NewsTrust - Mainstream Media - Most Recent Stories: Opinion

The Digital Economy's Coming Subprime Crisis (And What You Can Learn From It)

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

harvardbusiness.org - By Umair Haque - Nov. 17 (Opinion) - Today's media players aren't investing in better ads. They're investing in more — and more toxic — ads. Uh oh: it's the economic equivalent of the subprime crisis. The parallels, to me, are too striking to ignore. Here are eight time-worn steps to crisis that Wall Street took yesterday, and media's taking today. Toxicity. Wall Street's subprime crisis was built on toxic financial instruments. The mediascape's subprime crisis is being built on toxic communications. Social gaming — Facebook's Farmville, for example — is the hot growth area for VCs, advertisers, and publishers alike. But last week, TechCrunch blew the lid off it: much revenue in this nascent market is derived from scams masquerading as "ads." To me, there are striking echoes of CDOs — a hot new growth market for Wall Street, later revealed to be a house of cards.

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Josh Silver: Too Big to Block? Why Obama Must Stop the Comcast-NBC Merger

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Josh Silver - Nov. 13 (Opinion) - This train wreck of a deal will hurt all over. It will mean increased costs for cable television service; currently free online NBC content locked behind a pay wall; less opportunity for the distribution of independent media; even fewer choices and less programming diversity.

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Good Riddance To Mainstream Media?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

National Public Radio - By John Donvan - Nov. 12 (Opinion) - As newspapers go under, the network newscasts lose viewers and the mainstream media in general see more and more of their audience shift online, are we as a society better or worse off? Some argue that the diversity of voices available on the Internet to provide information and analysis makes for a better system. Others say a decline in traditional journalism means lower standards and fewer resources to investigate crucial stories. A panel of experts took on this topic Oct. 27 in an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate: John Hockenberry, Michael Wolff, Phil Bronstein, David Carr, Katrina vanden Heuvel. Three panelists argued for the motion "Good Riddance to Mainstream Media" and three against in an Oxford-style debate. Before the debate, the audience at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts voted 25 percent in favor of the motion and 50 percent against. Twenty-five percent was undecided. After the debate, 24 percent supported the motion "Good Riddance to Mainstream Media," while 68 percent opposed it and 8 percent remained undecided.

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Toward a Slow-News Movement

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Mediactive - By Dan Gillmor - Nov. 08 (Opinion) - Like many other people who’ve been burned by believing too quickly, I’ve learned to put almost all of what journalists call “breaking news” into the categories of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, “interesting if true.” That is, even though I gobble up “the latest” from a variety of sources, the closer the information is in time to the actual event, the more I assume it’s unreliable if not false. It’s my own version of “slow news” — an expression I first heard on Friday, coined by my friend Ethan Zuckerman in a wonderful riff off the slow-food movement. We were at a Berkman Center for Internet & Society retreat in suburban Boston, in a group discussion of ways to improve the quality of what we know when we have so many sources from which to choose at every minute of the day. One of society’s recently adopted cliches is the “24-hour news cycle” — the recognition that the once-a-day, manufacturing-based version of journalism has essentially passed into history for those who consume and create news via digital systems. Now, it’s said, we get news every hour of every day, and media creators work tirelessly to fill those hours with new stuff.

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Newsweek And Oil Lobby Team Up To Host Climate Change Event With Lawmakers

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Talking Points Memo - By Zachary Roth - Nov. 04 (Opinion) - Newsweek magazine is teaming up with an oil-industry lobbying group to host an event on climate-change and energy issues involving lawmakers, just as the Senate gets set to take up legislation on the subject.

