My feelings on the News Corp hacking scandal shouldn't really have to be guessed at. Nor should I waste time mincing words. Assuming News Corp is guilty as charged, I want them to go down and go down HARD. Hacking the phones of your subjects has no place in journalism or decent humanity. Add that to your subjects being murder victims and 9/11 victims, and your hacking actively impeding the investigations of same, and to say the least, you have no place in the journalism industry. Or polite society.
Bribing the cops to give you your scoops? Seriously, come on.
That established: one of my new favorite phrases has come out of this whole sorry affair. You know, one of those phrases you say you're going to start working into everyday conversation, and then you actually do that maybe twice before realizing you have no place for it in everyday conversation. That phrase is 'reverse ferret'.
As the story goes, Kelvin Mackenzie, former editor of The Sun, loved to go after people. When he had a target in his sights, he'd instruct his newsroom to "put a ferret up their trousers." At the same time, though, Mackenzie wasn't stupid. He knew that sometimes, taking this tack, he would have to back off lest The Sun get into trouble, legally, financially, politically or in the court of public opinion. When The Sun was at risk in this respect, he'd go into the newsroom and yell "Reverse ferret!" This was the signal for The Sun to play nice until they were out of danger.
You'll hear the phrase a fair bit over the course of the scandal. First, 'reverse ferret' is the most wonderful phrase in the world and every excuse should be taken to use it as much as possible. Reverse ferret. Reverse ferret. Reverse ferret. Second, the meaning of the phrase- back off the outrage and play nice- describes why Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp., is completely and utterly screwed. One of his holdings needs a specific, special emergency phrase just to tell them not to be jerks.
Translation: there's really no apology or measure of restitution Murdoch could possibly make to get himself out of this mess on his own terms. Any such measure will simply be called a reverse ferret and all investigations (oh, the glorious, glorious investigations) will simply continue on schedule.
Case in point, take Rebekah Brooks, editor of News of the World when the catalyst for this entire saga, the hacking of the phone of murder victim Milly Dowler, occurred. When Murdoch closed News of the World, the very first thing that crossed people's minds was that it was a move to protect Brooks. There was no celebration, no relief, no 'this is a positive step' editorials. No reaction whatsoever that would have signified a successful reverse ferret. The stink was not with News of the World, even though it was there too. The target was Brooks herself.
A few days ago, Brooks resigned from News Corp. Earlier in the scandal, that might- MIGHT, not a guarantee- have worked as a reverse ferret. Now, though, it's too late to be a successful fix. Enough time had passed to where the scandal had spread to every corner of Murdoch's empire. Brooks' departure was characterized by The Independent as "After 52 years, mogul's ally quits to protect jewel of US empire".
The phrase 'to protect'. Meaning, 'that's nice and all, but we have a bigger target in mind and we're not going away'. And the target is now Murdoch himself. Considering that News Corp. is centralized around Murdoch- structured to be so- to the degree that nothing really gets done without his say-so, that's a gigantic threat. Murdoch's been able to take a slow, steady stream of loyal opposition, but he hasn't dealt with something on the scale of the FBI and a united British Parliament going after him simultaneously.
So what happens to him, ultimately? On the American side of the Atlantic, the major criticism in my social circles is that while England may savage him, America won't care enough, his supporters are entrenched too deeply, for him to suffer in America or for Fox News, his most prominent American holding, to take any true damage.
My rebuttal is twofold. First: reverse ferret.
Sorry. Couldn't help it. First, the 9/11 victim-hacking aspect of this story hasn't fully unfolded yet. There is speculation, investigation, but so far nothing solid. So far, all the official, confirmed aspects of this scandal are UK-contained, and so given America's inclination to only care about America, more airtime has been given over here to Casey Anthony. (Which is downright shameful.) If the 9/11-victim link goes official, though, if the name of an affected victim comes out, well, all bets are off over here. There's no way that can't blow up... at least outside of Fox News, which is Murdoch-owned and thus has every incentive to try to save itself. Those who only watch Fox News still won't have a clue, but they're not the ones conducting the investigations. And the ones conducting the investigations are the ones Murdoch has to worry about.
Second, the kind of empire Murdoch has built isn't really structured so that he can just run to the other side of the Atlantic. If Murdoch goes down hard enough in Britain, it won't matter what he has going for him in America. Rupert Murdoch does not have clones running around. He is one man. If that one man, that one man that the entire empire is structured around, is taken down, the whole fortress is liable to crumble in his absence, like a video game boss whose lair collapses the second you beat him. News Corp., in Murdoch's absence, could do anything from undergoing a semi-orderly transition to shattering into a billion pieces.
And every new wrinkle, every new body found buried, only fuels the investigation further and digs the hooks in deeper, making Murdoch's ultimate departure more and more likely. For example, this newly-breaking news about the original News of the World whistleblower ever-so-magically turning up dead. The police do not, at least initially, consider it suspicious, but even official statements from the police have been rendered suspect, with multiple high-ranking officers of New Scotland Yard under investigation themselves for their roles in the scandal.
As deep as Murdoch's problems are in Britain, whether he suffers fallout in America is almost beside the point. He is liable to suffer a fall in America merely by proxy, rendered unable to operate in America to the degree he has been accustomed due to the damage suffered in Britain. It's all the same empire in the end.
So could he make an orderly transition to save News Corp from maximum damage (and there's almost no telling what 'maximum damage' might entail)? Given that he's 80 years old, he's certainly made plans. He would prefer to hand it down to his children. However, they've all got problems of their own, ranging from inexperience (42-year-old daughter Elisabeth) to past corporate failures (39-year-old son Lachlan) to being consumed by the scandal themselves (38-year-old son James). Elisabeth has been spotted verbally attacking James, saying that he "fucked the company". Shareholder pressure exists to hand control to someone from outside the family entirely, someone that doesn't have the tainted Murdoch name. Were that to happen, whoever took over almost certainly would not run things in so centralized a manner.
Which would probably be the biggest reverse ferret of all.
Showing posts with label journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label journalism. Show all posts
Monday, July 18, 2011
Friday, July 8, 2011
Outside The Lines, Inside The All-Star Team
Recently, I ruminated about the wisdom of including sportswriters on the Journalism All-Star Team. This was done after being confronted with Grantland. Grantland includes some very stellar writing, but then, the focus is on sports and pop culture, two of the lesser-heralded beats of the industry. The fields just plain are not as important as others in the grand scheme of things; when world events such as 9/11 or the death of Osama bin Laden intrude on sports, sportswriters will often make a mention of how, when it gets down to it, it's just a game.
It is not, however, impossible to practice true, traditional, thoughtful journalism in these fields. It's just a lot harder to do than in fields of greater importance.
Which is why I am today kicking myself. There is someone covering sports, at ESPN yet, that practices true, traditional journalism day in and day out to such a degree that they deserve an All-Star jersey. In fact, there are two. But I was so worried about Grantland that I failed to notice.
Why did I not notice Bob Ley and Jeremy Schaap earlier?
Ley, along with Chris Berman, is one of the only two anchors from ESPN's founding in 1979 to still be with the network. You currently know him as the host of Outside The Lines, and the most straight-laced reporter ESPN has. Ley was one of the anchors ESPN went to for the only airing of SportsCenter on 9/11, sitting alongside Trey Wingo. When ESPN has a deep, controversial issue to cover, one that is too heavy to be given the usual treatment of a couple of guys yelling at each other, you can be pretty sure Ley, an eight-time Sports Emmy winner, is not too far away. He has stewarded Outside The Lines from its start in 1990 as a monthly special to its current half-hour weekday timeslot.
And when Ley needs a day off, Jeremy Schaap is usually the first person turned to as a substitute. He has six Sports Emmys to his name for his work on Outside The Lines, as well as SportsCenter and fellow investigative show E:60, a weekly one-hour program. On occasion, you'll also see him on the mainstream-news circuit through appearances on Nightline and ABC's World News Tonight.
As is what we might as well call tradition at this point, Ley and Schaap will now be shown at the top of their respective games.
Ley first, showing how traditional journalism can be done at the sports desk on a daily basis with this discussion concerning concussions in hockey:
As for Schaap, when you type his name into YouTube and view the suggestions, above even his name alone will be his name sitting alongside Bobby Fischer. This will lead you to his most famous moment (one that got him one of his Emmys), the 2005 report "Finding Bobby Fischer". I remember this piece from when it was first presented, and part of why it got the level of attention it did was the fact that Schaap, who almost never editorializes, did so in this piece, and to Fischer's face at that.
Editorializing in journalism is a bit like using the word "fuck", or a comedian cracking up at a joke during their skit. The power it has when you do it is inversely proportional to how often you do it. If Quentin Tarantino says "fuck", you don't notice. It barely even registers. If the Dalai Lama says "fuck", you can just hear the record needle scratch.
In the same way, the more a journalist editorializes, the less you tend to notice any one editorial, including those in op-ed section itself. If you see an editorial by George Will, it probably won't register for long. It's George Will. That's what he does. That's ALL he does. But if Walter Cronkite editorializes, holy hell, sound the alarm bells.
The latter is what happened with Schaap when he, well, found Bobby Fischer. As it happened, Fischer had long ago befriended Jeremy's father Dick, but Dick over the years had become dismayed over Fischer's brewing anti-Semitism. Especially since the Schaaps were Jewish. As was Fischer. Dick would eventually remark that Fischer "did not have a sane bone left in his body," words still ringing in Fischer's years decades later when Jeremy found him in Iceland...
It is not, however, impossible to practice true, traditional, thoughtful journalism in these fields. It's just a lot harder to do than in fields of greater importance.
Which is why I am today kicking myself. There is someone covering sports, at ESPN yet, that practices true, traditional journalism day in and day out to such a degree that they deserve an All-Star jersey. In fact, there are two. But I was so worried about Grantland that I failed to notice.
Why did I not notice Bob Ley and Jeremy Schaap earlier?
Ley, along with Chris Berman, is one of the only two anchors from ESPN's founding in 1979 to still be with the network. You currently know him as the host of Outside The Lines, and the most straight-laced reporter ESPN has. Ley was one of the anchors ESPN went to for the only airing of SportsCenter on 9/11, sitting alongside Trey Wingo. When ESPN has a deep, controversial issue to cover, one that is too heavy to be given the usual treatment of a couple of guys yelling at each other, you can be pretty sure Ley, an eight-time Sports Emmy winner, is not too far away. He has stewarded Outside The Lines from its start in 1990 as a monthly special to its current half-hour weekday timeslot.
And when Ley needs a day off, Jeremy Schaap is usually the first person turned to as a substitute. He has six Sports Emmys to his name for his work on Outside The Lines, as well as SportsCenter and fellow investigative show E:60, a weekly one-hour program. On occasion, you'll also see him on the mainstream-news circuit through appearances on Nightline and ABC's World News Tonight.
As is what we might as well call tradition at this point, Ley and Schaap will now be shown at the top of their respective games.
Ley first, showing how traditional journalism can be done at the sports desk on a daily basis with this discussion concerning concussions in hockey:
As for Schaap, when you type his name into YouTube and view the suggestions, above even his name alone will be his name sitting alongside Bobby Fischer. This will lead you to his most famous moment (one that got him one of his Emmys), the 2005 report "Finding Bobby Fischer". I remember this piece from when it was first presented, and part of why it got the level of attention it did was the fact that Schaap, who almost never editorializes, did so in this piece, and to Fischer's face at that.
Editorializing in journalism is a bit like using the word "fuck", or a comedian cracking up at a joke during their skit. The power it has when you do it is inversely proportional to how often you do it. If Quentin Tarantino says "fuck", you don't notice. It barely even registers. If the Dalai Lama says "fuck", you can just hear the record needle scratch.
In the same way, the more a journalist editorializes, the less you tend to notice any one editorial, including those in op-ed section itself. If you see an editorial by George Will, it probably won't register for long. It's George Will. That's what he does. That's ALL he does. But if Walter Cronkite editorializes, holy hell, sound the alarm bells.
The latter is what happened with Schaap when he, well, found Bobby Fischer. As it happened, Fischer had long ago befriended Jeremy's father Dick, but Dick over the years had become dismayed over Fischer's brewing anti-Semitism. Especially since the Schaaps were Jewish. As was Fischer. Dick would eventually remark that Fischer "did not have a sane bone left in his body," words still ringing in Fischer's years decades later when Jeremy found him in Iceland...
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Journalism All-Star Draft Pool
As a policy, my journalism all-star team is staffed by individual journalists, not organizations. (To remind you of the current makeup of the team, in no particular order: Rachel Maddow, Mariana van Zeller, Soledad O'Brien, Jon Stewart, Nate Silver, Gwen Ifill, Stephen Colbert, Sanjay Gupta, Andrew Sullivan, Fareed Zakaria, Matt Taibbi, Anderson Cooper, Christiane Amanpour, and Laura and Lisa, the sisters Ling. Shepard Smith, due to his continued presence on Fox News, is on the DL.)
I don't have any jerseys to hand out today. But there are two places from which any new addition to the roster is likely to come.
First is Bill Simmons' new venture in sportswriting, Grantland. To a fair degree, Grantland looks a bit like what I would do if I were focusing solely on sports and pop culture, and deleted all the quickie give-you-something-to-do posts. Long-form, free-flowing wavering between covering a recent event and telling a story that just happens to be on someone's mind at the time. And Simmons has called upon quite the stable of writers. Depending on how I feel about adding a pure sportswriter, I may end up inducting someone from Grantland soon, perhaps Simmons himself, perhaps someone else. Haven't made up my mind yet.
The second place is Journeyman Pictures, which you can find on this YouTube channel. Based out of the UK, they do mini-documentaries on a wide variety of topics from around the world. They're like a higher-output, faster-turnaround version of the National Geographic Channel, but without all the episodes of Dog Whisperer.
Why no inductees from here? A few reasons: first, their website hides full hour-long documentaries behind a paywall, which in and of itself is a bit of an obstacle. (The YouTube channel is of course free, although there it's nigh-impossible to scrounge up any names at all.) Second, they don't do a very good job of sorting works by reporter, and as a result, I simply haven't gotten through any one individual's various works yet. Again, we reward individuals here, not organizations.
Although if our all-star team needed a home stadium, we know who we ought to call.
Here's one recent piece from Journeyman out of, what a coincidence, Wisconsin (amazingly, it has nothing to do with the recall efforts):
I don't have any jerseys to hand out today. But there are two places from which any new addition to the roster is likely to come.
First is Bill Simmons' new venture in sportswriting, Grantland. To a fair degree, Grantland looks a bit like what I would do if I were focusing solely on sports and pop culture, and deleted all the quickie give-you-something-to-do posts. Long-form, free-flowing wavering between covering a recent event and telling a story that just happens to be on someone's mind at the time. And Simmons has called upon quite the stable of writers. Depending on how I feel about adding a pure sportswriter, I may end up inducting someone from Grantland soon, perhaps Simmons himself, perhaps someone else. Haven't made up my mind yet.
The second place is Journeyman Pictures, which you can find on this YouTube channel. Based out of the UK, they do mini-documentaries on a wide variety of topics from around the world. They're like a higher-output, faster-turnaround version of the National Geographic Channel, but without all the episodes of Dog Whisperer.
Why no inductees from here? A few reasons: first, their website hides full hour-long documentaries behind a paywall, which in and of itself is a bit of an obstacle. (The YouTube channel is of course free, although there it's nigh-impossible to scrounge up any names at all.) Second, they don't do a very good job of sorting works by reporter, and as a result, I simply haven't gotten through any one individual's various works yet. Again, we reward individuals here, not organizations.
Although if our all-star team needed a home stadium, we know who we ought to call.
Here's one recent piece from Journeyman out of, what a coincidence, Wisconsin (amazingly, it has nothing to do with the recall efforts):
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Jim Lehrer To (Semi-) Retire
We have the impending departure of one of our All-Stars to report: as of June 6, Jim Lehrer will be stepping down from his post as the 36-year anchor of PBS' Newshour. He won't be gone entirely, but the 76-year-old Lehrer will take a more limited role in the program, coming in on Fridays to do week-in-review analysis.
It's a sad moment; Lehrer has more than earned his semi-retirement. But he leaves some gigantic shoes to fill, such that you really don't want to see him go. Even if you've never watched him on Newshour, his absence will be felt when he's no longer tapped to moderate Presidential debates. He is the undisputed king of the Presidential debate, with 11 tours of duty on his record, and given our current political climate, finding a man or woman to ably take the helm in his stead will be no easy feat. Not to mention finding a new daily anchor for Newshour; Meet the Press had to deal with similar circumstances upon the sudden death of Tim Russert, and David Gregory has only served to prove just how much Russert is missed.
As our All-Star team only includes active journalists, and he's easing out of 'active' territory, we'll be removing him from the team upon the conclusion of the June 6 broadcast; with no replacement pending, the team will stand at 16 members. He, however, leaves the team with the highest honor. We're gonna miss you, Jim.
