Recently in Writing, Media & Blogs Category

New polling data shows that Fox is now the most trusted name is news.

A Public Policy Polling nationwide survey of 1,151 registered voters Jan. 18-19 found that 49 percent of Americans trusted Fox News, 10 percentage points more than any other network.

Thirty-seven percent said they didn’t trust Fox, also the lowest level of distrust that any of the networks recorded.

I guess CNN will need to change their slogan.

Also interesting is the spin that PPP puts on the results of their own poll.

“A generation ago you would have expected Americans to place their trust in the most neutral and unbiased conveyors of news,” said PPP President Dean Debnam in his analysis of the poll. “But the media landscape has really changed, and now they’re turning more toward the outlets that tell them what they want to hear.”

Maybe they asked such a question, but if so it wasn't reported in this story. It sounds to me that Debnam is projecting his own biases onto his poll data and inferring accordingly.

My wife loves dogs so we've watched a lot of Cesar Millan, and one of our favorite episodes of South Park is the episode "Tsst", in which:

When Cartman's mom realizes she can't control her son anymore, she gets help from an expert. The "Dog Whisperer" may have what it takes but Eric Cartman's not going down without a fight.

And now, three years later, life imitates South Park.

It’s little wonder, then, that some parents, and even a few child therapists, have found themselves taking mental notes from a television personality known for inspiring discipline, order and devotion: Cesar Millan, otherwise known as the Dog Whisperer.

The suggestion that the Dog Whisperer is also a Child Whisperer of sorts has popped up — sometimes couched as a joke, but, well, not really — in parents’ forums like blogs, online discussion boards, magazines, Twitter feeds and podcasts. Some parents are starting to take notice.

“When we started watching his shows, we had intended to apply his advice toward our dogs,” said Amy Twomey, a blogger on parenthood for The Dallas Morning News who is raising three children under 10 with her husband, Matt. “But we realized a lot of ideas can be used on our kids.”

Yep! Our thoughts were on that same track way before we had an almost-one-year-old. Thanks to Cesar's techniques, Violet quickly learned not to touch the television or video equipment that's right at her head level in the living room.

(HT: James Taranto.)

The Associated Press is fabricating reality by labeling a health care takeover bill as "middle-of-the-road" while acknowledging that it only garnered one Republican vote in committee.

With support from a lone Republican, a key Senate committee Tuesday approved a middle-of-the-road health care plan that moves President Barack Obama's goal of wider and affordable coverage a giant step closer to becoming law.

Maine Republican Olympia Snowe said she was laying aside misgivings for now and voting to advance the bill, a sweeping $829-billon, 10-year health care remake that would help most Americans get coverage without creating a new government insurance plan. "When history calls, history calls," said Snowe.

Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., called his bill "a commonsense, balanced solution." A distance runner, Baucus has endured months of marathon meetings to get this far. It's not the finish line.

Well if the bill's author, Max Baucus, calls his bill "a commonsense, balanced solution" then how dare the Associated Press be skeptical? I suppose "reporter" Erica Werner couldn't be bothered to notice that Republican Olymbia Snowe is the most leftist Republican in the Senate and tends to vote with the Democrats on controversial issues. Her support is hardly enough to qualify any left-wing proposal as "middle-of-the-road".

The bill will never get to the floor of the Senate, but the AP and the rest of the leftist media is desperate to portray it as "middle-of-the-road" and the Republicans as obstructionists who oppose "commonsense, balanced solution[s]". Unfortunately for the AP, we're not all idiots.

Dalton Chiscolm has upped the ante for frivolous lawsuits by suing Bank of America for "1,784 billion, trillion dollars". Thanks for covering this, Reuters. This is important news!

Dalton Chiscolm is unhappy about Bank of America's customer service -- really, really unhappy.

Chiscolm in August sued the largest U.S. bank and its board, demanding that "1,784 billion, trillion dollars" be deposited into his account the next day. He also demanded an additional $200,164,000, court papers show.

Attempts to reach Chiscolm were unsuccessful. A Bank of America spokesman declined to comment.