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Glenn Beck's Hotline to Nowhere

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Thomas Frank - Nov. 04 (Opinion) - Glenn Beck, the popular Fox News host, has a red telephone on his desk that never seems to ring. Every now and then, in a moment of acute frustration, he will pick it up and give the camera his trademark pleading-puppy look. What Mr. Beck wants to hear from the phone are answers, and he wants to hear them from the highest authority in the land: the phone, he says, is "a dedicated line right to the White House." And when Mr. Beck gets things wrong, he wants his antagonists on Pennsylvania Avenue to correct him. But "They don't call. They're not going to call." One of the specific answers Mr. Beck wanted, on one of the days I watched his program last week, had to do with White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who has been caught on film quoting one of those Mao Zedong aphorisms that wouldn't look out of place on a motivational poster. She also remarked that Mao was one of her "favorite political philosophers," an honor the Chinese Communist shared with Mother Teresa. Obviously Ms. Dunn was yet another person who deserved to be added to the long list of radicals that Mr. Beck had uncovered within the government. What's more, no one would call that red phone to reassure Mr. Beck, to tell him that the Obama administration isn't crawling with traitors or to explain why his many nightmare scenarios will not actually come to pass.

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The White House’s war with Fox News

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Louis Menand - Oct. 26 (Opinion) - In 2008, half the people who watched the Fox News Channel were over sixty-three, which is the oldest demographic in the cable-news business, and, according to a poll, the majority of the ones who watched the most strident programs, such as Sean Hannity’s and Bill O’Reilly’s shows, were men. All that chesty fulminating apparently functions as political Cialis. Fox News shows should probably carry a warning: Contact your doctor if you have rage lasting more than four hours.

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Why Journalists Shouldn't Be Defending Fox News

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Dan Froomkin - Oct. 23 (Opinion) - The Obama administration's recent characterization of Fox News is a long overdue acknowledgment of the obvious: Fox News is not a legitimate news organization

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Fox wars

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Charles Krauthammer - Oct. 23 (Opinion) - While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they're engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

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The Washington Post Creates Its Own Facts to Support Afghan Nation-Building

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Melvin A. Goodman - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - The Washington Post is creating its own facts in order to support its argument for US nation-building in Afghanistan. In its lead editorial on Saturday, the Post asserted that the United States is capable of building a strong government in Afghanistan at the national and local levels. The Post claimed that Afghanistan had had a "working national government through most of the 1970s and 1980s." This is simply not so.read more

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Dear WSJ: To Avoid Google Disease, Please Put A Condom On Your Content

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Daggle - By Danny Sullivan - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - I’d thought I’d heard it all in the debate over Google and newspapers, but yesterday Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson took it up a notch. He accused Google of making people slutty. If we’re using sexual metaphors now, here’s another one. Why doesn’t the Wall Street Journal and News Corporation in general put a condom around all of its content, to protect itself from Google? There’s a good brand called robots.txt that will help.

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Why Fox News Is Un-American

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Jacob Weisberg - Oct. 18 (Opinion) - That Rupert Murdoch may tilt the news rightward more for commercial than ideological reasons is beside the point. What matters is the way that Fox's model has invaded the bloodstream of the American media. By showing that ideologically distorted news can drive ratings, Ailes has provoked his rivals at CNN and MSNBC to develop a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news. In this way, Fox hasn't just corrupted its own coverage. Its example has made all of cable news unpleasant and unreliable.

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Binyam Mohamed: full text of David Miliband's statement - Telegraph

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Telegraph - By David Miliband - Oct. 17 (Statement) - ''The Government is deeply disappointed by the judgment handed down today by the High Court which concludes that a summary of US intelligence material should be put into the public domain against their wishes. We will be appealing in the strongest possible terms.

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Fox News isn't even pretending anymore

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Gene Lyons - Oct. 16 (Opinion) - Since Obama’s election, the cable news channel has dropped all but the barest pretense of objectivity.Fox has turned itself into what Anita Dunn recently called “the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” Actually, that’s an extremely polite way of putting it. It’s closer to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.”

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How Fox News Outsmarted the White House

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Daily Beast - By John Batchelor - Oct. 14 (Opinion) - What’s worse than stupid about the conspiracy theory that Fox News is a pachyderm is that it is wrong. Fox News has nothing to do with the Republican Party or its dreary state. “We go to Fox because that’s the only place that will put us on TV,” a desultory Republican source admits. “But they don’t help us by telling everyone that we suck.”

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'Daily Show' Destroys CNN For Fact-Checking 'SNL' But Not Their Guests

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Show - By Jon Stewart - Oct. 13 (Comedy News) - Jon Stewart began his show last night by skewering CNN for fact-checking a "Saturday Night Live" skit in which Fred Armisen (playing Barack Obama) claimed to have done "nothing" since taking office. In this hard-hitting report, CNN found that while many of the president's initiatives have not moved forward, he has in fact done "something" since taking office. Take that, comedy show.

