Mike Daisey, in a Facebook comment thread, confronts a former CNN vice-president with the press’s blindness to its own sickness, in the wake of CNN’s much-derided coverage of the Steubenville rape trial: This is an absolutely perfect example of a story that tells all the facts in front of these reporters, and they have totally …
Tag Archive: journalism
Jan 08 2013
Internet Comments vs. Knowledge
Apparently, I’m not the only one who doesn’t like Internet comment sections. Neither does science. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: In an experiment . . . about 2,000 people were asked to read a balanced news report about nanotechnology followed by a group of invented comments. All saw the same report but some read a group …
Jan 02 2013
Making Tools to Fix Their Own Problems
Catherine Bracy on the tech sector’s obliviousness to genuine social causes and crises: The well-documented lack of diversity in the Valley would be comical if it wasn’t so harmful. It feels like, and often is, a bunch of Stanford guys making tools to fix their own problems. . . Barely any of them start from …
Dec 12 2012
The Earth Will Be Peopled by Entirely Another Generation
Yes, they cared about this a hundred years ago, too. From the New York Times, December 12, 1912: For those who delight in that sort of amusement to-day is a day to celebrate by writing a great many letters and dating them, each and every one, 12–12–12. The sequence of the twelves makes positively a …
Dec 06 2012
Mac in the USA
According to a new interview with Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, at least one line of Macs will be manufactured in the U.S. starting next year. Here’s what Mike Daisey just posted about it: Another step. I recall, vividly, how many times I was told that no one would ever adjust anything in their manufacturing ecosystem …
Nov 20 2012
Best Newspaper Correction in the Universe
From the New York Times on the declining birthrate of stars: An earlier version of this article misstated the sound made by a black hole in the galaxy NGC 1275. It is that of a B flat 57 octaves below middle C, not 27.
Aug 30 2012
Cowards at Yahoo News Give Wingnut Hacks a Scalp
David Chalian was fired by Yahoo News yesterday because he was caught saying something unflattering about the Romneys and their pals by NewsBusters. This is absolute bullshit. David was my direct supervisor when I interned at the ABC News political unit, where he was first deputy political director, and then promoted to director. He then …
Is it time to pull the plug on Web publishing pioneer Salon.com? (Link)
It seems to me that the problem with the idea of Salon becoming a kind of news nonprofit is not only that it doesn’t have any particular locality’s focus, but that it doesn’t fill any particular need. There is no shortage of outlets for political and cultural news and opinion, and Salon has never carved out a niche that is so particular to it that its absence would at all matter to the wider journalistic world. It’s a fine website, but we can all carry on without it if we have to.
Mar 17 2012
The Veracity and the Vicissitude of Mike Daisey
Listening tonight to the nearly-unbearable “Retraction” edition of “This American Life” in which Mike Daisey is taken to task for his fabrication of details about his experiences in China, I kept waiting for Daisey to more effectively counter the assertion by Ira Glass that people who come to see a monologue expect that every word of it …
Jul 01 2011
In Defense of Mark Halperin
I’ve been metaphorically bashing my skull into a brick wall as I’ve read all the commentary surrounding Mark Halperin’s “dick” comment this morning. The reaction to this has been absurd on so many levels, and as someone who once worked under his supervision, I very much want to say a few things about this — which of …
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