The Daily News Record (Harrisonburg VA) today published an NPR=commies editorial, titled “An NPR Celebration?” It raves over a single word in an NPR piece on China’s red army.
The article is unattributed, and neglects to mention, among many other things, that the idea for their op-ed is lifted, in part word-for-word, from a National Review blog by Mona Charen — whose livelihood is based on bashing liberals.
This is nothing new, GOPs hate Dems and vice versa — their bickerings are what passes as political debate in this country. But what did fascinate me is nearly all the verifiable info (including the NatlRevu source) was provided not by the paper but by the readers in their online comments.
People argue whether the unwashed masses are qualified as “news” reporters. Or must raw info first be filtered by Qualified Journalists, the annointed arbiters of What We’re Told. Having worked in MSM for decades, I have developed an alternate theory: The News is Always Wrong; at least non-MSM sources have a chance of being right. I’ll tell ya about it sometime.
Polls of Presidential voters are remarkably accurate. The day before the 2000 Iowa Democratic Primary, the MSM News folk were still reporting Dean as the frontrunner he’d been for months, despite the several polls that showed a last-minute turn towards Kerry. The news was wrong, the polls right; Kerry won.
Then in November the Voter News Service was criticized for picking Al Gore the winner of the 2000 election. But it turned out (years later) Gore did win. Again, the polls proved correct, even when the margins were so slim.
Most media folk, including myself, are notoriously pitiful at prognostication (hell, we’re not even any good at evaluating the present), so you really shouldn’t pay us any mind when we mindlessly try to predict wuz gonna happen. But do pay attention to those polls we pay for, cuz when several say the same thing, it’s likely an accurate reflection of reality.
All a long way of saying, check: RealClearPolitics – Polls. It’s an up-to-date listing of the major Election 2008 polls, averaged and listed individually. Then click their National Head-to-Head Polls and see who’d beat who if the prez were picked today. (Answer: Hillary’s kickin’ ass.)
This week’s HV cast is a portrait of the non-fiction writer Charles Bowden, told by the people he’s written about and the editors he’s worked with. Bowden lives in Tucson, Arizona, and has written extensively on the cultural and physical environment of the Southwest. His style is both harsh and beautiful, and somewhat painful to read, as he takes the position that we are all to blame, or perhaps that there is no one is to blame, for the violent and destructive acts committed against nature and society. He writes about child molesters, drug traffickers, savings and loan executives, real estate developers, and crooked politicians in a way that implicates all of us. And so his work has been largely ignored. These interviews, hopefully, will help end his anonymity. A story by Scott Carrier, “The Thing Just Beyond Our Reach” (22:41 mp3):
Been thinking about that catch-phrase and have decided…
Speaking Truth to Power wastes you breath:
1) Power doesn’t listen.
2) Power doesn’t matter
(“If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders.” –Bucky Fuller
“Don’t follow leaders; watch the parking meters.” –Bob Dylan
“Laurel and Hardy, that’s John and Yoko. And we stand a better chance under that guise because all the serious people like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot.” –John Lennon)
Thoroughly depressing article on an Al Jazeera camerman who’s been incarcerated at Gitmo for nearly six years: “Prisoner 345,” Columbia Journalism Review.
When Hub Brown’s students first told him they loved “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and sometimes even relied on it for news, he was, as any responsible journalism professor would be, appalled.
Now he’s a “Daily Show” convert.
“There are days when I watch ‘The Daily Show,’ and I kind of chuckle. There are days when I laugh out loud. There are days when I stand up and point to the TV and say, ‘You’re damn right!'” says Brown, chair of the communications department at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and an associate professor of broadcast journalism.…
As “The Daily’s Show’s” Web site puts it: “One anchor, five correspondents, zero credibility. If you’re tired of the stodginess of the evening newscasts, if you can’t bear to sit through the spinmeisters and shills on the 24-hour cable news networks, don’t miss The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a nightly half-hour series unburdened by objectivity, journalistic integrity or even accuracy.”
I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?
However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”
the circus/charade that’s been the media coverage of events at virginia tech, I found it more than a little amusing that chimps appear to have evolved more than humans since we split from a common ancestor: Chimps More Evolved Than Humans
Newsflash!!! Hold the presses. This just in: we now have incontrovertible evidence that Republicans approve of our Prez, Democrats don’t, and Independents aren’t sure. It took the resources of both Slate Magazine and researchers MediaCurves to divine this world-shaking new data; ie, here’s how researchers spend their and their focus group members’ time:
The fine folks at Duke’s Ctr for Doc Studies asked me to compile a short list of resources for learning radio. It was for some workshops I did at their annual Documentary Happening. This is the list…
Hearing Voices- Learn Radio LinksHere are the reading/hearings/viewings. The most important are the top two Must and Should categories. Those just starting should know the Basics. Those already producing should have the Tools. And finally, for those w/ lotsa time and interest, there’s a few of the many hours worth listening to from Third Coast Sessions.Radio is a mix of skills: interviewing, writing, editing, storytelling, mixing. Some of the links below are how-to’s; others are more inspirational than instructional.