"Incomprehensible," U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said in a brief order released Thursday in Manhattan federal court.

"He seems to be complaining that he placed a series of calls to the bank in New York and received inconsistent information from a 'Spanish womn,'" the judge wrote. "He apparently alleges that checks have been rejected because of incomplete routing numbers."

Who cares. This isn't news. The meta-story (which I'm writing about) is sorta news I guess. Eh, who knows.

(HT: RD.)

This "Beware of the Doghouse" ad is one of the most insulting pieces of trash that I've seen in a long time. It's very sad that anyone would think so little of their wife that they'd find it amusing to humiliate women as a gender in this manner.

Of course, I assume that the men in the ad were the intended butts of the joke, but that implicit intention really makes women look even worse.

Thankfully my wife is nothing like the ungrateful shrews that seem so prevalent in pop culture.

Jack Cashill makes a compelling circumstantial case that Willian Ayers ghost-wrote Dreams From My Father for Barack Obama. Maybe Obama should release some more of his writing so he can put these silly issues to rest.

(HT: Someone I can't remember.)

Update:

Oops. I accidentally posted this entry twice, and then deleted the copy that had two comments on it instead of this one without any comments. Here's are the two comments I deleted:

October 9, 2008 5:25 PM, jwilliamson08.myopenid.com wrote:
Michael, I've been reading your blog for quite some time now. Its one of my favorites. I think the articles you write about, especially the ones on technology, are interesting and exciting.

Frankly, I'm very taken aback by how much political spewing I've read so far. I'd like this place to be one of the few places that just avoid this political controversy. The facts remain:

Obama is most probably going to win this election. The polls couldn't be stronger for him. There are distinct reasons for this, despite how much you may think him to be not genuine. While all presidential candidates may have different outlooks and plans for a change in government, I've learned that a core responsible and morally sound person will always do a good job.

You and I both know McCain's ethics are questionable. We both know his ties to the Bush regime. We both know his pick for Palin was based on PURELY political stunted reasons, and frankly we both know that Palin is VERY unfit to be president. Heart attacks are rare, but the fact that McCain would gamble our leadership with someone as poorly sound in mind as that women, I find it insulting.

Now I know that this is simply just political spewing of my own, but lets just face some facts before we nitpick each candidate for more subtle reasons. Subtle reasons are always different. I wish this would be a place for news that combos of entries aren't for or against political candidates, as emotions are running high this election... big time.

October 9, 2008 6:25 PM, DeoDuce wrote:
*sigh* Yet another Kool-Aid drinker.

In case the casual observer of the world wasn't aware, the media in China is completely owned and operated by the Chinese government. As much as we Americans complain about the bias and shortcomings of our journalists, at least their reports aren't completely fabricated like this story about a "successful" space flight that launched before the rocket did.

BEIJING - A news story describing a successful launch of China's long-awaited space mission and including detailed dialogue between astronauts launched on the Internet Thursday, hours before the rocket had even left the ground.

The country's official news agency Xinhua posted the article on its Web site Thursday, and remained there for much of the day before it was taken down.

A staffer from the Xinhuanet.com Web site who answered the phone Thursday said the posting of the article was a "technical error" by a technician. The staffer refused to give his name as is common among Chinese officials.

Although, I hear that our media also pre-writes a lot of stories, like obituaries for old and important people. I guess just reporting the news is too old-fashioned.

I think Los Angeles Times editor Russ Stanton has misread his customer satisfaction surveys in a hilariously tragic way.

The Los Angeles Times plans to cut 250 positions, including 150 jobs in the print and online news departments, amid a continuing industrywide slump in ad sales, the paper's editor said Wednesday. ...

"The number one reason that people cancel the L.A. Times is, they tell us, they don't have enough time to read the paper that we give them every day," Stanton said. "We're going to be more picky about the stories we choose to write long and a lot more picky about the ones we write shorter."

I can see the survey question in my head:

We're sorry to see you go! Please tell us the number one reason you are canceling your subscription to the Los Angeles Times: [check] Not enough time to read it.