It's a sad moment; Lehrer has more than earned his semi-retirement. But he leaves some gigantic shoes to fill, such that you really don't want to see him go. Even if you've never watched him on Newshour, his absence will be felt when he's no longer tapped to moderate Presidential debates. He is the undisputed king of the Presidential debate, with 11 tours of duty on his record, and given our current political climate, finding a man or woman to ably take the helm in his stead will be no easy feat. Not to mention finding a new daily anchor for Newshour; Meet the Press had to deal with similar circumstances upon the sudden death of Tim Russert, and David Gregory has only served to prove just how much Russert is missed.
As our All-Star team only includes active journalists, and he's easing out of 'active' territory, we'll be removing him from the team upon the conclusion of the June 6 broadcast; with no replacement pending, the team will stand at 16 members. He, however, leaves the team with the highest honor. We're gonna miss you, Jim.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Remember The Goat
Sunday, on Lisa Ling's Twitter feed:
Here's the ad she's referring to. So as not to cause the highlighted problem, it's a link and not an embed. Her first comment got picked up by a couple gaming forums, and the reaction was pretty largely 'who cares what she thinks' and 'idiot media is trying to stir up videogame controversy again'.
I'm not going to speak to the actual PTSD-causing quality of the ad- my dad, a Vietnam veteran, will commonly talk in his sleep using statements that frequently seem military-related, though to my knowledge he's not yet seen the ad and hasn't shown any waking-hour flashbacks of any stripe; otherwise he wouldn't be watching war stuff all day.
Though I will say that that particular ad isn't really all that outstanding or notable considering the genre. There are plenty of games just like it who have done similar ads. Unless this is some sort of crazy Pikachu-causing-a-seizure instance where the specific blend of images causes a trigger, I don't think she has much to worry about here. I think it might just be a side effect of her having been, as she said, working with PTSD veterans. Being around the subject a lot lately, it was fresh in her mind when she saw the ad, noticed it when she wouldn't have noticed it previously, and had the reaction she had. I think she overreacted, but I get her train of thought.
It's easy to see where the gamers are coming from too, particularly for me, a gamer myself. I grew up on the Atari and NES. A number of fights with the media and even governments over the years over a wide variety of games- Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, Postal, Doom, Night Trap, Death Race 2000, just to name a few off the top of my head- has given gamers a sort of 'oh, geez, here we go again' attitude towards any new controversy, or anything that even has the whiff of a controversy. They brace themselves any time a videogame is even tangentically connected to something bad in the news. If a kid shoots up a school, after 'that's terrible', one of the first reactions you'll likely get from a gamer is 'please don't let there be an Xbox in his room when the cops show up at his house,' because if there is, they know exactly what's liable to happen next. Whatever game was spinning in his Xbox at the time is at risk of being the next controversy, especially if it was a game with guns in it.
And since the Battlefield 3 ad doesn't really stand out, the reaction is pretty much to dismiss Lisa as one more stupid journalist that has no idea what she's talking about.
Epke of the forum NoobToob, however, made a different point:
That's the other thing about 'controversial' games: controversy sells. People want to see what all the fuss is about. And oh, it can get much, much worse.
How much worse?
In 2007, Sony was promoting God of War 2 at a European release party in Athens, Greece. Fitting, as God of War references (read: kills) a large chunk of Greek mythology. In this release party, Sony went for the theme of an ancient Greek orgy. Attendees were treated to topless women.
Nobody noticed the topless women.
This is because everybody was too busy noticing the decapitated goat. The Daily Mail kicked off the controversy by describing it as such:
Sony released a statement in response saying that this was irresponsible reporting. Nobody was eating out of the goat, and it was returned to the butcher afterward. Well, that just makes it SO much better.
Everybody got in an uproar over this one, gamers included. Sony's explanation barely even slowed anyone down, with the response being simply 'you're still using a dead goat to promote your game'.
Here's actual footage of the event, so as to get away from he-said-she-said. You'll note in the video that snakes were not pulled out of a pit, but rather a key from a box filled with snakes, and the goat thing consisted of drinking something out of a large pot; Sony claimed it was punch. The knife-throwing, though, seems to have been described accurately.
God of War 2, of course, sold like gangbusters.
The eternal knock on violent games has been that the gamers somehow can't tell games from reality; that they'll put down the game, go about their day, and then mindlessly shoot someone thinking they'll get points for it, or something else of that nature.
Everything described by the Daily Mail, even that which was shown as wrong, is something most gamers would do in a game without thinking twice about it. Killing a goat is nothing. Using an in-game goat as a golf ball is a story you repeat on forums. In real life, though, when a goat gets killed, those same gamers will react like everyone else.
Battlefield 3 shouldn't be any different, for gamers or veterans. At least, that's what I'm hoping.
UPDATE: Lisa took the time to respond...
"Thx Aaron...I JUST returned home from a veterans retreat where men had been dealing with severe ptsd for decades. They told me that any realistic portrayal of war sends them into a panic. When I saw that commercial out of the blue, I couldn't help but think of those guys. I have nothing against the video game itself, but seeing the commercial on TV--and how real it is just startled me."
"Any realistic portrayal of war" is a fair bit more disheartening; as I stated, Battlefield 3's ad isn't that unusual. Ads and trailers for franchises like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, as well as the rest of the Battlefield franchise, aren't going to be any easier on them. Halo, Killzone and Metal Gear would easily count as well if the threshold for 'realistic' is adjusted low enough.
Horrified by the new Battlefield 3 commercial I just saw--especially after working with U.S. veterans with severe PTSD.
To the Battlefield gamers out there: I have no prob with the games, but when commercials come on randomly, it can trigger things.
Here's the ad she's referring to. So as not to cause the highlighted problem, it's a link and not an embed. Her first comment got picked up by a couple gaming forums, and the reaction was pretty largely 'who cares what she thinks' and 'idiot media is trying to stir up videogame controversy again'.
I'm not going to speak to the actual PTSD-causing quality of the ad- my dad, a Vietnam veteran, will commonly talk in his sleep using statements that frequently seem military-related, though to my knowledge he's not yet seen the ad and hasn't shown any waking-hour flashbacks of any stripe; otherwise he wouldn't be watching war stuff all day.
Though I will say that that particular ad isn't really all that outstanding or notable considering the genre. There are plenty of games just like it who have done similar ads. Unless this is some sort of crazy Pikachu-causing-a-seizure instance where the specific blend of images causes a trigger, I don't think she has much to worry about here. I think it might just be a side effect of her having been, as she said, working with PTSD veterans. Being around the subject a lot lately, it was fresh in her mind when she saw the ad, noticed it when she wouldn't have noticed it previously, and had the reaction she had. I think she overreacted, but I get her train of thought.
It's easy to see where the gamers are coming from too, particularly for me, a gamer myself. I grew up on the Atari and NES. A number of fights with the media and even governments over the years over a wide variety of games- Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, Postal, Doom, Night Trap, Death Race 2000, just to name a few off the top of my head- has given gamers a sort of 'oh, geez, here we go again' attitude towards any new controversy, or anything that even has the whiff of a controversy. They brace themselves any time a videogame is even tangentically connected to something bad in the news. If a kid shoots up a school, after 'that's terrible', one of the first reactions you'll likely get from a gamer is 'please don't let there be an Xbox in his room when the cops show up at his house,' because if there is, they know exactly what's liable to happen next. Whatever game was spinning in his Xbox at the time is at risk of being the next controversy, especially if it was a game with guns in it.
And since the Battlefield 3 ad doesn't really stand out, the reaction is pretty much to dismiss Lisa as one more stupid journalist that has no idea what she's talking about.
Epke of the forum NoobToob, however, made a different point:
EA [the publisher] will be pleased, there is no such thing as bad press, BF3 will sell more because of this.
And what is the biggie? it is not like the airport massacre in [Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2], just war like war is.
That's the other thing about 'controversial' games: controversy sells. People want to see what all the fuss is about. And oh, it can get much, much worse.
How much worse?
In 2007, Sony was promoting God of War 2 at a European release party in Athens, Greece. Fitting, as God of War references (read: kills) a large chunk of Greek mythology. In this release party, Sony went for the theme of an ancient Greek orgy. Attendees were treated to topless women.
Nobody noticed the topless women.
This is because everybody was too busy noticing the decapitated goat. The Daily Mail kicked off the controversy by describing it as such:
At the event, guests competed to see who could eat the most offal - procured elsewhere and intended to resemble the goat's intestines - from its stomach.
They also threw knives at targets and pulled live snakes from a pit with their bare hands.
Topless girls added to the louche atmosphere by dipping grapes into guests' mouths, while a male model portraying Kratos, the game's warrior hero, handed out garlands.
Sony released a statement in response saying that this was irresponsible reporting. Nobody was eating out of the goat, and it was returned to the butcher afterward. Well, that just makes it SO much better.
Everybody got in an uproar over this one, gamers included. Sony's explanation barely even slowed anyone down, with the response being simply 'you're still using a dead goat to promote your game'.
Here's actual footage of the event, so as to get away from he-said-she-said. You'll note in the video that snakes were not pulled out of a pit, but rather a key from a box filled with snakes, and the goat thing consisted of drinking something out of a large pot; Sony claimed it was punch. The knife-throwing, though, seems to have been described accurately.
God of War 2, of course, sold like gangbusters.
The eternal knock on violent games has been that the gamers somehow can't tell games from reality; that they'll put down the game, go about their day, and then mindlessly shoot someone thinking they'll get points for it, or something else of that nature.
Everything described by the Daily Mail, even that which was shown as wrong, is something most gamers would do in a game without thinking twice about it. Killing a goat is nothing. Using an in-game goat as a golf ball is a story you repeat on forums. In real life, though, when a goat gets killed, those same gamers will react like everyone else.
Battlefield 3 shouldn't be any different, for gamers or veterans. At least, that's what I'm hoping.
UPDATE: Lisa took the time to respond...
"Thx Aaron...I JUST returned home from a veterans retreat where men had been dealing with severe ptsd for decades. They told me that any realistic portrayal of war sends them into a panic. When I saw that commercial out of the blue, I couldn't help but think of those guys. I have nothing against the video game itself, but seeing the commercial on TV--and how real it is just startled me."
"Any realistic portrayal of war" is a fair bit more disheartening; as I stated, Battlefield 3's ad isn't that unusual. Ads and trailers for franchises like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, as well as the rest of the Battlefield franchise, aren't going to be any easier on them. Halo, Killzone and Metal Gear would easily count as well if the threshold for 'realistic' is adjusted low enough.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
I'm Live In Washington, And As You Can See, Everyone In America Is A Congressman
If you're from anywhere that isn't a national or at least regional media center, parachute journalism has probably happened to you at least once. Rick Larson of the Tri-City Herald in Washington state is putting up with it now. Parachute journalism, as he explains, comes when something notable happens in your hometown that you, being a local, can readily understand. Your local paper will probably do a pretty good job of reporting on it.
But that's not the report anyone outside your hometown is likely to see, because in come the bigger papers, the TV affiliates, to make camp, to do their reports on it for their larger audiences. And they, not being locals, are less capable of understanding what's going on or why, so their reporting is lackluster. They often do such a hack job of the story that the locals just end up wanting all the out-of-towners to go away.
Larson mentions it in relation to the area's Hanford nuclear reservation, the cleanup of which has caused many parachute journalists to come in and frown at it. Chronically high unemployment has been handwaved by the parachuters by basically going to the mall, failing to find a parking space, and marveling at a new store selling $800 handbags.
It has happened to us in Watertown. We're about halfway between Madison and Milwaukee. Some years ago, there was a tire fire just off the west end of town. Someone had stored way too many tires, it got to be unsafe, they caught fire somehow and off they went. You could see the black plume of smoke from any point in town, and probably a lot further afield as well. It was pretty bad- it took days to put it out- but beyond that, most of us in town treated it as something of a novelty. We found this bluff at a safe distance a couple farming fields away, parked our cars, set up lawn chairs and just watched the thing burn for a while. It was something different. The owner eventually ended up paying a huge fine; the fire engines involved got honored at a picnic in nearby Lebanon later that summer.
If you were to watch the news, though, you got a slightly different take on things. To hear the Madison and Milwaukee affiliates tell it, this was some huge, life-changing thing that brought Watertown to a screeching halt. A couple children's extracirricular activities were cancelled- you don't want the kids getting bits of rubber raining into their hair (something that didn't happen to me at any point)- but that was literally it as far as disruptions went. We get worse disruptions from snow in the winter. As far as the affiliates were concerned, though, that was enough to consider the city's collective life to be "on hold".
CNN's Wolf Blitzer, meanwhile, took the time to note that the plume of smoke was visible from a satellite photo. This is a distinction that becomes less meaningful every day. I can find my house on Google Earth. You can, and probably have, found your house too.
More recently, concerning the ongoing labor struggle and subsequent electoral fights, it's happened again. Wisconsinites have made a point of not really paying much attention to what out-of-state media was saying one way or the other. As soon as the national media began to assume that Wisconsin's state legislature worked just like Congress, and started asking why it doesn't, and why don't we make it like Congress, we pretty much tuned the out-of-towners out completely. When I was in Madison for the protests, I remember having to tell a CNBC guy from Cleveland not to stand under the tree that's shedding snow, because he's liable to get dumped on.
In their absence, we've gone to seeking coverage from the actual locals. The in-state affiliates, particularly the Madison affiliates. They're from Wisconsin. They send represenatives from their areas to Madison. They know how the state legislature works.
They have some idea what they're talking about.
But that's not the report anyone outside your hometown is likely to see, because in come the bigger papers, the TV affiliates, to make camp, to do their reports on it for their larger audiences. And they, not being locals, are less capable of understanding what's going on or why, so their reporting is lackluster. They often do such a hack job of the story that the locals just end up wanting all the out-of-towners to go away.
Larson mentions it in relation to the area's Hanford nuclear reservation, the cleanup of which has caused many parachute journalists to come in and frown at it. Chronically high unemployment has been handwaved by the parachuters by basically going to the mall, failing to find a parking space, and marveling at a new store selling $800 handbags.
It has happened to us in Watertown. We're about halfway between Madison and Milwaukee. Some years ago, there was a tire fire just off the west end of town. Someone had stored way too many tires, it got to be unsafe, they caught fire somehow and off they went. You could see the black plume of smoke from any point in town, and probably a lot further afield as well. It was pretty bad- it took days to put it out- but beyond that, most of us in town treated it as something of a novelty. We found this bluff at a safe distance a couple farming fields away, parked our cars, set up lawn chairs and just watched the thing burn for a while. It was something different. The owner eventually ended up paying a huge fine; the fire engines involved got honored at a picnic in nearby Lebanon later that summer.
If you were to watch the news, though, you got a slightly different take on things. To hear the Madison and Milwaukee affiliates tell it, this was some huge, life-changing thing that brought Watertown to a screeching halt. A couple children's extracirricular activities were cancelled- you don't want the kids getting bits of rubber raining into their hair (something that didn't happen to me at any point)- but that was literally it as far as disruptions went. We get worse disruptions from snow in the winter. As far as the affiliates were concerned, though, that was enough to consider the city's collective life to be "on hold".
CNN's Wolf Blitzer, meanwhile, took the time to note that the plume of smoke was visible from a satellite photo. This is a distinction that becomes less meaningful every day. I can find my house on Google Earth. You can, and probably have, found your house too.
More recently, concerning the ongoing labor struggle and subsequent electoral fights, it's happened again. Wisconsinites have made a point of not really paying much attention to what out-of-state media was saying one way or the other. As soon as the national media began to assume that Wisconsin's state legislature worked just like Congress, and started asking why it doesn't, and why don't we make it like Congress, we pretty much tuned the out-of-towners out completely. When I was in Madison for the protests, I remember having to tell a CNBC guy from Cleveland not to stand under the tree that's shedding snow, because he's liable to get dumped on.
In their absence, we've gone to seeking coverage from the actual locals. The in-state affiliates, particularly the Madison affiliates. They're from Wisconsin. They send represenatives from their areas to Madison. They know how the state legislature works.
They have some idea what they're talking about.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Louis, Louis, (unintelligible)
Back in August, I provided a list of 17 journalists I highly respect. A journalism all-star team, if you will. 17 people that are among the best in the business. To remind you, they are, in no particular order: Matt Taibbi, Jon Stewart, Shepard Smith, Anderson Cooper, Sanjay Gupta, Gwen Ifill, Andrew Sullivan, Mariana van Zeller, Rachel Maddow, Christiane Amanpour, Stephen Colbert, Soledad O'Brien, Jim Lehrer, Nate Silver, Fareed Zakaria, and the Ling sisters, Laura and Lisa.
A few months later, this blog declared Fox News as inherently untrustworthy. It was also mentioned that this affected Smith. Obviously, it's nothing against Smith. He is doing his best over there. However, the culture at Fox News is so utterly poisonous that it makes quality journalism impossible. The day Smith finds work at another organization, he'll be back on the team, but until then, he has to come off the active roster. We'll say he's on the disabled list.
Luckily, there's someone else that can be called up to the all-star team. That person is Louis Theroux.
If you're American, you almost certainly have not heard of him. That's because he's with the BBC. He began in 1998 with a series called 'Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends', and his personality and style of reporting has always been somewhat in that vein, but ever since he started, the topics he's selected have been more intriguing and heavy than weird. Just like Stewart and Colbert, he does the kind of work you wish it wouldn't take him to be doing.
