news media
mikethemadbiologist | March 16, 2008...at least some of the time. While there has been much gnashing of teeth and wailing about the political press' recent socializing with John McCain (and appropriately so), let's not forget that this is hardly the first time the press has knelt before power instead of confronting it. Rewind to Guatemala, 1954.
In 1954, at the behest of the United Fruit Company, the CIA organized and backed the overthrow of democratically elected President Arbenz. From Peter Chapman's Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World, here's how the political press behaved (boldface mine):
[United…
mikethemadbiologist | February 18, 2008...and it's pretty damn good. So I got an email from ScienceBlogling Orac about an autism 'hub' he's putting together, so, having belatedly checked my email, I'm moving this post up.
In the Sunday NY Times, Public Editor Clark Hoyt describes the Times' policy for covering autism-vaccination studies (italics mine):
On Jan. 23, Edward Wyatt, a culture reporter in the Los Angeles bureau, reported on the cover of The Arts section that the first episode of "Eli Stone," a legal drama on ABC, was stepping into the debate over whether childhood vaccines cause autism -- "and seemingly coming down on…
mikethemadbiologist | February 3, 2008Rogue Columnist describes how newspaper consolidation--a result of increasing laxity of anti-trust decisions--has damaged newspapers:
-The creation of monopoly markets and, through consolidation, cartels of newspaper ownership. Economic history shows us that monopolies and cartels always commit suicide. Divorced from the imperatives of real competition, monopolies easily slip into a self-centered world of bureaucratic conformity and a desire to protect the status quo. They became slow and rigid, in other words, road kill for competitors.
-Consolidation of newspapers into large, publicly held…
mikethemadbiologist | February 2, 2008One should be more informed, not less after watching a presidential debate. Jamison Foser, in an otherwise excellent post about the recent Democratic debate, makes one small error when he accuses CNN's Wolf Blitzer of being imprecise, when, in fact, Blitzer is just wrong:
Blitzer said, "I just want to be precise" -- but he was the opposite of precise. Clinton and Obama had given precise answers; Blitzer then restated their positions in less precise terms.
Here, let's look at all three statements again, in the order in which they were made:
OBAMA: "Part of it is paid for by rolling back the…
mikethemadbiologist | February 1, 2008Because they don't understand stuff. To wit, Mike Allen in The Politico:
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail traffic of suspected terrorists, expires on Friday. After that, any monitoring that's currently authorized could continue, but no new surveillance could begin.
Actually, what is set to expire is the Protect America Act ('PAA'). The reason the PAA is set to expire is that the retroactive immunity provisions for law-breaking companies in the new PAA are opposed by the Democrats, but the Republicans refuse to pass a…
mikethemadbiologist | January 29, 2008If you're like most sentient humans, you don't care whom the NY Times editorial board decided to endorse for president. But the 'logic' behind the endorsement of Clinton is revealing. The Mandarin Class still doesn't get it. About Clinton's foreign policy experience, the Times editors write:
It is unfair, especially after seven years of Mr. Bush's inept leadership, but any Democrat will face tougher questioning about his or her fitness to be commander in chief. Mrs. Clinton has more than cleared that bar, using her years in the Senate well to immerse herself in national security issues,…
mikethemadbiologist | January 13, 2008TEH STUPID. From Bob Somerby:
The second trait is the corps' sheer stupidity--an artifact of palace culture. Did she cry on purpose? they're asking today. Well, no, she didn't, we confidently state. If you think she did, you may not understand why acting schools exist. Or why they can be ineffective.
But our press corps is deeply, Antoinette-level dumb. They love what's silly--and despise what is "hard." Hence the striking account of Social Security offered by ABC News during Saturday's Dem debate. Like that phone call to C-SPAN in yesterday's HOWLER (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/7/08), we…
mikethemadbiologist | January 12, 2008Once again, someone in the traditional media is projecting their personal opinion onto millions of people without any evidence. Washington Post reporter Dan Balz in one of those hideous 'news analysis' pieces:
Edwards has offended many Democrats with his candidacy. They question his authenticity and see his shift from optimism to anger as the sign of an opportunistic politician. He and his most loyal supporters argue that that's not the case, that the Edwards of 2008 is a reflection of a changed country and his and his wife's changed personal situation.
We're offended, huh? I know some…
mikethemadbiologist | January 10, 2008You might have heard of push polling. But is there now 'push focus grouping'? Push polling is where you call up voters, and ask faux-poll questions that are actually designed to smear a particular candidate. For instance: "If Candidate X were to have had sex with farm animals, would you be more or less inclined to vote for him?" A bit over the top (not by much), but you get the idea. Other push polls are designed to push a political agenda in the same way.
