Wanted: Bore

From McClatchey:

The Bradenton Herald, a McClatchy newspaper in the competitive Tampa Bay market, is seeking a business reporter who embraces watchdog journalism and has strong analytical, writing and multimedia skills. As the economy struggles to recover, this beat is among the most critical – and needs someone who can tell the stories of small businesses, entrepreneurs, key local industries and their efforts to grow again. Two years’ daily reporting experience preferred; experience in business writing is a plus.

Benefit package includes medical, dental, vision, life, disability plans and 401(k) plan. Please send your resume and writing samples to

Executive Editor Joan Krauter at [Click Here to Email Your Resumé]

Consider the sluice

Found this headline:

New Fears on Long-Term Global Oil Supplies

I thought was at the top of a heap of stories aggregated by Google News. It occasioned a mild spasm of anxiety. Until I realized I was not reading a news aggregator, but only the New York Times front page:



I'm still of the wizdumb-of-crowds opinion that the aggregate could carry some weight.

These telenovelas?

In theSessum's memorable phrase, journaljism.

phyzzics of nooz

Solid: A small community of speakers can probably agree, more or less, on what's the news.

Liquid: A larger community, with a broader spectrum of the real and of views thereof, has more difficulty, and probablistically will be happier with algorithms than with any single vendor's version of "the" news. Especially when the vendor's life support consists mostly of vending advertisements for entities that aim to control credit markets, environment, intellectual property, "entertainment," etc.

Gas: Scale up beyond that larger community and the very notion of "news" begins to sputter, undergo another phase change. What scalable technique, method, or epistemology do we have to sensibly represent "the news" to the gathering digital maelstrom of global voices? The news about the war in Iraq is that there is no news, no single report, however complex, that can adequately acquit itself to all speaking communities of all nations of all earths.

The 4th Estate, moribund since 1956

WASHINGTON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - The U.S. government's main disaster-response agency apologized on Friday for having its employees pose as reporters in a hastily called news conference on California's wildfires that no news organizations attended.

When we're all done harrumphing, please advise as to what would have been learned had "real" reporters been there.

Sic et non

sic:

At any moment there are 40,000 stories out there claiming to be the gospel truth. Many of them are good as gold, presented by people with the best intentions; many are lies and distortions sponsored by people with the worst. Most are muddle and nonsense. It takes years of experience or constant immersion in the news cycles, or both, just to begin to sort them out.

non:

"If you can't explain a stock or an investment principle in under a sentence to me, chances are you're not serving the audience. So clarity counts. Getting to the point counts. None of the on-the-one-hand, and on-the-other-hand stuff."

Hold the Punch, Pinch

Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin

By CORNELIA DEAN

Published: September 27, 2007

A few months ago, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins received an e-mail message from a producer at Rampant Films inviting him to be interviewed for a documentary called “Crossroads.”

The film, with Ben Stein, the actor, economist and freelance columnist, . . .
Turns out to be a completely different film entitled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” with a different producer, a creationist ax, etc.

And downstream somewhere, Ben Stein, actor, economist and freelance columnist is further id'd:

Mr. Stein, a freelance columnist who writes Everybody’s Business for The New York Times, conducts the film’s on-camera interviews.

But you know, as Ben himself tells the Newspaper of Record he gets paid by,

“I don’t remember a single person asking me what the movie was about,” he said in a telephone interview.

And that's fair, isn't it? After all, like Ben, any working journalist knows better than to divulge to his sources, whom he is going to quote and attribute, the authority of the actual story he's getting them to create. Half of them wouldn't agree to speak if
they knew they were tools.

This trick is not unlike the contrivance of simple plots, such as those found in jokes.

"A hard-nosed scientist walks into a Creationist phantasm..."

USian Journalism is the punchline that arrives after the sources have been directed to act as if the story was about them.

Dissent does not dissent from marketing format

Democracy Now offered a worthwhile segment today of War Made Easy, Norman Solomon's dissection of USian war stupidity, over the last half-century.

The portions broadcast offered a range of strategic media manipulation, ranging from the explicit to the implicit (a new set design for the "war room" to make the Pentagoons look cool), etc.