And that's always been the most prevalent criticism of Theroux: that his topics, particularly some of his more recent topics, are too heavy for him. That he's sometimes really not up to the tasks he gives himself, that he sometimes lets his aloofness get in the way. To which I say: well, why don't you get out and do it better.
When Theroux is on his game, though, he is absolutely sublime. As we did with the original 17 all-stars, Theroux will be shown here at his best. And his single finest hour appears to his his 2003 report, 'Louis and the Nazis', in which he explores California's Neo-Nazi subculture.
Like I said. Heavy subject matter.
Here's that report, segmented into six parts as per Youtube time limits...
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
If a piece on Nazis is something you're simply not comfortable viewing, there are plenty of other Theroux pieces available online, and I can accomodate by linking to the opening parts of some of his other works (subsequent segments should pop up in the 'related videos' area if Youtube knows what's good for it)...
African Hunting Holiday
Law and Disorder in Johannesburg
The City Addicted to Crystal Meth (note: the city is Fresno, California)
Welcome to the squad, Theroux.
A few months later, this blog declared Fox News as inherently untrustworthy. It was also mentioned that this affected Smith. Obviously, it's nothing against Smith. He is doing his best over there. However, the culture at Fox News is so utterly poisonous that it makes quality journalism impossible. The day Smith finds work at another organization, he'll be back on the team, but until then, he has to come off the active roster. We'll say he's on the disabled list.
Luckily, there's someone else that can be called up to the all-star team. That person is Louis Theroux.
If you're American, you almost certainly have not heard of him. That's because he's with the BBC. He began in 1998 with a series called 'Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends', and his personality and style of reporting has always been somewhat in that vein, but ever since he started, the topics he's selected have been more intriguing and heavy than weird. Just like Stewart and Colbert, he does the kind of work you wish it wouldn't take him to be doing.
And that's always been the most prevalent criticism of Theroux: that his topics, particularly some of his more recent topics, are too heavy for him. That he's sometimes really not up to the tasks he gives himself, that he sometimes lets his aloofness get in the way. To which I say: well, why don't you get out and do it better.
When Theroux is on his game, though, he is absolutely sublime. As we did with the original 17 all-stars, Theroux will be shown here at his best. And his single finest hour appears to his his 2003 report, 'Louis and the Nazis', in which he explores California's Neo-Nazi subculture.
Like I said. Heavy subject matter.
Here's that report, segmented into six parts as per Youtube time limits...
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
If a piece on Nazis is something you're simply not comfortable viewing, there are plenty of other Theroux pieces available online, and I can accomodate by linking to the opening parts of some of his other works (subsequent segments should pop up in the 'related videos' area if Youtube knows what's good for it)...
African Hunting Holiday
Law and Disorder in Johannesburg
The City Addicted to Crystal Meth (note: the city is Fresno, California)
Welcome to the squad, Theroux.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
The Blame Game
Politifact is one of the best things going in political journalism these days. It is factchecking in its absolute purest form: take what someone said, and figure out whether they were right or wrong or outright lying. Note what a politician said on one day and compare with what they said on some other day. Note exactly what a politician promised, and see whether or not they follow through. If you don't already go, do so.
But there is one key weakness in their model. I've spoken about how they avoid using the word 'lie' in their Truth-o-Meter, instead saying 'false' and 'pants on fire'.
That's not the weakness.
The weakness we're addressing today comes on the other major venture, the promise meter. Once elected, a chief executive's promises made during the election are catalouged, numbered, and tracked during the term. All promises start without a rating, but are eventually assigned one of five labels: In The Works, Stalled, Promise Kept, Compromise, or Promise Broken.
Promise Broken is the weakness.
By Politifact's rules, a promise is considered Broken when action has been completed on a promise, but not in a manner consistent with the promise. Fair enough. But it says nothing about why that is so. Sometimes the executive in fact actively went against or neglected the promise. But sometimes they make an attempt on the promise, only to get stifled by the opposition in some manner. Sure. The promise wasn't kept. There wasn't a compromise. But you can't really call it a BROKEN promise either. However, as per the rules of Politifact, that is how the promise is scored. And due to the wording, what will inevitably end up happening is, no matter the cause, too much of the public won't read enough into why. They'll just see 'Promise Broken' and automatically chalk it up as the chief executive being a lying so-and-so that must pay on Election Day, and will just make the situation worse by improperly assigning blame, giving power to people that will only move further away from the original promise.
Sometimes Politifact instead assigns such scenarios a 'Stalled' rating if action isn't yet 'completed', even though it never will be. I don't think that quite works either. That tosses them in with items that have every intention of being completed, but have gotten placed on the backburner for more pressing matters.
I think the promise meter needs one additional category: Promise Defeated.
Part of uncovering the truth in politics is the act of assigning blame when things go wrong. For all the talk about people 'not wanting to play the blame game', we all eventually have to blame someone when we go into the booth. We either blame the incumbent for not keeping their promises (or keeping ones we disagreed with in the first place), or we blame the opposition for defeating promises that might otherwise be kept (or not doing enough to defeat promises we disagreed with). It's not enough to go 'okay, this didn't happen, this didn't happen, this did, this did, this didn't'. Why the promises that didn't happen, didn't happen, is important.
This is what Promise Defeated would help to determine. When it becomes clear that a stated promise will not be fulfilled, Politifact should begin the process of figuring out who had more to do with the promise's death. If it's determined that the chief executive set the promise aside, or took actions contrary to the promise, or was especially weak-willed, abandoning the promise after putting up virtually no resistance, then it in fact would be a Promise Broken. If, however, the matter died because of a lost vote in the legislature, the opposition stalling it to death somewhere along the line, funding being refused, or something else along those lines, that would be scored Promise Defeated.
As Election Day rolls around, and a voter carries resentment over something being done or not being done, far too often they simply blame 'those politicians'. That doesn't help. Sure. Politicians were to blame.
But for matters to improve, they need to decide who is more to blame. No matter how much one wants to claim 'they're all the same', you can't split a vote in half. By distinguishing between broken promises and defeated promises, that decision would be easier.
But there is one key weakness in their model. I've spoken about how they avoid using the word 'lie' in their Truth-o-Meter, instead saying 'false' and 'pants on fire'.
That's not the weakness.
The weakness we're addressing today comes on the other major venture, the promise meter. Once elected, a chief executive's promises made during the election are catalouged, numbered, and tracked during the term. All promises start without a rating, but are eventually assigned one of five labels: In The Works, Stalled, Promise Kept, Compromise, or Promise Broken.
Promise Broken is the weakness.
By Politifact's rules, a promise is considered Broken when action has been completed on a promise, but not in a manner consistent with the promise. Fair enough. But it says nothing about why that is so. Sometimes the executive in fact actively went against or neglected the promise. But sometimes they make an attempt on the promise, only to get stifled by the opposition in some manner. Sure. The promise wasn't kept. There wasn't a compromise. But you can't really call it a BROKEN promise either. However, as per the rules of Politifact, that is how the promise is scored. And due to the wording, what will inevitably end up happening is, no matter the cause, too much of the public won't read enough into why. They'll just see 'Promise Broken' and automatically chalk it up as the chief executive being a lying so-and-so that must pay on Election Day, and will just make the situation worse by improperly assigning blame, giving power to people that will only move further away from the original promise.
Sometimes Politifact instead assigns such scenarios a 'Stalled' rating if action isn't yet 'completed', even though it never will be. I don't think that quite works either. That tosses them in with items that have every intention of being completed, but have gotten placed on the backburner for more pressing matters.
I think the promise meter needs one additional category: Promise Defeated.
Part of uncovering the truth in politics is the act of assigning blame when things go wrong. For all the talk about people 'not wanting to play the blame game', we all eventually have to blame someone when we go into the booth. We either blame the incumbent for not keeping their promises (or keeping ones we disagreed with in the first place), or we blame the opposition for defeating promises that might otherwise be kept (or not doing enough to defeat promises we disagreed with). It's not enough to go 'okay, this didn't happen, this didn't happen, this did, this did, this didn't'. Why the promises that didn't happen, didn't happen, is important.
This is what Promise Defeated would help to determine. When it becomes clear that a stated promise will not be fulfilled, Politifact should begin the process of figuring out who had more to do with the promise's death. If it's determined that the chief executive set the promise aside, or took actions contrary to the promise, or was especially weak-willed, abandoning the promise after putting up virtually no resistance, then it in fact would be a Promise Broken. If, however, the matter died because of a lost vote in the legislature, the opposition stalling it to death somewhere along the line, funding being refused, or something else along those lines, that would be scored Promise Defeated.
As Election Day rolls around, and a voter carries resentment over something being done or not being done, far too often they simply blame 'those politicians'. That doesn't help. Sure. Politicians were to blame.
But for matters to improve, they need to decide who is more to blame. No matter how much one wants to claim 'they're all the same', you can't split a vote in half. By distinguishing between broken promises and defeated promises, that decision would be easier.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
September Surprise
One of, if not the, biggest problem with Presidential debates is that they really aren't. Candidates frequently, at the Presidential level, engage in debate camps beforehand. I link to a story about Barack Obama setting up his 2008 camp, but it could have been anyone. We could even link to a West Wing episode about it. They are peppered with whatever questions that they deem the moderator as most likely to ask. They rehearse answers, including rebuttals to what the opponent is likely to say, and how to steer an answer from an uncomfortable topic to a more comfortable one. The result is largely 90 minutes of kabuki theater, with the bulk of the drama centering around who messed up their script and who got off the best zingers.
Not far behind is another major, yet underrated, problem: all sides involved are fighting the battles of the previous term. Questions from a moderator will usually, nearly always, revolve around major topics that have been fought over during the previous 2-4 years. Sometimes, these topics will carry over to the next term as well.
But sometimes they won't.
Monday morning quarterbacking the previous term- 'well, I'D have done things this way, and if you vote for me, I will'- would be fine if issues carried over from one term to the next. And as we just stated, sometimes they do, issues such as the economy and any ongoing wars. Time, however, marches on. Sometimes the issue turns out to have already been settled, and will not come up to a large degree in the next term. Sometimes whether the issue is settled depends on who ultimately wins the election. And the next term is always filled with events which have not yet happened, and will push issues to the forefront that were never covered in the debate and which nobody focused on.
Case in point: how many of you over the course of the previous election figured that Egypt, Tunisia and collective bargaining were issues that merited serious examination before you cast your vote? Whoever raised their hand is a liar.
Obviously, trying to anticipate these things is nigh-impossible to do reliably. Attempts were made to mix up the topics over the course of the 2008 Presidential primaries by allowing people to submit questions online, but the online entries were either fighting the previous term as well, or asking about obscure niche topics that would never in a million years become a hot-button issue.
Both of these issues- the debate-camp problem, and the previous-term problem- can be addressed, maybe not solved entirely, but improved upon, with a debate format I call 'September Surprise', after a month debates will commonly take place in. (Yes, I realize we're a year and a half away from there. Like that's going to stop me.)
September Surprise's premise is to attempt to simulate, as best as possible, the next term, a period filled with unforeseen events that can cover a much wider range of topics than one is currently considering. The first step, of course, is for a moderator to try to figure out what might be one of those topics. This, you do by compiling a list of topics. Obviously, the current hot-button issues would have their place- Iraq, gas prices, partisanship, budget deficits, Medicaid, and so forth. But also in the list should be a wide range of topics that, while they may not be big now, one could reasonably consider to be an issue that might flare up under the proper circumstances or is at least is of sufficient importance. These would be things like tobacco, health food, imported goods, homelessness, bridge infrastructure, any country that stands a fair chance at popping up in the news regularly. I've tried this myself, and I got into the 150's before I got bored and called it quits. I wasn't done. I just got bored.
You can't just toss any topic into the list. Some things will always be minor issues or fringe issues. The gold standard, for example. That is just not going to be a hot-button topic. School uniforms, Swaziland, and college football playoffs may have their place, but they're not going to be big huge things. They just aren't.
Step 2 is to construct one question pertaining to each topic on the list. (Much as one might like to see what happens, you can't just go 'Candidates, you now must discuss corporate personhood. Go.') As the debate goes along, pick topics one at a time, right in front of everybody (use a random number generator, a bingo hopper, slips of paper out of a hat, however you want to do it), and read the corresponding question. If Afghanistan gets picked, fine and dandy. If gun massacres come up instead, or airport security or Taiwan or patent law or multilingualism, well... surprise.
No debate camp in the world is going to be able to completely prepare for that. However, since there are too many topics to anticipate, focus would likely be shifted to trying to steer things toward their preferred topics. But that defeats the entire purpose of September Surprise. A candidate who is unwilling or unable to stop fighting the previous battle is a candidate less prepared to handle the next battle. The moderator must therefore be vigilant about keeping things on topic. If a candidate jackknifes a question about the tax-exempt status of churches into a question about the Bush tax cuts, it's the moderator's responsibility to jackknife it back to the churches, interrupting the candidate if absolutely necessary.
After all, some of these things might become important later.
Not far behind is another major, yet underrated, problem: all sides involved are fighting the battles of the previous term. Questions from a moderator will usually, nearly always, revolve around major topics that have been fought over during the previous 2-4 years. Sometimes, these topics will carry over to the next term as well.
But sometimes they won't.
Monday morning quarterbacking the previous term- 'well, I'D have done things this way, and if you vote for me, I will'- would be fine if issues carried over from one term to the next. And as we just stated, sometimes they do, issues such as the economy and any ongoing wars. Time, however, marches on. Sometimes the issue turns out to have already been settled, and will not come up to a large degree in the next term. Sometimes whether the issue is settled depends on who ultimately wins the election. And the next term is always filled with events which have not yet happened, and will push issues to the forefront that were never covered in the debate and which nobody focused on.
Case in point: how many of you over the course of the previous election figured that Egypt, Tunisia and collective bargaining were issues that merited serious examination before you cast your vote? Whoever raised their hand is a liar.
Obviously, trying to anticipate these things is nigh-impossible to do reliably. Attempts were made to mix up the topics over the course of the 2008 Presidential primaries by allowing people to submit questions online, but the online entries were either fighting the previous term as well, or asking about obscure niche topics that would never in a million years become a hot-button issue.
Both of these issues- the debate-camp problem, and the previous-term problem- can be addressed, maybe not solved entirely, but improved upon, with a debate format I call 'September Surprise', after a month debates will commonly take place in. (Yes, I realize we're a year and a half away from there. Like that's going to stop me.)
September Surprise's premise is to attempt to simulate, as best as possible, the next term, a period filled with unforeseen events that can cover a much wider range of topics than one is currently considering. The first step, of course, is for a moderator to try to figure out what might be one of those topics. This, you do by compiling a list of topics. Obviously, the current hot-button issues would have their place- Iraq, gas prices, partisanship, budget deficits, Medicaid, and so forth. But also in the list should be a wide range of topics that, while they may not be big now, one could reasonably consider to be an issue that might flare up under the proper circumstances or is at least is of sufficient importance. These would be things like tobacco, health food, imported goods, homelessness, bridge infrastructure, any country that stands a fair chance at popping up in the news regularly. I've tried this myself, and I got into the 150's before I got bored and called it quits. I wasn't done. I just got bored.
You can't just toss any topic into the list. Some things will always be minor issues or fringe issues. The gold standard, for example. That is just not going to be a hot-button topic. School uniforms, Swaziland, and college football playoffs may have their place, but they're not going to be big huge things. They just aren't.
Step 2 is to construct one question pertaining to each topic on the list. (Much as one might like to see what happens, you can't just go 'Candidates, you now must discuss corporate personhood. Go.') As the debate goes along, pick topics one at a time, right in front of everybody (use a random number generator, a bingo hopper, slips of paper out of a hat, however you want to do it), and read the corresponding question. If Afghanistan gets picked, fine and dandy. If gun massacres come up instead, or airport security or Taiwan or patent law or multilingualism, well... surprise.
No debate camp in the world is going to be able to completely prepare for that. However, since there are too many topics to anticipate, focus would likely be shifted to trying to steer things toward their preferred topics. But that defeats the entire purpose of September Surprise. A candidate who is unwilling or unable to stop fighting the previous battle is a candidate less prepared to handle the next battle. The moderator must therefore be vigilant about keeping things on topic. If a candidate jackknifes a question about the tax-exempt status of churches into a question about the Bush tax cuts, it's the moderator's responsibility to jackknife it back to the churches, interrupting the candidate if absolutely necessary.
After all, some of these things might become important later.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
And Then They Wonder Why Nobody Trusts Them
After Anderson Cooper returned home from Egypt, he repeatedly called the claims of Hosni Mubarak "lies".
In doing so, Cooper got himself into just about the stupidest bit of trouble in journalism. You see, in American journalism, the word "lie" is a gigantic taboo, as if you went to a black-tie dinner and dropped one of George Carlin's seven dirty words at the top of your lungs. They might dance around it with synonyms and euphimisms like 'falsehood' or 'controversial statement' or 'disputed', but once someone says 'lie', it is monocles in the martini glass. Even Politifact, the entire point of which is to examine a statement and say whether it's the truth or a lie, dances around it, twice, with 'false' and 'pants on fire'. As in 'liar, liar, pants on fire'.
