Revisionista monitors news websites and detects when articles change. The versions are viewable and the changes are highlighted. Some edits are miniscule, others are
quite interesting. A Recommended Revisions
list yields all manner of edits. Also on the News Sniffer site,
Watch Your Mouth monitors the BBC's
'Have Your Say' website and detects when comments get censored.
posted by thisisdrew
on Nov 1, 2006 -
11 comments
Satire [M]y father, temperamentally a gentle person, is often filled with rage. The news does this to him . . . . I have found a way not to be angry at all. I have taken shelter in the ridiculous.
posted by caddis
on Sep 16, 2006 -
31 comments
Oops! A mud eruption probably triggered by oil exploration has been making thousands of Indonesians' lives miserable since May.
posted by thirteenkiller
on Sep 14, 2006 -
20 comments
News Sniffer. It's a site dedicated to monitoring news articles and discussion threads at the BBC. For censored comments from BBC news threads:
Watch Your Mouth. And now it has implementation that tracks changes in news articles, to see how things are edited:
Revisionista. Here's a
couple of
examples.
posted by gsb
on Sep 11, 2006 -
5 comments
Sherri Finkbine --as reported by BBC News, on this day in 1962 (video clip too)--her travails and travels, the law, publicity, and what happened afterwards. (more here from
American Prospect in 05:
...A Gallup Poll taken that year showed that the majority of Americans supported Finkbine, and her case was a turning point ...)
posted by amberglow
on Aug 26, 2006 -
16 comments
Blue Pill Red Pill This site just launched recently, by the looks of it. It bills itself as a "national database of all news critical, independent, and investigative this side of the galaxy." Seems to be a way of introducing people to verified and rated independent media sources, rather than aggregating content or providing articles itself. I haven't seen much like it out there.
posted by tb0n3
on Aug 11, 2006 -
26 comments
[Newsfilter] Terror plot
disrupted. Scotland Yard has arrested about 18 potential terrorists who were planning to blow up UK to USA flights mid-air. The
UK threat level is now
critical - "an attack is expected imminently". And there's
chaos at the airports where hand luggage has been banned from all flights.
posted by featherboa
on Aug 10, 2006 -
506 comments
Journalism. There have been lots of complaints in the US about reporters not asking the tough questions, especially when they contradict the prevailing view, or the current administration's view. Here are some reporters who won't accept a weasel answer.
posted by caddis
on Aug 5, 2006 -
52 comments
Ever Wonder How Newspapers Decide Which Photos to Print? NYT Online's Talk to the Newsroom has a question and answer session with the Assistant Managing Editor for Photography, Michele McNally. She addresses a few of the more common questions many people have about how editorial decisions are made in regards to which photographs get published, and which don't among other topics.
posted by stagewhisper
on Jul 13, 2006 -
13 comments
"
This statue proves that Jesus Christ is Lord over America, he is Lord over Tennessee, he is Lord over Memphis."
posted by naomi
on Jul 5, 2006 -
145 comments
Google Checkout is officially unveiled today; the latest service to join the Google
arsenal in their race to control the entire www. It has been suggested
in the news that the Google payment service was also a big factor in the recent Yahoo and eBay partnership, since eBay's Paypal service might finally have some real competition. More info on the service
here.
posted by p3t3
on Jun 29, 2006 -
32 comments
send a hammer is a site that popped up recently to offer something to send a congressman(or woman) to break down the wall that the
send a brick folk want made with their bricks. What a strange conversation the nation is having about immigration!
It's all the talk from the
churches
to the
white supremacists
but ---won't someone think of the
kids!!
