Flogging the News Biz
Filed Under Media | Leave a Comment
Not only do politicians spew forth much bullshit, the organization that’s supposed to separate shit from bull is itself full of crap.
US peoples don’t trust journalism:
Only one-quarter of those surveyed say news orgs get the facts right, a new low since 1985 when the question was first asked.
Two-thirds (66 percent) say stories are often inaccurate, a new high.
And nearly three-quarters of Americans believe that journalists try to cover up their mistakes, rather than admit them.
(Illustration found here).
Also in the Pew Research survey: …and 80 percent say news organizations are often influenced by powerful people and organizations.
And local news are trusted more than those national organizations — 69 percent vs 59 percent.
No wonder the US (and the world) is going to shit in a wire basket — much better information, and less biased information can be gathered from the foreign press, at least from what I’ve gathered.
In an example from The Daily Howler on the execution of Troy Davis last week — no real details on evidence were presented by anybody, including the fabled Gray Lady:
The headline on Wednesday’s editorial called the impending execution “a grievous wrong.”
Among other things, you read this:NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (9/21/11): Seven of nine witnesses against Mr. Davis recanted after trial.
Six said the police threatened them if they did not identify Mr. Davis.
The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime.
There are other reasons to doubt Mr. Davis’s guilt: There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime introduced at trial, and new ballistics evidence broke the link between him and a previous shooting that provided the motive for his conviction.Say what? The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime? And Davis was executed anyway?
What happened to the guy who confessed? The editors didn’t say.
Some mess there.
A mega-major problem is media attention span.
Firedoglake on Sunday looked at the nearly-unreported dust-up on Wall Street last week via an interview with Paul Weiskel, a photographer who has been taking photos of the occupation.
Weiskel talks reality:
They had to continually bring in more people and towards the end I honestly felt like it was very close to a police state.
I’ve been very hesitant to say the phrase “police brutality” because we don’t live in Syria.
We don’t deal with that type of police repression but today the New York Police Department did violently crack down on peaceful protesters, who definitely have legitimate claims, and I was flat out disgusted.
And the media interest tends to be non-so-called professionals:
I think with the increase in technology the ability to exchange this news, what’s going on, is pretty much equal if you look at the quality of video coming out, if you look at the quality of pictures coming out—if I could say that.
The main difference is the audience that you have.
There were a lot of tweets saying that right now CNN is running a segment on have dating rules changed in the best decade while people are getting pepper sprayed and beaten by cops on street corners in New York. So, it is a very orchestrated blackout by the media but once we get the audience they’re going to see the images and they’re going to be very high quality and very thought-provoking images.
And black outs?
One must remember that if the national media don’t want you to know something, you won’t know it.
Case in big point: In 2008 the New York Times ran a massive expose on those TV “military analysts” who gave most-wonderful commentary in the opening days of the Iraqi war and how they were in fact on the payroll of the Pentagon in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.
The NYT even won a Pulitzer Prize for the story, but a vast, huge chunk of US peoples haven’t a clue — the TV news outlets, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, etc., all blacked out the story — and the only news report on the expose was a segment on PBS.
In the mid 1970s when I started at the Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama, right out of J-school into the entry-level slot of police reporter, journalism was in its golden age buzz.
On the strength of Watergate, us news room types were a proud bunch as we thought what were doing was not only the neatest job in the whole-wide world, but we were there for the public’s right to know and understand.
That was way-long ago and really far, far away.
Goin’ on Holiday
Filed Under Cloud gazing | Leave a Comment
Today starts the first official vacation I’ve had in years — the last a near-decade ago while working for a newspaper — and the feeling is already weird.
I’ll not be posting again until most-likely next weekend as this ‘vacation‘ is the first time I’ve been disconnected from the online world for any length of time for nearly four years.
And how will I feed my news and info addiction — smoking more cigarettes, how else?
(Illustration found here).
In the reckoning of things, this is a massive news cycle I’m leaving for awhile as everything is hitting the fan, from the US and world economies, to weather, to war, and even a well-received revival of the ‘Ape’ movies.
The news will just have to cease for at least five days.
I’m traveling via AmTrak to central California to visit with three of my daughters — one coming from Tennessee — and hopefully it should be a good time had by all.
