The Sorkin Effect

Obama's campaign is based on a platform of change, bipartisan politics, and hope. No, that's not an agreement. That's merely the image his campaign has been trying to project for the past few months. Another projection though, another image, another aspect of his campaign is what I'll call the ICON. Obama as an icon, a symbol that stands in the midst of history, is just as big of a part of his campaign as the word change is.  

Eye candy.

  

more...

In a hilarious turn of events, article.

Palau News

I just checked an electoral calendar.  And it turns out that Palau is holding its presidential election on November 4th.  Embarrassingly ignorant of the Palau electoral process, the plight of the Palauen people, and even the location of Palau on a map, I've decided to give some of my attention.  

The Republic of Palau is an island nation in the South Pacific.  If someone were to toss you out of a plane roughly half way between your flight from Tokoyo to Sidney you might hit Palau with the perfect wind sheer.  It gained its independence in 1994, when it established a compact of free association with the US and entered the UN.  

Here's a quick list of the Palau political system.  Should be interesting, huh? 

Tiptoeing Through The Tulips

Media coverage of the political fight about the market is surprisingly fair.  Every article I've read so far, from CNN to Intl Herald Tribune to Foxnews (when was the last time we saw the word "deliberative" in a Foxnews article?), seems to tiptoe through the issue.  Careful not to blame Republicans for the crisis.  Careful not to point out the Democrats holding things up in Congress.

I'd like to submit that this is because the market is no longer a bi-partisan issue.  And, when there is no big VS in the picture, the media covers something fair.  

The current issue with the market is how much it should be regulated.  NOT, whether it should be regulated at all!  This is a departure from the more common Free Market vs Regulation model we've seen for the past many years.  

Also, I think it must be noted that covering finance requires an interest in finance.  Therefore, articles on that subject will more than likely be from writers who either aren't as familiar with or aren't as interested in politics.

All in all it makes for refreshingly solid coverage.     

SexyDirtyMoney

I thought you all might find this interesting.

"Everything that you are about to read might be wrong.
Roll Call’s annual attempt to rank the riches of Members of Congress is hampered by one fundamental flaw: It is based on the lawmakers’ financial disclosure forms, which are extraordinarily unreliable sources of information.

The disclosure rules allow Members to report assets in broad categories, so there is no way to tell the difference between a $20 million investment and a $5 million investment. The top category on the Members’ forms is “over $50 million,” so it is impossible to accurately account for anything worth more than that — like a professional sports team, for example. There is also a gaping loophole for assets owned by the Members’ spouse or dependent children; anything worth more than $1 million in value can be reported as “over $1 million.” There is no way to tell whether that is $1.2 million or $1.2 billion."

Rest of Article and List of 50 Richest members of Congress.

Air Wars Chapters 1-5 Schema

Howdy all,
The real usefulness of this book is that it really is an extended glossary of sorts, that is organized into lists and examples.  Below, I've broken down the lists of each chapter, as I kind of distilled summary.  This is by no means exhaustive, it is just what I took away from it.     

Chapter 1

Stereotypers    Visual Images

Association Visual Text

Demonization Music and Sounds

Code Words Color

Editing

Audio Voice Over (Narrator)

Hard Money

Soft Money (Buckley v. Valeo)

Phantom Ads

Attack Ads

Chapter 2

Strategies of Ad Buying

1.  How many issues?

2.  When (if) air attack ads?

3.  How often to broadcast ad(s)?

4.  How to mix local and national ad buys?

Strategic Interactions with Opponents, - or +

Chapter 3

The Power of the Portrait

Prominent Ads (not ness. in times run, but in effect)

Action Statements  The Campaign Stage

Policy Mentions

Personality Based

Social Issues

International Relations

Internet Ads & Sites

Negative Ads and Backlash

Chapter 4

Horse-race Coverage

The more - ads the more horse-race coverage

Ad Watches

Ads with footnotes

Oversight tools

Chapter 5

Favorability

Electability

Familiarity

How ads impact voters

Outfoxed: The Sad State of Media Criticism

I think we can all agree that those who are proponents of objectivity in journalism are either ignorant of most modern journalistic ethical literature or disingenuous.

I think we can all agree that the FOX news channel is biased. It is biased, in the sense of the above, but also in the sense of a conscious concentration and manipulation of certain attitudes that shape and frame the news.
All that said, Mike Greenwald, the documentary’s director, undercuts any decent argument he could make by employing some over handed tactics and some sloppy rhetoric.

The experts he employs to add substance and evidence to his claims about Fox news all come from well documented liberal background, men and women who have already spoken out against Fox news, not necessarily from the solid ground of journalistic integrity.

The parade of agenda biased journalists skew their credentials as experts (even if we are to concede that they do in fact know what they are talking about in the first place) as well as subvert any notions of untainted evidence.

The former Fox news employees were also misrepresented. For example, Mr. Du Pre of the West Coast Bureau, who is responsible for some of the most potentially damaging comments, is not really from the West Coast Bureau. He was from the local Los Angeles Bureau and was let go from Fox news for “biased reporting.” So not only does the production create false implications, but also Mr. Du Pre has an incredibly biased agenda against his former employer.

