People can handle the truth about war. Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas reflects on how the media's willingness to show the horrors of war has changed since Vietnam.
posted on May 15, 2008 - View this thread

"The Daily Show is no doubt entertainment, but it is entertainment, measurably, with a substantive point. It is, in its own way, another kind of No Spin Zone." The Project for Excellence in Journalism discusses what is and is not journalistic (PDF) about The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
posted on May 8, 2008 - View this thread

Bill Moyers interviews the Reverend Jeremiah Wright in his first broadcast interview with a journalist since he became embroiled in a controversy for his remarks and his relationship with Barack Obama
posted on Apr 28, 2008 - View this thread

The "sacred flame" winds its way towards Beijing, creating new flashpoints like a car bumper scraping sparks from the pavement.

The chinese public's anger at CNN now has a wildly popular theme song. "You can't turn lies into the truth by repeating them a thousand times"

Chinese nationalism and an American backlash are both growing. Where is all this leading to? And even if we can't understand how China sees Tibet, or know whether the Shanghai Princesses will really give up their Chanel, can we at least assure the Chinese that we don't like Jack Cafferty either?
posted on Apr 19, 2008 - View this thread

What happens when a US President declares war on a concept? In 1964, Canadian photojournalist Hugh O'Connor traveled to eastern Kentucky to document the battlefields of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty and was shot for trespassing. The incident is the subject of a wonderful documentary, Stranger with a Camera by filmmaker Elizabeth Barrett, produced by Appalshop, a non-profit organization in Whitesburg, Kentucky, that works with local artists to promote self-representation in media and the expediency of culture to counteract a stagnating local economy. Makes you think twice about nostalgic representations of poor Appalachian coal miners plucking their banjo strings in the hollers, doesn't it?
posted on Apr 15, 2008 - View this thread

Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone (via). More From America's Worst Mom: 9-Year-Old On The Subway, Continued.
posted on Apr 11, 2008 - View this thread

"When you have a TV at full blast, and there's a talking head, you hear his intake of breaths in between sentences really, really clearly. Ha-ha! And if you listen carefully for those, as though that was the important part of communication, you wind up not really hearing anything else! It is just a person gasping for breath! Ha-ha. The effect is especially great with Nancy Pelosi." Gene Weingarten spends a day with the media firehose.
posted on Apr 1, 2008 - View this thread

"Inevitably, after I finish speaking, the strong opinions come. It happens the same way every time: People listen and then they say what they've been feeling. Videogames are not good for you. Videogames are a waste of time. They isolate children. Kids never go outside to play. They just sit there and stare at the TV all day."

The Myth of the Media Myth: Games and Non-Gamers.
posted on Mar 30, 2008 - View this thread

Gore Vidal Speaks Seriously Ill of the Dead Annoyed with the rose-tinted view of William F. Buckley displayed by some of his obituarists, Vidal slams Buckley, Newsweek, and the media in general. (MeFi Buckley obit thread here).
posted on Mar 22, 2008 - View this thread

Gravityland. Interactive Web TV series. Watch weekly episodes, respond, contribute. Read blog. Add moves to music video. Play Where in the world is Gravityland? Read comic book. Build FAQ. Somehow, it's all related, and all possibility.
posted on Mar 5, 2008 - View this thread

"When copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied." Kevin Kelly (previously) describes eight "generative" values that increase in value as the price tag on making copies goes down. He also has some advice for creators who want to make money off the long tail. Via
posted on Mar 5, 2008 - View this thread

She is intelligent enough to understand what the world wanted of her: that she was created as a virgin to be deflowered before us, for our amusement and titillation. She is not ashamed of her new persona — she wants us to know what we did to her.
posted on Feb 26, 2008 - View this thread

The Times Machine allows easy browsing of every edition from 70 years (1851-1922) worth of New York Times in the original format. Very cool.
posted on Feb 25, 2008 - View this thread