And to the scant handful of peoples who visit this site on any kind of regular basis — please don’t forget me.
Have an awesome week!
Shakespeare the Stoner
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Literary, Musings | Leave a Comment
Standing on the corner
Suitcase in my hand
Jack is in his corset and jane is in her vest
And me I’m in a rock and roll band
Riding in a stutz bearcat jim
Those were different times
And the poets studied rules of verse
And all the ladies rolled there eyes
Sweet jane
Sweet jane
Sweet jane
– Mott The Hoople, ‘Sweet Jane‘ (Words and music by Lou Reed)
Creativity is just one delicious side effect of doing a bowl.
Somehow smoke opens new imaginative horizons where the creative factor weighs heavy in the air, alighting like a room full of bong smoke — oh the flow without interruption.
Marijuana lets loose those dogs of words: Last speculative point: marijuana also enhances brain activity (at least as measured indirectly by cerebral blood flow) in the right hemisphere. The drug, in other words, doesn’t just suppress our focus or obliterate our ability to pay attention. Instead, it seems to change the very nature of what we pay attention to, flattening out our hierarchy of associations.
(Illustration found here).
It’s in that high state where the flattening out come in real handy and the creative juices kick in.
Ironic, or maybe it’s just a jagged little pill for innovative thought, but Alanis Morissette agrees:
“As an artist, there’s a sweet jump-starting quality to [marijuana] for me.
I’ve often felt telepathic and receptive to inexplicable messages my whole life.
I can stave those off when I’m not high.
When I’m high — well, they come in and there’s less of a veil, so to speak.
So if ever I need some clarity … or a quantum leap in terms of writing something, it’s a quick way for me to get to it.”
Cop a buzz and you’re head over feet.
And now it appears one of the best-known and most-creative peoples in all of history, Bill Shakespeare, might have been a stoner, and a clue is Sonnet 76:
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.
Shakespeare might have been more inventive than first realized, and research peoples want to find out for good.
In 2001, scientists at the The South African Police Services Forensic Science Laboratory in Pretoria analyzed the stems and bowls of 24 clay pipes — including a number found in the garden of Shakespeare’s home in England — and found traces of tobacco, suggestive evidence of cannabis, and mysteriously, two of the pipes showed signs of what looks like cocaine.
National Geographic explained: The analysis was made after a South African scientist had a hunch that reference to the “noted weed” in one of Shakespeares sonnets may have been the bard’s way of extolling the effects of cannabis. “There were very low concentrations of cannabis, but the signature was there,” said Inspector Tommy van der Merwe, of the Forensic Science Laboratory.
And with the Bard: Of the pipes that were found in the garden of Shakespeare’s home at New Place, several tested positive for cannabis. “We can’t prove that Shakespeare smoked these pipes, but we do now at least know what his contemporaries were smoking,” Thackeray says.
Now they want to dig up Bill’s bones.
From Fox News (h/t Raw Story):
Paleontologists are looking to examine the remains of William Shakespeare, hoping to unlock the mysteries of the life and death of the world’s most famous playwright — and to prove that the poet once puffed.
The bard is buried under a local church in Stratford-upon-Avon. And a team of scientists, led by Francis Thackeray — an anthropologist and director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa — have submitted a formal application to the Church of England for permission to probe the site where he sleeps, perchance where he dreams.
…
“We have incredible techniques,” Thackeray told FoxNews.com, referring to the “nondestructive analysis” the team has planned. “We don’t intend to move the remains at all.” Instead the team will perform the forensic analysis using state-of-the-art technology to scan the bones and create a groundbreaking reconstruction.
…
Thackeray claimed the devices were used to smoke cannabis, a plant actively cultivated in Britain at the time. The allegation has provoked disbelief and anger among some fans of the bard.
Prof. Stanley Wells, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, told the Daily Mail, “I would be happy if they did open it up because it could put an end to a lot of fruitless speculation.”
“If we find grooves between the canine and the incisor, that will tell us if he was chewing on a pipe as well as smoking,” Thackeray told FoxNews.com, citing similar evidence found in Virginia.
However, there’s the curse Bill put on his grave:
Others may have issues with digging up the body, which goes directly against the late playwright’s dying wishes.
