Archive for the ‘Writing/Publishing’ Category

Birds of a feather?

Ha! I found this funny: I googled the term ‘disvalidation‘ this morning (I know it’s not a real word, but wanted to see if it was used, you’ll see why in a later post on the Filter Bubble) … and saw a web result that, on a glance, I thought had the word ‘education’ in […]

A question of perspective

What you see depends on where you stand. Or, put another way: How you look at pedestrian crossings depends a lot on whether you’re the person wanting to cross the road or the vehicle driver called to wait and let the person cross. A couple of days ago in the context of Martyn Bradbury’s rant, […]

Astonishing corruption at Murdoch’s Wall St Journal

Crikey. If this is how Murdoch’s flagship Wall St Journal operates, what’s going on in the background at Fox News? This tale of corruption, money-channelling and ‘news’ articles used as bribes to keep the conspiracy alive is devastating. It’s from Nick Davies who exposed News International’s phone hacking and police & political corruption … The Guardian […]

Bradbury: Martyr or moderated troll?

There’s been a reflexive kerfuffle about hard-left attack dog Martyn Bradbury being told his services will no longer be required as a ‘political commentator’ by NZ public radio after he read a billious scripted rant on a recent ‘discussion panel’. Let me be clear about my own opinion of Martyn: I think he is a […]

Storm the barricades, brothers and sisters!

The zeal of advocacy practiced by some in ‘new media’ is striking at times for an apparent lack of fair-mindedness. In some cases, it seems pretty clear an overt political campaign resembling trench warfare is being run under the guise of ‘news filtering’ or ‘commentary’ or blogging, among other things. Of course, mainstream media isn’t […]

Touché Oscar. How apposite.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. — Oscar Wilde That quote seems very apt, today, having yesterday myself opined that someone else’s words, if taken seriously, “reveal near-dementia levels of double standards and persecutional delusion.” Oops. Touché, Oscar. – P

Cameron Slater’s defective moral calculus

‘I’ve been told things. I’ll repeat them as if they were true.’ Cameron Slater, the right wing ‘blogger whose poos don’t smell‘ is at it again. Cameron parasitically relies on the mainstream media for source material to feed his abusive narrative against anything remotely ‘pinko’. He has the ill-grace to frequently berate the very same […]

Media bias: In the eye of the beholder

This comment from Ivan feeds into what I think is a perception about the ‘wicked-news-meed-ya’ today … My opinion is that there is a monolithic seachange in media approach. I believe that there has been a shift toward populist shockjock opinionated and quite trite media. They look privileged – they sound privileged and they act […]

A wittle bit of hyperbole? Or not?

There’s a saying in newsrooms which goes something like: “We’d better hope when the End of the World comes there won’t be a sports reporter on the newsdesk … because they’ll have used up all their superlatives.“ Look at this great lead paragraph regarding a Rugby League star: Last night’s game redefined the word irreplaceable. […]

Facebook. Brought to you by the letters ‘F’ and ‘O’.

I first ‘made’ and used the graphic to the right (FACEBOOK MEANS NO PRIVACY) for a post called Facebook — leaks like a sieve in April 2010, and we’ve discussed the treacherous descent of the social media behemoth down the slippery slope several more times since. Lesson: treat whatever you put there as PUBLIC. But […]

New media – it’s not about being impartial

There’s a sad, kid-with-his-nose-pressed-up-against-the-glass yearning in much of the whiny ‘commentary’ about how social media has ‘attacked’ mainstream media, and how MSM ‘hates’ or doesn’t ‘get’ social media. Bloggers from Cameron Slater to Martyn Bradbury agree on the sad state of MSM compared to … er, … their blogs. A lot of it is, as […]

Doing the anti-MMP campaign’s dirty work

I’ve been critical of partisan attack blogging (which I called “fixated, credibility-eviscerating attack blogging“). I am troubled (but not ‘shocked‘ or ‘outraged‘) by a demonstrated lack of what I called ‘fair-mindedness’ and the occasional deployment of untruthfulness (I regard that as a far more serious breach) I observe in some political blogs, some of whom […]

Sad saga of co-operation breaking down

Best line: Julian’s ghostwriter delivered a brilliant first draft of the book, bang on schedule, at the end of March. We read it and loved it. Julian didn’t. He didn’t love it. We’re not even sure how much he actually read. It was an extraordinary reaction to a manuscript he should have been grateful for […]

Black hat – the (shudder) ethics of spin

We’ve discussed ‘Black hat’ web ‘marketing‘ tactics before, in the context of so-called experts selling punters hyped-up snake oil like the Shaun Stenning-fronted Geekversity and, once that had collapsed, the Twalk and Snipr equally hyped and ill-fated enterprises that the Stenning performing troupe hawked around Asia like a cargo cult until the wheels fell off […]

An apology should cost you something

Wow. Things have been going off the rails for Johann Hari since he got ‘busted’ massaging quotes in his interviews. Now he’s issued an apology and given an explanation (again) for his lack of truthfulness, and touches on some of the points I try to make here now and then about the generalised loss of […]