How bad is this an issue to tackle in an election year -
don't forget how much
madness can get legislated in the shadow of a heated election
posted by donabean
on Jun 27, 2006 -
26 comments
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is pumping out a pile of podcasts that have covered
the importance of offensive comics to Art Spiegelman,
600 bands over 54 shows,
Captain America versus the American government,
Amy Sedaris and geekdom,
the journey of young immigrants,
French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut and Harper's publisher John MacArthur discussing Europe and America perspectives since 9/11,
the after life,
sex with monkeys,
what radio producers do,
the french word "corps",
Bonnie Fuller's "The Joys of Much Too Much: Go For the Big Life — The Great Career, The Perfect Guy, and Everything Else You've Ever Wanted (Even If You're Afraid You Don't Have What It Takes)",
Veteran Washington reporter Helen Thomas and some other bits & bobs [Breakdown inside]
posted by boost ventilator
on Jun 5, 2006 -
25 comments
MEDIA MISTAKES? Byron Calame, public editor of The New York Times, wrote a piece recently about how a faulty Page One story went unchallenged. He notes that despite a questionable premise, the story went uncorrected for a week, and even provoked a piece of art on the Times' op-ed page. Calame's piece gives us a tiny bit of insight into editorial mistakes and correction policies in the media, particularly when challenged from the outside. You get the sense of a behemoth bureaucracy in motion, difficult to head off, harder yet to correct. The Times itself collected some of its more ridiculous errors in its book
Kill Duck Before Serving a few years ago. But less amusing is what law professor Eric Muller found. In early May, he heard Fox News' Judge Andrew Napolitano telling a story meant to illustrate how out of control the federal government's commerce-governing powers have become. Though Muller researched the supposed case Napolitano reported and found nothing in the legal archives, and asked Napolitano for more details,
Napolitano has yet to respond.
posted by etaoin
on May 25, 2006 -
23 comments
Tony Snow On President Bush: ‘An Embarrassment,’ It seems clear now that we will have
Snow In Late April as the Bush appointment to be the new press spokesman. Snow comes to the lawn of the White House all the way from Fox News, where he represented their view of Fair and balanced. So balanced in fact that he said things such as this: "“No president has looked this impotent this long when it comes to defending presidential powers and prerogatives.” [9/30/05]. But that was then and this is now and so can we assume that suddenly Bush will be seen as a masterful leader of his nation?
posted by Postroad
on Apr 25, 2006 -
63 comments
Meet the new New York Times. After
five years, the most popular newspaper on the web has gotten a facelift. Joining a recent web design trend towards
optimizing for wider screens, they've gone for no fewer than six columns on the front page. And while I wouldn't look for a wiki any time soon, they seem to be giving a nod to the web 2.0 crowd with javascipty scrollable image bars and prominent links to recent
video (hello, YouTube) and
current rankings of their most popular, most emailed and most blogged articles (hello, Technorati). The new
Times Topics aggregate articles (and multimedia) from across the site, along with background info (hello, Wikipedia). All the more impressive, considering the head of their design team (who also
redid The Onion!) was
hired just three months ago. Of course, Mickey Kaus will still see this as proof that Sulzburger should be fired.
posted by gsteff
on Apr 3, 2006 -
92 comments
Prisoners of their Bureaus--the Besieged Press of Baghdad What it's like to be a journalist in Iraq now--and especially relevant given
the current attacks on the media for not reporting all the good that's happening in Iraq--
...
an ever-widening gulf between official language and the reality of the actual situation in Baghdad. While official language is relentlessly upbeat, the already nightmarish reality has been getting worse with each passing day. ... the insurgent attacks on the US forces and Iraqi government and the sectarian fighting between Sunnis and Shiites have become destructive beyond what most journalists have been able to convey ... (NY Review of Books)
posted by amberglow
on Mar 25, 2006 -
35 comments
The big payback in Iraq. Last night on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, ROBERT LICHTER, President, Center for Media and Public Affairs put forth the following:
You know, Charlie Peter, a great Washington journalist, once said, "The message of Watergate was dig, dig, dig, but journalists thought the message was act tough." And so I think you're getting negative coverage that may be kind of compensatory criticism.
Should the news focus more on the
optimistic elements or is it reflecting
public opinion. Is "compensatory criticism" justified for what it might wrongly perceive as possible White House manipulation during the run up to the war?
posted by Skygazer
on Mar 23, 2006 -
22 comments
All I have to do is change my name to Peyton, motivate my girlfriend to marry me and have a baby, and hey presto! young Peyton will receive a six-figure scholarship to
Brighton College in England, explains the BBC because the college can't fulfil the bequest by former pupil Derek Wakehurst Peyton. Brighton
looks a nice place so roll up all Peytons, the college principal is spreading "the net wider to the United States, Australia and beyond." Second thoughts ... maybe simpler for me simply to motivate her to change her name ...
posted by Schroder
on Mar 6, 2006 -
11 comments
via BBC Ground-based astronomy could be impossible in 40 years because of pollution from aircraft exhaust trails and climate change, an expert says.
posted by goldism
on Mar 2, 2006 -
17 comments