And Stanton interprets that answers to mean that his readers think the paper is too long! Seems pretty obvious to me that what the ex-subscribers really mean is that they don't have time to read the Los Angeles Times because they're too busy surfing the internet.

Slowly but surely the Iraqi government is meeting the benchmarks set for it by a Democrat-controlled Congress. Even though the Democrats intended to use the benchmarks as leverage for forcing an American retreat from Iraq, what some thought was impossible is actually happening, and we're winning. Naturally the Associated Press spins this optimistic step into a negative.

No matter who is elected president in November, his foreign policy team will have to deal with one of the most frustrating realities in Iraq: the slow pace with which the government in Baghdad operates.

Iraq's political and military success is considered vital to U.S. interests, whether troops stay or go. And while the Iraqi government has made measurable progress in recent months, the pace at which it's done so has been achingly slow.

The White House sees the progress in a particularly positive light, declaring in a new assessment to Congress that Iraq's efforts on 15 of 18 benchmarks are "satisfactory"—almost twice of what it determined to be the case a year ago. The May 2008 report card, obtained by the Associated Press, determines that only two of the benchmarks—enacting and implementing laws to disarm militias and distribute oil revenues—are unsatisfactory.

The White House sees, but of course we all know better. Can't they just report good news without hedging and qualification?

Lifehacker has a list of books that changed your lives, as voted on by its readers. Overall, the list is pretty good; in order:

• The Bible
• The Works of Ayn Rand
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, by Robert M. Pirsig
• The Stranger, by Albert Camus
• The Works of George Orwell
• The Works of Richard Dawkins
• The Hobbit and Lord of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
• Dune, by Frank Herbert

But wait, you say, one of these things is not like the others! The works of Richard Dawkins don't belong on a list of life-changing books! Because they are insipid and vacuous? No, but simply because they don't meet the fundamental criteria of the list: changing lives. Anyone who considers Dawkins' stunted philosophy to be profound was a bitter atheist long before reading The God Delusion.

(HT: RD.)

Ilya Somin writes that most science fiction fans come to it early in life, but Megan McArdle says that love for science fiction can be acquired by adults, even women. I would have agreed with Somin a year ago, but over the past few months my wife has had a revelation: Battlestar Galactica, Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, and even Star Trek: The Next Generation are now among her favorite works of fiction. I'm amazed and derive great joy from this newly shared interest.

First off, let me say that my wife and I have ardently disliked Hillary Clinton for almost two decades. We would never vote for her for anything. So imagine our surprise when Hillary did quite well during her appearance on The O'Reilly Factor. Bill O'Reilly asked some very good, very tough questions, and Hillary handled them well with a minimum of cast-iron talking-point repetition. I still don't agree with most of her policies and think she's incredibly dishonest, but she came across as poised, likable, and articulate.

To me, the highlight of the interview was when O'Reilly pointed out that her plan to raise taxes (and potentially eliminate the Social Security cap, though she denied it) would result in a 14% tax increase for him personally. She fielded it by saying that people as wealthy as he and her could afford it, middle-class taxpayers would benefit, etc. O'Reilly should have, but didn't, retort by telling her that he employs middle-class taxpayers, and he'd have to lay people off if her tax wishes are granted. But hey, this wasn't meant to be a debate, it was meant to be an interview.

Overall, the wife and I enjoyed watching quite a bit, and we're looking forward to tonight's installment. The questions were far tougher than any we've seen elsewhere, and we can't wait to see O'Reilly interview Barack Obama and John McCain. (Yeah, right.)

I don't envy him at all, but Brandon Sanderson has signed on to finish the late Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. I've never read anything by Sanderson, but the slashdotters have strong opinions on the succession, as you might expect.

(HT: Nick.)

Holy crap... in the recent Democrat presidential debate, all six of the questioners CNN presented as "undecided voters" were actually heavily involved in Democrat party politics!

CNN hits bottom and digs: All six debate questioners appear to be Democratic Party operatives. So much for "ordinary people, undecided voters". To paraphrase Junior Soprano, CNN is so far up the DNC's hind end, Howard Dean can taste hair gel.

