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Media
July 11, 2005
Dick, Jane, and Second-Rate Innuendo
My local Fox affiliate in New York, WNYW, runs an occasional feature called "You Paid for It!" The concept is to expose some government folly that your hard-earned tax money funded. The subtle implication: Fox is on the side of the common person, fighting against the excesses of big government. No word yet on when they'll run a segment on Medicare colonoscopies for Grandma and textbooks for Junior. (You can suggest that and other ideas for the Fox news team here.) The latest promo slipped over the edge dividing faux-populism with tastelessness.
Media
July 11, 2005
Sick of Butter
A panda cub was born at the National Zoo early Saturday morning, and the rarity of the event (which was via artifical insemination) has led to intense media coverage. When lots of different media organizations gather together to cover what is a very limited subject, there is inevitably tons of overlap in the stories. In this case, strangely, the use of the phrase "stick of butter" to describe the newborn has appeared everywhere from the New York Times ("A newborn panda has the weight of a stick of butter") to the Los Angeles Times ("It's a giant panda cub no bigger than a stick of butter") to the Washington Times ("The cub is about the size of a stick of butter, officials said"). And that's just newspapers with the word "Times" in them.
Media
July 10, 2005
Have they nothing better to do? (1)
For your latest dose of xenophobia, try Joel Achenbach's column in the Washington Post Magazine. Mr Achenbach had hisself a trip to Mexico City, proudly announcing his ignorance of Spanish, and pretty much everything else.
Here are some choice bits:
"It's a miracle anyone gets out of this country alive."
" Fruit is out of the question. Also meat that's juicy."
Media
July 10, 2005
The Cardinal's All Growed Up
I know a guy who is ghostwriting the autobiography of a female stripper. The book will go out under her name, and he's not getting paid as much for it as he should, but fair enough; no one really expects that she wrote the book herself, and no one who buys it really cares. It's the sort of thing, dishonesty-wise, that's about on par with lying to a cop when pulled over for speeding. You know you were going double the speed limit, he knows it, but you might still try and pull a, "Was I, officer? I was a bit distracted." But then that doesn't really fly in American newspaper journalism today.
Media
July 9, 2005
Al Qaeda is Flat
Over a month ago, Jack Shafer wrote an article in Slate in which he asked Thomas Friedman to quit using his spot on the editorial page of the New York Times to publicize his newest book, The World is Flat. "Since the book came out two months ago," he wrote, "his columns have stated that the world has become 'flat,' is 'increasingly flat,' has become 'flatter,' or some other variant ('flattened,' 'flattening,' 'flatten') at least six times, and that's not counting the 5,000-word excerpt ('It's a Flat World, After All') from his book…" Friedman has not stopped, and is now even expanding his use of the term.
Media
July 6, 2005
Will Judith Miller Blog From Prison?
New York Times reporter Judith Miller is going to jail after refusing to divulge sources for a story she worked on, but did not publish, about former CIA agent Valerie Plame. Shortly before she was sentenced, Miller helped to launch Judithmiller.org, a website about her work and her current troubles. Gelf spoke with Joshua Tanzer, the site's webmaster, about the website and its future now that its namesake will be incarcerated.
Media
May 4, 2005
The Swan hits The NYT
Now that Maureen Dowd has attached her column to it, there can be no doubt that the New York Times most recent attempt to bring evolutionary psychology into the public fold has been a disaster. Yesterday, Nicholas Bakalar reported on a new study that found that ugly kids spent less time being taken care of in the supermarket than good-looking ones. The study itself reads like a high-school sociology project—400 kids were watched at four different shopping malls—and the conlusions that the lead scientist draws are misleading.
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