It ought to be getting a little clearer to Harry Hummer and Suzie Sixpack that, across the mediascapes of radio, cable, newspapers, magazines, NASCAR events, Yellow Ribbon Magnet Manufacturers, War Marketeers of all stripes, etc., which are now their only eyes and ears, a scandal is constantly, nakedly recurring: the breaking of knowledge by power, the control of access to "intellectual property," that fake capitalist category, and the manipulation of phony psycho-public platforms as staging areas for simulations of critical assent.

So it was a bit dismaying to find so little shared substance of War Made Easy on the site created for it, which seems cast in the tired blurb 'n sell mold.

How come it hasn't been possible to put up a few clips from the documentary, a youtubation or two (where Solomon is already under attack), and a chapter from the book, a richer faq, etc. along with the pointers to where to buy the DVD?

the tres amigos.

Not Weinberger's fault

When Zeuxis unveiled his painting of grapes, they appeared so luscious and inviting that birds flew down from the sky to peck at them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to pull aside the curtain from his painting. When it was discovered that the curtain itself was painted on the surface -- the curtain was Parrhasius' painting, Zeuxis was forced to concede defeat. Wikipedia

Certain recent posts here at IMproPRieTies might seem rather random. What could Everything is Miscellaneous, JSTOR, the White House Press Corps and the Extraordinary and Plenipotent Roland E. Arnall possibly have in common? I'm not sure. All I know is, after reading David Weinberger's book, and writing a bit about it, a certain stimulus deriving from that reading seemed to propel me to "voice" certain, uh, reservations I've had about, among other things, the JSTOR Fortress of Knowledge.

Weinberger's take on miscellaneity is provocative. Even with Mr. Plenipotentiary Arnall - not that David in any directed way "caused" my interest in him - but when, in EiM, he speaks of shifting from an Aristotelian order of proper nomenclature, personhood and taxonomy to multiple, more open orders that are not so much contesting each others' claims but rather learning how to play well with each other, and to discover that knowledge resides between, not in, knowers, one of the first flags for me is the potential for fraud.

The space of fraud is the space between what something is said to be and what it "really is." Under an Aristotelian mode of knowing as representation, fraud is certainly possible -- and begins perhaps with the stories of Zeuxis, an artist Aristotle apparently did not care for, fooling the eye of the beholder -- but this falseness can be checked, unveiled, dis-covered through a penetrating effort of investigation (or by sheer chance); it can be seen to be other than the truth.

These considerations I think apply meaningfully to Journalism's failing to coincide with itself: News becomes news of the reception of the news of the reception of the... en abîme.

If everything is miscellaneous, it becomes ever so much more difficult to differentiate claims about some thing from the thing, because, per the argument, things per se, essences, no longer anchor the realm of signs. Metadata would appear to become increasingly difficult to distinguish from data - what is said about things replaces things with more of what is said about things: Reality dissolves into a welter of voices about reality, internet intercourse upends the stable epistemology of traditional discourse, rendering efforts to arrive at "truth" more problematic. Instead of a truth model of veil/unveil, we have -- no, in Weinberger's sense, we are becoming -- Parrhesian: all veil.

Obviously I'm still trying to figure out what David is saying, and why I'm finding what he's saying so provocative. While I wonder about these things, I'd be curious to hear whether other readers of the book find themselves provoked into vocalizing a bit more than usual.

And lest I forget, there's an interesting looking article about Aristotle and the Painters by Graham Zanker. Would have loved to have read it, but it's inside the anal crevass of JSTOR.

Tables Turned on Tuxedo Suiciders

Jay Rosen, attempting to fathom the moral equivalence of the White House Correspondent's Association dinner, exchanges letters with a New York Times employee:

Watching the dinner on C-SPAN, I found it impossible to decide: Are the press people sitting there with Bush sitting there as professionals who….

* previously understood and corrected for their most egregious failure in 50 years?

* remain in general denial about their most egregious failure in 50 years?

* persist in ironic detachment from this debacle, so as to return things as smoothly as possible to Normal?

* are completely deluded about the current state of the watchdog press and our basis for trusting it?

* aren’t worried at all because the bloggers and “activists” who say things like that have an ax to grind?

The press is now subjected to the same objectification and analysis as the institutions and officials it writes about. At first, the press imagined it was invisible, and this was not contested, because what it produced was "objective." Objective product. Therefore the producer could be anyone. Any professional. The product remained unblemished by subjectivity of the producer.