Shakespeare, famously fearful of the happenings of his own remains after his death, had a curse engraved on his tomb: “Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare,/ To digg the dust encloased heare;/ Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,/ And curst be he that moves my bones.”
Philip Schwyzer, a senior lecturer at Exeter University, told Reuters that “Shakespeare had an unusual obsession with burial and a fear of exhumation.
The stern inscription on the slab has been at least partially responsible for the fact that there have been no successful projects to open the grave.”
Dude, it’s just bones — chill a second, then re-fill the pipe.
Fake for Real — And We’re Better Off Because of It
Filed Under Media, Scratching Sounds | Leave a Comment
Someone asked why I invited Jon Stewart to be the first guest on the Journal’s premiere in 2007.
“Because Mark Twain isn’t available,” I answered.
I was serious.
Like Twain, Stewart has proven that truth is more digestible when it’s marinated in humor.
– Bill Moyers
A sad state of journalism when its top program and its most-popular individual is a fake — I’m not faking it though, when I laugh my ass off at Stewart and company’s take on the horrid events of our time.
(Illustration found here).
Moyers was on Stewart’s show last week and they discussed that 2007 interview, while concluding the current situation with US journalism is shitty at best, and near-criminal at worst.
And the bottom line, Moyers says: “a lot of news organizations no longer do much reporting.”
However, who gets the last, real laugh?
TV viewers ain’t faking it, though.
From Raw Story:
Comedy Central and “The Daily Show” both surged in the May Nielsen ratings, posting their best numbers yet. “The Daily Show” dominated its time slot across all of television, cable and broadcast, and boasted a very impressive 19 percent increase in viewership in May alone.
Meanwhile, according to Mediabistro’s TV Newser, Fox News suffered an overall decline in viewers in the highly sought-after 25-to-54-year old demographic for May, with total ratings down 10 percent.
Bill O’Reilly’s viewership dropped 9 percent, Sean Hannity’s 6 percent, with Greta Van Susteren and Glenn Beck suffering the steepest losses with Van Susteren’s “On the Record” losing 12 percent of its audience and Glenn Beck sliding a whopping 17 percent.
…
The new Nielsen numbers show that “The Daily Show” averaged 2.3 million viewers, beating every program on Fox except Bill O’Reilly’s average of 2.8 million.
“The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” beat all other cable and broadcast programming in a number of categories, including having the most affluent viewers and the most active web-sties.
The story also points out the drop in the ratings for fringe, bat-shit crazy ranters off the right wing: Some of the fall-off in Beck’s numbers may be attributable to the fact that his show is going off the air, but it has been a consistent loser in the ratings for several months. The drop in public interest is echoed in ratings for radio shows hosted by Beck and Rush Limbaugh, which have each lost a third of their listenership in the last year, according to the radio polling group Arbitron.
US peoples are apparently getting sick and tired of all the bullshit.
And what do the all those figures mean?
From tvbythenumbers: For the month of May 2011, “The Daily Show” averaged 2.3 million total viewers and a 1.2 P18-49 rating. Versus May 2010, “The Daily Show” grew an astounding +19% in total viewers, with incredible double-digit ratings growth across all key demos including P18-49 (up +21%), P18-34 (+22%), P18-24 (+21%), M18-34 (+18%) and M18-24 (+21%).
One just can’t beat that, and it is an indication not only how well the Daily Show is performing, but also how shitty every other media outlet is doing.
And Fox News not only sucks at journalism, but the organization is obviously plain, dumb-ass stupid.
In a story this weekend on Sarah Palin’s latest adventures, and to illustrate the segment, the Fox graphics department showed a photo of Tina Fey imitating the former Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008.
A news organization that’s not really a news organization using a illustration of an actress faking a display of a presidential candidate that’s really not a presidential candidate.
Well, gosh, darn, that is so not Paul Revere.
Who?
Scared of the Fear
Filed Under Bullshit | 1 Comment
“You can’t be afraid of words that speak the truth.
I don’t like words that hide the truth.
I don’t like words that conceal reality.
I don’t like euphemisms or euphemistic language.
And American English is loaded with euphemisms.
Because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality.
Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it.
And it gets worse with every generation.
For some reason it just keeps getting worse.
