Thursday, June 28, 2007
Full disclosure: I am not currently a Ron Paul supporter. Nor am I a registered Republicrat or Democan. Moreover, my readers will know that I hardly discuss politics here and that’s largely because I see politics as a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is kind of activity, and talk is particularly cheap in that domain. However, being that I DO blog about media, and being that I do think Ron Paul is an intelligent man worthy of respect, the treatment he received on Fox News is worth objecting to. Over on the Daily Paul, there is a video post of an interview with some ass from Fox News and Ron Paul. I think my favorite part is when the journalist asks “I want to remain clear, you’re against taxes.” This is neither clarifying anything or even a reasonable representation of anything that Ron Paul had said up to that point. Either this journalist did no research before meeting Ron Paul, or he has an agenda set by Fox to obfuscate the positions of candidates that Fox does not approve of, or he’s an idiot. Whichever one it is, he should not be on television reporting the news.
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Sunday, June 11, 2006
I’m gonna’ pick on this guy for two reasons. One, his web site has some UI issues. Two, he’s picking on Pixar’s new film, Cars. Christopher Kelly, the movie critic at the Star-telegram has decided that computer animation is a forumla and that he’s had enough. [Note: The review that this link originally went to is down. Strangely enough, the least of previous columns on Christopher Kelly's profile page is surprisingly brief.]
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Tuesday, March 14, 2006
I’ve seen this quote variously sourced but it goes like this “News is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is advertising.” I’d like to generalize on that little zinger: information is that which someone wants suppressed–everything else is propaganda. After asking my sociology teacher to show the class “What Barry Says,” a propaganda piece for the left as concerns US imperialism, something occurred to me. It’s really all just propaganda isn’t it?
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Tuesday, January 10, 2006
The economist this week had an article this week about a new paper coming out in Psychological Science that discusses how people may use Bayesian analysis to make predictions about events in the world. The estimates that people were tested on ranged from the estimated length of a congressman’s term (given how long they had been in office) to how long to bake a cake (given how long it had been in the oven), all things that people estimate given prior experience. Can the media affect this?
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Thursday, September 15, 2005
In “Interface Culture
,” Steven Johnson identifies many programs of media that aim to imitate a new form of media. His most eloquent example was that of the radio drama. The radio drama, the form of the drama itself, the theater, was “stripped down to meet the limited dimensions of radio” and would have been much more suited to the new media of television. [1] And just as television outpaced the radio and the radio attempted to imitate it, so the television has attempted to imitate the next generation of tactile media found on the Internet. CNN’s “Situation Room” is the latest of an incarnation of television that only barely captures the power of the next medium and manufactures a disjointed interface in the process.
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