Archive for the ‘Media issues’ Category

OTT?

The NZ Herald gave a bucketload of real estate to their story about a grieving family’s claims that too much Coca Cola killed their mum. Don’t you think? – P Slight purple tint is intentional. Irony. (cf: ‘Purple prose’.)

Free access to information … to ‘hate’ it?

In the middle of a worthwhile Guardian article quoting Tim Berners-Lee on the need for web users to be able to get their data out of social media and proprietary ‘silos’ (see: Tim Berners-Lee: demand your data from Google and Facebook), is this interesting sentiment: “Every time somebody puts a magazine on a phone now […]

Tumblr makes us LIARS

I don’t know if you’re aware that this blog has a Tumblr — used infrequently and pretty informally. Today I popped over to have a look and saw this, which made me laugh: Is it cynical of me to suggest there’s no way the majority of tumblr’s teenage clients will have read the approaching ten […]

Romney faces a ‘Vast Left Wing Conspiracy’. OMG!

Highlights from Kevin Liptak’s CNN post: Romney cites ‘vast left wing conspiracy’ Romney was making an appearance on Breitbart TV [Comment: surprise!] and was asked by host Larry O’Connor whether he was ready to take on “the media and these nonprofits groups that are working together.” “There will be an effort by the quote vast […]

NY Times smears former collaborator Assange: ‘a nut job’

What a sleazy smear. But just the latest in a long line. His reputation has taken a deep plunge since he shook the world in 2010 by releasing, in cooperation with The New York Times and several other news organizations, masses of secret government documents, including battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan. Most news organizations […]

‘New media’ absorption — another signal

Sorry to bang on about it, but the ‘blogosphere’ is more and more entering and becoming part of what some self-described ‘True Bloggers’ appear to think of as their mortal enemy, the ‘Mainstream Media’ (boo hiss) 🙂 Today’s exhibit: Congratulations to the Huffington Post and Politico — both of which I read (often through their […]

Of bloggers, dogs and fleas. The Ports of Auckland’s ‘ethical and legal breaches’

Now that the Ports of Auckland has admitted it, I haven’t got much to add to my earlier ‘Lie down with dogs get up with fleas’ comment in ‘Garner: “@whaleoil lies again.” Surprise me‘ about the Ports company leaking their personnel records to a sympathetic (at best case) blogger. Today’s Yesterday’s NZ Herald editorial: Port’s […]

Weaponising the web? Or just trolling?

David Carr wrote an interesting — and pretty balanced — retrospective on America’s recently-deceased right wing internet attack dog Andrew Brietbart, published in The New York Times over the weekend. Brietbart, perhaps more than anyone besides Matt Drudge, seems to me to have understood the practical weaponising of information-misinformation-disinformation-propaganda (call it what you will) using […]

Politicians and the media

Richard Nixon on “outrageous, vicious, distorted reporting” from Oct. 26, 1973 Press Conference (days after the Saturday Night Massacre) … reminds me of something. But I can’t quite put my finger on it. -P

Always try to be the one to write the contract

Those in the news media undertaking scrutiny of the New Zealand coalition government’s unpopular* state-owned asset sales/partial privatisation (your choice) programme will, naturally, look for ‘fish hooks and broken glass’ and clauses like this … and write headlines like Vernon Small’s Loophole allows sale of over 49pc A democracy depends on it. *I say ‘unpopular’ […]

The web: almighty humbler of power, or useful tool?

Worth a read: this brief article by Dan Zak at The Washington Post Woodward and Bernstein: Could the Web generation uncover a Watergate-type scandal? discussing how a ubiquitous internet has so seized the world-view of even bright people that they think journalistic ‘sleuthing’ can be done online and that no corrupt power can but kneel […]

Bank sugar coats price-fixing penalty as ‘rebate’

‘Spin’ (bending reality), is not a phenomenon just confined to politics. At the risk of being accused of ‘looking a gift horse in the mouth’, here’s a fine example: Yesterday I saw this letter which looks like a kind gesture from the BNZ — telling ‘small business owners’ who are credit card merchants about the […]

Entering the ‘monolithic, exclusionary, activist liberal media’ lion’s den

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Good Morning Real America www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook “Oooh, [Sarah Palin is] ‘infiltrating’ the Today Show. I think it means [Palin] is cynically exploiting a manufactured notion of herself as a crusader […]

For the record: Teapot tapes media audit clears ‘pond scum’

Herald on Sunday journo Jonathan Milne’s narrative of how the ‘cup of tea’ media stunt got recorded and the actions following is a must-read (if you care). See: Findings not quite Key’s cup of tea (NZ Herald) Read it. Seriously. (Ignore the 1 April dateline.) In the same paper, I noted that broadcaster Mike Hosking […]

Richard Nixon’s resignation letter

I had not seen this image before. A little piece of political history. via Reg Braithwaite (It seems genuine.) See my quote of Hunter S Thompson’s Nixon obit in this post: Gonzo – P