It doesn't even matter if you use it correctly. On CNN's Reliable Sources the following Sunday, we heard this:
Later, Kurtz deigned to "forgive" Anderson, due to the fact that Anderson was right, and besides, dude got punched in the head a whole lot by one of the sides. Maybe that's why he took a side! It doesn't excuse it, but maybe he just forgot his manners that one time!
Seriously, calling lies lies is the whole damn job description. If you don't want to call a lie a lie, if you think allowing a lie to gain credibility by not calling it for what it is to be the fair and objective thing to do, get the hell out of the business and let someone in that will actually do their job properly. You're not there to be nice to everyone; though it is certainly possible to do so, that's not the be-all and end-all. You're there to get the facts straight. If that means calling something a lie, then dammit, you call something a lie. If someone gets angry that you called what they said a lie, well, they shouldn't have lied.
Honestly. I can't believe I have to waste my time even typing this.
In doing so, Cooper got himself into just about the stupidest bit of trouble in journalism. You see, in American journalism, the word "lie" is a gigantic taboo, as if you went to a black-tie dinner and dropped one of George Carlin's seven dirty words at the top of your lungs. They might dance around it with synonyms and euphimisms like 'falsehood' or 'controversial statement' or 'disputed', but once someone says 'lie', it is monocles in the martini glass. Even Politifact, the entire point of which is to examine a statement and say whether it's the truth or a lie, dances around it, twice, with 'false' and 'pants on fire'. As in 'liar, liar, pants on fire'.
It doesn't even matter if you use it correctly. On CNN's Reliable Sources the following Sunday, we heard this:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: What we heard were the same lies we've heard from [Mubarak] and his regime for more than two weeks now. What we heard is a man who clearly believes that he is Egypt. He kept repeating this lie that this is all some sort of foreign interference.
(END VIDEO CLIP) KURTZ: Chris Dickey, Anderson Cooper repeatedly using the word lies. Now I think most journalists would agree with him, perhaps most Americans would agree with him. But should an anchor and correspondent be taking sides on this kind of story?
Later, Kurtz deigned to "forgive" Anderson, due to the fact that Anderson was right, and besides, dude got punched in the head a whole lot by one of the sides. Maybe that's why he took a side! It doesn't excuse it, but maybe he just forgot his manners that one time!
Seriously, calling lies lies is the whole damn job description. If you don't want to call a lie a lie, if you think allowing a lie to gain credibility by not calling it for what it is to be the fair and objective thing to do, get the hell out of the business and let someone in that will actually do their job properly. You're not there to be nice to everyone; though it is certainly possible to do so, that's not the be-all and end-all. You're there to get the facts straight. If that means calling something a lie, then dammit, you call something a lie. If someone gets angry that you called what they said a lie, well, they shouldn't have lied.
Honestly. I can't believe I have to waste my time even typing this.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Wikiplexed
Julian Assange.
What am I going to do with you?
Anyone who doesn't know the name Julian Assange by now is hiding under a rock. He's the Wikileaks guy, for the two of you that applies to. He takes leaks provided by a range of whistleblowers, and after a period of time spent X-ing out the informant's name, releases the leaks to the general public. For a while, this worked out pretty well. The leaks had a place to go, once in a while they'd get major media airtime, Wikileaks got a free plug, everyone ends up happy (aside from whoever's information got leaked.)
Recently, though, it's all gone wrong. Half the world's governments would love nothing more than to see a bullet through Assange's head, with much of the general public none to fond of him either, generally those from countries Assange has targeted. Interpol knows where he is and is one order away from moving on him. Sweden wants him on (disputed) sexual charges. Some Americans want to try him as a spy. Ecuador offered, then rescinded, an offer of safe haven. Wikileaks is losing places to host a server, as well as sources of financial support.
Things began to fall apart, at least from my vantage point, right around the time of the leak of the 2007 "Collateral Murder" video, obviously NSFW, which was leaked back in April. Wikileaks, at this point, went from an in-the-background place to do your leaking to a news item in and of itself, placing its own practices in the spotlight. They came to a head just recently, when the first of the 251,287 diplomatic cables began to see light. So what of it all? What can we learn from all this?
Not all that much, actually. At least, not much that Assange has been intending to teach.
You see, a lot of his previous leaks never really drew much attention. Part of the reason, I think, has to do with the sheer size of the information dump being conducted. Remember the healthcare debate? Remember how many teeth had to be pulled to get people to read a 2,000-page bill? Remember how much hay was made of the size of said bill? People often made it onto the news simply for having read the entire bill front to back. 2,000 pages is a tiny, pint-sized Wikileak. Again, the diplomatic cables number 251,287. Assange himself has readily admitted that he receives more material than he can sift through on his own. Which is the thing. If he can't do it, the average person has no chance. No matter how much info is presented, one person can only get through so much. If the important bits are hidden among pages and pages of detritus, the important bits tend to go unnoticed, as if they were never leaked at all. In journalism, this is called 'burying the lede', and considering that Assange believes himself to at some level be a journalist, he ought to know this. When the important information is easily findable by a visitor, things run smoothly. When not, it has less impact.
With the diplomatic cables, he has reversed this and resolved not to bury the lede. However, he has gone too far in the other direction. He has made everything a lede. News cycle after news cycle sees only a small easily-digestible handful of the quarter-million cables released, with each and every one devoured. So far, only about 1,100 have seen air.
But there's a problem. 251,287 cables does not mean 251,287 bombshell revelations. Far from it. There is the assorted useful piece of information. There almost has to be. You take any random group of 251,287 diplomatic cables, there's bound to be something new and interesting. The knowledge that China is not as warm towards North Korea as originally thought, the plan by Hillary Clinton concerning spying at UN headquarters, these can be of use. But other things Assange may have intended as bombshells are really nothing that someone paying sufficient attention to the news might already have figured out independently. China's cavalier attitude and hacking of Google shouldn't come as a large shock if you had been paying attention to Google's early adventures in China, where they came perilously close to pulling out of the country entirely. Google had suspected as much. Corruption in Pakistan and Afghanistan are not big surprises if you had been paying attention to previous reports on same that did not require Assange's assistance to find out. Vladimir Putin knew of the death of Aleksander Litvinenko, we've learned, but then, this was merely a confirmation of something just about everybody had reckoned from day one. The cables show China as flexing their muscle in diplomacy to the point of irritation by much of the rest of the world, but then, this is about as easily seen as the sun. The part about China's irritation with Norway was already found out when the Norwegian-based Nobel committee awarded Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, to where people came away knowing that if China wasn't aggressive towards Norway before, they certainly are now. We learn from the cables that the United States is doubtful of Mexico's ability to fight the drug cartels, but then, who isn't? Any news value is merely concerning tone and scale. Even the China/North Korea leak is seen as some as overstating the case.
And then there's the chatter behind each other's backs. The insults. The gossip, as it's been so frequently called. These are functionally worthless. Less than worthless, even. Sure. Diplomats are catty behind each other's backs. So are workers in just about any field of employment ever. This is nothing compared to what often happens in the diplomatic world. Spies are frequently sent into that field; it's easy to spy and easy to pull the spy out if something goes wrong. Duplicity is a grand, time-honored tradition in the diplomatic universe, of which you can find examples all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome; the Bible; the time of Hammurabi. People talking derisively about other people in the State Department? Well, I never! All that is likely to happen by releasing these is that it makes people less likely to talk to these diplomats, and go to other methods, potentially war, to achieve their goals concerning the countries involved. Diplomats also engage in diplomacy- trying to get along with each other. Why engage in conversation with another country if this is going to be the result of discussing things in their country (these are all cables from embassies in the US)? Forget talk. Might as well take the more direct and forceful route. And in moments of particularly high tension, one wrong word can sometimes be all it takes to light the powder keg. Go and look at all the duplicity that went on over the course of the Cold War, spying, name-calling and everything. How much of it that was not public at the time of its occurrence do you think could have been leaked without either the Americans or Soviets pushing the button in response? Not a whole lot, really.
That is, if it's only one target. A curious thing about blame is that when everybody is guilty, frequently, nobody is. Governmental investigations of lobbyists and corporations and such more frequently claim a scalp when someone is singled out for blame. When someone wants people not to 'play the blame game', this is what they're trying to do: make everybody guilty so that individuals- or, more to the usual point, they themselves- don't actually suffer consequences.
This is the phenomenon that Assange, in his zeal, has seemingly triggered. Though he may hate Hillary Clinton and want her to step down, he has created so many other guilty parties that few are in a moral position to press for her ouster, not that one would do so over such trifling things anyway, and the ones that have not been targeted have ample reason to believe they will be soon enough and any attempt to go after Clinton will end up blowing back on them. There will be a black eye for a while, yes, but eventually, all will be forgiven.
There is a debate that exists over whether we have a right to know about the content of these cables or whether they should remain secret. The first thing we must establish is that, either way, the debate does not apply to Assange. His informant, perhaps, who's surely in for a world of hurt because Assange's technique of simply X-ing out the informant's name is absolutely boneheaded, but not Assange. (Any interested party with a copy of the information can just look to see what got X'ed out, see what name is there, and go after that person; the informant would actually be better hidden if Assange didn't X out anything at all. It's the anonymity equivalent of giving the informant a large neon sign saying "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THIS MAN".) The cables originate in the United States. Assange is Australian and does not answer to American authority. (Not that he answers to Australian authority either, but you get the point.)
We've covered this particular mentality in a previous piece. Foreign nongovernmental entities don't really care what you think of them. And when an empire declines, as the piece exposits, everybody wants to get their licks in. Assange could, in a sense, be compared to the Visigoths sacking Rome, accelerating the empire's decline by making off with things of importance to the empire- in this case, the empire's secrets, privacy and reputation. An actual sacking of Washington DC, or any major world capital, would be unfeasible in this particular day and age, but what one can do is, instead of taking objects of value directly, take the ability to earn those objects or be able to afford to keep the objects they have. This being an age of information, every time a secret is divulged against one's will, every time one's dirty laundry is forced out into the open, it's like another gold coin, another gemstone, another crown jewel out the door.
Anyway. Do we have a right to know about these things? It's in the eye of the beholder as to the exact amount, really, but there is a line somewhere. You wouldn't divulge nuclear launch codes, for example. Obviously to suggest that you should is ridiculous, but that's just to establish the fact that a line exists somewhere- somewhere, anywhere. Any secret less important than that which you'd want to keep is merely helping to establish the location of the line. And the line, at least to me, does come well before that. Obviously there are things we need to know as well. I mean, look what I deal in around here. I want to know a whole bunch of stuff too. But I'm willing to wait if that knowledge is of the type where the downsides of having it be public knowledge outweigh the upsides. It's the political equivalent of a football playbook. You would not ask a football team to divulge, for public consumption, the contents of the playbook they are using this season. For them to do so would be to virtually guarantee that they lose their games. When a football player is called into the coach's office to be cut, they're told to take their playbook with them. You don't want them running off with it after they're no longer on the team.
However, the downsides diminish over time, as the information becomes outdated, so eventually just about everything becomes safe to release. Including playbooks. Any random fan can go out and find books containing diagrams of old plays. Most Packers fans will be able to tell you about a particular old play of Vince Lombardi's, the power sweep. Someone made a Broadway play to tell you all about it. It's a matter of what is okay to release and when, and it can be very tricky sometimes to establish the threshold.
As a whole, Assange has selected cables for which the downsides have been deemed by most to outweigh the upsides, in particular the catty insults. The questionability of the value of the leaked cables has done a strange thing: it's made this all less about the rights of the people to know, and more about Assange and his motives than is healthy for one who purports to engage in journalism. And his motives are plain as day: he describes himself as "a combative person" who enjoys "crushing bastards." Crushing bastards, as he puts it, is well and good, and a lot of people get into the industry with visions of the day they get to crush a bastard dancing in their head like sugar plums. But it is not something where you should be waking up and saying 'So which bastard am I going to crush today?' You try not to make the story about you. Sometimes you can't help but insert yourself into the story, but even so, you are trying to be merely a part of the story, not the story itself. And if you do become the story, you want to try to get the story off of you and back onto the original topic. Assange has become the story and is making no efforts to change that, and in the process a budding debate over how some governments are reacting to the content- the United States with warning people in an official government capacity away from reading the leaks, China opting for a straight blackout- has been to a degree choked out by stories about Assange. The debate here is peppered with frustration that while Wikileaks goes to considerable lengths to force out the information of others, they themselves remain deeply in the shadows. Considering the amount of people after them, this seems necessary if they want to remain able to do any leaking, but it smacks of hypocrisy to some who disagree to one degree or another.
He does, however, have an out. Maybe not out of his problems with the authorities, but out of his problems with the public. If there's one entity people tend to hate these days more than the government, it's banks. Assange has made note that among his cache of yet-to-be-released information is a "mega-leak" from a major American bank. Which one, he will not say. This fact has caused the ears of many to perk up, eager to find out what this leak contains. Arguably, there's more interest in the prospective bank leak than in the diplomatic cables. Assange, by releasing this, would get a significant segment of the public back on his side, carrying the dual advantage of being a popular and worthwhile target. The fact that he also has information on BP (he doesn't know if it's unique) helps his cause further. And if apprehended by Interpol or someone else, he has a contingency plan, namely, tens of thousands of other people who went to the Pirate Bay, a sympathetic site, and downloaded an 'insurance' file which includes, among other things, the remaining cables and the BP files, who will all recieve decryption codes in the event of his capture or death and put everything out in one gigantic tsunami of information dumping. This brings us back to the first problem of some important information flying under the radar, but at that point it can't really be avoided.
Assange has what is surely some extremely useful information, somewhere in all of that, and has taken great pains to ensure its eventual release. But he has no sense of what information is useful and what information is filler, or alternatively, he doesn't care. He has the potential to change the world in profoundly positive ways, and has provided a vehicle for this to be facilitated with an ease not previously seen anywhere, but has let it go to his head such that the vehicle has been damaged.
Julian Assange.
What am I going to do with you?
What am I going to do with you?
Anyone who doesn't know the name Julian Assange by now is hiding under a rock. He's the Wikileaks guy, for the two of you that applies to. He takes leaks provided by a range of whistleblowers, and after a period of time spent X-ing out the informant's name, releases the leaks to the general public. For a while, this worked out pretty well. The leaks had a place to go, once in a while they'd get major media airtime, Wikileaks got a free plug, everyone ends up happy (aside from whoever's information got leaked.)
Recently, though, it's all gone wrong. Half the world's governments would love nothing more than to see a bullet through Assange's head, with much of the general public none to fond of him either, generally those from countries Assange has targeted. Interpol knows where he is and is one order away from moving on him. Sweden wants him on (disputed) sexual charges. Some Americans want to try him as a spy. Ecuador offered, then rescinded, an offer of safe haven. Wikileaks is losing places to host a server, as well as sources of financial support.
Things began to fall apart, at least from my vantage point, right around the time of the leak of the 2007 "Collateral Murder" video, obviously NSFW, which was leaked back in April. Wikileaks, at this point, went from an in-the-background place to do your leaking to a news item in and of itself, placing its own practices in the spotlight. They came to a head just recently, when the first of the 251,287 diplomatic cables began to see light. So what of it all? What can we learn from all this?
Not all that much, actually. At least, not much that Assange has been intending to teach.
You see, a lot of his previous leaks never really drew much attention. Part of the reason, I think, has to do with the sheer size of the information dump being conducted. Remember the healthcare debate? Remember how many teeth had to be pulled to get people to read a 2,000-page bill? Remember how much hay was made of the size of said bill? People often made it onto the news simply for having read the entire bill front to back. 2,000 pages is a tiny, pint-sized Wikileak. Again, the diplomatic cables number 251,287. Assange himself has readily admitted that he receives more material than he can sift through on his own. Which is the thing. If he can't do it, the average person has no chance. No matter how much info is presented, one person can only get through so much. If the important bits are hidden among pages and pages of detritus, the important bits tend to go unnoticed, as if they were never leaked at all. In journalism, this is called 'burying the lede', and considering that Assange believes himself to at some level be a journalist, he ought to know this. When the important information is easily findable by a visitor, things run smoothly. When not, it has less impact.
With the diplomatic cables, he has reversed this and resolved not to bury the lede. However, he has gone too far in the other direction. He has made everything a lede. News cycle after news cycle sees only a small easily-digestible handful of the quarter-million cables released, with each and every one devoured. So far, only about 1,100 have seen air.
But there's a problem. 251,287 cables does not mean 251,287 bombshell revelations. Far from it. There is the assorted useful piece of information. There almost has to be. You take any random group of 251,287 diplomatic cables, there's bound to be something new and interesting. The knowledge that China is not as warm towards North Korea as originally thought, the plan by Hillary Clinton concerning spying at UN headquarters, these can be of use. But other things Assange may have intended as bombshells are really nothing that someone paying sufficient attention to the news might already have figured out independently. China's cavalier attitude and hacking of Google shouldn't come as a large shock if you had been paying attention to Google's early adventures in China, where they came perilously close to pulling out of the country entirely. Google had suspected as much. Corruption in Pakistan and Afghanistan are not big surprises if you had been paying attention to previous reports on same that did not require Assange's assistance to find out. Vladimir Putin knew of the death of Aleksander Litvinenko, we've learned, but then, this was merely a confirmation of something just about everybody had reckoned from day one. The cables show China as flexing their muscle in diplomacy to the point of irritation by much of the rest of the world, but then, this is about as easily seen as the sun. The part about China's irritation with Norway was already found out when the Norwegian-based Nobel committee awarded Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, to where people came away knowing that if China wasn't aggressive towards Norway before, they certainly are now. We learn from the cables that the United States is doubtful of Mexico's ability to fight the drug cartels, but then, who isn't? Any news value is merely concerning tone and scale. Even the China/North Korea leak is seen as some as overstating the case.
