media

Who are you talking to? Part 1

I just stopped reading an editorial provocatively entitled, "You will lose your private health insurance." (http://bit.ly/7wlpwQ) I thought it might help clarify what precisely is being debated in the House and Senate these days on health care.

But I stopped when I hit this line, "Of course the left will accept restrictions on funding for abortion, because they want to keep moderate Democrats on board for the goal they know is really important: giving the government a dominant role in health care."

Tags: 

Speaking of journalism...the NY Times is doing a lot right

I LOVE this new feature: http://www.nytimes.com/timeswire/index.html

It works great, provides great content, and I suspect I'll be using this as my NYTimes interface from here on out.

Just as an aside, I think the Times approach of subtly introducting new features is the right way to do things: it provides a good soft-launch to assist in debugging, and if it doesn't work, they can just as quietly retract the feature and work on it until it they can make it work well.

Tags: 

Is there any hope for civilization without rhetorical standards for journalism?

Yesterday there was a story that was covered all over the place (Reddit, Wall Street Journal, American Spectator) that stated that Seymour Hersh implicated Dick Cheney in an assasination plot that former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

I didn't even bother to click thru the links because the source was a newspaper in Pakistan, a country well-known for producing journalists who employ J. L. Austin's idea of performative utterances to make fantasy reality.

Tags: 

May, might, and could should be banned from "news" stories and headlines

I just can't hold back today. My morning news gorge begins with Yahoo! news and today I just can't take it: every other section has a story that speculates on some event that may or may not happen, whose outcome fits someone's political agenda, and the news outlet was just too lazy to fact-check the assertions contained in the story.

AP and Fox seem to be the leader in this form of story crafting, but all the news outlets are guilty of it, and it drives me crazy.

Tags: 

Subscribe to RSS - media