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Post by kmc on Aug 30, 2006 16:53:43 GMT -5
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Post by Galactus on Aug 30, 2006 17:29:39 GMT -5
Yeah, that's good stuff.
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Post by kmc on Aug 30, 2006 17:37:32 GMT -5
I like it.
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Post by Galactus on Aug 30, 2006 17:38:51 GMT -5
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Post by phil on Sept 3, 2006 9:26:31 GMT -5
Interesting piece IMO ...
Accusations fly after US rushes to judgment
The JonBenet Ramsey murder suspect was just the latest victim of an increasingly sensationalist American media, writes Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 3, 2006
The Observer
It seemed a perfect story. A 10-year-old murder case, a child victim, a dramatic confession in a faraway land and a supposed villain who looked every inch the creepy paedophile. No wonder the faces of John Mark Karr and JonBenet Ramsey were soon staring out of newspapers, magazines and TV screens across the country. The bloodshed in Iraq and the Middle East was bumped off the agenda as the US media produced saturation coverage of Karr's confession to killing JonBenet, solving one of America's most notorious crimes. But there was problem: it was not true.
Karr's exposure as a sick fantasist has prompted a bout of self-recrimination and criticism of American journalism at a time when the profession's stock is already at a pitiful low. For the Karr disaster is far from an isolated case. The New York Times is also coming under increasing fire for its coverage of an alleged rape involving students at the prestigious Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. 'The Karr and the Duke cases show a rush to judgment that has proven potentially disastrous,' says Mark Feldstein, a former CNN journalist and now director of journalism at George Washington University in Washington DC.
These stories also come after last year's obsessive coverage of teenager Natalee Holloway, who vanished on the Caribbean island of Aruba. Several suspects and an island's way of life were raked over the media coals, but the police have yet to charge anyone with murder.
It has all focused attention on exactly what press freedom means in America. On the one hand it can mean the right to go after the powerful and prevent the government from keeping information secret. On the other, modern media culture seems more likely to use its freedom to metaphorically lynch anyone accused of a crime. At the centre of the problem is the changing face of television news, and the growth of cable TV channels with 24 hours of screen time to fill. The result is a tendency to leap on simple, graphic stories and milk them. That in turn forces a story into newspapers and weekly magazines. 'It is amazing, but stories like JonBenet would not have been national issues before cable news. Now they get saturation coverage,' says Feldstein.
The coverage of Karr's confession and extradition to the US was a case in point. For 10 days the media pored over every aspect of the case. In some ways the focus on Karr seemed a way of apologising for the previous vilification of JonBenet's parents, who had often been accused of being the killers.
Karr's criminal past was dragged up and his trip back to the US was chronicled in such detail Americans were told what he had eaten on the plane. 'Solved!' blared the front page of the New York Daily News. The cable channels switched to live coverage. The coverage was surreal, bizarre and a violation of most journalistic ethics taught at media schools across the States.
In the wake of charges against Karr being dropped, the fallout has been equally vicious. 'This giant waste of time and resources occurred at the expense of real news affecting real lives: a major crisis in the Middle East and a war in Iraq that is killing an average of 100 Iraqis a day,' blasted media critic Bob Geiger. Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's media analyst, was more forthright. 'It goes down with the greatest media embarrassments in modern history,' he said.
But it is not just tabloid newspapers and cable news channels that are making mistakes. The Duke rape charges have prompted a slew of salacious and speculative stories around allegations of the rape of a black stripper at a college fraternity party held by an overwhelmingly white lacrosse team. Here it is the New York Times that has come in for most criticism. The paper has been accused of assuming the students' guilt, as more and more evidence emerges that the woman's allegations may be false. Last week, in a piece in the online magazine Salon, writer Stuart Taylor accused the Times of being 'bent on advancing its race-sex-class ideological agenda at the cost of ruining the lives of three young men whom it has reason to know are very probably innocent'.
However, most critics would put economics, not ideology, at the heart of why the American media - from the supermarket tabloids to the venerable Times - seems to produce more and more sensationalist journalism: it is simply a ploy to keep readers and make money in a tough market. 'If really serious stories full of balance made money, then newspapers would run them. Media organisations will do what they have to do to make money,' says Feldstein.
But there is an upside to the relative freedom the American press seems to have been abusing. Unlike Britain, where the Official Secrets Act stifles potentially vital investigative journalism, American journalists have the freedom to pursue the powerful as well as the inane. 'We can cover things that can't be done in the UK and on the whole our system, I believe, is better for it,' says Feldstein.
That may well be true. But over the past few weeks it has not looked like it on the American side of the Atlantic.
