January 2012
6 posts
WatchNewt Gingrich does media criticism. (It begins at 1:03 in the clip.)
“In the two debates we had here, in Myrtle Beach and in Charleston, where people reacted so strongly to the news media, I think it was something very fundamental that I wish the powers that be in the news media would take seriously. The American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half century to...
WatchMöbius Strip Journalism
I do my share of complaining about horse race reporting in politics. Well, more than my share. (Quick definition: horse race journalism is news about politics in which the only question that counts is: who’s gonna win?) But there’s a reason I complain about it. Sometimes the crazy passes by so quickly we don’t notice how fantastic it is that people get...
December 2011
1 post
November 2011
4 posts
October 2011
6 posts
The key word is "harness," as in what a horse...
As participants continue to speak for themselves while pundits try to get a fix on its “message,” compare these two views of what Occupy Wall Street must be.
From Jason Fitzgerald’s post in the Huffington Posts’ citizen journalism section, Off The Bus.
Occupy Wall Street, in other words, is not occupying anything. It is pointing toward and pointing away. It is pointing...
Fed up with weak reporting on Occupy Wall Street,...
See Robert David Graham, Independent reporting of #OccupyWallStreet
By reporting, I mean such things as contacting the park’s owners asking for an official statement. The protesters are occupying Zuccotti Park, owned by the same company (Brookfield Office Properties NYSE:BPO) that owns the adjacent skyscraper. An obvious step would be to contact them asking for a statement, but I could find...
September 2011
7 posts
We’re going to change your criticism into...
Journalists Washing Their Hands of the Truth.
...
August 2011
1 post
July 2011
4 posts
"Readers of the The Atlantic, I feel compelled to...
This is from an actual note that an actual journalist for The Atlantic sent to readers of his blog at The Atlantic site. It attempts to explain to those readers why his update to a post (Mumbai comes to Norway) suggesting radical Muslims were behind the killing spree in Norway made it look like he had presented this claim as just one theory among many, when in fact, he had not. You can get the...
"We create our own reality." Not so funny now, is...
Ron Suskind in the New York Times, October 17, 2004
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend...
June 2010
1 post
“The reactionaries won. Culture war won. The...
May 2010
2 posts
February 2010
2 posts
The Wrap gets Punked by Frank Luntz and Tries to...
The actual post I published at the local blog LA Observed. Go see it: The Wrap gets punk’d. But LA Observed doesn’t have comments, so I am opening this space to field those.
….Based on what I know The Wrap thinks there’s no story in Luntz’s return to politics one month after quitting politics for Hollywood, and no reason to do a follow-up, even though it appears...
January 2010
1 post
Newspaper Revanchism: Replying to a Live...
Earlier this week, the Independent (UK) ran a column by Tim Luckhurst, a professor of journalism at the University of Kent: Demise of news barons is just a Marxist fantasy. (Read it, please…) I called attention to the column on my Twitter feed. “UK friends! Museum-quality curmudgeon specimen has been unearthed on your shores. I hope you have the preservation skills.” The other...
December 2009
4 posts
My strange Q & A with the editor who said: We must...
Sunday night on Twitter, a link made the rounds among people I follow. It was to an editorial in a web publication called The Digital Journalist, entitled: Let’s Abolish ‘Citizen Journalists’. Now I’ve been tracking varieties of this disdain for years, but this struck me and others as a particularly vivid—in fact, imperious—expression of it.
Citizen journalist...
November 2009
3 posts
No names, no links: Writers give themselves a pass...
Mark Cuban: Rupert Murdoch to Block Google = Smart
I love to tweak all the internet information must be free bigots. They get so damn religious about information on the net that they lose what little objectivity and awareness of the real world they had in the first place
Wherever it’s found, bigotry deserves to be called out— say, with a link? Plus, tweaking people you ID is...
Sources of subsidy in the production of news: a...
I was asked to speak recently at a conference organized by Yale University with the title “Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?” This irritated me. The question should have been “who will subsidize news production?” because news production has always been subsidized by someone or something. Very rarely have users paid directly the costs of...
Rebooting the News System in the Age of Social...
Here are the ten key ideas I plan to share with the Media140/Sydney conference underway right now in Sydney, Australia. I will be speaking to the conference via Skype in a few hours. The theme of the event is “the future of journalism in the social media age.” These ten Twitter-able ideas are my contribution to that puzzle.
1. Audience atomization has been overcome. (Link) 2. Open...
May 2009
3 posts
Mindcasting: defining the form, spreading the meme
A method I endorse is to understand things by participating in them. By doing your own thing, you learn the difference between possible actions (what you can do with the system) and likely behavior: what most people will tend to do when that system is switched on for them. Forget this difference and you foreclose on your invention.
I started about a year ago in my project to understand Twitter by...
I am not a newpaper gravedancer, but if ever I was...
The Tuscon Citizen
Our Opinion: Seeking answers?
Published: 05.16.2009
For those of you looking to this space for perspective on the Citizen’s demise, for those looking for What It All Means - you are looking in the wrong place. Excuse us, but we’re a little too close to the situation right now.
Do you ask someone how it feels when a relative dies after a long bout with cancer?...
Massively Multi-Player Denial: When Do We Grok the...
The problem lay not so much with the poverty of the underlying theory as with selective reading of it—a selective reading shaped by the social milieu. That social milieu encouraged financial decision makers to cherry-pick the theories that supported excessive risk taking. It discouraged whistle-blowing, not just by risk-management officers in large financial institutions, but also by the...
April 2009
10 posts
Freud Called it The Reality Principle. Repealing...
1. “Left to Just Study What We Do.”
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued....
Catch that term "poly-partisan?” It's new. (New...
PoliticsDaily is the brainchild of Martin Moe, senior vice president at AOL, and is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself.
Moe says that while the Huffington Post is largely a content aggregator, has a leftward bent, and doesn’t pay many of its bloggers, PoliticsDaily will be 100% original content from “experienced” paid...
Infantalizing the Readers By Disabusing Them of...
1.
The New York Times’ Peter Baker, who reported on the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations for the Washington Post, said that the Obama administration is “in some ways … more transparent,” but in other ways, “they’re just like every other White House.”
Baker said that while the Obama team will engage with reporters more than the Bush team did, the traditional...
First Hypothesis: The Exaggerations Grow but the...
www.motherjones.com/KevinDrum
Chart of the Day - 4.23.2009
— By Kevin Drum | Thu April 23, 2009 10:01 AM PST
Just kill me now. Via The Monkey Cage.