Category Media

Entries 59 Total

An Interesting Conundrum

Feb 19, ’11 7:45 AM

Whenever NPR or PBS are in fund-drive mode, they go on and on and on about how they get almost no money from the government, and how they depend on viewers/listeners like me for all of their money, and so on and so forth.

The money from the government, it’s like the government buying them a coffee once in a while. Not like that, even, actually; it’s like the government bringing them a cup of coffee from home. Bad coffee that they were just going to throw out anyway.

Pbs whinging

But when there’s a proposal to cut government funding — when there’s a suggestion that no matter how awesome Cokie Roberts and/or Elmo are, the government is broke and should stop spending so god-damned much money, and that this includes the relatively small amount spent subsidizing TV and radio for affluent whites — suddenly this is a huge crisis, and the continued existence of such heavily-merchandised characters as Big Bird, Arthur, and Bert and Ernie is in question.

They can’t have it both ways.

Comments Off

This Time It’s For Real

Feb 12, ’11 11:35 AM

A much-blogged story recently informs us that only 45% of people surveyed know that the U.S. has the ‘world’s largest economy’.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 45% of voters know the United States has the world’s largest economy. Another 34% say it’s not true, and 21% are not sure.

Says Rasmussen.

In case you’re one of the 55% who doesn’t know this, the United States does have the ‘world’s largest economy’, and not by a little bit. The world’s second-largest economy, that of the People’s Republic of China, is about 2/3 the size of the U.S. economy.

I expect that the size of the Chinese economy will eventually surpass the size of the U.S. economy — and O what hand-wringing we’ll be subjected to then! — if only because of the population imbalance. There are about four times as many Chinese people as there are Americans these days, so if the average Chinaman produced 25% of the value that the average American produces, the U.S. and Chinese economies would be the same size.

Remember, though, that today the Chinese economy is 2/3 the size of the U.S. economy despite having more than four times as many people contributing to it; this means that, economically speaking, each Chinese person produces as much as .15 of an American. Or, each American produces as much value as 6.3 Chinese people.

You’re probably scratching your head at this, because this certainly isn’t what you hear from the news media. The news never talks about the millions of Chinese who spend 100% of their time trying to wring a bare existence from the mud. The time and space they might use talking about them is instead used to make sure you’re up to speed on the plight of illiterate Americans who have no value to offer anyone, and so are reduced to driving a car without air conditioning, and watching only basic cable.

A recent story in Foreign Policy is a perfect example:

American Decline

They even have to say ‘this time it’s for real’, because they know that the media have been telling us that the United States has been in terminal decline since at least Sputnik. Most magazines can simply ignore the fact that this hasn’t happened, but Foreign Policy is aimed at a decidedly brainier demographic, and they might be expected to start questioning whether this is just so much B.S.

‘Plus 10 Other ‘Unconventional Wisdoms’, they say: because the idea that the U.S. is in decline is some zany, fringe idea? It seems to be the perennial campaign theme of the Democratic party, and it’s an important sub-theme of most Republican campaigning.

So if you run an article about American Decline in your magazine, you have to point out in the headline that there’s something different here, because American news magazines might as well all be called American Decline Weekly.

Foreign Policy sees this, and it even gets in a preemptive reference to The Boy Who Cried Wolf, albeit with what I’m sure they consider a neat spin in an attempt to get it to bolster their argument:

But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive — and China is the wolf.

Oh, oh how clever. You see? The near-constant assertions along the same lines that other people have been making for the last sixty years or so (at least) aren’t a reason to doubt Foreign Policy‘s stupid point here, but quite the opposite: they all but prove that now the U.S. is in decline, because after all the wolf does eventually come.

And that wolf, this time, is apparently China. Because they have an economy that is, on a per-capita basis, 15% of the size of the United States’, and because authoritarian communist governments have long been known to issue inaccurate statistics that show that everything under their purview is just awesome.

Why do western societies, and in particular the United States, doubt themselves so?

Comments Off

‘The Daily’ Stinks

Feb 3, ’11 8:30 PM

The Daily is lousy. I’m not talking about the technology (which is lousy, and which has been criticized elsewhere anyway); I’m not sure whether I should cut them a break there, but I will, because it’s early days. I’m talking, rather, about the journalism, the writing and editing: it’s bad. As near as I can tell, the whole thing is shallow fluff.

It’s a newspaper for people who aren’t particularly interested, which raises the question: who the hell is supposed to read this thing? If you’re not particularly interested in the news, you’re not going to pay $1 a week for this; and if you are particularly interested in the news, you’re really not going to pay $1 a week for this.