Even the statistics are tainted (yeah, “even” implies that they normally wouldn’t be. And yeah, everyone knows the idiom “there are lies, goddamn lies, and statistics.” I just wanted that conjunction). Yet, they are more than tainted, they are embarrassingly sloppy in their impurity. When presenting the number of people Rupert Murdoch can reach on a daily basis, Greenwald adds each constituent together, ignoring those people who could fall into multiple categories. People who have basic cable can also access the Internet. Those groups are not mutually exclusive, yet Greenwald adds them all up for the largest number possible.

Perhaps the biggest problem though, is his refusal to create a baseline from which to compare Fox news’ journalistic culture to other news outlets. There are no, this is what CNN does, and look how biased Fox news is, points.
The best example of this is the memos from Fox high command that supposedly generate and perpetuate propaganda and bias. Perhaps these memos are biased. I can not, though, as a viewer, know what to think for certain without relevant comparisons.

Yet, even these memos don’t seem biased. And Greenwald over handed attempts to make them appear biased subverts any credibility he has left. My favorite example of this is the memo pertaining to the coverage of Abu Grahb prison. The memo reads something along these lines:

“People are upset over the Abu Grahb prison photos. And they are rightfully so. Today, we’re going to show a US citizen captured and presented to us bound and gagged. Where is the sympathy for this man?” (apprx)

The narrator though skips the second line, as that piece of text fades into the background. Greenwald obviously removes the piece of fairness from the memo. This presentation is about as absurd as asking Mrs. Lincoln how the play was despite the assassination. The removal of a vital piece of text from the narration is in poor taste, but to leave the original memo in is, plainly, stupid and sloppy.

If someone ever brought this script into the writing center, I would have serious concerns as a tutor. As a citizen watching this film, I also have serious concerns, concerns about the state of media criticism.

RIP DFW

David Foster Wallace has a great article on John McCain's press coverage titled "Up Simba."

That was to make this post relevant.  RIP DFW. 

Outfoxed

For those who don't wish to roll out of bed this weekend.  

TV-watching is a different animal from Peeping Tourism

Do media create distance between participant (viewer, reader, etc.) and event? That seems to be the big question of the week, and like all big questions, this one falls perilously short of appropriately addressing the issue. The relationship between media, audience, and event is an incredibly complex dynamic of power, space, and trust (those are not mutually exclusive.).

For those who don’t really have the patience or the desire to read Foucault (not many do), there’s a great little essay by David Foster Wallace (back at you Pop Culture Critic) called E Unibus Pluram (the title's source), which does a decent job of explicating the relationship between media, audience, and event.

For our purposes, though, let’s assume that media is an event itself. Watching TV, going to a film, sitting through a play, those are all events. And that media event imposes itself on our conscious immediately acting as a lens through which we perceive another event. Now, I chose the word lens carefully, because although lens create distance, the sometimes offer clarity. I think that model accurately captures media.

So any absolutist argument, in my opinion, off the bat assumes an agenda. Reading “Easy Citizenship: Television’s Curious Legacy” was like reading a 1940s article bashing the TV as evil. Ad homonym attacks aside, one of Hart’s thesis: “not everything that is good for us is easy,” suffers from a lack of sophistication and a subtle adherence to an agenda – that media is bad.

The Reeher piece does a much better job at representing the complexity that a discussion of this subject must undertake. He views media as neither inherently good nor bad, it is an event, and with all events it carries the connotations and effects it accumulates over time.

The internet, for example, is controlled by the clicking of the individual. Its very structure forces active participation (perhaps unlike television) in the event of surfing. So, activism online is already occurring. To use a Hart word, its structure creates “inertia.”

The Obama campaign has certainly exploited this inertia and turned it into a cash and voter collecting system of unparalleled precedence. They have treated media as a tool, specifically the internet, which can not only access many, many people, but it can also turn them into active users. This is just a reflection. I’m thinking more about this problem for a later, lengthier post.

The Media Under Fire

And it begins, again.

Obama has had enough.

A Good Ole' Fresh Cup of...

Interpreting data is risky business. What might seem clear one moment becomes a ghost in the evidence the next. As my grandpa, a professor of statistics at Yale, is fond of saying, “reading data is high wire act between skepticism and conjecture. No models are ever completely accurate, the most we can hope for is that some are useful.”

Perhaps one of the most seductive syllogisms of data is that of parallel direction. If A. is moving in the same direction as B. and they are even in relative acceleration and velocity to each other, I’d like to assume a relationship between the two. There is a certain logic to this. However, upon more detailed scrutinizing, this assumption can often falter.

The mounds of data that both "Election 2006 Online" as well as “The State of the News Media” presented seemed, at least in part, to be governed by the above assumption as well as some others. 

It would, of course, be amiss of me not to provide an example. The “Election 2006 Online” states the following:

"The growing importance of the internet in political life is tied at least in part to the spread of broadband connections in American homes. From November 2002 to November 2006, the share of adult Americans with high-speed connections at home grew from 17% to 45%. These “always on” internet connections draw people to online news of any kind, political news included" (ii.).