And then there's the chatter behind each other's backs. The insults. The gossip, as it's been so frequently called. These are functionally worthless. Less than worthless, even. Sure. Diplomats are catty behind each other's backs. So are workers in just about any field of employment ever. This is nothing compared to what often happens in the diplomatic world. Spies are frequently sent into that field; it's easy to spy and easy to pull the spy out if something goes wrong. Duplicity is a grand, time-honored tradition in the diplomatic universe, of which you can find examples all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome; the Bible; the time of Hammurabi. People talking derisively about other people in the State Department? Well, I never! All that is likely to happen by releasing these is that it makes people less likely to talk to these diplomats, and go to other methods, potentially war, to achieve their goals concerning the countries involved. Diplomats also engage in diplomacy- trying to get along with each other. Why engage in conversation with another country if this is going to be the result of discussing things in their country (these are all cables from embassies in the US)? Forget talk. Might as well take the more direct and forceful route. And in moments of particularly high tension, one wrong word can sometimes be all it takes to light the powder keg. Go and look at all the duplicity that went on over the course of the Cold War, spying, name-calling and everything. How much of it that was not public at the time of its occurrence do you think could have been leaked without either the Americans or Soviets pushing the button in response? Not a whole lot, really.
That is, if it's only one target. A curious thing about blame is that when everybody is guilty, frequently, nobody is. Governmental investigations of lobbyists and corporations and such more frequently claim a scalp when someone is singled out for blame. When someone wants people not to 'play the blame game', this is what they're trying to do: make everybody guilty so that individuals- or, more to the usual point, they themselves- don't actually suffer consequences.
This is the phenomenon that Assange, in his zeal, has seemingly triggered. Though he may hate Hillary Clinton and want her to step down, he has created so many other guilty parties that few are in a moral position to press for her ouster, not that one would do so over such trifling things anyway, and the ones that have not been targeted have ample reason to believe they will be soon enough and any attempt to go after Clinton will end up blowing back on them. There will be a black eye for a while, yes, but eventually, all will be forgiven.
There is a debate that exists over whether we have a right to know about the content of these cables or whether they should remain secret. The first thing we must establish is that, either way, the debate does not apply to Assange. His informant, perhaps, who's surely in for a world of hurt because Assange's technique of simply X-ing out the informant's name is absolutely boneheaded, but not Assange. (Any interested party with a copy of the information can just look to see what got X'ed out, see what name is there, and go after that person; the informant would actually be better hidden if Assange didn't X out anything at all. It's the anonymity equivalent of giving the informant a large neon sign saying "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THIS MAN".) The cables originate in the United States. Assange is Australian and does not answer to American authority. (Not that he answers to Australian authority either, but you get the point.)
We've covered this particular mentality in a previous piece. Foreign nongovernmental entities don't really care what you think of them. And when an empire declines, as the piece exposits, everybody wants to get their licks in. Assange could, in a sense, be compared to the Visigoths sacking Rome, accelerating the empire's decline by making off with things of importance to the empire- in this case, the empire's secrets, privacy and reputation. An actual sacking of Washington DC, or any major world capital, would be unfeasible in this particular day and age, but what one can do is, instead of taking objects of value directly, take the ability to earn those objects or be able to afford to keep the objects they have. This being an age of information, every time a secret is divulged against one's will, every time one's dirty laundry is forced out into the open, it's like another gold coin, another gemstone, another crown jewel out the door.
Anyway. Do we have a right to know about these things? It's in the eye of the beholder as to the exact amount, really, but there is a line somewhere. You wouldn't divulge nuclear launch codes, for example. Obviously to suggest that you should is ridiculous, but that's just to establish the fact that a line exists somewhere- somewhere, anywhere. Any secret less important than that which you'd want to keep is merely helping to establish the location of the line. And the line, at least to me, does come well before that. Obviously there are things we need to know as well. I mean, look what I deal in around here. I want to know a whole bunch of stuff too. But I'm willing to wait if that knowledge is of the type where the downsides of having it be public knowledge outweigh the upsides. It's the political equivalent of a football playbook. You would not ask a football team to divulge, for public consumption, the contents of the playbook they are using this season. For them to do so would be to virtually guarantee that they lose their games. When a football player is called into the coach's office to be cut, they're told to take their playbook with them. You don't want them running off with it after they're no longer on the team.
However, the downsides diminish over time, as the information becomes outdated, so eventually just about everything becomes safe to release. Including playbooks. Any random fan can go out and find books containing diagrams of old plays. Most Packers fans will be able to tell you about a particular old play of Vince Lombardi's, the power sweep. Someone made a Broadway play to tell you all about it. It's a matter of what is okay to release and when, and it can be very tricky sometimes to establish the threshold.
As a whole, Assange has selected cables for which the downsides have been deemed by most to outweigh the upsides, in particular the catty insults. The questionability of the value of the leaked cables has done a strange thing: it's made this all less about the rights of the people to know, and more about Assange and his motives than is healthy for one who purports to engage in journalism. And his motives are plain as day: he describes himself as "a combative person" who enjoys "crushing bastards." Crushing bastards, as he puts it, is well and good, and a lot of people get into the industry with visions of the day they get to crush a bastard dancing in their head like sugar plums. But it is not something where you should be waking up and saying 'So which bastard am I going to crush today?' You try not to make the story about you. Sometimes you can't help but insert yourself into the story, but even so, you are trying to be merely a part of the story, not the story itself. And if you do become the story, you want to try to get the story off of you and back onto the original topic. Assange has become the story and is making no efforts to change that, and in the process a budding debate over how some governments are reacting to the content- the United States with warning people in an official government capacity away from reading the leaks, China opting for a straight blackout- has been to a degree choked out by stories about Assange. The debate here is peppered with frustration that while Wikileaks goes to considerable lengths to force out the information of others, they themselves remain deeply in the shadows. Considering the amount of people after them, this seems necessary if they want to remain able to do any leaking, but it smacks of hypocrisy to some who disagree to one degree or another.
He does, however, have an out. Maybe not out of his problems with the authorities, but out of his problems with the public. If there's one entity people tend to hate these days more than the government, it's banks. Assange has made note that among his cache of yet-to-be-released information is a "mega-leak" from a major American bank. Which one, he will not say. This fact has caused the ears of many to perk up, eager to find out what this leak contains. Arguably, there's more interest in the prospective bank leak than in the diplomatic cables. Assange, by releasing this, would get a significant segment of the public back on his side, carrying the dual advantage of being a popular and worthwhile target. The fact that he also has information on BP (he doesn't know if it's unique) helps his cause further. And if apprehended by Interpol or someone else, he has a contingency plan, namely, tens of thousands of other people who went to the Pirate Bay, a sympathetic site, and downloaded an 'insurance' file which includes, among other things, the remaining cables and the BP files, who will all recieve decryption codes in the event of his capture or death and put everything out in one gigantic tsunami of information dumping. This brings us back to the first problem of some important information flying under the radar, but at that point it can't really be avoided.
Assange has what is surely some extremely useful information, somewhere in all of that, and has taken great pains to ensure its eventual release. But he has no sense of what information is useful and what information is filler, or alternatively, he doesn't care. He has the potential to change the world in profoundly positive ways, and has provided a vehicle for this to be facilitated with an ease not previously seen anywhere, but has let it go to his head such that the vehicle has been damaged.
Julian Assange.
What am I going to do with you?
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
News of Breaking Late Cheesecake Importance World
News aggregators are one of my favorite tools for finding things out. As I've said before, even though you don't see the widest variety of stories on cable news, there's plenty to be known, and whatever you want to know about, someone somewhere has likely reported on it recently.
That's the thing, though. Someone went out and wrote the article. It might be a lazily-done thing, but someone thought about the words they were putting down and actively said 'okay, this is good enough for me to submit'.
Someone, however, somewhere, one day got the idea that this was too much work. They would prefer to just have the computer write the story for them. This is how the scourge of automated news has come to be. Automated news writes stories according to an algorithm of some sort based on the writings of others. These writings are then combined, mashed up, and then presented as a unique piece.
Luckily for us, they do an awful job of it. Let's take this site here, which titles itself "Latest Update Headline News".
I'll use, just as an example, something totally innocuous and noncontroversial, a weird-news story: namely, that of a woman stripping naked on a flight from Chicago to New York. Let's start by showing how an actual human being working for the Associated Press- and reported in USA Today- reports on this:
And now to the automated version of events from "Latest Update Headline News", which for you may read differently from this, as the exact text may change over time:
Any questions?
Well, yes, but I meant about the quality of the articles. One was coherently written, the other is Babelfish News.
Why? Why would someone do this? There are two possible reasons, far as I can figure:
1: Someone is just that lazy. In which case, find another line of work. That's just plain awful.
2: Ad revenue. Someone doesn't even care if they have a coherent article. They just want someone to mistake it for one long enough to get them in front of some ads, which if clicked make that someone money.
It's not likely you'll come across these places very often- they're a drop in the bucket. But it's really troubling that they exist at all. Let's try and make sure they stay a drop in the bucket. Don't click their ads, and really, try not to click their links if you can pick them out.
That's the thing, though. Someone went out and wrote the article. It might be a lazily-done thing, but someone thought about the words they were putting down and actively said 'okay, this is good enough for me to submit'.
Someone, however, somewhere, one day got the idea that this was too much work. They would prefer to just have the computer write the story for them. This is how the scourge of automated news has come to be. Automated news writes stories according to an algorithm of some sort based on the writings of others. These writings are then combined, mashed up, and then presented as a unique piece.
Luckily for us, they do an awful job of it. Let's take this site here, which titles itself "Latest Update Headline News".
I'll use, just as an example, something totally innocuous and noncontroversial, a weird-news story: namely, that of a woman stripping naked on a flight from Chicago to New York. Let's start by showing how an actual human being working for the Associated Press- and reported in USA Today- reports on this:
Police have removed an emotionally disturbed passenger who stripped naked on a flight between Chicago and New York.
The incident happened Saturday night as Delta Flight 6562 began its descent into Kennedy Airport.
A Newsday news manager who was on the flight said flight attendants tried to cover the woman with a blanket while she yelled "No! No! No!"
The Newsday manager, David Holland, said that when the plane landed, other passengers got off before police removed the woman.
A spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said the woman was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center.
The woman's name was not released. She is not expected to be criminally charged.
And now to the automated version of events from "Latest Update Headline News", which for you may read differently from this, as the exact text may change over time:
Woman Strips Naked On JFK-Bound Flight: Police hаνе private аn emotionally uneasy newcomer whο nude exposed οn the moody between Chicago аnd Nеw York. Thе situation happened Saturday night аѕ Delta Flight 6562 ѕtаrtеd іtѕ skirmish іntο Kennedy Airport. Reports ѕаіd thаt thе Flight attendent hаѕ attempted tο cover thе women bυt ѕhе denied tο bе lonesome up. ѕhе announced NO NO NO!.
Thе reason οf hеr shameful try hаѕ nοt bееn tοld nοr thе name οf thе women revealed. Thе Newsday manager, David Holland, ѕаіd thаt whеn thе craft landed, οthеr passengers gοt οff prior to military private thе woman. Later οn, thе lady wаѕ taken tο Jamaica Hospital Medical Center.
Any questions?
Well, yes, but I meant about the quality of the articles. One was coherently written, the other is Babelfish News.
Why? Why would someone do this? There are two possible reasons, far as I can figure:
1: Someone is just that lazy. In which case, find another line of work. That's just plain awful.
2: Ad revenue. Someone doesn't even care if they have a coherent article. They just want someone to mistake it for one long enough to get them in front of some ads, which if clicked make that someone money.
It's not likely you'll come across these places very often- they're a drop in the bucket. But it's really troubling that they exist at all. Let's try and make sure they stay a drop in the bucket. Don't click their ads, and really, try not to click their links if you can pick them out.
Friday, November 12, 2010
We Need More (And Less) Of This
Earlier tonight- a day I spent putting time into my club-soccer book- I stumbled upon the Rachel Maddow Show. Tonight, she was spending the hour talking with Jon Stewart, who has been sick with what he calls "the bubons", which is a pretty good way to describe a bug that's recently been making the rounds more or less everywhere you look including my whole family (but not me personally, fingers crossed).
As it happens, that hour was one of the most intelligent and refreshing hours of television I have seen in quite some time. Here you have two very smart, rational individuals having a calm discussion about, mostly, the media's role in politics (including Rachel and Jon's own roles), and an amazing thing happened when they disagreed:
Neither one raised their voice in anger.
They found common ground. They ceded ground. They agreed to disagree. They did all this calmly, talking like normal human beings who just happened to be very very smart (and one of whom was very very sick). And what's more, they were kind of working without a net. Rachel had a small bit of notes, but by her admission, the discussion got away pretty early on from the intended set of questions because neither one was getting bored with the topic they were finding themselves discussing (which I have no problem with whatsoever; there is no sense cutting off a good debate with 'we'll have to leave it there'), and Jon had no notes at all. It's just two people in chairs shooting the breeze. It led to a smattering of factual errors, but really, you try having a discussion of that length sometime with that few notes and not screwing anything up. You probably fail at it all the time. So do I. I spend time away from the Internet. My memory's not perfect. (We'll see how they handle the errors they did make. They have time now to go over what they biffed; we'll see if corrections are forthcoming.)
The raw feed can be found here; it goes nearly 50 minutes, so set some time aside.
The problem is that the national debate in this country has become so utterly poisoned that I go around looking at reactions to the discussion on Facebook and Daily Kos and Penny Arcade- all places that saw the debate- and a not-insignificant number of people failed to pick up on the tone at all. They started to look for a "winner" (usually Maddow, giving no slack to Jon being sick, which, really, you try being at the peak of your cognitive skills when you're throwing up all day long), in the process completely missing the point of what was going on. They think Jon had a fall from grace, that he should stick to jokes. One said if she had seen this before the Rally to Restore Sanity, she'd have skipped it.
Why do we have to declare a winner and a loser? This is not what this discussion was. Jon and Rachel even expressed mutual respect for each other. Jon didn't even have to appear on the show. Sick, remember? He could have cancelled. Yet he showed enough respect for Rachel that he sucked it up and fought the bug (and at the close of proceedings, called Maddow his "ginger root".)
This is the core of the underlying political problem plaguing us. Too many of us have lost the ability to talk to one another. Worse, too many of us seem to look at someone with which we disagree on some things, look at another person with which we disagree on all things, and reserve our greatest contempt for the former, acting as if they're betraying us. If you don't agree with me on everything, you're the enemy and must be destroyed along with all the others.
That needs to stop. This isn't a football game, where it's one team fighting another team. This is the Royal Rumble: a whole bunch of people in one ring, every man for themselves. Two of our forefathers would tell you themselves-- Ben Franklin once said "We must all hang together or surely we shall all hang separately"; Abe Lincoln said "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
We may not agree on the best way to move the country forward, but an utter contempt for anyone that disagrees with us on anything sure as hell is not it. If we don't learn to listen to one another, we all go down together.
Think about this: If we were bombed tomorrow morning by a foreign entity, any one you care to think of, would we set our differences aside and do something about it, or would we sit around and bicker about which party is to blame and speculate about the impact on the 2012 elections for so long that the same entity bombs us a second time?
If you even consider for a second that it might not be the first option, it's time to have a serious think about just how far our regard for each other has fallen, and what you personally are willing to do about it.
As it happens, that hour was one of the most intelligent and refreshing hours of television I have seen in quite some time. Here you have two very smart, rational individuals having a calm discussion about, mostly, the media's role in politics (including Rachel and Jon's own roles), and an amazing thing happened when they disagreed:
Neither one raised their voice in anger.
They found common ground. They ceded ground. They agreed to disagree. They did all this calmly, talking like normal human beings who just happened to be very very smart (and one of whom was very very sick). And what's more, they were kind of working without a net. Rachel had a small bit of notes, but by her admission, the discussion got away pretty early on from the intended set of questions because neither one was getting bored with the topic they were finding themselves discussing (which I have no problem with whatsoever; there is no sense cutting off a good debate with 'we'll have to leave it there'), and Jon had no notes at all. It's just two people in chairs shooting the breeze. It led to a smattering of factual errors, but really, you try having a discussion of that length sometime with that few notes and not screwing anything up. You probably fail at it all the time. So do I. I spend time away from the Internet. My memory's not perfect. (We'll see how they handle the errors they did make. They have time now to go over what they biffed; we'll see if corrections are forthcoming.)
The raw feed can be found here; it goes nearly 50 minutes, so set some time aside.