IMG 0009

They do know one thing about all their readers: every one of them has an iPad. So there’s a whole bunch of things like ‘Judd Apatow: what’s on his iPad’ and ‘What I Love On My iPad’ with Nolan Gould, who is a child actor.

Mr. Gould likes, among other things, Angry Birds and Notebooks. About Notebooks, he says

I’ve got a writing app where you can write and make books and stuff on it. Maybe I’ll write a book — I like to write stories. A lot of the time when I’m traveling, I come up with a good idea and need to write it down.

The copy informs us that Mr. Gould is a member of Mensa. News you can use.

But that’s not all. The comments are lousy, there’s a full-page story about Groundhog Day that consisted of a giant photo of a groundhog, and seventy-three words, including the headline and byline. This paragraph is over half the length of the entire Groundhog Day ‘story’.

The ‘opinion’ section is small, which is probably wise given that opinions are not what you’d call in short supply on the Internet. But there is room in there for a column where Michael Maiello laments how shallow and ignorant the American public are — and while doing so, he manages to get in a swipe or two at Sarah Palin. How original and insightful.

In the end, though, these are all quibbles. The biggest problem with The Daily is that there’s just not much information there. One of the lead stories today is about the snowstorm that struck much of the country yesterday. This features a movie that includes a scene of what looks like a freeway filled with abandoned cars.

IMG 0010

Nowhere in the story or in the movie do they say where this is. The story hints that it might be in Chicago — in which case: where in Chicago? The Daily doesn’t tell us. The USA Today iPad app works better, provides far more information, and doesn’t come with a subscription charge. The Professional Journalism Types working for Rupert Murdoch had exactly the same access to the USA Today app that I do, and yet they came up with this thing as their higher-priced competition.

Truly, the future of journalism.

Comments Off

Gift Guide For Nie-Blankes

Dec 9, ’09 10:59 AM

The New York Times has a ‘Holiday Gift Guide’, with pages covering all kinds of things, from the “10 best books of 2009″ to “Holiday DVD’s” [sic] to ‘smartphones’ from each of the major carriers in the U.S.

And then they have a page of gift ideas for colored people.

Oh, no, wait, pardon me. ‘Colored people’ is of course a euphemism from the 1800s that is now considered fairly offensive. The Times‘ gift guide is for ‘people of color’, which is somehow different even though the entire point of the phrase is to lump together people of drastically different histories and cultures and pretend that they’re the same thing. Because doing this is not, somehow, racist. Yeah, whatever.

What do ‘colored people’ like, according to the New York Times? Apparently:

  • Children’s books about Barack Obama
  • Children’s books about Sonya Sotomayor
  • ‘Wise Latina’ t-shirts
  • Gospel cruises
  • Bindya scarves
  • ‘Baby Jamz’, a ‘hip-hop and rhythm-based toy line’ that includes a ‘Mix Master Music Chair that allows children to be their own D.J.’s’ [sic] and a ‘Jammin’ Microphone’.

Comments (2)

Pardon Me, Madam; Your Condescension Is Showing

Dec 6, ’09 9:52 AM

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

And while scores at Hanna Woods [Elementary School] have improved over the last few years, the gains have not been good enough for the federal government. The [No Child Left Behind] law, enacted in 2002, requires states to set testing goals that get tougher every year. By 2014, every student in the nation, including the poor, minority and disabled, is expected to pass all tests.

You will note that the decidedly left-wing Post-Dispatch more or less equates being a ‘minority’ with being disabled or with being poor — and certainly with being too stupid to pass the tests. Every student — even black ones — will be expected to pass the tests: goodness! The Post does not say so directly, but the tone of the thing makes it clear that they believe that reading and basic arithmetic is pretty much beyond the abilities of most ‘minority’ students. Lovely outlook, that.

From the Washington Post, in an article about the ‘digital divide’ and how it’s harming schoolkids:

But even in Fairfax, the digital divide lives on in the study carrels of the Woodrow Wilson public library in the Falls Church area. Most afternoons, it is crowded with students from low-income or immigrant families using the computers.

It’s crowded with students from low-income or immigrant families. All those Indian anesthesiologists, Chinese engineers, Korean entrepreneurs, not buying computers for their kids even though they can afford it. Oh, wait, they do buy computers because they can afford it. Certainly many immigrants are relatively poor; but it’s interesting that the story equates being an immigrant and being poor. A better newspaper would have written that the libraries attract ‘students from low-income families, many of them recent immigrants.’

