Archive for the ‘Media issues’ Category

Godwin’s law

Sometimes falsely truncated to: ‘The first person to mention Hitler in an online argument loses’, Godwin’s law actually states (well, according to, gulp, Wikipedia): As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. I saw the misinterpretation of Godwin’s law: “first person to mention Hitler, Nazis, or […]

Smear the messenger! (Groan)

The New York Times has been singled out as “unfair” (ahem) for its coverage of the Pope’s blame/knowledge/involvement in the cover up of serial sex abuser Father Lawrence C Murphy. Here’s how the NYTimes reports on itself … Vatican Official Defends Pope’s Handling of Case 31 March 2010 VATICAN CITY — A top Vatican official […]

iLearningGlobal ditches MLM, bemoans lack of leaders

This is too bad. I thought this best-teachers-in-the-world-on-video model (a la Buckminster Fuller) had some real possibilities. (Thank goodness for iTunes, iTunes U, TED talks, BBC, NPR and a zillion audio & video podcasts that distribute terrific material — a great deal of it free). The MLM structure (requiring a high monthly ‘spend’ from your ‘downline’) […]

Facebook — leaks like a sieve

Facebook Glitch Exposes Private Email Addresses Huffington Post 31-Mar-10 Just over a month after a Facebook glitch sent personal messages to the wrong users, a new Facebook flub that struck yesterday evening exposed members’ private email addresses. The bug hit at around 6:45PM ET Tuesday evening and lasted approximately 30 minutes… Continue reading at HuffPo […]

I heart Rachel Maddow … trying to increase the cost of lying

Remember the full page ad she took out to say it wasn’t true? He’s apparently still saying it is. So, Rachel Maddow let Scott Brown have it straight … You [Senator Brown] made something up that’s not true. You have such a lack of respect for your conservative donor base around the country that you […]

Mocking Bill O’Reilly – such a juicy target

Recently on Fox News, Mr-Exception-that-proves-the-rule Shep Smith may have been (-subtly-) taking the mickey out of Bill O’Reilly over his infamous “We’ll do it live!” meltdown… But for my money, by far the funniest spoof of O’Reilly going thermonuclear was the BarelyPolitical.com crew’s “Bill O’Reilly’s Producer (Unseen footage)” — watch: (warning: some blue language) From […]

David Frum’s ‘Waterloo’ blog post

— that got him sacked. www.frumforum.com/waterloo Just so we can find it easily…. oh, and it’s worth reading! Telling the truth about the ‘divergent interests’ of the Republican leadership and the ‘conservative entertainment industry’ I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it […]

How is THIS good for the TRUMP brand?

Somebody tell me how selling the pie-in-the-sky, one-chance-in-nine-million New Zealand Lotto draw enhances The Donald or his brand … Please.

Point and counter point … bottled water

Great example of an exposé of ‘Manufactured Demand’ for bottled water … Followed by a ‘fake journalism’ (complete with ‘noddies’) PR/propaganda fightback by the bottled water manufacturers*…’Good Stewards of the Environment’ How do they keep a straight face? *Let me know what BWM Report could possibly stand for.

Karl Lagerfield – interviewed by Bruce LaBruce

When Vice [Magazine] called me last month with an out-of-the-blue offer to fly to Paris and interview the Kaiser himself, Karl Lagerfeld—creative director of the $10 billion Chanel empire, the house of Fendi, and his own eponymous line—I jumped at the chance. I have to confess that I wasn’t an expert about the fabled fashion […]

Google ‘leaves’ China over censorship

Good on Google for deciding that censorship was dodgy. It was always, always dodgy,* but perhaps the ‘commercial imperative’ had driven the free-thinkers at Google to submerge their outrage. ( — which is NOT a long term strategy, as we have discussed in relation to an example closer to home.) From the Google blog today: A […]

Fearless: Margaret Moth RIP

Margaret Moth was the trail-blazing, globe-trotting photojournalist and camera operator whose jaw was blown away by a sniper’s bullet as she and her CNN news crew were traveling through Sarajevo’s infamous Sniper’s Alley in the early 1990s. Terribly injured, she recovered and eventually went back to work, doing what she did best with tenacity and […]

What new media needs to learn from old media

COURAGE . What journalism should be: Dogged and fearless Wise words from one of my former editors, Don Rood, reviewing Nothing but the Truth by Anna Politkovskaya on Radio NZ this morning. Yeah! Damn right. Dogged and fearless. To proudly call yourself ‘new media‘ and talk about freedom of speech is good. But recognise that […]

The peasants are revolting

Remember this?: Very recently, it seems, under threat and pressure from different advertisers/spruikers, or the poor economy, or something, the ‘corruption’ (to use a word I really dislike) appears to have spread. It has now reached the point where … the forum Moderators and management appear to be actually CENSORING THE DISCUSSION FORUM to make […]

Murdoch: It’s not old media versus new media …

… it’s about how the content is produced and who is paying for it.” Paraphrase: “Google do not have the right to scrape our very expensively produced content if we want to stop them.” I see content scraped from news sites and reproduced in its entirety on discussion forums and blogs — with a credit […]