  

Just because “always on” internet connections have increased does not mean that those connection “draw people to online news of any kind, political news included.”
In fact, if you were to consider the framing of that logic for a moment, you would find that the sentence implies that the greater accessibility of the internet causes people to seek online news.  

Does accessibility draw people to online news sites? My gut says no. How could greater accessibility to the large window that is the internet result in a specific increase to a small sector?

I’m not sure.

But, let’s consider its viability for the moment. The study goes on to examine the influence of broadband and mentions it 42 more times (43 total). And as the evidence mounts, the less plausible the study’s initial claim seems.

"As we documented earlier this year, those who have broadband at home are different news consumers from non-internet users and dial-up users. In this survey, broadband users are just as likely to turn to the internet for news as they are their local newspaper on a typical day. Some 38% of home broadband users get news online on a typical day, the same percentage as home broadband users who read a newspaper on a typical day. For home dial-up users, however, online news is not as much an everyday activity" (4.).

 
To me, this section undermines the claim of a draw. Since it presents the same suspiciously same percentage for both the usage of newspapers and internet among broadband users. This data tells me that broadband users are just as likely to turn on safari as they are to pick up the times. It also tells me that broadband has the same drawing power as regular old newspapers.

I might be missing something, though, the original claim might be relative to dial up users. If I were to assume that then the claim is absolutely plausible. 27% of broadband users get most of their election news online, while only 13% of dial up users get their news online. 

But, the original claim does not, to my powers, imply or state a relationship between broadband or dial up. It claims that, in no absolute terms, broadband attracts more people to news on the internet.  

But, now I might have an even bigger problem. The chart on page 8 clearly states that 27% of broadband users receive most of their campaign coverage online. However, in an earlier paragraph, already quoted in this article, the study claimed that “38% of home broadband users get news online on a typical day.”

Now, we could parse the language. That the chart presents information pertaining to solely the campaign, and the paragraph presents data relating solely to news. But, at this point in time, I’m beginning to question the accuracy of the study’s numbers. I want to see how these percents were calculated in the first place. I’d like to know about this organization, etc.

I hope this excerise in close reading gave everyone a healthy cup of skepticism before class on Monday.

Riffing off of Cranky's

You all might enjoy this too.

" ST. PAUL, Minn. — On behalf of the media, I would like to say we are sorry.On behalf of the elite media, I would like to say we are very sorry.

We have asked questions this week that we should never have asked. We have asked pathetic questions like: Who is Sarah Palin? What is her record? Where does she stand on the issues? And is she is qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency?

We have asked mean questions like: How well did John McCain know her before he selected her? How well did his campaign vet her? And was she his first choice?

Bad questions. Bad media. Bad.

It is not our job to ask questions. Or it shouldn’t be. To hear from the pols at the Republican National Convention this week, our job is to endorse and support the decisions of the pols.

Sarah Palin hit the nail on the head Wednesday night (and several in the audience wish she had hit some reporters on the head instead) when she said: “I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment. And I’ve learned quickly, these past few days, that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone.”

Rest of the article here.

The Objective Reporter

Howdy Gents,

I just wanted to clarify and elaborate on my comments in class today.  I noticed there was some confusion at the time, so I want to take this opportunity to articulate my position to the best of my ability.  

The very word "fact" is a convention.  It is a linguistic structure dating back to the Latin factum, which meant something close to "deed" or "event" even with an evil connotation.  There is no doubt, though, that today we use the word to demarcate truth,what the reality of any situation was.  

In many cases fact is an established result of empirical data and observation.  Those facts carry such a large body of proof that in many cases they're truthiness (oh yes) is indisputable - the world is round example, perhaps overused but apt falls into this category.  

Yet, for those nuanced and multi-variable events that human narratives so often include, fact, I believe, becomes impossibly subjugated to perspective.  But more than that, to claim facts in those cases compresses complex situations into simple, digestible dominoes, that can be aligned in a way that would demonstrate the reality of a certain event.  

I believe that these sorts of facts are fallacies.  As conventions themselves they represent the agendas of all who participated in the construction and maintenance of the linguistic societal rules.  They are the products of the indoctrinated, and thus inseparable from perspective.   

Even if we were to remove every variable of the mirror analogy that Leighley suggests appropriately characterize her "objective fact news," the ways in which those facts are presented, structured, organized, and communicated are products of culture and invariably influence their content.  The upturned lip of a monotone shatters this theory.

I, though, have no problem with facts.  I think that there need to be things that we take for granted in this world.  We simply can not process all of the information we take in every day, let alone every week, etc.  But to ignore that the word fact represents a social contract of that sort can create major problems.  

To maintain that journalist, and news outlets, have an obligation to fact and to truth, is a conjecture that I think is unreasonable and unsound.   It is unfair to hold someone responsible for documenting truths beyond human existence.  We can not and can never be mirrors.        

Even CSPAN positions its camera.