Tag: Fairness Doctrine
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Fill the reader or fulfill the writer?
Both sides are sticking to the peculiar Shared Lie that newspapers are supposed to “hold power accountable” or “speak truth to power”. The two sides have different party-based definitions of which truth and which power, but they’re both essentially wrong. Newspapers were ALWAYS working for one party or for the owner’s business interests. Newspapers are…
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Clicking for anger isn’t new
We believe that the use of disgust and anger to create ‘engagement’ is new. It’s not. These polls from a 1946 book about radio and advertising surprised me. First an unsurprising poll on general attitudes: Radio was slightly more favorable than newspapers, and local government was lowest on the approval scale. Another unsurprise: The Fairness…
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Before WP rudely interrupted me…
Back to regularly scheduled snark. Taibbi discusses his parents who were both journalists: My father had a saying: “The story’s the boss.” In the American context, if the facts tell you the Republicans were the primary villains in this or that disaster, you write that story. If the facts point more at Democrats, you go…
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Boss vs boss
Wandering through ‘Elon Twitter’ for chuckles, ran across a surprisingly non-partisan take from an unexpected source, a wonderful reversion to how entertainment used to function under the Fairness Doctrine. Bon Appetit is for gourmet cooks. They focused on Twitter’s wildly expensive free lunches: Musk’s incessant tweeting, mass layoffs, radical changes to the platform, and public…
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Another faker down
I’ve been following Straight Arrow News since June. They made an impressive start, claiming to enforce the Fairness Doctrine. They featured a ‘Bias Meter’ gadget and invited readers to use it as a poll on articles. Today they finished converging to the norm, as usual. This article on “climate” is written strictly and totally from…
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Smart observation by Taibbi
Taibbi is discussing the downfall of journalism in a simple practical way. When CNN decided to run 24-hour news, quality switched to quantity. Definitely true. But Taibbi started in the industry after the Fairness Doctrine was already gone. Revoking the Doctrine opened the way to transform news into soap opera, and the increased quantity of…
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Would be nice…
Latest from Kirn: Someday creativity, free speech, civil liberties, peace, prosperity, and a balanced respect for tradition and exploration will not be assailed as “extreme” positions. The Boy Scout in me hopes that a more open Twitter will help in this process. I think it might. I think it won’t. This is one of the…
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Can’t be monetized
CNN is trying, or pretending to try, for a less partisan approach. Its viewers are revolting. No fairness allowed! We want pure D-brand crack! There was never any profit in plain truth. Newspapers have always been partisan. The only difference is that they’re all D now, compared to about 60% D in earlier decades. Radio…
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Just a rehash
I haven’t hit this theme lately. Time for a rehash. Free speech is a fake issue. Freedom is the goal of criminals and psychopaths. Normal people want to live a normal life and do useful work. Normal people want to be PROTECTED FROM THE FREEDOM-LOVING DEMONS. Freedom really means I win, you die. The high-status…
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Reprint from 2016
In previous item I was bitching about modern podcasts failing to show the real balance of male and female in marriage. A similar change happened in drama and comedy, with a pivot point around 1960. Before the shift, spy shows and adventure shows had teams of men and women with everyone participating in appropriate ways.…
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WWJD?
This week I’ve been quoting Duane Jones’s 1955 book on marketing and business practices. What would Jones say about Bitcoin and Metaverse and NFT? Facebook is primarily an advertising agency, so it certainly fits inside the topic. Jones couldn’t have imagined such MAGNIFICENT STUPIDITY. He worked in a period (1930-1960) when businesses functioned on PROFIT,…
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GREAT Fairness Doctrine work
StraightArrowNews wins the blue ribbon with this feature on the border wall. In just a couple minutes they dissolve the partisan crap from both sides. Clear graphics show how long the border is, where the walls are and where the gaps are, and the LONG process of gradually strengthening the wall. After seeing this, no…
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Fairness Doctrine with a vengeance!
I’ve been noticing some small-scale attempts to recapture the Fairness Doctrine, like StraightArrowNews. Via Kirn yet again…. The Disney-backed streaming service Hulu is refusing to run political ads on central themes of Democratic midterm campaigns, including abortion, guns and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, prompting fury from the party’s candidates and leaders.…
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Gedankenexperiment rides again
Listening to Hoeg’s detailed presentation of the latest turn in Elon vs Twitter. I’ve been puzzled by the importance of the bot count. Why is this the absolute deal-breaker? The political to gangster transform answers the question. Change the characters from political gangsters to old-fashioned non-political gangsters to spot the underlying pattern. Twitter is a…
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From an extremely different era 17
A 1950 ‘meet the press’ style program had 5 reporters talking with Betty Hutton. Atypically the preserved recording is an uncut version, with frequent ‘offstage’ pauses where the reporters try to figure out who goes next, or check with Hutton to see if a question is acceptable. She had an interesting life. Like most reporters…
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