This past Monday, the US recognized Kosovo as an independent state. Today, Serbs appear a little upset.
posted on Feb 21, 2008 - View this thread

This little news story might be slightly damaging to John McCain's campaign. You know how the press lets stuff like this slide. uno dos tres cuatro cinco sex?
posted on Feb 21, 2008 - View this thread

Oamos is a "metasearch engine" that generates a sprawling cornucopia of sound, text and images based on your query.
posted on Feb 13, 2008 - View this thread

John.He.Is turns John McCain quotes into a beautiful song. Two suburban women sit around discussing whether or not America is ready for a smart President. Filmmakers get ready to release Barackula: The Musical. Rap musician BigHitBuda drops Elect Obama.
posted on Feb 11, 2008 - View this thread

I was going to share the many amazing videos that StSanders has uploaded to youtube featuring guitar gods like Van Halen and Santana shredding, since they have inexplicably only received scant mention on mefi so far. But StSanders' account has been suspended all all videos have been removed!
posted on Feb 5, 2008 - View this thread

The incredible works of Juan Francisco Casas, drawn using a Bic pen (some NSFW).
posted on Feb 4, 2008 - View this thread

Mark Khaisman makes incredible art using packing tape on plexiglass. (via)
posted on Feb 1, 2008 - View this thread

The talk show host, Miss Oprah Winfrey is illegally invading my privacy to promote show ideas on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Further, each time I gather evidence of proof, she pays people with her talk show earnings money to bribe them to destroy evidence. Many more complaints to the FCC about selected tv shows here.
posted on Jan 31, 2008 - View this thread

Saddam's Confessions - Given Saddam Hussein's central place in the American Consciousness over the last couple decades and particularly in recent years, I found 60 minutes' interview with FBI interrogator George Piro pretty fascinating.
posted on Jan 27, 2008 - View this thread

"You Don't Understand Our Audience" --what John Hockenberry (formerly of NBC, now at MIT Media Lab) learned about network news--good guys and bad guys, the "emotional center", synergy, facts, and why fewer and fewer watch nowadays.
posted on Dec 31, 2007 - View this thread

Jon Swift asked everyone on his blogroll to pick what they considered their best post of 07-- ...There are posts on politics by liberals, conservatives and moderates, posts on movies, music, television, books, economics, health care, science, sports, religion and history, personal stories and slices of life, poetry, prose, pictures and video. Some are very funny, some are quite serious, some will make you angry and some will make you say "Huh?" ...
posted on Dec 28, 2007 - View this thread

Once again, The Year in Media Errors and Corrections.
posted on Dec 28, 2007 - View this thread

Wayne White's paintings
posted on Dec 20, 2007 - View this thread

Bill Clinton on Charlie Rose - on display: Thoughtful Visionary as well as Political Animal; cf. Howard Dean and Jimmy Carter.
posted on Dec 16, 2007 - View this thread

The Page 69 Test --inspired by Marshall McLuhan's suggestion to readers for choosing a novel, a new blog, inviting authors to describe what's on page 69. One says: Not the best, but not the worst. If my pages were presidents, I’d put page 69 somewhere in the James K. Polk range.
posted on Dec 11, 2007 - View this thread

Last week, the Chicago Reader laid off four of its best journalists: John Conroy (previously), Harold Henderson, Tori Marlan, and Steve Bogira. The cuts almost certainly mark the beginning of the end of the paper's role in Chicago as an investigative force and a corruption watchdog. The New York Times responds with a salute to Conroy and a defense of muckraking's relevance.
posted on Dec 11, 2007 - View this thread

The media begins to awaken. Recently, Tom Curley, the President and CEO of Associated Press lashed out at the absurd conditions surrounding the detention of Bilal Hussein. After being detained for over 18 months, the US Military has finally decided to charge him, but nobody can say for what, or when, or why, or what evidence might be brought forth. Strangely, Mr. Curley writes this without a hint of the irony present in being caught in the net of lies, deception and constructed memory hole that the media has participated in the creation of. Playing patsy comes back to bite. AP hosts a timeline of articles.
posted on Nov 26, 2007 - View this thread

