Posts tagged journalism
Power Structures of the World Don't Play Nice
After journalist arrests at Occupy Wall Street, US drops 27 spots on global press freedom index. Now ranked 47th in the world.
List of countries ahead of US on the Reporters Without Borders global press freedom index:
Finland, Norway, Estonia, Netherlands, Austria, Iceland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Cape Verde, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Ireland, Cyprus, Jamaica, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Namibia, Japan, Surinam, Poland, Mali, OECS, Slovakia, United Kingdom, Niger, Australia, Lithuania, Uruguay, Portugal, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea, Slovenia, El Salvador, France, Spain, Hungary, Ghana, South Africa, Botswana, South Korea, Comoros, Taiwan…
Then the United States of America at #47.
Source: Reporters Without Borders global press freedom index, released today.
(via citizen-earth)
Today, how we look and how we “present” information has become far more important than how we gather it. It’s upside down and backwards. And, the worst part is … we have gotten used to it.
Mr. Rather may be overdue in revealing his inner thoughts on his former industry (and, as it was pointed out to me, made a substantial living, thus making it easy for him to rage against the same machine where he was once a huge cog). But Dan Rather is right: for the sake of ratings facts are often beside the point. And many journalists and media professionals know it, loath it, turn a blind eye and cash their paychecks to it. Begs the question: shouldn’t we call the corporate media exactly what it is, a paid advertisement?
When the news is owned and driven by corporations, packaged for the sole purpose to grab eyeballs for profit, the result isn’t so much fact but entertainment. Many of the TV news programs have devolved into a carnival, complete with fancy graphics, dramatic music stings, pseudo-punditry and the exaggerated energy of an infomercial. - Michael Nigro
(via theamericanbear)
(via theamericanbear)
“Modern establishment journalists have taken what should be the credo and mission of actual journalism — afflict the powerful and comfort the powerless — and completely reversed it”—
Glenn Greenwald in a positively scathing editorial on the mainstream media’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests (via downlo)
A video game called Warco—currently in development—hopes to change the first-person shooter dynamic. In the game you get a video recorder instead of a shotgun, and you can’t kill anyone or blow up buildings. Your job is to sit back and document the scene. Warco, you see, is the first video game instilled with the principles of journalism. Keep reading …
Future Journalism Project: How Tumblr is Changing Journalism
Earlier this week we looked at the remarkable growth of Tumblr, a blogging and curation service that now gets over 12 billion page views per month. Tumblr is mostly used as a consumer curation tool - it’s an easy way for people to re-post articles, images and videos. But Tumblr can also…
(via futurejournalismproject)
Copyright: Evolving with the Modern Digital Age?
. . . there is hope on the horizon for a new chapter in journalism, preserving this great engine of free expression in the digital age. The Journal Register Company, one of the nation’s leading local news and information companies, last week joined up with MediaNews Group to form Digital First Media. Together, they are embracing the challenge of journalism in an Internet-empowered information economy.
Read more here.
Technology Keeping Internet Freedom Ahead of Censorship
Control the flow of information and you can control the entire populace of a country by more or less peaceful means by directing the thought processes of the people. Hitler understood that. Stalin understood it. And the leaders of the democracies of the West understand it as well. That is why it is vital that the Internet remain free of censorship. But the governments of the world won’t take resistance lying down. That is one thing we can be very sure of.
by Bob Adelmann
The New AmericanAugust 24, 2011
Efforts by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to regulate the Internet may become irrelevant if the new technology being developed succeeds as expected. When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled against the FCC last December, the FCC rewrote its rules to allow them to regulate the Internet anyway through the whitewash called “net neutrality.” Verizon immediately filed suit to overrule the new attempt, and a House subcommittee in March voted to invalidate the actions of the FCC. But the new rules remain in place until the issue is decided.
All of which may be irrelevant as new technology, called Telex, is being developed as a “work-around” for any such attempts by the FCC. Alex Halderman (pictured above left), an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, is one of the developers of the software. In a recent interview he explained that people living under Internet censorship are already able to connect to third-party servers outside their country, but that it doesn’t take long for the government to find these servers and block them. Telex, on the other hand, turns the entire Internet into an anti-censorship device. He says:
Read more here.
Censorship By traditional Media
“Despite many well-intentioned people in the so-called media reform movement, reform measures via government agencies have rarely worked at the federal level. This is why we must all be the media, we must create and share our own transparently sourced, fact-based news, and we must support independent voices that are doing the same. We cannot depend on those that have created the problems of the news media, contributed to problems of the news media, and benefited from those conditions to take heed and go about fixing said problems in the public interest. That has not, and likely will not happen.”—
Mickey Huff, Director, Project Censored, to Truth-Out.org: Is the Corporate Media Still Censoring Stories?
For 35 years, Project Censored has released its list of the year’s most important underreported — or “censored” — stories by traditional media. Research was originally conducted by students at Sonoma State University in California but now includes research from students and faculty from 30 universities around the country.
Censored 2012 will be released in later this month on the Project Censored Web site.
(Source: futurejournalismproject)