In a nutshell, CNN's six "undecided voters" were:

A Democratic Party bigwig
An antiwar activist
A Union official
An Islamic leader
A Harry Reid staffer
A radical Chicano separatist

Also: Gateway Pundit here in STL.

George R. R. Martin is releasing a new book at the end of the month, but it's not a continuation of his awesome A Song of Ice and Fire series... it's a short story anthology! I've actually read some of his short stories, and they were fun, but I'm not going to buy the books for one simple reason: I never finish short story anthologies. In fact, I'm convinced that no one ever does. You read one or two stories, then lose interest and move on to something else. Am I wrong?

I just learned from Bernardo that Robert Jordan, author of the Wheel of Time series, has died. I had no idea that he had a chronic illness that was hindering his writing for the past few years, and I'm saddened to hear that he has passed. The fantasies he wove brought me many hours of joy, excitement, and wonder. It's especially sad to me that he must have been terribly disappointed to leave his world-renowned series unfinished.

There might be more information at Robert Jordan's blog, but the server is unresponsive at the moment, probably due to overwhelming traffic. Here's TarValon.net's obituary. Man, this is really terrible.

Amidst an otherwise interesting article about how to debunk a myth, the Washington Post tosses a few context-less grenades at the Bush Administration and the War on Terror.

... But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.

The only link the Bush Administration has made between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 is that our invasion of Iraq is part of a greater Global War on Terror. No Bush Administration official has ever claimed that Saddam Hussein was involved in planning 9/11, but both the attack on the World Trade Center and the invasion of Iraq are part of the same overarching conflict. The Washington Post pathetically mischaracterizes the most important issue of our time to score cheap political points.

And then at the bottom of the story is a control that lets you add an Iraq War body count to your blog!

I doubt the authors of the psychology paper the article was ostensibly about were happy to see their research hijacked.

We're All Journalists Now by Scott Gant is a brief yet informative piece that explains the new era that the profession of journalism is entering. Gant begins his argument that we are in a new era of media by giving us an outline of what old-fashioned journalism looked like (think Dan Rather.) He points out that the profession of journalism only pertained to a select few who worked for large, institutional organizations. One conjures the image of the cigar-toting, tie-and-vest journalist who swilled whiskey on his lunch break and while sitting hunched over a typewriter. The new era of journalism has changed this notion of the Journalist, with more people now then ever actually attaining that elusive status through the Internet Age. Gant's main point in giving us the old versus new contrast is to illustrate that all journalists, not just the large, organizational ones, deserve to have access to "shield laws" and "privacy" traditionally awarded journalists. Gant believes that it's high time for the American judicial system to start recognizing that "journalism is in flux" and there are more and more average people ("citizen journalists") who deserve the right to protect their sources. Gant says of this: "Nonprofessional journalists are sure to occupy an increasingly prominent and significant role in American life," (p.135).

The book is a fairly decent read with what I think is a balanced look at the journalism industry. Gant gives a concise history of American journalism and delves into the numerous court cases where small-time journalists were forced to reveal their sources and notes while larger journalists were allowed to refuse to do so. As Gant points out, "We should be suspicious of efforts to allocate preferences that do not reflect the reality that we're all capable of being journalists now," (p. 134).

To his credit, Gant also outlines some of the difficulties with this new Internet age of Citizen Journalism. He mentions that some press settings, such as a government building, only allow a certain number of journalists to attend. So, how do we sift through the rising number of both professional and non-professional journalists to determine who gets a press pass? Who gets media credentials and who does not? Which journalist gets press preferences and press perks? Gant gives various criteria for this problem starting on page 132: "Preferences should be based on the activity in which a person is engaged, rather than who the person works for, whether the person is paid, or the views that are expressed."

While most experienced bloggers and the internet-savvy will have already thought of or read about or heard of the ideas that Gant presents in this book, it provides a good perspective on the status of journalism today. We're All Journalists Now gives many details on court cases pertaining to the transformation of journalism, as well as layman explanations of the results of those cases. I would recommend this book to current students who are majoring in Journalism, as well as folks like Dan Rather.

