Category: Media

— Salon.com takes a look at Media Whores Online:

Rabid watchdog
While attacking what it sees as a vast, right-wing media conspiracy, an anonymous Web site has led to a growing media mystery: Who is behind Media Whores Online?

Yes, that right wing bias in the media’s everywhere, isn’t it? According to the easter bunny, anyway.

— The demure Up Yours – And More Helpful Tips announces a new poll:

COMING UP NEXT ANOTHER GREAT POLL – THE BLOGOSPHERE’S MOST SEXIST BLOGGER!!!!

Look, the voting is a mere formality. Just tell me what my prize is going to be so I can sell it on E-bay.

— John McLaughlin, Larry King, Arthur C. Clarke, and Joanne Jacobs figure into this magnificent piece from Soundbitten on Glenn Harlan Roberts’ war with Big Media.

— It’s not often I agree with New Labourite Nick Denton, but these observations are right on the money:

Matt Welch is a friend of mine, so take anything I say with a pinch of salt. That said: take a break from this page and read him. He’s a warblogger, and can bash the Saudis as well as any of that crowd. But at least he’s not predictable. He’ll lay into Bush over trade or coddling of the Saudis. And he even dares give Chomsky some credit, in a recent post. My main complaint against neocon bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds, though I read them regularly, is that I know what they’re going to say. Reynolds will never resist a chance to bash a European, academic, or an international organization, and preferably all three together. Sullivan will always find a way to give the benefit of the doubt to Bush; he toes the Republic party line as well as any political operative. That gets tedious. Matt at least surprises me.

I go one step further – if you know what they’re going to say, don’t read them. Life is too short to waste time on pinheads and prima donnas. I know, it’s for the links…

— The Daily Pundit, Bill Quick, has converted his blog to Movable Type and undergone a redesign in the process; temporarily reachable at http://64.247.33.2/~icebergw/ until DNS catches up.

While the new design is more fetching to the eye as an aesthetic object, it’s a step backward in terms of accessibility. There’s a large banner on top which pushes his content lower on the page, and the contrast between foreground and background in the links section is less than it used to be, which makes it harder to read. To compensate for the lack of contrast, the designer uses an extra-large font, which means you have to do more scrolling to read his site than you should. I like Bill’s content because he’s passionate and funny, but the new design doesn’t showcase his writing as much as it showcases the designer’s flawed concept of aesthetics.

Ditch the colors, Bill. The nice thing about Bill’s new blog is that he has an RSS feed, so he’s now included in RoboPundit.

— Berkeley now offers a course on Weblogs:

Weblogs are a new form of online publishing that have rapidly become a popular way of getting news and information on particular topics. Some are run by journalists, while others operate in competition with journalists. In this class students will create a Weblog to explore the subject of “intellectual property” – copyright issues, the battle over free music downloads and peer-to-peer networks, deep linking to Web sites, etc. News sources will be scanned each day for items of interest to the IP community, the top stories will be selected, and precise summaries of each story will be written, with a unique perspective and voice. The resulting Weblog column will be posted to the school’s Web site and to an email list of interested subscribers. We’ll also be bringing in experts in the Bay Area on intellectual property and copyright issues to become contributors to the Weblog.

In the future, only the educated will be allowed to blog, so get yours while you can.

Link from Scripting News.

— 9014 hits in one day’s a lot, right? I’m gonna have to look at the logs and see what’s going on.

— John Hiler’s piece on the interactions between blogs and traditional journalism (Blogosphere: the emerging Media Ecosystem – How Weblogs and Journalists work together to Report, Filter and Break the News) is the best thing I’ve seen so far on this subject. I was particularly struck by his account of the speed at which the false rumor propagated through the blogs about an ugly new EU flag that looked something like a bar code. 50 blogs picked up the story, but when it was exposed as a fiction, only 5 published corrections. The new flag design was simply a concept, and not one that anybody saluted.

Of course, we see that sort of thing all the time, and while we like to tell ourselves that blogs correct their errors faster and better than journalism, this doesn’t really happen. A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on new blogging technologies (“Is Instapundit Over?“) which was reported by Instapundit himself as charging that he was indeed over. His claim was picked up by a dozen or so blogs, and when I challenged them one by one to show me where I’d said that, none of them could.

In a second episode of deception by the same person, now with a chip on his shoulder, an angry libertarian posted this comment on Ben Domenich’s blog in connection with a discussion of the teen sex epidemic: “Ben feels left out when people talk about teen sex, cause he wasn’t getting any!” As the misanthropic libber had been egged-on by Glenn Reynolds comparing himself to Clarence Thomas, I reacted with this play on his name: “‘DS’ apparently stands for “dumb shit”, given the nature of that last comment. Is Glenn Reynolds in favor of teen sex because he gets a lot of it?” Reynolds reported my remark out-of-context from the one I was reacting to, and even out-of-context from his own self-serving and inflammatory comment.

So now the rumor is wildly circulating among Instapundit-fed blogs that I’m saying poor, put-upon Glenn has a sexual fixation on teenagers, and that I hate breastfeeding and lesbians, beat my wife, shoot heroin, and all sorts of other things. Lies get out of hand easily, especially in Blogistan, but there’s generally a malignant force behind them grinding an axe of some sort. But back to the future, our topic.

Hiler believes the Blogoshpere will grow in influence as if becomes more automated:

The Blogosphere isn’t perfect, but it’s the most robust and diverse Media Ecosystem we have. As the mechanisms tying it together grow more and more automated, its collective power and influence will start to approach that of any single newspaper or magazine.

I have to agree with him, and toward that end I put the RoboPundit demonstration on this blog, in the left column. The stories in RoboPundit are harvested automatically from a variety of blogs with different slants, and presented without much editing. This technology lends itself to selection, comparison, cross-linking, and a variety of other forms of sifting that are no longer practical without automation. And these very refinements, which are beyond the scope of traditional journalism, will make blogs the premier vehicle for news and opinion in years to come.

Technology naturally scares those who have a vested interest in the status quo, but one way or another, it always wins out. While it’s been interesting to see traditional journos scream like stuck pigs over the advent of blogging, in the weeks and months to come we’re going to see traditional bloggers scream about the new technology as they sense their impending irrelevance. In fact, we already have.

— Biddle tells me he writes for Fortune magazine. I’d like to suggest that Red Herring would be a good market for his style of reasoning, given this definition:

A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to “win” an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of “reasoning” has the following form:
Topic A is under discussion.
Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
Topic A is abandoned.
This sort of “reasoning” is fallacious because merely changing the topic of discussion hardly counts as an argument against a claim.

Another example: Person A makes a claim about unwed births. Person B says person A has the facts wrong, and introduces data including marital births, independent of rate to make his case. When person A points out the fallacy in person B’s response, person B calls person A a “hair-splitter.”

Red Herring is the place for you, RiShawn.

— Don’t visit The Truth Laid Bear; the dude is suffering from Link Withdrawl ’cause he didn’t know the first one’s free.

Instead, go see this wacko, or The Fat Guy, who’s Not-A-Pundit: just a guy writing about food, music, books, and tractors. They make ’em weird down in Texas, which is why I had to leave – no way to stand out.