Harris-Walz media strategy

If you follow political news, there have been some criticisms from some of those in the pundit class (even those considered to be Democratic supporters) about the paucity of media interviews given by the Harris-Walz team. Some of this is self-interested. They like to portray themselves as at least partly above the partisan fray and in trying to appear even-handed, they look for things to criticize and this is one of them. Other popular topics are her alleged lack of specifics about her proposals and how she will pay for them.

Noteworthy is the fact that creepy Donald Trump seems to get a pass on all these things. It is as if he is so out there, that there is no point in even trying to find fault with him or, if they do, it is to indulge in ‘both siderism’. A good example is this exchange between a so-called conservative Bret Stephens and a so-called liberal Gail Collins, two columnists for the New York Times.
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Fox News in a squeeze

To put the current fight within the family of Rupert Murdoch for control of the Murdoch media empire in context, one needs to understand the changing political media landscape in the past three decades.

When the cable news channel Fox News started in 1996, it barely made a blip in the public consciousness. It was designed to be right wing and its founding CEO Roger Ailes was unapologetically so. But initially most people, and even journalists in major media like ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and the print news were not even aware of its existence or confused it with the Fox TV broadcast network. That changed in 2000 when in the highly close presidential election, Fox News made an early and controversial call giving Florida to George W. Bush and that proved to be a significant factor in determining the final outcome.
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Succession fight over Rupert Murdoch’s media empire

Fox News has been a pernicious influence in US public life. It has promoted extreme right wing policies, cultivated hatred of immigrants, indulged racists, targeted minorities, and in general been on the wrong side of almost every major social issue.

Rupert Murdoch, the founder of Fox News and owner of other major media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the UK-based Times and Sun, has been challenged by three of his children who are fighting to prevent him from changing the terms of the irrevocable trust (worth $1.49 billion) he created to take over his empire when he dies. The closed hearing before a probate judge began on September 16 in Reno, Nevada. We will likely not know what is going on until either a settlement is reached that everyone agrees to, or the case goes to court because one or the other side appeals the probate judge’s decision.

In a nutshell, Murdoch has six children by his first three wives. According to this report, “The trust was formed at the time of the 1999 divorce of Rupert from his second wife, Anna Murdoch Mann, the mother of James, Lachlan and Elisabeth. She wanted to ensure her children had a future ownership stake in the Murdoch empire. The trust was “irrevocable,” meaning it would be difficult to alter.”

Under the terms of the trust, Murdoch’s four eldest children (from his first two wives) would end up sharing equally the 40% voting power over the father’s empire. But while the eldest son Lachlan shares his father’s political views, the other three Prudence (from his first wife), Elisabeth, and James have gone in a different direction. In fact, James has endorsed Kamala Harris. That may be why the patriarch wanted to change the terms of the trust so that Lachlan would inherit all the controlling power of 40%.
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The source of the false Haitian rumor apologizes

I am not active on social media but do have an account on Nextdoor, that connects people living in a small geographical area and thus supposedly consists of one’s neighbors. In theory it helps people get to know their neighborhood by sharing information about it. I do not check the feeds that often but occasionally see posts where people report something that they ‘heard’ about and asking if anyone else has too. Some of these posts contain speculations that are bigoted or at least sail close to that line. Sometimes other people call them out on it but often it just disappears into the ether. Some posters seem to see themselves as small-time investigative journalists and deliver ‘scoops’ by being the first to relay some juicy morsel of information, often in the form of a rumor.

Apart from so-called ‘influencers’ who use social media to try to reach huge audiences as part of their business model, most social media users tend to use it largely to communicate with friends, family, and affinity groups of people who share similar interests. This can give a feeling of intimacy, that you are only talking to a small group, and thus one might be more inclined to spread baseless gossip, not realizing that your network is connected to the much larger internet and could, given the right conditions, explode your post into the general public consciousness, if it is picked up and relayed by people with much larger audiences.

That seems to be what happened with the ugly story about Haitians in Springfield, OH eating people’s cats and dogs. The person who first posted a rumor without any evidence on Facebook now regrets what she did.
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Is Kamala Harris adopting a ‘Ming vase’ strategy?

I wrote before about a very interesting interview that Rory Stewart had with David Remnick. Stewart was an ambitious Conservative politician in the UK who had all the traditional qualifications, coming from a privileged family, attending an elite private school (Eton) and then Oxford University. He quickly rose up the ranks and even made a bid to become party leader, losing out to Boris Johnson in 2019. He left the party just prior to Brexit.