The problem is that the national debate in this country has become so utterly poisoned that I go around looking at reactions to the discussion on Facebook and Daily Kos and Penny Arcade- all places that saw the debate- and a not-insignificant number of people failed to pick up on the tone at all. They started to look for a "winner" (usually Maddow, giving no slack to Jon being sick, which, really, you try being at the peak of your cognitive skills when you're throwing up all day long), in the process completely missing the point of what was going on. They think Jon had a fall from grace, that he should stick to jokes. One said if she had seen this before the Rally to Restore Sanity, she'd have skipped it.
Why do we have to declare a winner and a loser? This is not what this discussion was. Jon and Rachel even expressed mutual respect for each other. Jon didn't even have to appear on the show. Sick, remember? He could have cancelled. Yet he showed enough respect for Rachel that he sucked it up and fought the bug (and at the close of proceedings, called Maddow his "ginger root".)
This is the core of the underlying political problem plaguing us. Too many of us have lost the ability to talk to one another. Worse, too many of us seem to look at someone with which we disagree on some things, look at another person with which we disagree on all things, and reserve our greatest contempt for the former, acting as if they're betraying us. If you don't agree with me on everything, you're the enemy and must be destroyed along with all the others.
That needs to stop. This isn't a football game, where it's one team fighting another team. This is the Royal Rumble: a whole bunch of people in one ring, every man for themselves. Two of our forefathers would tell you themselves-- Ben Franklin once said "We must all hang together or surely we shall all hang separately"; Abe Lincoln said "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
We may not agree on the best way to move the country forward, but an utter contempt for anyone that disagrees with us on anything sure as hell is not it. If we don't learn to listen to one another, we all go down together.
Think about this: If we were bombed tomorrow morning by a foreign entity, any one you care to think of, would we set our differences aside and do something about it, or would we sit around and bicker about which party is to blame and speculate about the impact on the 2012 elections for so long that the same entity bombs us a second time?
If you even consider for a second that it might not be the first option, it's time to have a serious think about just how far our regard for each other has fallen, and what you personally are willing to do about it.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Change The Channel
I don't trust Fox News.
I'm not stating some big revelation here. Years ago, before my TV had a cable box hooked up, it had an 'add/delete' feature where you could set it to automatically skip past certain channels when channel-surfing; you would have to actively punch in the channel number in order to see it. So if you never wanted to see, for instance, the Home Shopping Network again, you could delete that channel number. Which I did, along with the usual assortment of garbage channels- QVC, Hallmark, CMT, the channel devoted to advertising the cable provider, the televangelist channels.
I also used it on Fox News.
My channel-surfing mechanism may have changed over the years, but the sentiment remains; my only substantial interaction with the network since has been second-hand or through their online content. But the quality of the news, if anything, has gotten even worse since then, to the point where they have become little more than a 24-hour-a-day campaign headquarters for the Republican Party.
Exhibit A: A number of Republican candidates for office are using Fox News as basically their sole and only interview partner. Media Matters, on September 27, showed five names in the 2012 Presidential mix- Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, John Bolton, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum- appearing on Fox News a combined 269 times in 2010 through September 18, as opposed to a combined six times on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS, all six by Gingrich. MSNBC and CBS did not get any appearances at all. Palin and Huckabee in particular are employed by the network; Huckabee with his own show, Palin as a contributor.
Exhibit B: A few weeks ago, President Obama told Rolling Stone how he compared Fox News to the media empire of William Randolph Hearst. Looking back on the history of the Hearst papers, I like that comparison. Hearst pulled the same kind of tactics, most notably against Upton Sinclair in the 1934 race for California governor, a race largely credited with- or more to the point, blamed for- inventing modern media-driven politics as we know it today.
Exhibit C: The $1 million that parent company NewsCorp just up and gave to the pro-Republican Chamber of Commerce, which has been responsible for a lot of the campaigning this season, as well as an equal amount to the Republican Governors Association, which needs no further explanation. This is as opposed to the other media empires, which have done smaller donations that have been split between the parties.
Today, for me, came the straw that broke the camel's back, which we'll call Exhibit D: this piece about the 2010 Senate staffer edition of an annual health fair held throughout the federal government. Nothing big about that; lots of places do something similar. My workplace has signs up in the back room advertising flu shots for employees and family members. But no, apparently this has to be turned into an over-the-top wild-eyed outrage. Let's start at the very beginning of the piece:
It doesn't even matter what comes after these three paragraphs. It could be the word "Triscuit" repeated over and over. The emotional response from the reader has already been predetermined. You can just feel the piece straining to cram every last bit of anger down your throat as it possibly can. You can see from a mile away all the loaded unnecessary language and the responses it's designed to elicit:
'Yeah! I'm a HARDWORKING AMERICAN, dammit! They just sit around and screw me all day!'
'An orgy! They're having an orgy! For two whole days!' (Why else would that word even find its way in there if not to invoke that mental image?)
'The BEST HEALTH CARE IN THE COUNTRY and look at what I'm going through!'
'Ohh, LA DE DA with the fancy iPod and the prissy little organic food!'
The fourth paragraph tosses in a reference to taxpayers and the cost to same (answer: uncertain; translation: 'potentially eighty gazillion dollars of YOUR OWN PERSONAL MONEY'), as well as a reference to two sources, the Senate Education and Training Office and the Senate sergeant-at-arms, declining to state who the vendors are (translation: 'JUST WHO ARE YOU ALL ON THE TAKE FROM, I WANT ANSWERS'). I didn't even read on after that.
I can't take it anymore. If this kind of shameless dog-whistling is going to be inserted into everything, then I have little choice but to discard everything.
That is why I am officially stating that it will, from this day on, be official blog policy to regard Fox News as inherently untrustworthy. They will be treated not as news, but as propaganda. Anything they report officially does not count. If they are the only source available for a story, we'll just disregard the story. This was really done informally in the past, but now it is stated, official policy. If we were to do a future 'real news vs. random news' competition, like we did recently, neither Fox News nor any other Fox network will be included. (This includes Shepard Smith, whom normally would be left alone, because he's okay, but if this is to have any real punch, unfortunately, he has to take the hit along with everybody else.)
Yeah. I know. 20 hits a day over here. I'm a gnat. Big loss. But hey, one has to start somewhere.
I'm not stating some big revelation here. Years ago, before my TV had a cable box hooked up, it had an 'add/delete' feature where you could set it to automatically skip past certain channels when channel-surfing; you would have to actively punch in the channel number in order to see it. So if you never wanted to see, for instance, the Home Shopping Network again, you could delete that channel number. Which I did, along with the usual assortment of garbage channels- QVC, Hallmark, CMT, the channel devoted to advertising the cable provider, the televangelist channels.
I also used it on Fox News.
My channel-surfing mechanism may have changed over the years, but the sentiment remains; my only substantial interaction with the network since has been second-hand or through their online content. But the quality of the news, if anything, has gotten even worse since then, to the point where they have become little more than a 24-hour-a-day campaign headquarters for the Republican Party.
Exhibit A: A number of Republican candidates for office are using Fox News as basically their sole and only interview partner. Media Matters, on September 27, showed five names in the 2012 Presidential mix- Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, John Bolton, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum- appearing on Fox News a combined 269 times in 2010 through September 18, as opposed to a combined six times on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS, all six by Gingrich. MSNBC and CBS did not get any appearances at all. Palin and Huckabee in particular are employed by the network; Huckabee with his own show, Palin as a contributor.
Exhibit B: A few weeks ago, President Obama told Rolling Stone how he compared Fox News to the media empire of William Randolph Hearst. Looking back on the history of the Hearst papers, I like that comparison. Hearst pulled the same kind of tactics, most notably against Upton Sinclair in the 1934 race for California governor, a race largely credited with- or more to the point, blamed for- inventing modern media-driven politics as we know it today.
Exhibit C: The $1 million that parent company NewsCorp just up and gave to the pro-Republican Chamber of Commerce, which has been responsible for a lot of the campaigning this season, as well as an equal amount to the Republican Governors Association, which needs no further explanation. This is as opposed to the other media empires, which have done smaller donations that have been split between the parties.
Today, for me, came the straw that broke the camel's back, which we'll call Exhibit D: this piece about the 2010 Senate staffer edition of an annual health fair held throughout the federal government. Nothing big about that; lots of places do something similar. My workplace has signs up in the back room advertising flu shots for employees and family members. But no, apparently this has to be turned into an over-the-top wild-eyed outrage. Let's start at the very beginning of the piece:
As millions of hardworking Americans struggle to make ends meet, Senate staffers will participate next week in a two-day orgy of back massages, organic food tastings and milk mustache photos.
It's all part of a health fair for the staffers, who enjoy some of the best health care in the country.
Not only will they get health screenings, they'll also find out if their iPods are too loud.
It doesn't even matter what comes after these three paragraphs. It could be the word "Triscuit" repeated over and over. The emotional response from the reader has already been predetermined. You can just feel the piece straining to cram every last bit of anger down your throat as it possibly can. You can see from a mile away all the loaded unnecessary language and the responses it's designed to elicit:
'Yeah! I'm a HARDWORKING AMERICAN, dammit! They just sit around and screw me all day!'
'An orgy! They're having an orgy! For two whole days!' (Why else would that word even find its way in there if not to invoke that mental image?)
'The BEST HEALTH CARE IN THE COUNTRY and look at what I'm going through!'
'Ohh, LA DE DA with the fancy iPod and the prissy little organic food!'
The fourth paragraph tosses in a reference to taxpayers and the cost to same (answer: uncertain; translation: 'potentially eighty gazillion dollars of YOUR OWN PERSONAL MONEY'), as well as a reference to two sources, the Senate Education and Training Office and the Senate sergeant-at-arms, declining to state who the vendors are (translation: 'JUST WHO ARE YOU ALL ON THE TAKE FROM, I WANT ANSWERS'). I didn't even read on after that.
I can't take it anymore. If this kind of shameless dog-whistling is going to be inserted into everything, then I have little choice but to discard everything.
That is why I am officially stating that it will, from this day on, be official blog policy to regard Fox News as inherently untrustworthy. They will be treated not as news, but as propaganda. Anything they report officially does not count. If they are the only source available for a story, we'll just disregard the story. This was really done informally in the past, but now it is stated, official policy. If we were to do a future 'real news vs. random news' competition, like we did recently, neither Fox News nor any other Fox network will be included. (This includes Shepard Smith, whom normally would be left alone, because he's okay, but if this is to have any real punch, unfortunately, he has to take the hit along with everybody else.)
Yeah. I know. 20 hits a day over here. I'm a gnat. Big loss. But hey, one has to start somewhere.
Monday, September 27, 2010
TV News Vs. Random News, Day 3/3
Saturday, narrow win for the RNG.
Sunday morning, decisive win for TV news.
But the prime-timers haven't had a go yet. In this, the final day of the competition, the RNG is pitted against the big names of primetime cable news, who really don't come out to play on weekends. What happens when ratings start to affect the story choices? The RNG doesn't care. The RNG doesn't know what ratings are. It picks what it picks.
This is about where I kind of regret picking this particular Monday for this competition, as it has been realized too late that Monday Night Football this week is Packers/Bears. In Wisconsin, that's a bit of an oversight. So I'll have to slalom between the game and the news.
But, that's my problem, not yours. TV, take your shot.
CNN: Rick's List, hosted by Rick Sanchez. He is announcing the results of a giveaway of a book he wrote, and promoting a book-signing he will be doing in Atlanta. That is... that is a poor showing there, Rick.
CNN Headline News: Nancy Grace.
"URGENT BREAKING NEWS
COPS: NURSE HIRES MAN TO KILL HUSBAND IN EXCHANGE FOR A MOTORCYCLE!"
Seriously. That's how the byline is written. With the exclamation point and everything.
FOX News: Bill O'Reilly's answering his e-mail. The specific letter mentions the Rally To Restore Sanity, which launches O'Reilly into a criticism of Stephen Colbert's testimony in front of Congress.
MSNBC: The crossover from Keith Olbermann to Rachel Maddow. Maddow begins her night with noting how Republicans are running national campaigns for the upcoming election, while Democrats are running local campaigns.
CNN International: Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, showing a report on Afghan civilians being killed for sport by US troops. Drew Griffin reports.
Bloomberg: Nigeria flooding causing fears of a food shortage.
FOX Business: Cavuto, noting how a Congressional vote on the Bush tax cuts was delayed until after the election. Or, as the byline put it, "CONGRESS PUNTS: TAX HIKES FOR ALL BEGIN ON JANUARY 1ST". (International readers should be reminded that this current Congress, regardless of the election's outcome, will still be seated until January 3rd.)
CNN International, Bloomberg and to a lesser extent Maddow rescuing an otherwise dismal lineup, damaged further by terrible coverage of those terrible story choices.
The RNG only gets 7 spins, but with the opposition it's been given, it shouldn't need more:
Serbia
Spain
Norway
Belize
Serbia
United Arab Emirates
Madagascar
Scores of potential. Very strong lineup, as strong as one could ask. But it still has to be converted on. And as you'll see, Serbia shows up twice. Intriguing gambit by the RNG.
Serbia 1: Assailants blew up the cars of two Serbs somewhere in that country's northern area; police think it's in response to the Serbs in question with Albanian minorities in Kosovo, a nation some Serbs do not recognize the independence of.
Spain: We have a corruption trial underway; 95 defendants accused of collectively making off with 2.4 billion euros from the coffers of the city of Marbella. Marbella was robbed so blind that it couldn't pay "even the smallest bills to local businesses, rubbish collectors and cleaners."
Norway: The nation's central bank is suing Citigroup for exactly what you'd expect them to sue Citigroup over.
Belize: Hurricane... er, Tropical Storm... wait, Tropical Depression Matthew passes over.
Serbia 2: Went to the Serbia well once too often; this time we can only come up with tennis player Viktor Troicki beating Marco Chiudinelli of Switzerland 6-3, 6-1 in the first round of the Thailand Open. Troicki is seeded 7th; Rafael Nadal is seeded 1st.
United Arab Emirates: They've banned Dead Rising 2. Why? No official reason given, but probably every single reason you'd want to play it.
Madagascar: A piece on Operation Smile, an organization of volunteer hospitals in the developing world; in this case in Antananarivo.
Only the one real clunker from the second try in Serbia; the gambit failed. That's a decisive RNG victory, making up almost entirely for the loss on Sunday.
Which leaves us in a bit of a pickle. Really, if you added the quality of the RNG's Saturday win to the quality of the Monday win, it adds up to basically the amount of TV news' Sunday win.
Scoring on rounds won, the RNG wins 2 days to 1. But on points?
It's a tie.
Sunday morning, decisive win for TV news.
But the prime-timers haven't had a go yet. In this, the final day of the competition, the RNG is pitted against the big names of primetime cable news, who really don't come out to play on weekends. What happens when ratings start to affect the story choices? The RNG doesn't care. The RNG doesn't know what ratings are. It picks what it picks.
This is about where I kind of regret picking this particular Monday for this competition, as it has been realized too late that Monday Night Football this week is Packers/Bears. In Wisconsin, that's a bit of an oversight. So I'll have to slalom between the game and the news.
But, that's my problem, not yours. TV, take your shot.
CNN: Rick's List, hosted by Rick Sanchez. He is announcing the results of a giveaway of a book he wrote, and promoting a book-signing he will be doing in Atlanta. That is... that is a poor showing there, Rick.
CNN Headline News: Nancy Grace.
"URGENT BREAKING NEWS
COPS: NURSE HIRES MAN TO KILL HUSBAND IN EXCHANGE FOR A MOTORCYCLE!"
Seriously. That's how the byline is written. With the exclamation point and everything.
FOX News: Bill O'Reilly's answering his e-mail. The specific letter mentions the Rally To Restore Sanity, which launches O'Reilly into a criticism of Stephen Colbert's testimony in front of Congress.
MSNBC: The crossover from Keith Olbermann to Rachel Maddow. Maddow begins her night with noting how Republicans are running national campaigns for the upcoming election, while Democrats are running local campaigns.
CNN International: Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, showing a report on Afghan civilians being killed for sport by US troops. Drew Griffin reports.
Bloomberg: Nigeria flooding causing fears of a food shortage.
FOX Business: Cavuto, noting how a Congressional vote on the Bush tax cuts was delayed until after the election. Or, as the byline put it, "CONGRESS PUNTS: TAX HIKES FOR ALL BEGIN ON JANUARY 1ST". (International readers should be reminded that this current Congress, regardless of the election's outcome, will still be seated until January 3rd.)
CNN International, Bloomberg and to a lesser extent Maddow rescuing an otherwise dismal lineup, damaged further by terrible coverage of those terrible story choices.
The RNG only gets 7 spins, but with the opposition it's been given, it shouldn't need more:
Serbia
Spain
Norway
Belize
Serbia
United Arab Emirates
Madagascar
Scores of potential. Very strong lineup, as strong as one could ask. But it still has to be converted on. And as you'll see, Serbia shows up twice. Intriguing gambit by the RNG.
Serbia 1: Assailants blew up the cars of two Serbs somewhere in that country's northern area; police think it's in response to the Serbs in question with Albanian minorities in Kosovo, a nation some Serbs do not recognize the independence of.
Spain: We have a corruption trial underway; 95 defendants accused of collectively making off with 2.4 billion euros from the coffers of the city of Marbella. Marbella was robbed so blind that it couldn't pay "even the smallest bills to local businesses, rubbish collectors and cleaners."