Comments Off

'Hunger' in the U.S.

Nov 20, ’09 1:44 PM

The USDA released its annual report on Food Security (i.e. whether people can secure enough food to eat, not whether Chef Boyardee is an Al Qaeda mole) this week, and the media have temporarily stopped writing stories about the crisis of Obesity among the poor to write stories about how the real problem is that they’re starving.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith approaches his job of revising The Times to ensure that the government’s predictions always can be shown to have been accurate:

For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot.

We seem to be living in a kind of strange mirror image of Oceania here, where everyone has a different pair of boots for every day of the week but where the newspapers are full of hand-wringing editorials about the boot shortage.

The New York Times reports on the USDA Food Security Report:

Hunger in U.S. at a 14-Year High

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who lived in households that lacked consistent access to adequate food soared last year, to 49 million, the highest since the government began tracking what it calls “food insecurity” 14 years ago, the Department of Agriculture reported Monday.

The important thing here is to note that the Times uses the common and easily understood word ‘hunger’ in the headline; but the lede backs off from this quite a bit, putting the actual thing being measured in quotes, and interjecting a ‘what it calls’. It seems to have occurred to someone at the Times that what is at an all-time high is not hunger, exactly.

A better headline, really, would be: Some People Too Stupid To Use Food Stamps because there’s absolutely no reason for anyone in the United States not to have enough to eat. If your income is $0, the government will feed you. If your income is greater than $0 but less than an amount that’s almost impossible to figure accurately, the government will partially feed you.

The Times again:

About a third of these struggling households had what the researchers called “very low food security,” meaning lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point in the year.

The other two-thirds typically had enough to eat, but only by eating cheaper or less varied foods, relying on government aid like food stamps, or visiting food pantries and soup kitchens.

It falls to Tino to do the reporting that, for whatever reason, the New York Times won’t, and explain what these terms mean.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has four categories for ‘food security’:

  1. High Food Security
    Pretty much what it says. USDA says ‘no reported indications’ of food access problems.
  2. Marginal Food Security
    Basically: anxiety. USDA: ‘Little or no indication of changes in diets or food intake.’
  3. Low Food Security
    Poor. Buying store brands. USDA: ‘Little or no indication of reduced food intake.’
  4. Very Low Food Security
    USDA says: ‘Reports of multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.’

You are sorted into these categories based on your answers to the questions in this survey. The questions are like:

I worried whether my food would run out before I got money to buy more: Often, sometimes, never

I couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals: Often, sometimes, never

In the last 12 months, did you ever cut the size of your meals or skip meals because there wasn’t enough money for food?

In the last 12 months, did you ever eat less than you felt you should because there wasn’t enough money for food?

I relied on only a few kinds of low-cost food to feed my child because I was running out of money to buy food: Yes, no

Basically, you get a point for each ‘Yes’, ‘Often’, or ‘Sometimes’ answer. So if you’ve worried, and eaten a small meal, and eaten what you think is an unbalanced meal, or relied on ‘only a few kinds of low-cost food’ to feed the kids at least once any time in the past year, you have ‘very low food security’. That might be a valid thing to measure, but it certainly is not ‘hunger’.

Incidentally, it’s notable that the people in the survey report markedly better ‘food security’ in the 30 days immediately prior to the survey than they do when asked the same questions about the past year. This strongly suggests that people are remembering things as worse than they really were. On top of the vagueness of the questions, this renders the survey almost totally pointless.

The official victim class (to which a lot of ‘food-insecure’ people certainly belong) would all be pretty skilled in being sure to always tell the government survey that everything’s terrible; this is, after all, the job of the professional victim.

In the United States, if you can’t afford food, the federal government will subsidize your eating, usually on the spot. When you apply for food stamps, unless something goes wrong you generally leave the office with your EBT card. In 2007, Nicole and I tried the food stamp diet to see whether it was possible to eat well on it, and the conclusion is that you need to know how to cook, but that other than that, it’s pretty damned easy.

What we actually did was the $21 per week diet. At the time, the average food stamp benefit came to $21 per person per week. You’re not actually meant to spend only $1 per meal; as your income rises, your benefit is cut. If you actually have no income at all, you got $155 a month, which is $38.75 a week. Given that it’s entirely possible to eat a healthy and tasty diet on $21 a week, $38.75 would be a piece of cake. Literally: on $21 you can only afford cookies.

The benefit has increased since then, and if you receive SNAP benefits (the actual name for the food-stamp program these days), any kids you might have are eligible for free breakfast and lunch at school.