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Why Declaring War on Fox News Could Be a Mistake for Obama

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - By Chris Rovzar - Oct. 13 (Opinion) - ... if Team Obama ignores Fox, it just gives the network's talent the chance to further caricature him as a socialist, foreign, effete, America-hating Other. It isn't a racist portrayal, necessarily, but is certainly one that gives actual racists a lot of comfort. Not countering that will help Fox viewers conveniently forget that Obama is intelligent and well spoken. George Bush, who certainly wasn't the latter, came across as human and likable in interviews. It was one of his greatest strengths (and for critics, one of his most confounding attributes).

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Fox: a news source in name only

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Leonard Pitts Jr. - Oct. 04 (Opinion) - Fox is in a class by itself. In its epidemic inaccuracy, its ongoing disregard for basic journalistic standards of fairness, its demagogic appeals and its blatantly ideological promotions it is, indeed, unique — a news source in name only. That's not just an opinion: a 2003 study found Fox viewers more likely to be misinformed than those who get their news elsewhere.

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US Press Corps Fails Again on Iran

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Robert Parry - Sep. 30 (Opinion) - the most dangerous parallel between the misreporting on Iraq and the current hysteria about Iran may be that major U.S. news outlets, especially the New York Times and the Washington Post, continue to paint the disputes in black and white and leave shades of gray out of the frame. In doing so, these news organizations again are casting aside their own rules about objectivity and balance.

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The Public Editor: Tuning in Too Late

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Clark Hoyt - Sep. 27 (Opinion) - By stressing the politics, the article irritated more readers. “A suspicious person might see an attempt to deflect criticism of Acorn by highlighting how those pesky conservatives are at it again,” said Albert Smith of Chatham, N.J.

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Andy Richter Crushes CNN's Wolf Blitzer In Celebrity Jeopardy

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Sep. 18 (Comedy News) - Hey, Wolf Blitzer! Know what the situation is, in your Situation Room? Looks to me like the situation is that Andy Richter controls the universe. At least as far as "Celebrity Jeopardy" goes!

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Porn, Glenn Beck and Nudie Pics: Is Our Mass Culture Turning Kids Into Sex Crazed, Right-Wing Automatons?

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Branwyn Lancourt - Sep. 16 (Opinion) - The new generation is a different breed altogether. Kids today are being made to process an insane amount of sex, violence and stupidity in the form of reality TV, internet porn, and World Of Warcraft. In addition they’ve got all the Limbaughs, Hannitys and Becks aggressively spouting their righteous faux morality across the nation’s airwaves. This strange dichotomy must be far more stressful to try and make sense of, than what previous generations have had to contend with. It can only stand to reason that what might be waiting for us at the finish line could be a pretty mixed up bunch of sick puppies.

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The Rise of the Professional Blogger

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Benjamin Carlson - Sep. 13 (Opinion) - Today, the romantic notion that solitary, untamed bloggers are running the Web is more fantasy than fact—nearly as apocryphal as old myths about stoic Western sheriffs killing 11 outlaws with six bullets.

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Living in a Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Henry A. Giroux - Sep. 08 (Opinion) - Within these politics, largely fueled by market fundamentalism - one that substitutes the power of the social state with the power of the corporate state and only values wealth, money and consumers - there is a ruthless and hidden dimension of cruelty, one in which the powers of life and death are increasingly determined by punishing apparatuses, such as the criminal justice system for poor people of color and/or market forces that increasingly decide who may live and who may die.

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Free Press Calls on Obama Administration to Resist Extremism in the Media

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - By Josh Silver - Sep. 08 (Press Release) - "Beck has a First Amendment right to stoke prejudice, and we do not and will not support efforts to silence him. This is not about censorship; it’s about sanity. Our leaders have a responsibility to condemn fear mongering in all its forms, defend those who are unfairly attacked, and support a more diverse media system that provides alternative voices to the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other extremists. The lesson from the shameful McCarthy era that culminated in 1954 is that we must confront the politics of personal attack with decency, reason and a commitment to more political speech, not less.

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