Media News and Analysis

"There's nobody more cynical about the media than your average European. Only 12 percent of Europeans claim to trust the media, compared to 15 percent of North Americans, 29 percent of Pacific Asians and 48 percent of Africans, the BBC has found. Yet new research out of the London School of Economics and Political Science suggests that even the most hardened Europeans may succumb to media manipulation and change their political views if they are bombarded long enough with biased news." - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet

The leaderboard seems to be a great way to gain a quick insight into the sharing habits of users on Twitter. - polou/indigo_bow from Bookmarklet

=more geeks where r the normal ppl on Facebook? - polou/indigo_bow

nay he aren't going 2 be like MJ, but eerie! Timing interesting??? - polou/indigo_bow from Bookmarklet

Looks like he's sick - anna sauce

surprised........ - ffcode

Skynet at work again. :) - rowlikeagirl, hecho en eu

"It's even harder to adapt to the digital gale sweeping through publishing when big 'old-media' stories about canonical authors are still grabbing everyone's attention .. William Goldman, who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is almost as well known for his coruscating portrait of the movie business, Adventures in the Screen Trade. This, in turn, is celebrated for its dictum about Hollywood executives – "No one knows anything" – a phrase that has a way of popping into mind whenever the discussion turns towards the future of books and newspapers..." - james reilly from Bookmarklet

I know something: ebooks and ereaders will substantially replace paper books and other varieties of print publication (including newspapers and magazines). That's a no-brainer, and has been so for at least fifteen years, because they afford numerous advantages. - Sean McBride

"20 minutes after it passes..." - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet

"Instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, HR 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care," Kucinich said in a statement explaining why he voted against the bill. "In HR 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so... more... - ovigia

Only 24% females don't read manual, oh well, I don't like manuals but I do keep em as reference & I do troubleshoot before I need 2 reference my manual or the consumer service or vice versa. - polou/indigo_bow from Bookmarklet

Accuracy is the most important 2 me, when possible, info that I obtain r accurate as they r as press time, as I strive 2 make this a number 1 priority, not #1 in getting news out 1st. - polou/indigo_bow

why would I need a website while I can just micro-blog and or read tweets? Or a matter of fact: RSS. - polou/indigo_bow from Bookmarklet

Wow -- I have a very positive first impression of Twitter Tim.es -- the more tools for improving signal to noise, the better. This is essentially a news recommender system. - Sean McBride

Silicon Valley may have discovered the perfect business: charging real money for products that do not exist. - polou/indigo_bow from Bookmarklet

"As anyone following health reform knows, centrism is a political position too. And you see moderate bias — i.e., a preference for centrism — whenever a news outlet assumes that the truth must be "somewhere in the middle." You see it whenever an organization decides that "balance" requires equal weight for an opposing position, however specious: "Some, however, believe global warming is a myth." (Moderate bias would also require me to find a countervailing liberal position and pretend that it is equivalent to global-warming denial. Sorry.) Often, moderate bias is just the result of caution, but the effect is to bolster centrist political positions — not least by implying that they are not political positions at all but occupy a happy medium between the nutjobs. Meanwhile, conservatives see moderate bias as liberal, and liberals see it as conservative — letting journalists conclude that it's not bias at all." - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet

"RIVERA: I think that the great tragedy of this incident is that it will cast a gloomy cloud of suspicion over all the Muslim G.I.s who serve with great honor and who are an amazing assist to the United States in this conflict we’re having with radical Islam. This will, and also, I remember my dad, just very briefly. When we were growing up there would be a notorious crime and my dad used to gather the family. We used to say, like a little prayer, “please God” that it’s not a Puerto Rican. You know because we had, dealing with so many social pressures and prejudices, dealing with all the rest of it, we didn’t want one of these awful examples to cast aspersion and negativity on our group. And this is the same thing with American Muslims now, specifically American Muslim G.I.s." - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet

A Pew Internet & American Life study has refuted the idea that use of the Internet necessarily leads to decreased social isolation. - polou/indigo_bow from Bookmarklet

"I'm obviously ambivalent about the issues of media responsibility raised by all of this. It's difficult to know exactly how the competing interests should be balanced -- between disclosing what one has heard in an evolving news story and ensuring some minimal level of reliability and accuracy. But whatever else is true, news outlets -- driven by competitive pressures in the age of instant "reporting" -- don't really seem to recognize the need for this balance at all. They're willing to pass on anything they hear without regard to reliability -- to the point where I automatically and studiously ignore the first day or so of news coverage on these events because, given how these things are "reported," it's simply impossible to know what is true and what isn't. In fact, following initial media coverage on these stories is more likely to leave one misled and confused than informed. Conversely, the best way to stay informed is to ignore it all -- or at least treat it all with extreme skepticism -- for at least a day." - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet

Exactly. The most egregious error that was made yesterday - the status of the shooter - only magnifies how inept the coverage was. How in the blue hell do you get whether a person is alive or not ***wrong***? The fact that every news source got this one important fact wrong only shows the problem - everyone wanted to be first, no one wanted to be correct. - Steven Perez

The economy's soaring, and so are the ranks of city slum dwellers. Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, says in the current issue of Forbes India. "India's success is in its entrepreneurs but it has to develop a macro-foundation, especially enabling infrastructure." - polou/indigo_bow from Bookmarklet

