Being paid to influence others

Businesses have long realized that we are swayed more by the opinions of our friends and neighbors than by advertisements in the media, which is why social media has become so powerful in shaping messages. For some people, this trust apparently also extends to celebrities on social media since their recommendations are also assumed to be disinterested. So a celebrity who recommends something on Twitter is more likely to sway readers than the same celebrity saying the same thing in a commercial. The former is seen as an honest preference while the latter is just an actor reading someone else’s words.
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Edward S. Herman (1925-2017)

He died on November 11, 2017 at the age of 92. He was emeritus professor of finance at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the co-author with Noam Chomsky of that excellent book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) that I think should be essential reading for anyone interested in politics and the media and which I have referred to many times on this blog. His Wikipedia page provides his biography.
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What is going on with the DNC?

I have never been a fan of Donna Brazile, seeing her as a career political hack who was comfortably well-ensconced in the Democratic neoliberal party establishment (as represented by the Democratic National Committee) and a spokesperson for those policies in the media. She was the very definition of a party apparatchik. Hence I was surprised at the furor that her book has generated and the way that the party establishment has turned against her.
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When the use of stock images misleads

Articles like to use photographs to liven up their appearance. But getting your own photographs is time-consuming and expensive so many publications resort to using stock images from the various sources that provide them and that can be easily searched on to provide one that seems to most closely fit the needs of the article. But Adam Jonson at FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) has noticed that not enough care seems to go into selecting images and that, for example, a single trope tend to dominate in reports about Iran that perpetuate myths about that country.
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And now the hoax stories start

Things like the Las Vegas shooting reveal that there is something seriously wrong with the psyche of many people in the US. I am not talking about their deep love of guns and the paranoid fear that many have that they are defenseless unless armed to the teeth with massive weaponry, even though such heavy weaponry is overkill for any ordinary everyday need and utterly inadequate when confronting (say) the US military, which some gun enthusiasts feel is on the verge of declaring martial law.
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The neoliberal policing of the left

Jonathan Chait is a columnist in New York magazine. Friends sometimes send me links to his article because they think he presents a sensible, liberal, perspective. I have never been impressed by him, just as I have never been impressed by Nicholas Kristoff, another columnist much favored by liberals. Alex Pareene captures well what I don’t like about Chait’s work. He says that the goal of neoliberal Democrats like Chait is to prevent the Democratic party from moving further to the left than the boundaries set by (say) the Clintons.
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Comic pages puzzle

The local newspaper the Plain Dealer has quite a few daily and Sunday strips but their policies puzzle me. Most strips run seven days a week. But one strip called Baby Blues appears only on Sundays and not weekdays but another strip Judge Parker appears on weekdays and not on Sundays. I cannot fathom the reason for this. Surely it would makes sense to pick either Judge Parker or Baby Blues to run seven days a week and drop the other? This would not require more space on the comic pages.
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Hillary Clinton’s blind spot about the media

There is no question that the media coverage of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was atrocious, focusing endlessly on things like the email issue as if it was some huge nation-threatening scandal when at most it was an error of judgment that others had also committed. There can also be no question that part of it was fueled by the fact that she is a woman because the US is about half a century behind the rest of the world when it comes to accepting a woman as president.
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Bye, bye, Eric! Please do let the door hit you on the way out

Eric Bolling, one of the most odious of the many odious people working at Fox News (and that is really saying something), has agreed to “part ways amicably” with the network, a polite way of saying that he has been shown the door. This comes after he was suspended pending allegations that he had sent photographs of his penis to co-workers. Andrew Kirell gives us a brief summary of Bolling’s sickening history, especially his habit of racist innuendo targeting Barack Obama and his incredibly sexist attitudes towards women.
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