Onto focus groups. In focus groups, you recruit people and ask them questions, the goal being to elicit detailed, longer answers…
mikethemadbiologist | January 10, 2008Here's one example, unintentionally brought to you by NY Times columnist Frank Rich, of how writing political narratives instead of discussing data leads to unsupported conclusions (italics mine):
The continued political import of Iraq could be found in three different polls in the past six weeks -- Pew, ABC News-Washington Post and Wall Street Journal-NBC News. They all showed the same phenomenon: the percentage of Americans who believe that the war is going well has risen strikingly in tandem with the diminution of violence -- from 30 percent in February to 48 percent in November, for…
mikethemadbiologist | January 5, 2008Who ya gonna believe? The Mighty Pundit-ji or your own lyin' eyes? Matthew Yglesias writes (italics mine):
Everyone's gotten to the fact that Newsweek's Evan Thomas is factually wrong to say that increased partisan polarization turns people off from politics. It's worth stopping to pause the fact that Thomas had a false, empirically verifiable, CW [conventional wisdom]-reaffirming thesis in his head and a major newsmagazine went ahead and published it without either the author or any of his editors stopping to check the evidence, which would have proven him wrong. Meanwhile, it's a foregone…
mikethemadbiologist | December 31, 2007That would be William Kristol, their new op-ed writer. It's nice to see that stupid people are being mainstreamed into society. Of course, I never thought of them as a historically oppressed minority...
mikethemadbiologist | December 20, 2007Driftglass is organizing a letter writing campaign to the advertisers on Chicago's hate radio station WIND. If you live in the area, help him out. Here's why:
Remember, if you choose to contact any or all of the organizations on the list;
1. Polite but firm works best to accomplish what you are trying to do.
2. This is not a Free Speech issue. Like any other American, Michael Weiner Savage is free to vomit his lunacy in letters to the editor, or on his preferred street corner, or on a blog, or scrawled in his own shit on his bedroom walls.
Instead this is about Disinvestment. This is about…
mikethemadbiologist | December 13, 2007If you visit ScienceBlogs regularly, you've probably read about ScienceBloglings Sheril Kirshenbaum's and Chris Mooney's proposal for a presidential debate about science. There's a lot I like about this proposal, but the reality of what could happen bothers me. First, what I like about the idea.
For much of the last two and half years, I worked at a non-profit organization that focused on infectious disease policy and programs. Science policy--and politics--are important. The idea that every political candidate would actually have to devise a science policy, and perhaps even be judged by…
mikethemadbiologist | December 8, 2007Republicans are upset that, at the most recent CNN-hosted Republican presidential debate, a member of the audience who turned out to be a Democrat asked a question:
"My name is Keith Kerr, from Santa Rosa, California. I'm retired brigadier general with 43 years of service, and I'm a graduate of the Special Forces Officer Course, the Command and General Staff Course, and the Army War College. And I'm an openly gay man.
"I want to know why you think that American men and women in uniform are not professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians."
This is hardly an unfair question. Had he…
mikethemadbiologist | November 29, 2007Things are kind of hectic, but I stumbled across this interesting post by Chris Colvin, an NBC news writer, about blogging:
Now to the news media.. the Mainstream Media.. as it has become known, and an object lesson in how the blogosphere is changing the way the MSM operates. (And I say this at the risk of sounding hopelessly naive to the many people who think the "corporate media" exists to push a political agenda-- if that's true, I'm either too stupid or too low on the food chain to be able to actually demonstrate it.) Anyway. Salon's Glenn Greenwald has engaged in a fairly brutal…
mikethemadbiologist | November 27, 2007I've considering canceling my New York Times subscription. Here are the pros and cons. The reasons to keep my subscription:
The NY Times has a really good science section (John Tierney excepted). It's worth supporting that.
Much of there 'straight' reporting is quite good--or at least it's better than most other papers'.
Paul Krugman is very good.
The Sunday magazine is usually interesting.
The Sunday book reviews are pretty good.
Some of the other columnists, such as Dan Nocera and Gretchen Morgenson are worth reading.
The reasons I'm considering canceling my subscription have to do…
mikethemadbiologist | November 17, 2007How can a CNN debate be considered news when questions supposedly asked by the audience are actually scripted? Isn't that lying as opposed to news? CNN, at a recent Democratic debate, according to one questioner, screened and scripted every 'audience' question (italics mine):
Maria Luisa, the UNLV student who asked Hillary Clinton whether she preferred "diamonds or pearls" at last night's debate wrote on her MySpace page this morning that CNN forced her to ask the frilly question instead of a pre-approved query about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
"Every single question asked…
mikethemadbiologist | October 18, 2007I'll get to Noah in a bit. But first, digby describes the lobotomization of our national discourse:
Something very disconcerting has been happening in our discourse for some time, even worse than the up-is-downism that has characterized the most unctuously presumptuous members of the Cheney administration. It's no longer just Bush who is blatantly dumb on TV. A lot of public figures these days adopt all the poses and cadence of ordinary conversation, but actually speak in some sort of gibberish language that makes no sense.
...They gesture and talk and sound for all the world as if they are…
mikethemadbiologist | October 10, 2007As if outing Valerie Plame, whose primary task was to monitor and contain WMD proliferation in the Middle East--including Iran, wasn't bad enough, the Bush Administration destroyed another intelligence gathering operation for political gain (italics mine):
A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had…