"The Post is obviously free to publish whatever it wants, but, wth some very rare exception, its Op-Ed page under Fred Hiatt now really is the leading outlet for neoconservatve and related right-wing advocacy. It is one of those outlets typically counted as part of the "Liberal Media" by right-wing self-victimizers and their media amplifiers, yet The Post's claimed devotion to airing a "wide range of views" is scarcely more credible than Fox News' "fair and balanced" slogan." - Sean McBride from Bookmarklet

Judge Denny Chin basically ruled that photographers are not authors, and that the settlement only covers “word-based material,” with the exception of illustrations in children’s books. - polou/indigo_bow from Bookmarklet

So what is photographer place now? Nothing? No one? - polou/indigo_bow

"Forty years ago, storing information of any kind was expensive; now computer memory is so cheap that in the near future it should be possible to record in digital form every telephone conversation, every television and radio transmission and every movie and still image. Already, more than two billion songs a day are shared over the net, hundreds of millions of video streams are placed on YouTube, the surveillance CCTV cameras in London alone send 64 trillion bits of data a day to their command centres. By the end of the next decade or so, humankind will be producing more information each second than was produced in the entire 19th century. And all this information can be stored, cross-referenced and mined for eternity. This is a new phenomenon, and has massive and disturbing potential." - Sean McBride from Bookmarklet

Something I read somewhere once interpreted the "mark of the beast" www - this was ages ago, though... I think the "reasoning" for it (if we dare to call it that) was something along this vein: http://www.av1611.org/666... -- lol. Sorry, I shouldn't laugh, but I find it amusing. - ProsePetals (aka Denise)

Religious archetypes that have resonated deeply in human culture and the human mind over centuries or millennia perhaps merit some attention -- they may point in an intuitive and symbolic way towards real events and situations on the horizon. - Sean McBride

"After months of often bitter debate, European Union lawmakers reached agreement on how to preserve citizen's rights to Internet access in a meeting that ended in the early hours of Thursday morning. .. The text of the telecoms package now contains a new Internet freedom provision that states that access to the Internet is a human right of every E.U. citizen, and that if authorities take away that right people must have the opportunity to defend themselves; citizens also have an automatic right to mount a legal challenge. However, the text does not demand that authorities in the 27 countries of the E.U. obtain a court order before cutting off someone's Internet connection, as the European Parliament demanded when it last voted on the issue in early summer." - james reilly from Bookmarklet

I happened to be listening to a local sports talk radio show interview of Keith Olberman at the time this news was breaking. They tried to get him to take a shot at Beck. His response was very classy, basically saying that even though he did not like the man and his stance on the issues, he would never wish poor health on him and hoped for a speedy and healthy recovery. - Steve

Waiting for the next video of an unshaven Glenn Beck on the brink of suicide ... but, I am with Keith on this one, too. - Rene Wirtz

Of course I don't wish him ill. I don't wish *anyone* ill. I just wish Beck would quietly fade into obscurity where he & his bassackward ideas belong. - ProsePetals (aka Denise)

"The key to the new functionality for site owners is being able to get more information about their visitors. For example, depending on what Friend Connect widgets you install, you can have a questionnaire that comes up the first time a user shows up on your page and signs in with Friend Connect. This may sound like it would be annoying to a visitor, but assuming you don’t install it as a giant overlay when people first hit the site, it could actually be very useful for both parties. Site owners will be able to target content to visitors based on these answers. And visitors will be able to find other like-minded Friend Connect users that also visit that site." - polou/indigo_bow from Bookmarklet

Intel is facing a federal lawsuit that accuses it of using "illegal threats" to dominate microchip sales. - polou/indigo_bow from Bookmarklet

"The next day, the Chicago Tribune's political blog, The Swamp, parroted the same stat: "FOX viewership is up 9 percent and 14 percent among adults since the feud with the White House started." Done deal, right? Wrong, because those numbers didn't add up. Or more specifically, those numbers did not reflect Fox News' ratings two weeks prior to the controversy and two weeks after. Instead, the numbers represented a cherry-picked attempt to create the illusion of a ratings spike for Fox News. And here's how. As I mentioned, the two weeks prior to the White House dispute cover the dates from September 28-October 11. The two weeks after that cover the dates from October 12-October 25. But the tabulation used to come up with the 9 percent ratings gain (i.e. 1.2 million vs. 1.3 million) only measured Fox News' post-controversy ratings from October 12-October 23, which meant it was a 14-day comparison vs. a 12-day comparison. And which two days were left off the tabulation? Saturday, October... more... - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet

This has been a recurring pattern for wingnuts and their talking points: throw out some half-assed idea, say it enough times til it becomes a meme, then constantly repeat in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When the meme does fall down, it doesn't matter, because they now have four other memes to prop up. - Steven Perez

Forget it unless it includes a loner program! - polou/indigo_bow from Bookmarklet

Spring Design is suing Barnes & Noble for allegedly stealing its e-book reader designs. - polou/indigo_bow from Bookmarklet

"you simply don't exist" online, according to Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable. - polou/indigo_bow from Bookmarklet

Privacy is a very complex issue cannot cover just in one quote or one article or one policy - polou/indigo_bow