New York Times writer (and former editor) Bill Keller printed a series of letters exchanged between him and muckraking journalist Glenn Greenwald. It’s a little long, but well worth reading. Via New…
News
It’s not what’s important; it’s what’s selling. How does the news keep your attention? With negativity, shock, and sensationalism. Warren Francke, a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, designed…
Don’t worry, loyal citizens: The NSA is still here to stalk love interests, read your mail, listen in on your conversations and otherwise keep acting like a psycho ex-girlfriend/boyfriend. Via Information Liberation:…
I’m an organ donor, but stories like this one (and that one) sure give me the creeps. I’m happy if my spare parts can help other people, but I’d like to think…
Priceless? Apparently these newscasters haven’t been in Toys R Us in a few years.
The truth is out. We are living in a time when a shocking four out of 5 U.S. adults will struggle with joblessness or poverty. This revelation not only flies directly in the face…
Hungry for more news? Here are a few more items of interest that caught the attention of our all-seeing eye. Arthur Machen in the underworld After torture, and between Harry Potter novels,…
As they say, the medium is the message, and the 24-hour breaking news cycle may be degrading your mind and your life. Via the Guardian, Rolf Dobelli argues thus: News is bad…
A few days ago, I had heard that there were riots going on in Brooklyn. I had no idea what was going on or why and didn’t feel like waiting for the…
Peter Sinclair posts at Climate Denial Crock of the Week:
Watch this, and ask yourself, who might be writing that script?
The artistic creation of Julian Oliver and Daniil Vasiliev, the Newstweek device allows for “altering reality on a per-network basis” by literally changing the headlines on people’s screens:
Newstweek is a device for manipulating news read by other people on wireless hotspots. Built into a small and innocuous wall plug, the Newstweek device allows writers to remotely edit news read on wireless devices without the awareness of their users.
While news is increasingly read digitally, it still follows a top-down distribution model and thus often falls victim to the same political and corporate interests that have always sought to manipulate public opinion. Newstweek intervenes upon this model, providing opportunity for citizens to have their turn to manipulate the press; generating propaganda or simply ‘fixing facts’ as they pass across a wireless network.
Smelly armpit deodorising company, Lynx (or Axe as they are known outside the United Kingdom) recently launched a contest to send 22 people into space, and I want to be one of…
More from the just-deceased Neil Smith — a classic dissection of how to properly read and understand the USA Today newspaper:
Each edition of USA Today has four seperate sections aimed at the broadest possible appeal — there’s News, Money, Sports, Life — who could object to that?
Via Daily Bhaksar Yalvac (Turkey): A woman heavily pregnant with the child of her rapist, killed the perpetrator and left his severed head in the local village square, Sun reported. The woman…
Perhaps designed to satisfy your morbid curiosity or shed light on the workings of our society, Cops Shooting People provides a round up of each day’s local news stories of fatal police…
MEDIA ROOTS — Seeds are at the very core of the public commons as the first link in an essential food chain. Throughout the 20th century, the agricultural biotech giant Monsanto perverted intellectual property laws to corner the world’s seed supply.
By allowing the food supply to be attached to the bottom line of a corporation, the world places its future in the hands of a corrupt few. Abby Martin explores the multinational corporation’s sordid past of corruption and toxicity and their current scandalous dealings for RT.
The New York Times points out that two-thirds of the most frightening post-9/11 plans for attacks on American soil were stings orchestrated by government agents. Typically, a bumbling, gullible, down on their…
Clearly, many people of all political stripes are seeing through the hoax put forward by KONY 2012 to legitimize another grand military adventure, now in Africa under AFRICOM.
Rap News Episode 12: YES WE KONY. It’s March, and the Internet delivers 2012′s first globe-consuming meme: the unstoppable, Stop-Kony 2012 video, which has highlighted the plight of African child soldiering like never before. But is it really good? Is it really bad? Or is the world really more complex than ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’?…
15 editions of the BBC’s News at Six from January, edited down to two minutes, changing what the anchors did say into what they should have said:
Parapolitical notes the contrasting linguistic framing used by the Associated Press in two stories five decades apart: How does the Associated Press choose which unanimous votes to dismiss as the slavish resolutions…
Oprah Winfrey got her own network, now Glenn Beck is considering it. Will a network last if it only has it’s delusional audience to rely on? The New York Times reports: The…