(HT: With thanks to Jessica Williams.)

MSNBC has published an article about journalists who make political donations but they bury the lead: 90% of journalist contributions were to leftist politicians or causes.

MSNBC.com identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

That's a pretty incredible ratio, and the leftist journalists quoted explicitly admit to biased reporting.

The openness didn't extend, however, to telling the public about the donations. Apparently none of the journalists disclosed the donations to readers, viewers or listeners. Few told their bosses, either.

Several of the donating journalists said they had no regrets, whatever the ethical concerns.

"Probably there should be a rule against it," said New Yorker writer Mark Singer, who wrote the magazine's profile of Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign, then gave $250 to America Coming Together and its get-out-the-vote campaign to defeat President Bush. "But there's a rule against murder. If someone had murdered Hitler — a journalist interviewing him had murdered him — the world would be a better place. I only feel good, as a citizen, about getting rid of George Bush, who has been the most destructive president in my lifetime. I certainly don't regret it."

Gee, no conflict of interest there!

Guy Raz does work for a news organization.

As the Jerusalem correspondent for CNN, he was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq in June 2004, when he gave $500 to John Kerry.

He didn't supply his occupation or employer to the Kerry campaign, so his donation is listed in federal records with only his name and London address. Now he covers the Pentagon for NPR. Both CNN and NPR forbid political activity.

"I covered international news and European Union stories. I did not cover U.S. news or politics," Raz said in an e-mail to MSNBC.com. When asked how one could define U.S. news so it excludes the U.S. war in Iraq, Raz didn't reply.

Anyway, there are numerous other examples in the article and I won't bother quoting them all.

The Conservative Alternative points out that journalism can be a crusade -- if you're transparent about it.

This is typical of the mindset of journalists who see their jobs as a crusade as opposed to just reporting the news. Journalism can be a crusade, but if you are on a crusade you need to let the reader/viewer know that upfront instead of pretending to be objective.

Does this mean that journalists should be required to publicly display their political tendencies? I think yes. All these journalists have professional biographies on their employers' websites, so why not include a section on which causes and politicians each journalist contributes to and votes for? Then, at the end of each article, include a short sentence such as "So-and-so votes for and contributes to XYZ." Why shouldn't journalists have their motivations examined as closely as they examine those of politicians?

Here's the list of contributions by journalists compiled by MSNBC. Kudos to them for doing the research.

First off, let me say that I highly value everyone who has taken the trouble to link to my blog. Thank you! This post isn't meant as a complaint, but rather an attempt to improve the quality of links that we bloggers give to each other. I get lazy and do it "wrong" myself very often, but I'm trying to improve!

This article explaining how Google PageRank works reminds us that:

Myth: the higher your google PageRank, the better the results. “While pages with a higher PageRank do tend to rank better, it is perfectly normal for a site to appear higher in the results listings even though it has a lower PageRank than competing pages. [..] Google examines the context of your incoming links, and only those links that relate to the specific keyword being searched on will help you achieve a higher ranking for that keyword.” [Top 10 Google Myths Revealed]

I bolded the key information: the text between the <a> and </a> tags in your link makes a huge difference! Google uses the text in the link to associate the link with keywords used in searches.

Let's do a quick example. I found the article above via GeekPress, but if I link to GeekPress like I just did then the only search term that Google will associate with the site will be "GeekPress".

What Paul Hsieh would probably prefer, however, is for Google to associate his site with terms relating to the PageRank algorithm, so that when other webmasters are searching for such information they will come across his post. To that end, I would do better to write the links like this:

GeekPress posts about PageRank and links to an article about how PageRank works.

It's harder to write like this. Basically you have to write two (or more) links that both mention the relevant search terms but don't sound stupidly redundant. In this case I mentioned "PageRank" twice; that's somewhat awkward, but I can't think of a way around it without short-changing one of the links. (Any ideas?)

Again, I'm nothing but grateful to all the people who have to link to me. If we bloggers take the time to craft better links to each other, though, we'll all reap the rewards.