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Post by luke on Sept 3, 2006 11:23:29 GMT -5
Great article. Like how it points out that the biggest tragedy here is that the American press has so much power but really loves to flush it down the toilet for sensationalism.
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Post by phil on Sept 3, 2006 11:34:06 GMT -5
Gotta sell copies and get those add revenues ... !
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Post by rockysigman on Sept 10, 2006 12:05:44 GMT -5
Anyone feel the earthquake this morning?
Luke? Fuzznuts? Even Strat perhaps?
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Post by luke on Sept 10, 2006 12:27:27 GMT -5
I didn't even know about it until you mentioned it.
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Post by phil on Sept 10, 2006 14:39:02 GMT -5
Anyone feel the earthquake this morning? Luke? Fuzznuts? Even Strat perhaps? What ! You got lucky last night ... ?? |
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Post by Fuzznuts on Sept 11, 2006 6:43:37 GMT -5
I was just waking up when it started. I didn't feel very much because I was still in bed, but my wife said the whole house was shaking and shit on the walls was rattling pretty good.
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Post by luke on Jan 10, 2007 15:26:21 GMT -5
So my brother in law sent me this racist drivel of an e-mail forward today:
Denver Post:
This text is from a county emergency manager out in the central part of Colorado after todays snowstorm.
WEATHER BULLETIN
Up here, in the Northern Plains, we just recovered from a Historic event--- may I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions" --- with a historic blizzard of up to 44" inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH that broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to 10's of thousands.
FYI:
George Bush did not come.
FEMA did nothing.
No one howled for the government.
No one blamed the government.
No one even uttered an expletive on TV .
Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton did not visit.
Our Mayor did not blame Bush or anyone else.
Our Governor did not blame Bush or anyone else, either.
CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX or NBC did not visit - or report on this category 5 snowstorm. Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards.
No one asked for a FEMA Trailer House.
No one looted.
Nobody - I mean Nobody demanded the government do something.
Nobody expected the government to do anything, either.
No Larry King, No Bill O'Rielly, No Oprah, No Chris Mathews and No Geraldo Rivera.
No Shaun Penn, No Barbara Striesand, No Hollywood types to be found.
Nope, we just melted the snow for water.
Sent out caravans of SUV's to pluck people out of snow engulfed cars.
The truck drivers pulled people out of snow banks and didn't ask for a penny.
Local restaurants made food and the police and fire departments delivered it to the snowbound families.
Families took in the stranded people - total strangers.
We fired up wood stoves, broke out coal oil lanterns or Coleman lanterns.
We put on extra layers of clothes because up here it is "Work or Die".
We did not wait for some affirmative action government to get us out of a mess created by being immobilized by a welfare program that trades votes for 'sittin at home' checks.
Even though a Category "5" blizzard of this scale has never fallen this early, we know it can happen and how to deal with it ourselves.
"In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about 48 degrees North Latitude, 90% of the world's social problems evaporate."
It does seem that way, at least to me.
I hope this gets passed on.
Maybe SOME people will get the message. The world does Not owe you a living.
In addition to this being written, Denver received another 2 feet of snow on 12-29-06
So I wrote back this:
Yep, and after that blizzard, when the city of Denver was in ruins and economy of Colorado had collapsed...
Oh wait, that didn't happen, did it? Nope, it's 52F in Denver right now. After the blizzard, everyone squeegeed the water off the front porches of their undamaged houses, went to the Starbucks around the corner or maybe shopping in Downtown Boulder for those faux-hippie designer clothes everyone wears up there. Then maybe they got together and bitched about how those lazy welfare-loving turds on the Gulf Coast were too stupid to have rich parents and grandparents who could move them up to fancy condos and expensive housing in the middle of some cultureless Mid-Western nowheresville where the worst thing that's gonna happen is some snow that's gonna melt in a few days.
I have a friend living in Denver who was attending LSU and was in Baton Rouge during Katrina. I forwarded him this e-mail and he told me, "Comparing the forces of nature involved in this blizzard to Katrina is like comparing a riot of teeny-boppers at a Justin Timberlake concert to World War II."
And "fyi", the storm was broadcast on every major cable news station, and Anderson Cooper, Bill O'Reilly, and Larry King all talked about it.
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Post by Kensterberg on Jan 10, 2007 15:30:26 GMT -5
Great response, Luke. Was that penned by you or your bro-in-law?
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Post by shin on Jan 10, 2007 17:40:43 GMT -5
What the fuck was your brother in law thinking, sending that to you? The Modern Conservative Movement is truly one of the most foul mind plagues ever to sweep across modern society.
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Post by kmc on Jan 10, 2007 18:00:07 GMT -5
That guy right there voted for George W. Bush. 'Nuff said.
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