Emma Clarke the voice of the London Underground has just been fired for recording and posting some spoofs on her own website. "Mind the gap" no more. (To spare Emma's server and in case she is forced to remove the files for some reason: External linkage to streaming mp3's of these spoofs are below)
posted on Nov 26, 2007 - View this thread

Milo Radulovich, RIP --thrown out of the Air Force during the Red Scares, he fought back--Radulovich's case (and the new medium of TV) showed millions the impact McCarthy was having and the absurd lengths he was going to. He himself wasn't ever accused of being a Communist himself tho:
posted on Nov 21, 2007 - View this thread

They claimed they would destroy all television with their business. $100 million and one cast member of First Kid later, all they had were massive amounts of failure, tremendous parties with Bryan Singer, and many, many, many allegations of sexual molestation. Now they hide in the Spanish Riviera and hire Chinese sweatshop workers to mine for World of Warcraft items. Check as well the original 2000 LA Times expose on the company, to say nothing of the "gay pedophile version of Silver Spoons" which remains their finest artistic achievement. via boingboing
posted on Nov 16, 2007 - View this thread

The internet is killing the reporter, or at least the investigative journalist. So says David Leigh, the Guardian's esteemed dirty digger. But how right is he? Doesn't "the powerful global conversation", to quote the Cluetrain Manifesto, give investigative journalism new hope. Rather than be centred around the reporter, can communities of interest unite to share and uncover the sort of information that was once the sole property of reporters like Mr Leigh?
posted on Nov 14, 2007 - View this thread

The Heeb 100 Heeb Magazine, you know that sometimes controversial magazine out of Jew York has recently released their list of the "100 people you need to know about" who also happen to be Jewish. Also, be sure to check out their reposting of an interview with art world honcho and big time heeb Zach Feuer.
posted on Nov 5, 2007 - View this thread

Unqualified Reservations is a fascinating ongoing commentary on society and governance in postmodernity. He's currently on about the pwning of Richard Dawkins, after writing about Mediocracy and Official Journalism. It might be best to first read his earlier posts in which he defines the self-invented terminology he's fond of using, like: Formalism, The Iron Polygon, Universalism, Neocameralism, and The Rotary System.
posted on Oct 29, 2007 - View this thread

Last weekend, The Oregonian's Sports columnist John Canzano wrote about the two DUIIs by the son of the Oregon Ducks' coach. On Saturday, the Ducks football team beat the USC Trojans. The next day, Canzano wrote a story about the win. Before he wrote that story however, he wrote a blog post on what happened during the fourth quarter. Columnists are often held to different standards than reporters; and bloggers are often held to even different standards. It seems journalists are still learning the ropes of what standards they are held to under these different media. As a commenter JPound added to the post, "Before blogs, this unfortunate interaction would only have seen the light of day in a memoir."
posted on Oct 29, 2007 - View this thread

The FCC, again, moves to loosen ownership rules for television and newspapers. A similar proposal in 2003 drew huge public opposition. This time, there is a narrow window for public comment, ending in mid-November. You can contact the FCC or go to the Common Cause page.
posted on Oct 28, 2007 - View this thread

In the wake of Rupert Murdoch's takeover of the Wall Street Journal, several of the paper's top reporters have left for safer ground. Among them is Tara Parker-Pope, who joined the New York Times on October 3rd. Her blog, Well, currently accounts for three of the paper's top ten e-mailed stories: in addition to number 1, Five Easy Ways to Go Organic, she has number 5, Shhh...My Child Is Sleeping (in My Bed, Um, With Me), and number 8, Drug-Resistant Staph: What You Need to Know. Touché Rupert.
posted on Oct 25, 2007 - View this thread

