Abby Huntsman, daughter of failed Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman. has like many children of well-known politicians, parlayed her family connections and fame into a career as some sort of media personality. And as is the case with media personalities, they feel free to make assertions on policy matters with little attention to facts.
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There has been much discussion about the benefits and costs of social media. On the one hand, it enables people to form communities and relationships with like-minded people without proximity being a factor. This has been a boon for people in low-density population areas or who have interests shared by just a small fraction of the population. But one downside is that immediate physical communities may suffer as people withdraw into their virtual worlds.
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The news media and the internet in general is abuzz about the mysterious disappearance of the Malaysian airliner on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and we are at the stage where theories as to what happened are getting increasingly exotic. I have not been following the story closely because it seems likely that despite the fervent hopes of people who had loved ones on it that the plane might have landed somewhere, the sad truth is that it did crash into the ocean and that everyone perished and that eventually the wreckage will be discovered and the cause determined.
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The average age of people who watch Fox News is 68. That means that many people’s parents and grandparents get their news almost exclusively from a cable news channel that deliberately sets about feeding a demonstrably false narrative aimed at pursuing an agenda that is a mix of enriching the wealthy, despising the poor and working class, ginning up viewership with fake controversies, making the audience feel that they are constant siege by hostile forces, and advancing the interests of the Republican party and its Tea Party base.
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The truth of the Greek dramatist Aeschylus’s famous line that “In war, truth is the first casualty” keeps getting demonstrated over and over again. The latest example is the effort by the US government to revise the history of the Vietnam war. During that war, the US government kept insisting that things were going fine even as the reporters on the ground could see for themselves that things were going horribly wrong. The evening press briefings provided by the military became known as the ‘Five O’clock Follies” and the source of much dark humor.
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Matt Taibbi is the latest journalist to join First Look Media, the new operation started by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, and others. Since he is not on the national security beat, it reinforces the impression that this is going to be a fairly full service media outlet.
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Journalism professor Jay Rosen has a piece about how much of political journalism has gone astray by focusing their efforts not on educating the voters about what the important issues are but by appealing to those whom they refer to as ‘political junkies’, those who love the gossipy insider game of tactics used by the masters of the game.
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As rumored, the reporters who first broke the stories based on documents released by Edward Snowden have received the prestigious Polk journalism awards for 2013, in their case in the category for national security reporting. As the press release says:
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The organization Reporters Without Borders has released its 2014 World Press Freedom Index, its rankings of press freedoms around the globe and the US has plummeted 13 spots and is now at #46 out of 180 nations, sandwiched between Romania at #45 and just above Haiti at #47. Here is what the report says about why the US declined. [Read more…]
Nobody’s perfect. The fact that actors and writers and other artists may be personally flawed does not usually cause a problem with appreciating their work because we have learned to (mostly) separate the work of the artist from the person of the artist, so that praise for the artistic work does not mean we like or approve of the artist or the lives they lead. [Read more…]