George Orwell’s classic 1946 essay Politics and the English Language makes the case that politics degrades language because when politicians want to look truthful while telling lies they do so by making their language convoluted and using big words so that the listener is not aware of what the speaker is actually saying. Orwell says …
Category Archive: Media
Feb 24 2013
Krugman lets loose
Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is clearly so fed up with the quality of public discourse on budget issues and the kinds of people the media hold up as being authorities that he departs from his usual measured language. This time he unloads on the execrable Alan Simpson, the former senator and …
Feb 21 2013
The servile White House press corps
There is perhaps no body of journalists in the US more useless than the White House press corps. These are the people who spend their days in the White House or follow the president on his travels, hoping for some morsel of news to be dropped or to overhear a gaffe or get a deliberate …
Dec 18 2012
How mass killings should be covered
Although I own a TV, it is used almost exclusively to watch DVDs and I have not watched TV news or any programs in ages, preferring to get both via the radio or the internet. But I can imagine that there must have been wall-to-wall coverage of the shootings at the elementary school last week. …
Nov 24 2012
The Onion parodies TED Talks
In an article that I linked to some time ago, Alex Pareene describes TED talks as a “Massive, Money-Soaked Orgy of Self-Congratulatory Futurism” and recounts its history and describes the typical talk:
Nov 23 2012
Why does Fox News hate Christmas?
Talking Points Memo describes how Fox News seems to go out of its way to make us all frightened and depressed about Christmas.
Nov 20 2012
What on Earth is a ‘gay tax’?
[Correction: For some reason I replaced the actual name Morris with Brown in places. I have made the correction.] Phillip Morris is a local columnist for the Plain Dealer who usually writes fairly boring boilerplate local interest stories. I usually read just the first paragraph before moving on. But a couple of days ago my …
Nov 06 2012
Green screen technology
I still have no landline after Hurricane Sandy brought down the tree and with it the phone line. So that means I will not have DSL and will have to follow the election results the old-fashioned way, on TV. I suspect that they will use a lot of gee-whiz technology.
Nov 04 2012
How media consensus was reached on the debates
Do you remember the time when you were an adolescent? That was the time when you could roughly split people into three groups: the trendsetters, the trend followers, and those who deliberatively chose to go against prevailing trends, irrespective of whether they were good or bad. Most people fell into the second category, people who …
Oct 28 2012
Copyright and fair use
The rules about what you can legally use of other people’s creative work are not very well defined. ‘Fair use’ guidelines depend on judgments about what fraction of the work is used and whether it is being used for commercial purposes, with educational use getting more leeway, but there are no formulas that can be …
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