The interview mainly dealt with what Stewart described as the soul-killing nature of political leadership but he also had interesting things to say about the general election that was due to held in the UK this year. Labour party leader Keir Starmer had been criticized for not detailing specific policies that he would implement if elected, choosing instead to speak in broad generalities. Stewart described this as the ‘Ming vase’ strategy, where you are holding a precious Ming vase and walk very carefully so as not to break it. Starmer had clearly decided that the country desperately wanted to throw the Tories out and were not that interested in specifics of Labour policies, having the general idea that they were more on the side of ordinary people than the Tories.. They had a general idea of what Labour stood for and that seemed to be enough. Starmer did not want to make specific promises that might alienate some voters and thus break that consensus. Stewart said that this can be a successful strategy for winning elections (as it was for Starmer) but can cause problems after you win office because you do not really have a mandate for anything specific.
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Murder among the upper middle class

If you are like me and enjoy watching murder mystery thrillers, and recently there have been a spate of limited-series TV shows in this genre, you can be excused for thinking that most murders occur in the homes and families of the well-to-do, either upper middle class or very wealthy. In most of them, people live in fancy homes, some even in massive quasi-castles with servants and large landscaped gardens, and drive expensive cars. Even if not that elaborate, the homes that the characters live in seem to be quite expensive and their interiors all spotless and the product of interior designers. These shows seem to be a form of real-estate porn.
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The ratio of mindless speculation to actual news goes through the roof

There is no question that the shooting at the Trump rally is big news. But it is also a good rule of thumb that in the immediate aftermath of unexpected events like a shooting, the amount of actual factual information available is very small and yet the media feel the need to spend vast amounts of time on it. The inevitable result is that you get huge amounts of mindless blathering as news media try to fill the time without having anything to say.

So you will get reactions from politicians who were nowhere near the scene, from people who were at the scene but did not really see anything, and also the inevitable discussion about what this means for the election, again accompanied by speculations from politicians, political pundits, and ordinary people, none of whom really know anything.

Much of the chatter will be about the possible motives of the shooter, whom the FBI identified as a 20-year old man Thomas Matthew Crooks. They have released his name so people have immediately scoured the internet to find out information using that name, in order to seek a motive that will bolster their preferred narrative. But this is dangerous because few names are unique, though in this case having three names narrows things down, assuming that it is correct. I have often been surprised when searching for someone on the internet to find out how many people have the same name. In addition, inferring motive from biographical data is a practice that has dubious value.

I find it helpful at these times to just tune out the news and occasionally check the headlines to see if anything new has been discovered. It is best to wait until firm information is unearthed before forming any conclusions. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Too busy to read books? There’s an app for that!

We are all familiar with the sinking feeling that the list of books that one would like to read but have not yet found the time to do so grows longer by the day. It is hopeless to think that we will ever catch up and most of us are resigned to that somber fact. But Anthony Lane alerts me to a new app called Blinkist that addresses that need..

Blinkist is an app. If I had to summarize what it does, I would say that it summarizes like crazy. It takes an existing book and crunches it down to a series of what are called Blinks. On average, these amount to around two thousand words.
…

Once you are Blinked in, your days will follow a new pattern. Instead of being woken by an alarm, or by a bored spaniel licking your face, you will find yourself greeted by a Daily Blink. This will arrive, with a ping, on your phone, alerting you to a book that, suitably pruned, is ready to be served up for your personal edification.

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Does getting shot really throw someone back?

It is a familiar trope in any violent action scene. Some gets shot and the impact causes the person to fall back, sometimes even thrown into the air or, more spectacularly, propelled backwards through a glass window. Filmmakers seem to love such scenes but it would never happen in reality. This is because although the bullet is traveling at high velocity, it also has very small mass and so its momentum (mass times velocity( is small, not enough to knock the victim over. At best they might move back a couple of inches

Bullets cause damage by penetrating the body and hitting the various organs inside and causing loss of blood.

This article explains why.
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The courtroom sketch artists at the Trump trial

The trial of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) in New York does not allow live TV coverage of the proceedings and photographers have only been allowed to take photographs before the day’s proceedings begin. There have been complaints by the media that the public has a right to know what is going on in high-profile cases like this and that a live video feed should be allowed in the public interest.

While there would undoubtedly have been considerable interest (even though much of court proceedings are routine and boring), I am not convinced that allowing TV cameras and photographers is a good idea. A trial is not an event aimed at the general public. The only audience that matters are the jurors and the goal should be to give them the best experience of the case. When TV cameras are present, it might subtly distort that behavior of all the participants, and photographers vying for the best shot could also be distracting.
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