The Times story goes on, eventually leading here:

Some conservatives have attacked the survey’s methodology, saying it is hard to define what it measures.

Considering that the statistics don’t make sense and that even the New York Times feels a need to distance itself from the weird terminology involved, I’d say that ‘some conservatives’ might have a point.

Comments Off

More Excellent Journalism

Nov 20, ’09 8:14 AM

It’s a truism that the more you know about something, the more the media seem to screw it up. This is particularly true of any story involving aviation; after an airplane crashes, for instance, nearly all the news stories are full of things that clearly show that the person writing it had absolutely no idea what the hell they were saying.

A Washington Post feature story today about a kid learning to fly is up (down) to the usual standard, but with a difference: the inaccuracies can’t possibly be down to misunderstanding, general cluelessness, or confusion. The passage in question:

First, Colin has to check out the airplane: a 27-year-old Cessna 172 Skyhawk. He runs his finger along the propeller blades, checks the oil level and looks for dings or nicks on the wings. He looks over the flaps and the airbrakes. Once inside with the instructor, he fiddles for the right key and starts up the plane. Minutes later, he’s heading for the runway, talking to air traffic controllers: “Potomac Tower, this is 511236 rolling to runway 2-4.”

Problems:

  1. Potomac Airfield doesn’t have a control tower. It’s what’s called an ‘uncontrolled field’.
  2. Nobody would be talking to air traffic controllers while taxiing at an uncontrolled airport.
  3. 511236 is not a valid registration number in the United States.

Number 2 I’m willing to forgive, because when you’re taxiing at an uncontrolled field you often do announce as much on the radio, and there’s no reason for a newspaper features writer to know who the guy’s talking to.

Number 1 I might be willing to forgive, because the kid in question is a student pilot (and probably nervous as hell with a Washington Post reporter along) and he might have actually said ‘Potomac tower’ instead of what he should have said, which is ‘Potomac traffic’.

Number 3 is just ridiculous, though. There’s no way he said this. FAA registration numbers all start with N (which you don’t say on the radio in the U.S.) and up to five numbers and up to two letters, but with a maximum length of five. So N1 is a valid registration number, as is N12345 or N1234A or N123AB. N511236 is just not possible. The Post just needed something that sounded airplane-y, and so they made this up.

In a photo gallery accompanying the story online, the Post has this picture of Colin pre-flighting the airplane:

N64181

And this one of him taking off:

N64181 Taking off

If we squint real hard, we might be able to make out the registration number.

The story at one point also says ‘His next hurdle is winning a coveted commission to the U.S. Air Force Academy’; but you get appointments, not commissions to the service academies. This is likely simply an error, though, and not fabrication.

Now, really, you can easily say that this isn’t important at all. It doesn’t make the slightest difference to the story, which isn’t about the registration number of that airplane, or the phraseology for announcing your actions on the radio at Potomac Airfield, or the specific terminology used for getting into the U.S. Air Force Academy.

But it does show that the Washington Post is okay with just making up details (or quotes) when the reporter didn’t make a note of them, even when they would be easy to check (call the flight school, or look at the Post‘s own photos).

So what else are they just making up when it’s convenient?

Comments Off

Porn Inflation

Oct 28, ’09 11:50 AM

1. Why is there any money in porn? I suspect that there isn’t, at least in ordinary non-weird porn. As it’s becoming clear was true of all old media, the real value the companies were adding was distribution — the printing, marketing, shipping, etc. The porn guys were making money from their printing presses, their videotape duplicators, and the networks of pornography stores that sold the stuff. The Internet has replaced all of that, and so now all you need to produce porn is a pair of tits and a camera.

2. I think that this might be why we might be seeing more… unusual porn.

Let’s say that you’re turned on by the naked female body. There are about 3.45 billion human females in the world; half of them are uglier than average, so figure 1.7 billion better-looking-than-average females. Figure that 20% of these are in the prime porn age range, so there are 340 million good-looking young ladies out there. Even if 90% of them would never, ever pose for pornography, that means that there are 34,000,000 potential porn stars out there. Good-looking young ladies willing to pose for porn are just not a scarce good, when you look at the problem globally.

Scarcer are good-looking young ladies willing to pose for porn while being defecated on, or tied up, or while fucking a dog, etc., etc., etc.; this can be sold at a premium, because there is less competition. Fewer people are interested in this kind of thing, but they’re willing to pay quite a bit more for it.

Ergo the real talent in porn — the people who put a lot of effort into it, and who are dedicated to making serious money from porn — are going to make fetish porn.

