What is this, a few journalists have discovered blogs for the first time and have decided they just don't like 'em? This fellow Zengerle seems to see them as a threat to the Republic, and now some guy named Quin Hillyer at the American Spectator weighs in, with some devastating complaints.
He is shocked at the funny names. "What the heck, for instance, is 'Echidne of the Snakes' or 'Nyarlathotep's Miscellany'?" Whoa. Burn. I'm sure glad I didn't pick a weird name for my blog.
He doesn't get Fafblog. He seems to think it's about stilted writing, rather than some of the sharpest mockery of the…
revere | June 26, 2006Beltway journalists in traditional media outlets like the New York Times must find it tiresome to take dictation for the Bush administration day after day. Concurring Opinions blogmeister Daniel Solove has taken pity on them and crafted a template (or stationery, in word processing terms) for use by journalists like NYT's stenographers to write their stories about the latest government snooping activity.
Here it is:
Under a top secret program initiated by the Bush Administration after the Sept. 11 attacks, the [insert name of agency (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.)] have been gathering a vast database…
revere | June 25, 2006The war in Iraq is going down as history's most dangerous for journalists. War correspondents have some idea what they are getting into, however. Reporters covering local funerals of bird flu victims and poultry culling operations are usually general beat reporters and didn't sign up for ultra hazardous duty. Now the Indonesian press corps is starting to worry.
''I really feel strongly that the issue of health and safety of reporters covering avian flu must be addressed by the management of news organizations,'' said Daenk Haryono of the North Sumatra-based 'Harian Global' daily.
''Many…