No More Bleeding Ledes, Please. Sensationalism is rampant in our consolidated news system, where scandal, celebrity gossip and violence (or the threat of looming violence) lead the headlines. Ever wonder why this is all we see and read and hear? It isn’t simply that scandal and violence are all that’s happening in our communities; in fact, it’s the only news that companies want to cover. And they make it expressly clear to their reporters. Take a look at the “if it bleeds, it leads” approach expressed with chilling precision in the submission guidelines of the self-described “backbone of the world’s information system” – the Associated Press.
Sounds great. Don’t Share: The guidelines for AP Ohio, largely the same, had this gem of an addition: Yes: Single-victim murders that involve unusual circumstances, a prominent person or happen outside the metropolitan areas, where murders are common. No: Routine one-victim murders in big cities, where murders are more common.
What might this vision look like? Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog » Blog Archive » Why don’t we trust the press? Ezra Levant vs Reality – A Prelude To Fox News North « A. Picazo – Midnight Politico. The battle between supporters and opponents of Sun TV News – the Fox News style channel headed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former communications director Kory Teneycke – reached new heights when members of the ‘Fox News North’ team took issue with a growing online petition urging the CRTC to reject Quebecor’s (QMI) request to “make it mandatory for cable and satellite networks to provide access to the channel ‘for a maximum period of three years to effectively expose and promote its programming to viewers across Canada’.”
In an article entitled Anti-Sun TV News campaign in U.S., Sun Media (QMI)’s Brian Lilley alleges the petition is the work of “a group of left-wing Americans supporting interests in Canada that don’t want to see competition in news broadcasting … backed by MoveOn.org a lobby group that has taken millions of dollars from currency speculator George Soros.” “Soros is a Nazi Collaborator“ “Move over, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Moving on, Levant writes: Classy. CHART OF THE DAY: The End Of Newspapers. Newspapers had a nice run from the 1970s to the 1990s. Unfortunately, as this chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics makes clear -- by way of Marketwatch -- it's over. Newspaper employment has utterly collapsed in the last 15 years, with employment numbers now around where they were in the mid-1950s. The good news: It's a great opportunity.
The next decade will give birth to new forms of reporting, more in tune with today's technology and news consumption habits. Confidence in Newspapers, TV News Remains a Rarity. WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans continue to express near-record-low confidence in newspapers and television news -- with no more than 25% of Americans saying they have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in either. These views have hardly budged since falling more than 10 percentage points from 2003-2007. The findings are from Gallup's annual Confidence in Institutions survey, which found the military faring best and Congress faring worst of 16 institutions tested.
Americans' confidence in newspapers and television news is on par with Americans' lackluster confidence in banks and slightly better than their dismal rating of Health Management Organizations and big business. The decline in trust since 2003 is also evident in a 2009 Gallup poll that asked about confidence and trust in the "mass media" more broadly. Implications Survey Methods Samples are weighted by gender, age, race, education, region, and phone lines. Fulbright in Portugal » Blog Archive » Counting heads. It’s not all porto and pastéis de nata for me here in Portugal.
I spent yesterday doing journalism. I was contacted a couple of days earlier by Curt Westergard, whose Airphotoslive.com company uses cameras on tethered balloons to produce high-resolution aerial photos. He had been hired by CBS News to get images of the crowd that gathered Saturday for the Glenn Beck “Restoring Honor” Tea Party rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. CBS also wanted a credible estimate of the size of the crowd. That’s where I came in. I started doing crowd estimates back in my Miami Herald days, for local events such as a visit by Pope John Paul II or the annual Calle Ocho street festival.
Crowd counting, particularly of political events, always is controversial. Naturally, I expected more of the same about my Beck rally estimate. Airphotoslive.com shot for CBS News My estimate is that about 80,000 people were at the rally. Now the fun begins in the blogosphere. The Index of Banned Words (The Continually Updated Edition) | The Loom. Rajendra Pachauri innocent of financial misdealings but smears will continue | George Monbiot | Environment. Has anyone been as badly maligned as Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? In December, the Sunday Telegraph carried a long and prominent feature written by Christopher Booker and Richard North, titled: Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri. The subtitle alleged that Pachauri has been "making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies".
The article maintained that the money made by Pachauri while working for other organisations "must run into millions of dollars". It described his outside interests as "highly lucrative commercial jobs". The story (which has subsequently been removed from the Sunday Telegraph's website) immediately travelled around the world.
There was just one problem: the story was untrue. KPMG studied all Pachauri's financial records, accounts and tax returns, as well as TERI's accounts, for the period 1 April 2008 – 31 December 2009. KPMG concluded: monbiot.com. A cricket writer enlightens us on the Urdu tense system. « previous post | next post » Pakistan is playing England in a series of cricket matches, and on Sunday, August 29, Mike Brearley filed from the famous Lord's cricket ground an unbearably pompous article in The Observer about how things are going. "Cricket is the cruellest game," he began; "It is also, by the same token, the kindest" — I will spare you the rest of the self-contradictory pseudo-literary drivel of his first paragraph.
But with his second paragraph he moves into linguistics and theology, and I think Language Log has to comment on the former: There is no future tense in Urdu; the future is in the hands of Allah, it is not for mortal men to speak as if they presume to know what it holds. But Pakistan's players must at least have feared for their future as the day wore on. Can you guess what I did on seeing this, Language Log readers? FUTUREI shall or will escape həm bəcenŋgeFeminine changes -ga to -gi and -ge to-gi.
So what the hell did Mike Brearley think he was doing? The British Tabloid Phone-Hacking Scandal. Andy Coulson discussed phone hacking at News of the World, report claims | Media. The prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson, freely discussed the use of unlawful news-gathering techniques while editor of the News of the World and "actively encouraged" a named reporter to engage in the illegal interception of voicemail messages, according to allegations published by the New York Times. Coulson, who resigned as editor of the News of the World in January 2007 after its royal correspondent was jailed for intercepting voicemail messages, has always insisted that he had no knowledge of illegal activity when he edited the paper or at any time as a journalist.
He told a Commons select committee last year: "I have never had any involvement in it at all. " The New York Times website published a trail to a story due to appear in its Sunday magazine. Coulson resigned after the imprisonment of his royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, for "hacking" into the voicemail messages of eight public figures. Journalism the third most untrustworthy profession, according to poll. A poll of 3,000 UK adults put journalists behind only politicians and bankers on trusted professions Journalists are the third most distrusted professionals in the UK, according to a new survey by the Co-operative Bank.
The poll of 3,000 UK adults put journalists behind politicians and bankers, but ahead of electricians and estate agents. More than half of those polled (57 per cent) said politicians were the most untrustworthy profession, followed by 43 per cent for bankers. Car salesmen came in joint third place alongside journalists, with 41 per cent saying they were least trustworthy. Plumbers, builders, car mechanics and footballers made up the rest of the top 10. On the other side, doctors, teachers and police were cited amongst the most trusted professions.