3. This has led to two things: a devaluation of porn all together, or porn inflation, e.g. things like widespread mainstream-media coverage of celebrities with their bosoms hanging out, and at the same time a diminution of what you might call respectable mainstream soft-core almost-porn, R-rated feature films that were thinly-veiled excuses to show breasts on the screen. Maybe I’m not paying attention, but this sort of thing seems to have disappeared completely — as you’d expect, because you can see the same thing for free now without having to also sit through what were usually excruciatingly bad movies.

4. And it’s led to a third thing: the belief, among members of the public, that society is getting more and more depraved.

It’s not that; the reality is that while the porn of an earlier age needed to appeal to the widest possible variety of potential customers (in order to provide for the capital expense of printing, tape duplication, etc.), while today’s porn needs to appeal strongly to niche markets (in order to provide for the greater margin necessary in a world where so-called ‘vanilla’ porn is essentially free).

All of this has undoubtedly and unambiguously happened to the porn industry, and the same thing appears to be happening to the news industry. Basic news and commentary is now pretty close to free; it doesn’t cost much to observe an event or to have an opinion, and the distribution cost has gone to $0. We see news fragmenting into niche markets (examples include Fox News and MSNBC each attempting the narrow-appeal route, and the increasingly transparent political bias of Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, etc.; though this will likely work better for Fox and other conservative news organizations because ‘vanilla’ news is already pretty far left), and we see criticism from both the right and left that the news coverage is becoming more ‘polarized’, more ‘irresponsible’, more — dare I say it? Depraved. Just like the zoo porn.

I wonder what industry this phenomenon will hit next. TV shows would be the obvious answer, but while the distribution cost of a TV show online has dropped to pretty close to $0, I think the production of even a mediocre show might still be too capital-intensive.

Comments Off

Now They Tell Us

Jan 21, ’09 11:02 AM

An AP story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

President can’t always control unemployment rate

[...] Presidents don’t have much control over either the number of new jobs or the number of people looking for work. The labor force has more than doubled since 1953.

Likewise, the number of new jobs created in a year is determined by expansions and contractions in the business cycle — cycles that begin years, even decades, before a president takes office.

A year ago, of course, the articles in the paper seemed to assume that the president was somehow able to control the unemployment rate, that for some reason Bush et al. preferred that things go south. Though, it must be said, that we were also hearing about the ‘disastrous Bush economy’ even while the economy was booming.

Further down in the article:

Is there anything presidents can do to create jobs?

One thing: Build infrastructure.

“We built a lot of infrastructure in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson era,” [Colgate U economic historian Michael] Haines said. “I’m sure the interstate highway system created an incredible amount of employment. We can do it again.”

This ignores the distinction between productive jobs and just jobs. You could always hire two guys, one to dig a hole and the other to fill it in again: two jobs created! Few ‘job-creation’ schemes are quite that useless, but most of them have a significant amount of futility built in; almost always, if the work being done under the scheme were work that people particularly wanted done, someone would be making money off it.

Do we need another Interstate Highway System? What else could we build that would require that kind of initial outlay without being money down the tubes? I can’t think of anything. I hear a lot about ‘crumbling infrastructure’, but I just don’t see it. I hear a lot about the need to ‘invest in schools’, but I can’t help but notice that most public school systems already spend more than all but the most elite private schools. I hear about making sure that everyone has the ‘opportunity for a college education’, but I note that graduation rates are already falling off because we’re already sending people who aren’t suited to it off to college.

Comments (3)

Inauguration TV Ads

Jan 20, ’09 10:49 AM

The ads on the inauguration coverage on the local DC TV stations are a bit strange. The vast majority of them are for personal-injury lawyers — the usual advertisers on local TV at this time of say — but also lots of frankly disingenuous ads about the Employee Free Choice Act, AKA ‘card check’.

The EFCA would allow unions to sign up members by getting them to sign union cards, rather than through a secret ballot as is currently required. The unions’ argument is that this secret-ballot procedure is cumbersome and inconvenient, and that its effect is to make it more difficult to unionize workplaces. They probably have a point.

On the other hand, a ‘card check’ procedure would mean that people pushing for unionization of a given workplace would know exactly who was with them and who was against them. It might then turn out to be in the union’s interest to cajole, threaten, or eliminate — by getting them fired or by encouraging them to resign, not by killing them (though that’s not unknown either in the history of unionization) — recalcitrant employees.

This is what the ads are calling ‘a level playing field’, while strongly giving the impression that unionization is impossible otherwise.

Comments Off