Norway: The nation's central bank is suing Citigroup for exactly what you'd expect them to sue Citigroup over.
Belize: Hurricane... er, Tropical Storm... wait, Tropical Depression Matthew passes over.
Serbia 2: Went to the Serbia well once too often; this time we can only come up with tennis player Viktor Troicki beating Marco Chiudinelli of Switzerland 6-3, 6-1 in the first round of the Thailand Open. Troicki is seeded 7th; Rafael Nadal is seeded 1st.
United Arab Emirates: They've banned Dead Rising 2. Why? No official reason given, but probably every single reason you'd want to play it.
Madagascar: A piece on Operation Smile, an organization of volunteer hospitals in the developing world; in this case in Antananarivo.
Only the one real clunker from the second try in Serbia; the gambit failed. That's a decisive RNG victory, making up almost entirely for the loss on Sunday.
Which leaves us in a bit of a pickle. Really, if you added the quality of the RNG's Saturday win to the quality of the Monday win, it adds up to basically the amount of TV news' Sunday win.
Scoring on rounds won, the RNG wins 2 days to 1. But on points?
It's a tie.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
TV News Vs. Random News, Day 2/3
In Day 1, the RNG achieved a victory over TV news, but not a very satisfying one. What should have been a crushing defeat of the Saturday crew became a fairly even matchup, with the RNG coming up with the strongest story choices of the day by a fair margin, thereby ekeing out the win, but the TV crews avoiding total embarrassment at the bottom end, something the RNG was unable to avoid.
Sunday. TV news puts its best foot forward today, particularly Sunday morning. The most respected names in the industry toil their entire careers for a shot at these timeslots, even moreso than the primetime hours. When one of the coveted Sunday-morning shows needs a new anchor, everybody's ears perk up. Fingers are crossed. Names are considered, dropped, considered again. Even if you've made enough enemies in Washington to choke a horse, even if half the town wouldn't consent to an interview with you if you put a gun to their head, capture a Sunday morning slot and it no longer matters. You have the entire Beltway on call. Your enemies HAVE to appear on your show now.
But can the all-stars of the Beltway defeat the Random News Generator in this, Day 2 of the competition?
TV
NBC-Madison Affiliate: Today Show, covering the effectiveness of charter schools as part of the network's daylong focus on education. Al Roker hosting.
NBC-Milwaukee Affiliate: Meet The Press, panel discussion on education reform. Panel includes Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Randi Weingarten, Robert Bobb. David Gregory hosting.
CBS: Face The Nation. Discussing the Tea Party.
ABC: This Week with Christiane Amanpour. Queen Rania of Jordan interviewed about Israel/Palestine peace talks. (NOTE: I stopped here and let the interview run to completion before moving on.)
CNN: Reliable Sources. Jeff Zucker ousted from NBC; Jon Klein ousted from CNN. Howard Kurtz hosting.
CNN Headline News: A dropoff in prescription drug usage, with seniors turning in unused portions to pharmacies. Natasha Curry reporting.
FOX News: Interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
MSNBC: Obama's upcoming roadtrip to four states- New Mexico, Wisconsin, Iowa and Virginia. Mike Viequera reporting.
CNN International: A look at the fashion industry, specifically how some models are Photoshopped heavily before being depicted in advertisements.
Bloomberg: Bill Clinton interviewed concerning the upcoming election. Bill Hunt reporting.
WIS-E (a state-level public-access channel): 'Difference: Women In Law Enforcement'.
WPT (a PBS affiliate): Covering the Wisconsin governor's race. (This was added via one additional round through the channels, since that was done yesterday and I wish to be consistent.)
Few complaints about that effort. Let's see if the RNG can keep up. It's got 12 spins to work with.
Jordan
New Zealand
Djibouti
DR Congo
Trinidad and Tobago
Ecuador
Azores Islands
Namibia
Guam
Antigua and Barbuda
Uruguay
Fiji
The dreaded Trinidad and Antigua, killers from yesterday, make return appearances, but also some great potential at the top end. But it's all in the stories that get picked.
Jordan: Their economy has grown in the second quarter.
New Zealand: They have decided they will take part in the Commonwealth Games, set for Delhi, India. India has hoped these Games to do for them what the Beijing Olympics did for China. As it turns out, not so much. Everything's breaking, the athlete's village has been described as 'unfit for human habitation', someone shot up a tourist bus recently, and the visiting athletes have been understandably skittish about the prospect of the whole thing. Canada had threatened to stay home entirely.
Djibouti: A status report on the nation's healthcare system, and... let's just say that despite the debate going on in America, be glad you've got this one as opposed to that one.
DR Congo: Two pilots, one from Ukraine and one from DR Congo, were released after a three-week kidnapping by Mai Mai rebel forces. Two other people were also released, apparently "without conditions".
Trinidad and Tobago: David Beckham arrived in the country to campaign for England's bid to host the 2018 World Cup.
Ecuador: Robert Mugabe has NOT arrived in the country to receive an honorary law degree from a discredited Christian university.
Azores Islands: Hurricane Lisa is weakening 955 miles south of the Azores. Close enough, right?
Namibia: Their soccer federation is threatening to report Zimbabwe's federation to FIFA over Zimbabwe poaching their national-team coach.
Guam: 40,000 welding jobs are on offer to help build a military base. Anyone out there up for it?
Antigua and Barbuda: The country is helping to celebrate World Tourism Day.
Uruguay: Oh, come on. Chess? CHESS? Really? Chess?
Fiji: More Commonwealth Games coverage. Or in Fiji's case, the explanation of lack thereof. Fiji had a military coup in 2006, earning them an expulsion from the Games and are still on the outs.
Not gonna sugarcoat it. TV won this round and not by a small margin. Lots of wasted potential here.
CHESS, for Pete's sake. I'm counting on you to not embarrass me, RNG. Get it together. And stop drawing Antigua and Barbuda.
Sunday. TV news puts its best foot forward today, particularly Sunday morning. The most respected names in the industry toil their entire careers for a shot at these timeslots, even moreso than the primetime hours. When one of the coveted Sunday-morning shows needs a new anchor, everybody's ears perk up. Fingers are crossed. Names are considered, dropped, considered again. Even if you've made enough enemies in Washington to choke a horse, even if half the town wouldn't consent to an interview with you if you put a gun to their head, capture a Sunday morning slot and it no longer matters. You have the entire Beltway on call. Your enemies HAVE to appear on your show now.
But can the all-stars of the Beltway defeat the Random News Generator in this, Day 2 of the competition?
TV
NBC-Madison Affiliate: Today Show, covering the effectiveness of charter schools as part of the network's daylong focus on education. Al Roker hosting.
NBC-Milwaukee Affiliate: Meet The Press, panel discussion on education reform. Panel includes Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Randi Weingarten, Robert Bobb. David Gregory hosting.
CBS: Face The Nation. Discussing the Tea Party.
ABC: This Week with Christiane Amanpour. Queen Rania of Jordan interviewed about Israel/Palestine peace talks. (NOTE: I stopped here and let the interview run to completion before moving on.)
CNN: Reliable Sources. Jeff Zucker ousted from NBC; Jon Klein ousted from CNN. Howard Kurtz hosting.
CNN Headline News: A dropoff in prescription drug usage, with seniors turning in unused portions to pharmacies. Natasha Curry reporting.
FOX News: Interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
MSNBC: Obama's upcoming roadtrip to four states- New Mexico, Wisconsin, Iowa and Virginia. Mike Viequera reporting.
CNN International: A look at the fashion industry, specifically how some models are Photoshopped heavily before being depicted in advertisements.
Bloomberg: Bill Clinton interviewed concerning the upcoming election. Bill Hunt reporting.
WIS-E (a state-level public-access channel): 'Difference: Women In Law Enforcement'.
WPT (a PBS affiliate): Covering the Wisconsin governor's race. (This was added via one additional round through the channels, since that was done yesterday and I wish to be consistent.)
Few complaints about that effort. Let's see if the RNG can keep up. It's got 12 spins to work with.
Jordan
New Zealand
Djibouti
DR Congo
Trinidad and Tobago
Ecuador
Azores Islands
Namibia
Guam
Antigua and Barbuda
Uruguay
Fiji
The dreaded Trinidad and Antigua, killers from yesterday, make return appearances, but also some great potential at the top end. But it's all in the stories that get picked.
Jordan: Their economy has grown in the second quarter.
New Zealand: They have decided they will take part in the Commonwealth Games, set for Delhi, India. India has hoped these Games to do for them what the Beijing Olympics did for China. As it turns out, not so much. Everything's breaking, the athlete's village has been described as 'unfit for human habitation', someone shot up a tourist bus recently, and the visiting athletes have been understandably skittish about the prospect of the whole thing. Canada had threatened to stay home entirely.
Djibouti: A status report on the nation's healthcare system, and... let's just say that despite the debate going on in America, be glad you've got this one as opposed to that one.
DR Congo: Two pilots, one from Ukraine and one from DR Congo, were released after a three-week kidnapping by Mai Mai rebel forces. Two other people were also released, apparently "without conditions".
Trinidad and Tobago: David Beckham arrived in the country to campaign for England's bid to host the 2018 World Cup.
Ecuador: Robert Mugabe has NOT arrived in the country to receive an honorary law degree from a discredited Christian university.
Azores Islands: Hurricane Lisa is weakening 955 miles south of the Azores. Close enough, right?
Namibia: Their soccer federation is threatening to report Zimbabwe's federation to FIFA over Zimbabwe poaching their national-team coach.
Guam: 40,000 welding jobs are on offer to help build a military base. Anyone out there up for it?
Antigua and Barbuda: The country is helping to celebrate World Tourism Day.
Uruguay: Oh, come on. Chess? CHESS? Really? Chess?
Fiji: More Commonwealth Games coverage. Or in Fiji's case, the explanation of lack thereof. Fiji had a military coup in 2006, earning them an expulsion from the Games and are still on the outs.
Not gonna sugarcoat it. TV won this round and not by a small margin. Lots of wasted potential here.
CHESS, for Pete's sake. I'm counting on you to not embarrass me, RNG. Get it together. And stop drawing Antigua and Barbuda.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
TV News Vs. Random News, Day 1/3
I have grown cocky in the abilities of what I've begun to regard as a trademark around here, my Random News Generator. It's drawn a couple duds, to be sure, but, top to bottom, it's done pretty well; given up some pretty good stories.
In fact, I would wager that, given as similar circumstances as possible, the RNG could hang with, and possibly even outdo, the guys on TV.
So today, we begin a three-day showdown between TV news and the RNG. I make it three days because this particular three-day stretch includes TV news' three major moods: Saturday Mode, Sunday Mode, and Weekday Mode. Saturday sees the news at its most lazy, by and large. Sunday- particularly Sunday morning- sees the news at its best. The weekdays- represented here by Monday- sees the news in a 'normal' mode, if you will. Therefore, it would only do to test all three in one go.
Here's how the showdown will work:
TV NEWS
*The TV will be scored first.
*I will channel-surf on my own TV. I have Charter, in an area that serves both the Madison and Milwaukee markets, for reference.
*I will stop at any channel that is airing a news program at the time I reach it. Business channels count (such as CNBC), sports channels do not (such as ESPN), and entertainment channels do not (such as E!); though if a sports or entertainment story is aired on a non-sports network, it will count. Commercials are excused.
*I will record whatever story is being aired by that network at that very moment. Whatever they're reporting on, that's how they're scored. Top story, bottom story, fluff piece about cheese-rolling, doesn't matter. If I stop on a commercial, or I arrive too late in the piece to figure out what story they've chosen, the next story aired will be the one scored. If I can catch the name of the reporter in question, I will record that as well.
RANDOM NEWS GENERATOR
*The RNG will be scored second, as the first step in its scoring is to find out how many networks have contributed a report.
*However many networks have been scored, the RNG will be run an equivalent number of times. If nine networks have aired a news program, there will be nine spins of the RNG.
*Normal procedure is, I would take the 232 nations/territories/dependencies/etc. that make up the RNG, randomly select one, and cherry-pick the best news story from there as seen on Google News, unless the country is a total dud, in which case I spin again. That will not be done here.
*Instead, it will be the very first story given; the top result for the given country on Google News. If the nation's a dud, too bad. If the story is inferior to another one further down, too bad. If the particular link given is inferior to another write-up on the same story, too bad. An allowance will be given so as to ensure coherent use of the English language, but that is it. What comes up, comes up.
The aim here is to see, top-to-bottom, who does a better job of reporting in terms of story selection: the TV guys as a team, or my virtual dartboard. By 'story selection', I mean in terms of 'natural disaster vs. that Spanish tomato-throwing festival'.
This is Day 1 of the competition: Saturday. TV news at its worst. Its laziest. Most of the big guns of the industry are off at the bar or something. MSNBC is airing prison documentaries all day and I have decided they will be punished for that by having it scored and allowing the RNG that one extra spin.
Due to the sheer amount of stories covered here, we won't get too much into context. Just mention what is being reported, and move on.
So here goes. TV first.
ABC: Start of the Chris Matthews Show. It's election coverage, specifically comparisons between Obama and Clinton.
National Geographic: An episode of Explorer; Inside LSD.
CNN: A house party shooting in Los Angeles. 12 dead.
CNN Headline News: 4th lawsuit filed against Georgia pastor Eddie Long regarding sexual misconduct. Natasha Curry reporting.
FOX News: Panel discussion concerning US requesting that China buy a stake in GM.
MSNBC: Not prison documentaries, lucky for them. They'll put an actual story onthe board. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg donating $100 million as a grant to Newark schools. Rehema Ellis reporting, Alex Witt anchoring.
CNN International: Sports news. Specifically, the starting grid for the Singapore Grand Prix.
Bloomberg: Cris Valerio interviews FUBU CEO Daymond John. At the point I got there, the discussion had gotten to his role on ABC's 'Shark Tank'.
That makes for eight channels, a pretty low number, as there was a fair bit of paid programming to go through, and it took a second round through the channels to get ABC squeezed in. National Geographic snuck in by a lucky shot; Explorer is the only show on the network one could call a news program and including it really only helps the TV squad out. Eight spins of the RNG.
The RNG lineup:
San Marino
Trinidad and Tobago
Antigua and Barbuda
Syria
Mauritania
Georgia
Romania
Panama
Bad, bad luck for the RNG here. That's a terrible draw at the top three. Picked a bad time to pull those.
San Marino: Their 6-0 loss to Sweden in Euro 2012 qualifying two and a half weeks ago.
Trinidad and Tobago: More soccer. A preview of the FIFA U-17 Women's World Cup final, held in Trinidad and Tobago, in which it will be South Korea vs. Japan.
Antigua and Barbuda: The second story was about three suspended members of their electoral commission, but that's not the one that scores. The one that scores concerns the 2010 Caribbean Surf Ski Tour.
Syria: Syria criticizing the UN nuclear agency, the IAEA, for not censuring Israel over a refusal to allow inspections.
Mauritania: Their army denies the death of 19 soldiers in a clash with al Qaeda in northern Mali.
Georgia: There were two dates in which the New York Philharmonic was scheduled to visit; these are now cancelled over budget issues on Georgia's side.
Romania: Their president has given up police protection after thousands of officers protested a decision to cut their pay by 25 percent. He still has Presidential security, though.
Panama: Drug enforcement agents seized three tons of cocaine, purported to be a record.
After the weak start, the RNG recovered very quickly.
The best faces put forward on Day 1 by TV would have to be the election coverage, Inside LSD and the Facebook grant to Newark schools. The RNG responded with the IAEA criticism, Romanian police protests and Panamaian cocaine seizure.
The worst faces: for TV, the Singapore Grand Prix, Daymond John interview and probably the pastor scandal. For the RNG, soccer and surfing.
TV on Day 1 wasn't nearly as strong on the front end, but it proved consistent enough to where the bottom-tier stories held up reasonably well. The RNG was very erratic: a strong top-tier, but a ruinous back end.
Both have two days to improve. TV's first string is still coming up; the RNG can certainly draw better than it did here.
In fact, I would wager that, given as similar circumstances as possible, the RNG could hang with, and possibly even outdo, the guys on TV.
So today, we begin a three-day showdown between TV news and the RNG. I make it three days because this particular three-day stretch includes TV news' three major moods: Saturday Mode, Sunday Mode, and Weekday Mode. Saturday sees the news at its most lazy, by and large. Sunday- particularly Sunday morning- sees the news at its best. The weekdays- represented here by Monday- sees the news in a 'normal' mode, if you will. Therefore, it would only do to test all three in one go.
Here's how the showdown will work:
TV NEWS
*The TV will be scored first.
*I will channel-surf on my own TV. I have Charter, in an area that serves both the Madison and Milwaukee markets, for reference.
*I will stop at any channel that is airing a news program at the time I reach it. Business channels count (such as CNBC), sports channels do not (such as ESPN), and entertainment channels do not (such as E!); though if a sports or entertainment story is aired on a non-sports network, it will count. Commercials are excused.
*I will record whatever story is being aired by that network at that very moment. Whatever they're reporting on, that's how they're scored. Top story, bottom story, fluff piece about cheese-rolling, doesn't matter. If I stop on a commercial, or I arrive too late in the piece to figure out what story they've chosen, the next story aired will be the one scored. If I can catch the name of the reporter in question, I will record that as well.