Amusing Ourselves to Depth: Is The Onion our most intelligent newspaper?: "While other newspapers desperately add gardening sections, ask readers to share their favorite bratwurst recipes, or throw their staffers to ravenous packs of bloggers for online question-and-answer sessions, The Onion has focused on reporting the news. The fake news, sure, but still the news. It doesn’t ask readers to post their comments at the end of stories, allow them to rate stories on a scale of one to five, or encourage citizen-satire. It makes no effort to convince readers that it really does understand their needs and exists only to serve them. The Onion’s journalists concentrate on writing stories and then getting them out there in a variety of formats, and this relatively old-fashioned approach to newspapering has been tremendously successful." The article is based on the premises of the late media critic Neil Postman, especially from his book "Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In The Age Of Show Business."
posted on Oct 20, 2007 - View this thread

Government is good. An unapologetic defense of a vital institution.
posted on Oct 9, 2007 - View this thread

“War Made Easy" is a documentary with Sean Penn narrating, and is based on a book by Norman Solomon . This is an award winning expose on how the American Public has been led into a 50-year pattern of government deception and spin, dragging the United States from one war into another. Remarkably this film exhumes archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations. Brutally persuasive this film presents disturbing examples of propaganda from those we want to believe in.
posted on Sep 29, 2007 - View this thread

A gay Republican news story that you probably didn't read about in the paper: In late August, Ralph Gonzalez--Republican strategist, former Georgia GOP executive director, and "political powerhouse"--was murdered (along with his roommate, David Abrami, another Republican political consultant) by Gonzalez' "friend" and former Marine Jason Robert Drake. Characterized as the result of a "lovers' quarrel," it's a bizarre crime story that should've made at least a ripple in the national news, given some other recent incidents. But it never did.
posted on Sep 19, 2007 - View this thread

Leave Jesus Alone!
posted on Sep 17, 2007 - View this thread

Anti-Piracy agents MediaDefender have 700MiB of juicy internal emails leaked on BitTorrent; are in trouble.
posted on Sep 16, 2007 - View this thread

Old Magazine Articles Neat little database of .pdf copies of vintage magazine articles like Gilbert Seldes' 1922 review of Krazy Kat in Vanity Fair, a 1910 look at "Horse Versus Automobile," early nose jobs, an interview with James Joyce and more. [via ResearchBuzz]
posted on Sep 13, 2007 - View this thread

"A paper around her neck said she was Ida, but Ida said nothing at all." So tells the story of the saddest, unluckiest girl that ever lived.
posted on Sep 6, 2007 - View this thread

NewsFilterFilter: What Kind Of News Do People Really Want? A recent study by the Pew Research Center For The People & The Press analyzes 165 separate surveys of Americans' news preferences (conducted over a period of 20 years). One of the findings would have been obvious to most Mefites: "Polarizing social issues involving family, sexuality, patriotism and God engender the highest levels of attention." Crime, health and politics have consistently received mid-level attention. Tabloid and entertainment news (Paris and Britney, this means you), science and technology, and "foreign" news? Meh, not so much.
posted on Sep 4, 2007 - View this thread

Going After Gore "Al Gore couldn't believe his eyes: as the 2000 election heated up, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other top news outlets kept going after him, with misquotes ("I invented the Internet"), distortions (that he lied about being the inspiration for Love Story), and strangely off-the-mark needling, while pundits such as Maureen Dowd appeared to be charmed by his rival, George W. Bush. For the first time, Gore and his family talk about the effect of the press attacks on his campaign—and about his future plans—to the author, who finds that many in the media are re-assessing their 2000 coverage."
posted on Sep 4, 2007 - View this thread

“It seems that everytime I get a request from a western photojournalist to do a project on Manila, it's always about the slums and squatters and I am sick of it.” Carlos Celdran is well known for his chatty walking tours of Manila, and he’s tired of the one-track perception Westerners have of the city. Manila as slum gothic – low-hanging fruit for lazy photojournalists or writers? Or is a fairer perspective (in more ways than one) possible?
posted on Aug 28, 2007 - View this thread