Media performance
One of the major themes in the blogosphere are the shortcomings of the mainstream media. These are typically most on display when it comes to reporting totemic issues, ones which sort out the Virtuous from the wicked. John Howard, Iraq, the Sydney riots all provide such status markers. As we can see:
ABC radio did not manage to cover events in Sydney very well. An Age correspondent, reporting from Sydney beaches, tells us rather more about her prejudices than reality. Reuters and CNN and AP/NYT have not exactly been doing a terrific job in covering the Sydney riots. Nor is The Independent (scroll down) or The Guardian much chop either. Fisking Germaine Greer whose Guardian piece is rife with sneering superiority over (white) working class Australia.
A sceptical take on the timing and content of the New York Times story about NSA surveillance of international calls that originated or went to the US. Three democratic revolutions in a single year and Time picks a billionaire philanthropist couple and a rock star as persons of the year. Counting the word-coverage in UK papers of the Iraqi election.
If you are reading a Faifax metro, remember their journalists may not quite report the same world as other folk.
A case of what photo-cropping doesn't show. Via windswept.
ADDENDA And, while we're at it, the dead from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were disproportionately white. A pertinent comment about the (fairly dreadful) on-the-spot reporting of Katrina: Bernie Goldberg, is closer to the truth when he asserts that the major news sources exist in a bubble -- a self-contained informational feedback loop -- in which certain "truths," learned in the age of the Civil Rights struggle, Vietnam, and the Watergate scandals, are perpetuated and promulgated long after they have ceased to have much correspondence with the contours of the real world. New York reporters looked at Katrina and saw, not New Orleans, but Selma and Birmingham, they look at Baghdad and see Hanoi, they look at Bush and see Nixon. (Australian examples can be substituted in.)
The BBC and The Independent are very keen to name the ethnicity of the "whites" (by which they presumably mean Anglo-Celts aka skippies), but get all coy about the other group.
ABC radio did not manage to cover events in Sydney very well. An Age correspondent, reporting from Sydney beaches, tells us rather more about her prejudices than reality. Reuters and CNN and AP/NYT have not exactly been doing a terrific job in covering the Sydney riots. Nor is The Independent (scroll down) or The Guardian much chop either. Fisking Germaine Greer whose Guardian piece is rife with sneering superiority over (white) working class Australia.
A sceptical take on the timing and content of the New York Times story about NSA surveillance of international calls that originated or went to the US. Three democratic revolutions in a single year and Time picks a billionaire philanthropist couple and a rock star as persons of the year. Counting the word-coverage in UK papers of the Iraqi election.
If you are reading a Faifax metro, remember their journalists may not quite report the same world as other folk.
A case of what photo-cropping doesn't show. Via windswept.
ADDENDA And, while we're at it, the dead from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were disproportionately white. A pertinent comment about the (fairly dreadful) on-the-spot reporting of Katrina: Bernie Goldberg, is closer to the truth when he asserts that the major news sources exist in a bubble -- a self-contained informational feedback loop -- in which certain "truths," learned in the age of the Civil Rights struggle, Vietnam, and the Watergate scandals, are perpetuated and promulgated long after they have ceased to have much correspondence with the contours of the real world. New York reporters looked at Katrina and saw, not New Orleans, but Selma and Birmingham, they look at Baghdad and see Hanoi, they look at Bush and see Nixon. (Australian examples can be substituted in.)
The BBC and The Independent are very keen to name the ethnicity of the "whites" (by which they presumably mean Anglo-Celts aka skippies), but get all coy about the other group.