–>MUST SEE/READ:Watch Ira’s training vid, read Jeff’s ProTools primer. These are two concise yet comprehensive production guides…
Ira Glass- Current TV: Storytelling (15min video):
http://www.current.tv/studio/survivalguide/?section=storytelling&sub1=interviews&sub2=glass
Jeff Towne- Transom Tools: A Beginners Guide to Pro Tools (primer):
http://www.transom.org/tools/editing_mixing/200610_guide_to_pro_tools/
–>SHOULD READ- TRANSOM REVIEWS:Transom.org Guests’ posts are littered with pubradio insight. Here’s some of my favorite excerpts from their discussions…
Larry Massett- In Search of Aliens (online discussion)
http://www.transom.org/guests/review/200203.review.massett.html
Robert Krulwich- Why I Love Radio (online discussion)
http://www.transom.org/guests/review/200211.review.krulwich.html
Scott Carrier- Running After Antelope (online discussion)
http://www.transom.org/guests/review/200104.review.scarrier.html
Nancy Updike- Better Writing Through Radio (online discussion)
http://www.transom.org/guests/review/200601_nancy_updike/
–>BASICS:Some stripped down primers on pubradio production (a couple written for kids)…
–>TOOLS:Send (ftp) files for broadcast as uncompressed .wav or encoded .mp2 — do not broadcast or produce w/ mp3s if possible; use mp3 for audition only…
David Kestenbaum- Explaining the World in Four Minutes (1 hr conference session audio)
http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/annual_conference_2005.asp#id16
Robert Krulwich- These are a Few of My Favorite Things (1 hr conference session audio)
http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/annual_conference_2006_sessions.asp#favoritethings
Chris Brookes- Ways of Hearing (1 hr conference session audio)
http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/annual_conference_2003_sessions.asp#id11
Joe Richman- The Invisible Narrator (1 hr conference session audio)
http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/annual_conference_2006_sessions.asp#invisiblenarrator
I just came across this post about a Fox News Poll by Eric Kleefeld while reading the Talking Points Memo and couldn’t help reposting.
“You’ve got to check out the questions in the latest Fox News poll. They’re hilariously loaded — so much so, in fact, they are as clear a case study as anybody could possibly want that:
(a) Poll questions can be skillfully rigged to bring about a desired outcome; and
(b) Fox News specializes in asking such questions, especially on issues that could be damaging to President Bush and the GOP.
Check out these questions, and their responses. Fox’s artful wordings elicited the exact opposite findings of other, more reputable polls on questions involving the Attorney Purge and the Iraq War:
Do you think a Congressional investigation into the dismissal of the eight federal prosecutors is a good use of taxpayer money?
Yes 39%
No 51%
And:
Who do you trust more to decide when U.S. troops should leave Iraq — U.S. military commanders or Members of Congress?
Commanders 69%
Members of Congress 18%
Note the absence in the above question of the word “Bush.”
There’s also this little gem:
After the 2004 presidential election, the president of the left-wing Moveon.org political action committee made the following comment about the Democratic Party, ‘In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn’t need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it’s our Party: we bought it, we own it and we’re going to take it back.’ Do you think the Democratic Party should allow a grassroots organization like Moveon.org to take it over or should it resist this type of takeover?
As mentioned before I’m hooked on C-Span. Mainly for it’s raw unedited info, and insight into how-.gov-works. But also for it’s moments of pure real-life theatre, like during last weeks’ Senate Hearings on Global Warming, in this interaction b/w witness Fmr VP Gore and Senators Inhofe and Boxer:
What was more enlightening, tho, was the educated exchanges Gore had w/ senators on both sides of the aisle. Sure the occasional pol proposed things like sunspots as cause for globe.warm (really, a Senator said that: sunspots). But most — GOP and Dem — were informed, concerned and open to learning more. Here’s Sen Clinton and the fmr Veep:
Highly recommended you stream this thing: all 2+ hours of the C-Span (RealMedia) coverage. As a contrast, read CJR Daily‘s eval of network sound-bitten reports on Gore’s testimony to both houses.
"It would be an immense source of pride for me if NPR could find in its heart new beats and new sounds -- not radically different ones, just different enough that they would belong to the people who are now 17 but who are going to be listening 40 and 50 years from now." --Robert Krulwich
"[NPR is] the retirement community of the air. What was once an insurgent radio movement now sounds like Chet Huntley reading the evening news.†--Alex Beam, Boston Globe
"NPR is run by newspaper people. Sometimes I think they don’t even like radio." --Bob Edwards
Polls of Presidential voters are remarkably accurate. The day before the 2000 Iowa Democratic Primary, the MSM News folk were still reporting Dean as the frontrunner he’d been for months, despite the several polls that showed a last-minute turn towards Kerry. The news was wrong, the polls right; Kerry won.
This week’s 
Oldie but goodie Paul Harvey cut-up (1:24 
Free online Journalism Training course from News University, taught by the NY Times multimedia editor:
From