– George Carlin
Fear is a real-funny word, quoting George again: “I don’t have a fear of heights. I do, however, have a fear of falling from heights.”
Nowadays, it seems, US peoples are living on a kind of extremely-ironic fear, seemingly adjusting to all kinds of scary stuff, with the biggest fright coming from shit that don’t exist.
Although there’s more than enough of reality to be feared, US peoples love their fantasy-fright to be attached to something to be touched.
In the last decade, Osama bin Laden and his cohorts have created a fear of fear itself, a terror of being caught up in terror.
Even though this fear is way down on the to-be-frightened scale — a Cato report of unlikely fear: In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.
Yet when anyone says “Nine-eleven” the fear factor goes off the charts and emotional bullshit fills the airwaves and brain waves, creating a beyond-fear-based lie.
And US peoples are mega gullible when it comes to terror coming from terrorists.
Paul Woodward puts US fear nicely in context via War in Context:
You can’t talk like a five-year old without ending up thinking like a five-year old, yet this is the mentality many Americans bring to bear when they look at the world through the prism of 9/11.
America is at war with “bad guys” and on Monday morning “we got him” — the baddest guy of all.
To the non-American ear there is something at turns amusing then disturbing about the fact that full-grown adults, including literate and less literate presidents, can, without any sense of irony, use this kind of comic-book language.
Yet beneath these simplistic expressions is a sense of innocence that Americans cling to, born from the notion that this is a nation that can do no wrong; that at worst America can be misguided but its errors will ultimately never obscure its intrinsic virtue.
What 9/11 and its aftermath did was to widen the gap between the way America sees itself and the way it is seen by the world.
If some of us might have hoped that this nation had grown up a bit over the last decade, there has been little evidence of that over the last few days.
…
The American story is a story of power and virtue we keep telling ourselves as though it would quickly be forgotten or disbelieved if not reinforced through constant repetition.
Yet what might be conceived as a form of self- and national affirmation serves no good if it refuses to accommodate reality.
If our self-image is not informed and modified by the perceptions of others, it is no more than a conceit — a picture we can only believe in by refusing to see ourselves through the eyes of others.
The real fear is what is real.
Climate change is real — but, oops, it’s just not scary enough yet, though, US peoples in the southeast, and now on the flood plains of the midwest, would think different.
Peak oil is real, yet no one is ready to give up his SUV.
Both of those fears are fears based on some real-bad reality, but no where as frightful are Osama and his boys.
And the economy — be afraid, be really, really scared as shit.
Paul Krugman in his New York Times column this morning looks at invisible monsters.
Some nuggets:
From G.D.P. to private-sector payrolls, from business surveys to new claims for unemployment insurance, key economic indicators suggest that the recovery may be sputtering.
…
It’s not as if our political class is feeling complacent.
On the contrary, D.C. economic discourse is saturated with fear: fear of a debt crisis, of runaway inflation, of a disastrous plunge in the dollar.
Scare stories are very much on politicians’ minds.
Yet none of these scare stories reflect anything that is actually happening, or is likely to happen.
And while the threats are imaginary, fear of these imaginary threats has real consequences: an absence of any action to deal with the real crisis, the suffering now being experienced by millions of jobless Americans and their families.
…
Which brings me back to the destructive effect of focusing on invisible monsters.
For the clear and present danger to the American economy isn’t what some people imagine might happen one of these days, it’s what is actually happening now.
Unemployment isn’t just blighting the lives of millions, it’s undermining America’s future.
The longer this goes on, the more workers will find it impossible ever to return to employment, the more young people will find their prospects destroyed because they can’t find a decent starting job.
It may not create excited chatter on cable TV, but the unemployment crisis is real, and it’s eating away at our society.
Yet any action to help the unemployed is vetoed by the fear-mongers.
Should we spend modest sums on job creation?
No way, say the deficit hawks, who threaten us with the purely hypothetical wrath of financial markets, and, in fact, demand that we slash spending now now now — which might well send us back into recession. Should the Federal Reserve do more to promote expansion?
No, say the inflation and dollar hawks, who have been wrong again and again but insist that this time their dire warnings about runaway prices and a plunging dollar really will be vindicated.
Don’t be scared, just take off those rose-colored glasses and you’ll be fine.