But now that we have another data set - the press itself, seen through the axgrinding bloggers - the tables are turned. To be in that audience, enduring Rich Little's dead presidents, is to have left the world of the invisible craftsman of objective reality, and entered Blogworld.

Now the surround of data is inescapable. Before, the dinner would be "covered" by the press however it wished. Now it's merely more data, inserted into a seething mass of information. Laughter and clinking glasses, riots, suiciders, displacement of the voices of those doing the laughing, Katrina victims -- Colbert's "report" brought into the room what is all around it, a resonant realm of metadata that situates the press within a context which it apparently cannot conceive or exclusively determine.

The denial Rosen mentions is more general than just having to do with one giant error. The press is in denial that it is no longer invisible. The grammar of the world that it manufactured for our consumption is no longer entirely at its service. The tools and skills that were its province are now more widely shared. Attending that dinner is the last gasp of a peerage being consumed by its king, to the general delight and disgust of the people it has failed.

The reception of Moyers is predicted by his story

"The institutional decay which Moyers chronicles is not merely a matter of historical interest. Instead, it continues to shape our mainstream political dialogue every bit as much as it did back in 2002 and 2003." Greenwald.

"Moyers' program frustrated and depressed me, for the simple reason that it showed how well-protected the US state is from any real democratic challenge." Perrin.

Tom Tomorrow

Spectacular Moyers

Buying the War would seem a pretty sharp piece of journalism. Packed with stats, interviews, glimpses of the USian press in denial, in suckage, in syncophancy, in DanRatherism, in policy diktats that show, in the case of MSNBC and mineshaft canary Phil Donohue, that Joe McCarthy could rest quietly instead of having to rise up and hold public hearings. Unelected powers were sufficient to put terror of the number into the heart of corporate media.

Moyers' critique was well constructed journalism, sufficiently devastating to the NY Times and its ilk to be news. It didn't make the Times' previews.

The spectacle continues to make a spectacle of itself.

USian Journaljizm is Number

More Than 20 Killed, Dozens Wounded
In Shooting at Virginia Tech University
Arsociated Press
April 16, 2007 1:03 p.m.

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- A gunman opened fire in a dorm and classroom at Virginia Tech Monday morning, killing 22 people in the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history. The gunman was killed but it was unclear if he was shot by police or took his own life.

"Today the university was struck with a tragedy that we consider of monumental proportions," said Virginia Tech president Charles Steger. "The university is shocked and indeed horrified." (See the full text of the University's statement.)

The university reported shootings at opposite sides of the 2,600-acre campus, beginning at about 7:15 a.m. at West Ambler Johnston,

1. Un matin, cependant que dans la triste rue
2. Les maisons, dont la brume allongeait la hauteur,
3. Simulaient les deux quais d'une rivière accrue,

a co-ed residence hall that houses 895 people, and continuing about two hours later at Norris Hall, an engineering building. The name of the gunman wasn't released.

BASEBALL STATS AHEAD: Up until Monday, the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history took place in 1966 at the University of Texas, where Charles Whitman climbed to the 28th-floor observation deck of a clock tower and opened fire. He killed 16 people before he was gunned down by police. In the Columbine High bloodbath near Littleton, Colo., in 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before taking their own lives.

On Monday, one student was killed in a dorm and the others were killed in the classroom, Virginia Tech Police Chief W.R. Flinchum. After the shootings, all entrances to the campus were closed and classes canceled through Tuesday.

It was second time in less than a year that

• ** Number of calories you burn by kissing for one minute: 26
• ** Percentage of people who say they want to be rid of their current partner: 8
• ** Percentage of third marriages that end in divorce: 90

the campus was closed because of a shooting. In August 2006, the opening day of classes was canceled and the campus closed when an escaped jail inmate allegedly killed a hospital guard off campus and fled to the Tech area.

We consider the response of a uniformly accelerated monopole detector that is coupled non-linearly to the nth power of a quantum scalar field in (D+1)-dimensional flat spacetime. We show that, when (D+1) is even, the response of the detector in the Minkowski vacuum is characterized by a Bose-Einstein factor for all n. Whereas, when

A sheriff's deputy involved in the manhunt was killed on a trail just off campus. The accused gunman, William Morva, faces capital murder charges.

Virginia Tech, with more than 26,000 full-time students, is located about 240 miles from Washington.

Copyright © 2007 Associated Press