RANDOM NEWS GENERATOR
*The RNG will be scored second, as the first step in its scoring is to find out how many networks have contributed a report.
*However many networks have been scored, the RNG will be run an equivalent number of times. If nine networks have aired a news program, there will be nine spins of the RNG.
*Normal procedure is, I would take the 232 nations/territories/dependencies/etc. that make up the RNG, randomly select one, and cherry-pick the best news story from there as seen on Google News, unless the country is a total dud, in which case I spin again. That will not be done here.
*Instead, it will be the very first story given; the top result for the given country on Google News. If the nation's a dud, too bad. If the story is inferior to another one further down, too bad. If the particular link given is inferior to another write-up on the same story, too bad. An allowance will be given so as to ensure coherent use of the English language, but that is it. What comes up, comes up.
The aim here is to see, top-to-bottom, who does a better job of reporting in terms of story selection: the TV guys as a team, or my virtual dartboard. By 'story selection', I mean in terms of 'natural disaster vs. that Spanish tomato-throwing festival'.
This is Day 1 of the competition: Saturday. TV news at its worst. Its laziest. Most of the big guns of the industry are off at the bar or something. MSNBC is airing prison documentaries all day and I have decided they will be punished for that by having it scored and allowing the RNG that one extra spin.
Due to the sheer amount of stories covered here, we won't get too much into context. Just mention what is being reported, and move on.
So here goes. TV first.
ABC: Start of the Chris Matthews Show. It's election coverage, specifically comparisons between Obama and Clinton.
National Geographic: An episode of Explorer; Inside LSD.
CNN: A house party shooting in Los Angeles. 12 dead.
CNN Headline News: 4th lawsuit filed against Georgia pastor Eddie Long regarding sexual misconduct. Natasha Curry reporting.
FOX News: Panel discussion concerning US requesting that China buy a stake in GM.
MSNBC: Not prison documentaries, lucky for them. They'll put an actual story onthe board. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg donating $100 million as a grant to Newark schools. Rehema Ellis reporting, Alex Witt anchoring.
CNN International: Sports news. Specifically, the starting grid for the Singapore Grand Prix.
Bloomberg: Cris Valerio interviews FUBU CEO Daymond John. At the point I got there, the discussion had gotten to his role on ABC's 'Shark Tank'.
That makes for eight channels, a pretty low number, as there was a fair bit of paid programming to go through, and it took a second round through the channels to get ABC squeezed in. National Geographic snuck in by a lucky shot; Explorer is the only show on the network one could call a news program and including it really only helps the TV squad out. Eight spins of the RNG.
The RNG lineup:
San Marino
Trinidad and Tobago
Antigua and Barbuda
Syria
Mauritania
Georgia
Romania
Panama
Bad, bad luck for the RNG here. That's a terrible draw at the top three. Picked a bad time to pull those.
San Marino: Their 6-0 loss to Sweden in Euro 2012 qualifying two and a half weeks ago.
Trinidad and Tobago: More soccer. A preview of the FIFA U-17 Women's World Cup final, held in Trinidad and Tobago, in which it will be South Korea vs. Japan.
Antigua and Barbuda: The second story was about three suspended members of their electoral commission, but that's not the one that scores. The one that scores concerns the 2010 Caribbean Surf Ski Tour.
Syria: Syria criticizing the UN nuclear agency, the IAEA, for not censuring Israel over a refusal to allow inspections.
Mauritania: Their army denies the death of 19 soldiers in a clash with al Qaeda in northern Mali.
Georgia: There were two dates in which the New York Philharmonic was scheduled to visit; these are now cancelled over budget issues on Georgia's side.
Romania: Their president has given up police protection after thousands of officers protested a decision to cut their pay by 25 percent. He still has Presidential security, though.
Panama: Drug enforcement agents seized three tons of cocaine, purported to be a record.
After the weak start, the RNG recovered very quickly.
The best faces put forward on Day 1 by TV would have to be the election coverage, Inside LSD and the Facebook grant to Newark schools. The RNG responded with the IAEA criticism, Romanian police protests and Panamaian cocaine seizure.
The worst faces: for TV, the Singapore Grand Prix, Daymond John interview and probably the pastor scandal. For the RNG, soccer and surfing.
TV on Day 1 wasn't nearly as strong on the front end, but it proved consistent enough to where the bottom-tier stories held up reasonably well. The RNG was very erratic: a strong top-tier, but a ruinous back end.
Both have two days to improve. TV's first string is still coming up; the RNG can certainly draw better than it did here.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Cooper School and Maddow School
One of the more enduring debates about a journalist's job concerns how to play their personal beliefs against the events of the day. Some think it's okay to allow your beliefs to provide perspective, others say to just shut up and report the facts.
I think there's room for both.
Most people might call the two groups 'journalists' and 'pundits', and leave it at that. That really doesn't tell the whole story to me; it implies that pundits aren't really practicing journalism on some level. They are. They're just doing it differently. And sometimes very, very, maliciously badly, but we'll get to that in due time.
I consider them more as two different 'schools' of journalism more than anything else, schools that I will here name after examples of each that I placed in my Journalistic Sweet 17- the Cooper School and the Maddow School. Both can be done well, and both can be done badly.
First, the Cooper School, named for Anderson Cooper. This is the 'journalist' half of journalism. This is the straight-laced, no-personal-opinion reporting, the school that believes your beliefs have no place in the report, and that you shouldn't express an opinion of any sort if the issue being addressed is at all in doubt or up for debate. Cooper School journalists will go to great lengths to preserve their neutrality; some will go so far as to deliberately not vote in elections, on the belief that the vote will give them a stake in the outcome, and unduly skew their reporting in order to favor that result.
When done right- when done perfectly- a Cooper School journalist will rarely make a big splash, but they'll make up for it in sheer respect. The people called on to moderate Presidential debates come exclusively out of the Cooper School. They're the ones everybody misses when they die. There's Cooper, Jim Lehrer, Tim Russert, Walter Cronkite.
Lesser Cooper School journalists, though, tend to make a few common mistakes. Poor story selection is always a killer. I'm sure that very few people got into the journalism industry so they could be the one to finally break the news on what Octomom is up to now.
Keep living the dream there, Radar Guy Clearly Too Humiliated By What His Career Has Come To To Bring Himself To Put His Name On The Byline.
The other major mistake Cooper School journalists make is trying too hard to force equivalency. At some point, viewpoints stop being equal. At some point, there stops being an ability to even have an honest debate. It's fine to have a debate on, say, illegal immigration. Having a debate about whether we landed on the moon makes you less of a journalist than, say, Adam Savage. And even when debates are warranted, it's not worth letting viewpoints go unchallenged, or undebunked, just so both sides can feel equal. Sometimes they're simply not. If one side's just filling the debate with lie after lie, call them out on lie after lie. That's your job.
Which leads to the Maddow School, named for Rachel Maddow.
These are who you would call the 'pundits'. The Maddow School gets to be in the Maddow School for a variety of reasons. Maybe they believe that true neutrality is impossible. Maybe they believe that they can't just stand idly by and let things happen if they believe they can improve matters by contributing their views. Maybe they just can't stop themselves. Maybe they don't give a damn. Whatever the reason, these are the people that mix news with opinion.
The important thing in being part of the Maddow School is this: while you by nature no longer feel bound by any false-equivalency concerns, you have to know how not to go too far in the other direction. You've made your biases known. Fair enough. Now that you've done that, you still have to be fair. You have to be willing to praise the other side, however begrudgingly. You have to be willing to call fouls on your own side. The pitfalls of not doing so are obvious. Fail to do this properly and you're not really thought of as much of a journalist anymore.
The kind of respect that lets you moderate debates is gone. You're not neutral. How could you possibly do a good job? On the other hand, Maddow School journalists have the tendency to be able to do things that will end up in front of a very wide audience, things that are going to stick much more easily in people's minds. They feel more free to express themselves, say things that need to be said but cannot be said by a true neutral. Nobody expects straight-laced equivalency at all costs from a Maddow School journalist, so one might as well do what one has to do to get a point across, things a Cooper School journalist couldn't risk doing for fear of losing respect.
Basically, being in the Maddow School means you get to do things like this.
Being in the Maddow School comes with two major caveats:
1. If you think of yourself as an entertainer, and you do things that would, as a journalist, put you in the Maddow School, nobody is going to buy it if and when you decide to retreat back to 'but I'm just an entertainer'. Yes. You are an entertainer. You are an entertainer that is practicing journalism, and will be critiqued on the merits of what you report same as everybody else. (Stewart and Glenn Beck both think of themselves along this line, though they use it for different ends. Beck goes 'I'm just an entertainer, I'm not to be taken seriously.' Stewart goes 'I'm just an entertainer, and yet here I am doing the media's job for it. What does that say about the rest of you guys when I'M kicking your ass?'Beck uses it as a crutch; Stewart uses it as a pressure point on the rest of the media.)
2. It's easy to get into the Maddow School. It's much harder to get out. And while you can dip your toe in the pool, once you've dived in entirely, you're not coming back out. Once you've expressed your views, you can't unexpress them. They're out there, and now you just have to deal with it. Be very, very careful about anything that might signal a transition from the Cooper School to the Maddow School. If the transition's intentional, tread lightly. Too jarring a transition, and it can be a swift fall from grace.
Keith Olbermann is a shining example of how you can screw up the transition, which he made around the time of Hurricane Katrina. It started with the occasional 'Special Comment', the concept of which he attributed to idol Edward R. Murrow. This was dipping the toe in the pool, which Murrow would occasionally do. Then the 'Special Comments' turned out to be happening rather often, and began to infect the rest of the program. Murrow had merely dipped his toe in the pool, but Olbermann had submerged himself completely, a fact that became obvious on December 18, 2006, the day when he devoted an entire program to rerunning previous Special Comments. Later, he would put out a book combining past 'Worst Person In The World' segments, and upon the close of the 2008 Presidential campaign, released a daily 'Campaign Comment'. By this time he had figured out that he was doing so many comments that they weren't very Special anymore.
Actually, no, he hadn't. He had to be told.
It has been 1,481 days- four years and half a month- since Olbermann's original Special Comment on August 30, 2006. Olbermann has issued 60 Special Comments- seriously, there is a Wikipedia page for this- and 9 Campaign Comments, which would have also been 'Special' had he not been warned away from that label. Not counting the Campaign Comments, it works out to one Comment every 24.68 days.
Now, Murrow would tackle some weighty issues himself. But he kept an even keel. He spoke calmly. He didn't yell. He didn't keep a daily list of the Worst Persons In The World. The feud Murrow is best known for is with Senator Joe McCarthy. Olbermann's best-known feud is with fellow Maddow School journalist Bill O'Reilly. And in the process of each, the two saw very different outcomes. Murrow defeated his prey. Olbermann became the equal of his.
Even if Olbermann wished to reverse himself, it's too late. From where he is, there's no going back to the Cooper School.
I think there's room for both.
Most people might call the two groups 'journalists' and 'pundits', and leave it at that. That really doesn't tell the whole story to me; it implies that pundits aren't really practicing journalism on some level. They are. They're just doing it differently. And sometimes very, very, maliciously badly, but we'll get to that in due time.
I consider them more as two different 'schools' of journalism more than anything else, schools that I will here name after examples of each that I placed in my Journalistic Sweet 17- the Cooper School and the Maddow School. Both can be done well, and both can be done badly.
First, the Cooper School, named for Anderson Cooper. This is the 'journalist' half of journalism. This is the straight-laced, no-personal-opinion reporting, the school that believes your beliefs have no place in the report, and that you shouldn't express an opinion of any sort if the issue being addressed is at all in doubt or up for debate. Cooper School journalists will go to great lengths to preserve their neutrality; some will go so far as to deliberately not vote in elections, on the belief that the vote will give them a stake in the outcome, and unduly skew their reporting in order to favor that result.
When done right- when done perfectly- a Cooper School journalist will rarely make a big splash, but they'll make up for it in sheer respect. The people called on to moderate Presidential debates come exclusively out of the Cooper School. They're the ones everybody misses when they die. There's Cooper, Jim Lehrer, Tim Russert, Walter Cronkite.
Lesser Cooper School journalists, though, tend to make a few common mistakes. Poor story selection is always a killer. I'm sure that very few people got into the journalism industry so they could be the one to finally break the news on what Octomom is up to now.
Keep living the dream there, Radar Guy Clearly Too Humiliated By What His Career Has Come To To Bring Himself To Put His Name On The Byline.
The other major mistake Cooper School journalists make is trying too hard to force equivalency. At some point, viewpoints stop being equal. At some point, there stops being an ability to even have an honest debate. It's fine to have a debate on, say, illegal immigration. Having a debate about whether we landed on the moon makes you less of a journalist than, say, Adam Savage. And even when debates are warranted, it's not worth letting viewpoints go unchallenged, or undebunked, just so both sides can feel equal. Sometimes they're simply not. If one side's just filling the debate with lie after lie, call them out on lie after lie. That's your job.
Which leads to the Maddow School, named for Rachel Maddow.
These are who you would call the 'pundits'. The Maddow School gets to be in the Maddow School for a variety of reasons. Maybe they believe that true neutrality is impossible. Maybe they believe that they can't just stand idly by and let things happen if they believe they can improve matters by contributing their views. Maybe they just can't stop themselves. Maybe they don't give a damn. Whatever the reason, these are the people that mix news with opinion.
The important thing in being part of the Maddow School is this: while you by nature no longer feel bound by any false-equivalency concerns, you have to know how not to go too far in the other direction. You've made your biases known. Fair enough. Now that you've done that, you still have to be fair. You have to be willing to praise the other side, however begrudgingly. You have to be willing to call fouls on your own side. The pitfalls of not doing so are obvious. Fail to do this properly and you're not really thought of as much of a journalist anymore.
The kind of respect that lets you moderate debates is gone. You're not neutral. How could you possibly do a good job? On the other hand, Maddow School journalists have the tendency to be able to do things that will end up in front of a very wide audience, things that are going to stick much more easily in people's minds. They feel more free to express themselves, say things that need to be said but cannot be said by a true neutral. Nobody expects straight-laced equivalency at all costs from a Maddow School journalist, so one might as well do what one has to do to get a point across, things a Cooper School journalist couldn't risk doing for fear of losing respect.
Basically, being in the Maddow School means you get to do things like this.
Being in the Maddow School comes with two major caveats:
1. If you think of yourself as an entertainer, and you do things that would, as a journalist, put you in the Maddow School, nobody is going to buy it if and when you decide to retreat back to 'but I'm just an entertainer'. Yes. You are an entertainer. You are an entertainer that is practicing journalism, and will be critiqued on the merits of what you report same as everybody else. (Stewart and Glenn Beck both think of themselves along this line, though they use it for different ends. Beck goes 'I'm just an entertainer, I'm not to be taken seriously.' Stewart goes 'I'm just an entertainer, and yet here I am doing the media's job for it. What does that say about the rest of you guys when I'M kicking your ass?'Beck uses it as a crutch; Stewart uses it as a pressure point on the rest of the media.)
2. It's easy to get into the Maddow School. It's much harder to get out. And while you can dip your toe in the pool, once you've dived in entirely, you're not coming back out. Once you've expressed your views, you can't unexpress them. They're out there, and now you just have to deal with it. Be very, very careful about anything that might signal a transition from the Cooper School to the Maddow School. If the transition's intentional, tread lightly. Too jarring a transition, and it can be a swift fall from grace.
Keith Olbermann is a shining example of how you can screw up the transition, which he made around the time of Hurricane Katrina. It started with the occasional 'Special Comment', the concept of which he attributed to idol Edward R. Murrow. This was dipping the toe in the pool, which Murrow would occasionally do. Then the 'Special Comments' turned out to be happening rather often, and began to infect the rest of the program. Murrow had merely dipped his toe in the pool, but Olbermann had submerged himself completely, a fact that became obvious on December 18, 2006, the day when he devoted an entire program to rerunning previous Special Comments. Later, he would put out a book combining past 'Worst Person In The World' segments, and upon the close of the 2008 Presidential campaign, released a daily 'Campaign Comment'. By this time he had figured out that he was doing so many comments that they weren't very Special anymore.
Actually, no, he hadn't. He had to be told.
It has been 1,481 days- four years and half a month- since Olbermann's original Special Comment on August 30, 2006. Olbermann has issued 60 Special Comments- seriously, there is a Wikipedia page for this- and 9 Campaign Comments, which would have also been 'Special' had he not been warned away from that label. Not counting the Campaign Comments, it works out to one Comment every 24.68 days.
Now, Murrow would tackle some weighty issues himself. But he kept an even keel. He spoke calmly. He didn't yell. He didn't keep a daily list of the Worst Persons In The World. The feud Murrow is best known for is with Senator Joe McCarthy. Olbermann's best-known feud is with fellow Maddow School journalist Bill O'Reilly. And in the process of each, the two saw very different outcomes. Murrow defeated his prey. Olbermann became the equal of his.
Even if Olbermann wished to reverse himself, it's too late. From where he is, there's no going back to the Cooper School.
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