Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
I think you can vacuum up more information and stimulation in 15 minutes walking through warblogs than two hours flipping through the cable and traditional network news. And if you do decide to channel surf, a tip: You’ll feel somewhat less filthy and a bit more informed if you spend more time with Jennings / Brokaw et al than with the younger, more sensationalistic reporters on Fox / CNN.
But don’t try and combine blogging and TV news – the mothership doesn’t like that.
Big events week at the J-School coming up – I’m going to end up ragged. In addition to a week-long conference on multimedia training for mid-career journalists, we have three excellent events happening, all of which will be webcast live:
Monday, March 24 — Discussion and Q&A on weblogs and journalism with J.D. Lasica, Online Journalism Review and Rusty Foster, founder of kuro5hin.
Wednesday, March 26 – Presentation and Q&A on wireless technology with Cory Doctorow.
Thursday, March 27 – Presentation and Q&A on charging for online content with Vin Crosbie of Digital Deliverance.
Get your QuickTime plugins greased up!
Millions of Americans tune in for The Great Spectacle, expecting “Shock and Awe” at unspeakable volumes. Instead they get hours of grainy footage of the back end of a tank in convoy plowing through the Iraqi desert. CNN tries to make the most of it, calling it “remarkable footage” and “historic,” which doesn’t change the fact that they’re broadcasting hours of the butt end of a tank because they have nothing else to show. Is America getting its money’s worth? No doubt some actual spectacle around the corner, but meanwhile how to keep the viewers from tuning out? Ah — treat them to a night with no commercials. Which of course means the competing network doesn’t get to do commercials either. There might not be a commercial for days! Who needs Tivo? Wife starts flipping channels. Protests clog NY, Philly, Washington. In SF more than 1000 are arrested. Fox brushes up against this news, does all it can not to treat it with revulsion. I mean with Shock and Awe. How can anyone protest at a time like this?, the reporter asks. Our boys are halfway across the world at risk of dying to protect our very right to protest, and they’re protesting? The irony is thick like chemical weapons gas, the reporter nearly coughs. Meanwhile, protestors vomit for peace. Fox puts convicted war criminal Oliver North in the field as a reporter — that’s what credibility is all about. And in case Ollie’s spiel is too complicated, Geraldo will be there to sign Iraqi women’s backsides. 16 die in a helicopter crash — 12 brits and a 4 yanks. Or so I hear on CNN. When Fox does the same story a few minutes later, they tell us that four people have died. If you’re not American your life isn’t worth prime-time mention. The info graphic tells me the cruising speed and gas mileage of the Abrams tank and I feel informed.
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Floating around, author unknown: A Warmonger Explains War with Iraq to a Peacenik.
Students involved with the J-School’s bIPlog have created Revolution Is Not an AOL Keyword (to the tune of Gil-Scot Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”) – a roster of interesting intellectual property links embedded in a “fair use” (?) reconstitution of the original poem.
Sat in on a class today discussing ethics in documentary filmmaking and was reminded twice that, as the cliche’ goes, nothing is as it seems. First was a five-minute excerpt from a NOVA special about a firefight and rescue operation in Kentucky in the 90s. It all seemed very intense and scary and educational and all that. Afterwards we were asked what the problem with it was. No one had any idea. Turns out that all of the rescue scenes of a downed firefighter with a crushed pelvis being pulled out of the area by a brave team and a helicopter were totally faked. Staged. By NOVA. One of the most respected long-form documentary/science shows running.
The second example was the opening sequence to Ken Burn’s “The Civil War,” which revolves around the person who signed the papers to put an end to the war (neither Grant nor Lee, I forget his name). They showed old pictures of his house, they showed him, they showed the people who were there. Except that they didn’t. Burns couldn’t find any pictures of this guy, or his house, or anything. So he found pictures that would convey the mood and intentionally misled the viewer into thinking he was seeing accurate historical photographs.
Burns is one of the most respected historical documentarians we’ve got. If we can’t count on Ken Burns or Nova to give us the truth even when in documentary mode (where the journalist ostensibly has the time and resources to do it right), are there any journalists or institutions we can count on for the truth? How would we know? Even in the context of a class on the very subject, we didn’t have enough context to know we were watching something tantamount to lies. How much worse is it for the general public watching your average evening magazine or Fox News or CNN coverage of event XyZ?
Dinner at Great China after work with my boss, several workmates, Orville Schell, and a Chinese student involved in monitoring The Great Firewall of China — various mechanisms of internet censorship exercised by the government. An evening’s worth of conversations about Google and blogging, the slippery nature of the internet, encryption, proxies, obfuscation, and the immense scale of China’s censorship efforts.
The plan is to do something similar to what we did with bIPlog, but on the subject of Chinese internet clampdown techniques and mechanisms/stories of circumvention. We’ll be bringing in CS students to help us find ways to monitor whether and how our site is blocked from within China. We’ll also feed and seed the Western press with info gleaned anonymously from within the continent. Should be a fascinating project, though we likely won’t begin until this summer.
It’s all going to be published in Chinese, which means I’ll need to manage a site in a language I can’t read. Looks like Movable Type handles Unicode well ….
J.D. Lasica of New Media Musings has written a comprehensive overview of the RSS phenomenon for Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review. J.D. sent interview questions to take pulse of my RSS habits a while ago, and quotes me in the article (I didn’t realize at the time that he’d also be running our comments in uncut form).
I disagree with J.D.’s statement that RSS won’t be the next big thing. I predict RSS aggregating capabilities being built into major browsers inside of six months. Within two years, any news site that doesn’t publish to RSS is going to start slipping off people’s radars.
Just received email from the editorial director of the O’Reilly Network informing me that the content of my ORA blog has been placed under one of the new Creative Commons licenses. I happen to be a big fan of Lessig’s Creative Commons as a result of last semester’s work in the bIPlog class, and I’m happy to have sundry mind belches released under the Share Alike deed.
Didn’t see it, but heard that CNN has accused FOX of wanting to “own coverage of the war” – which is probably true, but even if so, CNN would do better to inspire by example and rise above the pettiness than to engage in public fisticuffs. In response, Fox apparently ran an ad in the NY Times denying that they were interested in owning the story. On the brink of war, our two primary news outlets are having a credibility war. Except that instead of both outlets proving themselves with quality of coverage, they try to convince us by shouting more loudly than the other “Over here! Look at us! We’re the credible ones!”
This may be our most post-modern war yet!
Benjamin corrects me: “Actually, CNN proclaimed itself as wanting to “own the story.” The full page Fox add in the NYT was answering to that by saying “We report. You decide.” The implication is that they (Fox) wold not be so arrogant as to want to own the story because after all Fox is fair and balanced.
That’s what I get for posting things I didn’t experience first-hand. :(
Watching a show on Discovery about nurture / nature, and at one point the camera ends up, as it tends to do in so many documentaries, in sub-Saharan Africa. Observing a tribe of villagers going about their dailies, we see several women without tops, breasts swinging freely … during prime time … and not on Pay-Per-View. What circumstances make full-frontal prime-time female nudity kosher? Can you imagine suddenly seeing the breasts of any American female sitcom character? Front page news. If a culture is sufficiently removed from the mainstream, we treat them with different rules. You can’t explain this by saying that tribal women don’t mind being seen without garments – there are plenty of Western women who feel the same, but that fact doesn’t lift the taboo.