Tagged "journalism" | worship the glitch

Dan Rather @ Occupy Wall Street

We take a look at the current global citizen uprising. Who is behind the “Occupy Wall Street” gatherings in New York, Los Angeles and dozens of other cities across America; and what are they looking to achieve? We talk exclusively with Grim Womyn, one of those helping to lead the online effort of this growing movement.

Is this the same Grim Womyn from grimwomyn.tumblr.com?

FOIA and the Question of Secret Law →

Charlie Savage of the New York Times has filed this FOIA suit in an effort to acquire a classified report issued by DOJ and ODNI to Congress “pertaining to intelligence collection authorities” under section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act (permitting the government to obtain from the FISC an order for the production of “any tangible things” upon a showing of “reasonable grounds” in relation to an international terrorism or counterintelligence investigation). The report appears to have sparked fierce objections from Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, who have asserted in floor debate that the government has a troubling “secret” interpretation of the PATRIOT Act.

A Message From Josh Marshall

tpmmedia:

A Message to TPM Readers,

This morning TPM published an article on the ‘hacktivist’ group ‘Anonymous’ which included mugshots of 14 accused members of the group which TPM obtained through a federal FOIA request. For six years the TPMMuckraker section of our site has chronicled public corruption, public wrongdoing and various sorts of criminal investigations. As part of that reporting we’ve published mugshots of numerous people accused or convicted of various crimes.

At just before 5 PM eastern time this evening, our site went offline. It took some time to confirm the nature of the outage. But it was eventually determined that we were under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. For those not familiar with these terms, this a coordinated attack by a number of individuals which overloads a site’s servers and makes it unavailable to readers. In layman’s terms, our site was hacked and knocked offline.

We have no direct evidence of who is behind the attack. Still, given that Anonymous’s signature has been denial of service attacks, the logical inference is as apparent to us as anyone else.

TPM is dedicated to bringing our readers the news. So we are mobilizing all our technical and legal resources to restore the site as soon as possible. We are also in contact with law enforcement.

We are lucky enough to live in a country where the risks and consequences of practicing journalism are usually quite light. Certainly compared to other countries. This episode is trivial in comparison to what numerous journalists have suffered in other countries when people retaliate over what is reported about them. Still, even in such minor forms, reporting the facts about criminal activity and the news of the day is not without consequences. But we believe in what we do. So we can take it.

On behalf of our 25 member staff, we appreciate your support.

Josh Marshall

Obama’s claim of having passed the “biggest middle-class tax cut in history” is ridiculous.

Obama’s whopper of a claim on tax cuts - The Fact Checker - The Washington Post

(via jeffmiller)

I can’t prove that WaPo is incorrect, but I do know that “fact checker” Glenn Kessler prints zero numbers and cites zero sources to back up his argument. He also builds his entire case on the sentence, “We took an informal survey in our office and asked people what they thought the president’s statement meant.”

This is not fact-checking. It’s arguing. If you print the sentence, “We ran the numbers every which way,” without actually printing any of those numbers, you’re at least as full of shit as you opponent.

(via jeffmiller)

Jann Wenner owns Rolling Stone which he founded during the Summer of Love when I was 15. He can publish these stories that don’t appear — and will probably never appear — in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times mainly because his business is radically different from their businesses. Rolling Stone doesn’t look to Citibank or Morgan Stanley for advertising. And Jann Wenner has nobody to report to except himself. Like me, he doesn’t give a damn. Those other papers have shareholders and boards of directors that inevitably create a cesspool of interests and intrigue no matter what the church-versus-state rules are supposed to be.

This is not to say that the Journal and the Times won’t jump on this story at some point, but that point will carefully be after it is already too late. If Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein goes to jail, those papers will cover it, not predict it, and they certainly won’t make it happen. At best they’ll carefully explain the story after the fact.

Robert X. Cringely

I read Cringely religously for years and then stopped for reasons I can’t recall. I’ve been noticing a lot of his work popping up around the web lately and I’m, once again, a regular reader.

I highly recommend reading his book, Accidental Empires, and tracking down his old PBS specials if you can find them.

All the people participating in the “journalist or not” debate are insiders. They are all compromised. Whether or not they disclose some of these conflicts, none of them disclose the ones that are central to what they will and will not say.

Dave Winer

journalism

Good News: How the revolution transformed Egypt’s media.

The transformation of Al-Ahram has been almost comically drastic. Every day for years, the newspaper’s chairman, Abdel Moneim Said, and its editor in chief, Osama Saraya, wrote editorials that began on the front page of the paper and continued onto Page 3. Saraya was a devout Mubarak loyalist, and Said a “reformer” associated with Hosni Mubarak’s Western-oriented son, Gamal. As soon as Mubarak fell from power on Feb. 11, both men became ardent enthusiasts of the revolution. “The people ousted the regime,” that day’s headline blared. The shamelessness of the switch became a standing joke. Younger journalists at Al-Ahram had shoved Saraya aside long before he was forced out, and this formerly powerful figure is now regarded with ridicule. Even so, says Shukrallah, “they continued to play the game: [They would write,] ‘The youth of the street is so wonderful, but now it’s time for everyone to go home.’”

Then, on March 30, Prime Minister Essam Sharaf fired Saraya, Said, and the leaders of the other state-run papers and the news agency. On March 31, Al-Ahram appeared with no editorials at all on the front page. This was quite a delicious shock to readers. Hala Mustafa, a longtime democracy advocate who had been banned from the state-run media after quitting a dubious reform body organized by Gamal’s supporters, told me, “Now it’s just the news — according to the importance of the news.” The front-page news the day I called her consisted of a picture of Mubarak and an article about the effort to put him on trial. The same thing had happened at Rose al-Youssef, another state-run mouthpiece of the ruling party. No more front-page editorials — just the news, according, more or less, to its importance. Mustafa is writing once again in Al-Ahram. [+]

Churnalism →

onethingwell:

Enter a press release to see which UK papers and websites have ‘churned’ it into news, complete with slick interactive visualisations of every cut ‘n’ paste.

An example: if you paste this press release into Churnalism, it shows that The Daily Mail churned it into this news item, pasting a whopping 98% of the press release directly into the published article.

So, curious readers and standards bodies can use it to uncover lazy reporting. PR outfits, companies and charities can use it to track the spread of their promotional efforts. And I’m sure folk will come up with more uses, too—under the hood it’s effectively a new type of news search/comparison engine, one that’s especially adept at spotting matching phrases, sentences and passages of text.

Tiny disclaimer: I worked on Churnalism for a couple of days early on in its development, and a friend wrote the backend.

This is not necessarily false, but it’s worth nothing that this person is from Pittsburg, has 55 followers and lists his home page as google.com. I can’t even confirm his first name. This tweet cites no sources and the tweeter hasn’t demonstrated that he’s a source, himself. It’s been retweeted 33+ times and has hundreds of notes here.

We can do better.

stfuislamophobes:

claerwen:

if you haven’t had a reason to dislike mubarak yet, you can start with his disregard for history

Reblogging because this is disgusting and I’ve been following what is happening through my personal Tumblr.

(via think4yourself)

CNN: Government blocking media access to hide growing #oilspill catastrophe.

\via @alyssa_milano

Al Jazeera is running circles around the U.S. media with this stuff.

On The Listening Post this week: How a profile in Rolling Stone magazine brings down the US’ top commander in Afghanistan and the stories of three journalists on the run from their countries.