Tag Archives | media bias

Al-Jazeera Buys Current TV, Pundits’ Heads Explode

By on January 15, 2013 in News 5

Picture: Flickr User Mike Licht (CC)

Current TV was sold to Al-Jazeera English for a reported $500 million dollars. Eliot Spitzer has quit his show, while the Young Turks made a point of saying they are independent, and thus owned by neither organization.

Time Warner Cable opportunistically jumped at the chance to drop Current with the ‘change of ownership’ clause in their contract. Time Warner contends it was not a political move, but cited ‘lack of demand’ and their already-streaming online free content as factors. According to the New York Times, Time Warner Cable wrote: “We are keeping an open mind, and as the service develops, we will evaluate whether it makes sense, for our customers, to launch the network.”

The point has been made at AlterNet that Time Warner subscribers are hit with the cost of political organizations they may not even want, with FOX charging $1 per month for its content and MSNBC 20 cents.… Read the rest

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The Climate Change Denier Who Became The Voice Of Hurricane Sandy On Wikipedia

By on November 4, 2012 in News 26

We all rely far too much on Wikipedia without questioning the veracity of the source. As a reminder of the fallibility of the user-generated entries, Dan Nosowitz exposes the climate change denier Ken Mampel at PopSci:

“All I am is a contributor. I have no title, I’m just a Joe Blow,” says Ken Mampel, a currently unemployed 56-year-old living in Ormond Beach, Florida. He’s also largely responsible for the Wikipedia article about Hurricane Sandy. If it isn’t already, that article will eventually become the single most-viewed document about the hurricane. On the entire internet.

In an unpaid but frenzied fit of news consumption, editing, correction, aggregation, and citation, Mampel has established himself as by far the most active contributor to the Wikipedia page on Hurricane Sandy, with more than twice the number of edits as the next-most-active contributor at the time this article was written.

And Mampel made sure that the Hurricane Sandy article, for four days after the hurricane made landfall in New Jersey, had no mention of “global warming” or “climate change” whatsoever.

… Read the rest

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NewsDiffs Shows Changes Made to New York Times Articles After They’re Published

By on June 18, 2012 in News 1

SOA Watch

In the first ever disinformation anthology, You Are Being Lied To, Russ Kick examined the suspicious number of changes the Associated Press makes to its articles after first publication. Now NewsDiffs, a project made at the Knight Mozilla MIT hackathon, tracks changes in the New York Times using Github. Adrianne Jeffries reports for BetaBeat:

Back in October, the New York Times made substantial changes to a report about Occupy Wall Street protesters marching over the Brooklyn Bridge. Version one opened with: “After allowing them onto the bridge, the police cut off and arrested dozens of demonstrators.” Version two, edited just 20 minutes later, opened: “In a tense showdown above the East River, the police arrested more than 700 demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street protests who took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon.”

The major changes drew criticism, as the question of whether the police had allowed the marchers onto the bridge was central to hundreds of disorderly conduct charges.

… Read the rest

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Google News Censors Liberal Blogs

By on November 24, 2010 in News 25

alg_google-flamesIn case there was actual doubt that Google was a powerful corporate entity biased in all the same ways as other large scale media empires, here’s a little jewel from the folks at SFGate:

Yep. You read that correctly: “Google News Politics: Anti Sarah Palin Post Gets Google Censorship.” That’s another way of saying this blogger’s Zennie62.com blog was not included in Google News after a blog post called “Will Sarah Palin Ever Shut Up?”

Prior to Friday, November 19th, when that post, and others on Zennie62 for that day were included on Google News, then taken off and moved to Google Blog Search, Zennie62.com had become a major presence on Google News, outperforming many news sites, and showing a way toward a positive future for media that can be done by anyone.  A truly democratic effort.  But what’s Google News?

Google News is a news aggregator that places the “news of the day” from news websites, blogs, and now videos, into categories for content consumption by people like you and me.

… Read the rest

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