Negative Space: deception
- Administration pays to secretly promote policy
- What would have happened if the Clinton administration also paid to have government policy secretly pushed?
- Al-Qaeda tea-parties in Iraq?
- Did Saddam Hussein support terrorists? According to the Washington Post, yes. It’s all a matter of how you read their article.
- All omissions are not created equal
- The story of Corporal Jeff Starr’s quote illustrates not only why you can’t trust major newspapers in the United States, but also that you can’t trust some people to understand why we care about misquotes.
- The big lie and the Associated Press
- One reason that bigger lies go undetected is that they’re harder to verify.
- Brainwashing 101
- Except for a few high points, this documentary is disappointing, and especially so whenever the director appears on-screen. It takes an important issue and trivializes the political causes and implications.
- The coming crisis
- We know it. We just don’t know what it is yet.
- D.C. voucher students show gains
- D.C. voucher students show increased learning at lower cost; parents happy. Washington Post not as happy.
- Deliberately imprecise language is itself a bias
- The Chicago Tribune claims to use extremely imprecise language out of a fear of repetition. This ends up introducing a bias--or at least an extreme lack of clarity--into their reporting.
- Fahrenheit 9/11 Reviews Show Restraint
- Reviewers of Michael Moore’s latest work appear to have learned their lesson: don’t put anything you learned in writing, because it is probably wrong. The first rule about Fahrenheit? Don’t talk about Fahrenheit.
- The Helter Skelter Media
- Joe the Plumber and the vengeance of the media.
- Mainstream media and balance in Iran
- In order to present Iran’s holocaust revisionary conference as balanced, the BBC has to omit some important facts about the attendees.
- Media balance at its best at CSPAN
- Too often, “balance” in mainstream media means over-simplifying to the point that right and wrong are given equal time.
- Media misdirection
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What does it matter when major news organizations try to rewrite history through omission and misdirection?
- No biased Times?
- Can the New York Times be any more biased in its Iraq vote reporting? Or is it just blatant ignorance?
- Obama campaign skirts campaign finance law
- I expected the New York Times to be silent on the illegal donations that the Obama 2008 campaign encourages. I should have known better: they’re trying to cover for the campaign. But the bigger issue is that laws that don’t get enforced are counterproductive; they encourage dishonesty and lawlessness.
- Paranoid Times
- “On newspaper articles words dance. Reality and unreality collide on such a fundamental level that each becomes the other and anything is possible.”
- Question with boldness
- Thomas Jefferson is probably second to Mark Twain with regards to having apocryphal quotes attributed to him. In Jefferson’s case some of these apocryphal quotes are not so much wrong but too mild.
- Red vs. Blue working out well in Houston
- Our antagonistic attitude in politics has become so ingrained that we naturally assume the worst even when people are doing their best to help.
- Reporting from press releases
- Much of what we read in the newspapers is not reporting: it is a rewriting of a press release written for the purpose of being used in place of news reporting.
- Shattered Glass, Shattered Illusions
- Great movie, great commentary on the DVD with directory Billy and New Republic editor Chuck Lane.
- Substantive answers cause misquotes
- Newspapers really just don’t like substantive answers. If you try to give one, they’ll just rewrite the question and attribute it to you.
- There will be deception
- As their world falls apart, media liars will get better at lying.
- Why Frey’s fakery matters
- Seth Mnookin explains why James Frey’s “embellishments” are a disservice to his readers and to recovering addicts.
- Will the real Laura Bush please stand up?
- Media sources once again put words into someone’s mouth, and people who want to believe it “lap it up”.
- World News Tonight vs. the Sirens of the Internet
- News organizations haven’t yet seemed to figure out that Iraq is a democracy. It isn’t up to George Bush to sack or not sack their Prime Minister.
