The news media sets the agenda for public conversation by determining what stories it will cover outside of hard news such as wars, mass murders and celebrity breakups. This week we have a perfect example of the great disservice that the news media does in the way it currently determines what issues to make the […]
First the sad news: A study released yesterday by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that only about half of approximately 570 television weathercasters surveyed believe that global warming is occurring and fewer than a third believe that climate change is caused by human activities. Now the news media coverage, primarily […]
I usually don’t analyze the comments people leave on my blog, mainly because there is usually nothing much to say except, “Thanks for the kind words.” I do want to spend a few paragraphs looking at what someone named Tom Snyder wrote about my entry of March 24 in which I share the results of […]
The news media was full of a very scary Louis Harris poll yesterday, a poll, by the way, that wasn’t supposed to be officially announced until today. Some examples of stories about the survey: “Poll: Most Republicans think Obama is a Muslim” and “‘Scary’ Harris poll: 24% of Republicans think Obama ‘may be the Antichrist’“ First let’s […]
One of the most inventive TV commercials in a long time is the “Feed your senses” spot for Friskies cat food. At the opening of a can of Friskies, a cat steps through a silver hole that represents the can and enters a pleasantly surrealistic animated world in which turkeys spin around and salute it. […]
Most of the first round of hand-ringing about the Texas Board of Education’s decision to infuse inaccuracies in social science textbooks is over. I’ve noticed a very interesting fact about the comments in the main stream news media. Here is a sampling of what four mainstream and four regional media said about the Texas school […]
In every metropolitan region and nationally we have media of record, generally the largest daily newspaper and the most news-oriented radio and TV stations in cities. Nationally, it’s the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the network news and National Public Radio. These are the media that set the terms of the debate. […]
Most news stories are second hand, which can mean one of several things: The story is reprinted from another media or a wire service such as Associated Press. The story is reconfigured using the facts and images from another story, as when TV or radio read a series of 10-15 second stories, all based on […]
Read More… from Who will actually report and generate the news if newspapers die?
Yesterday was “Fix the Sewers” day in the news media. A front-page New York Times story presented the sad story of many municipalities and water districts with need of making major repairs to sewer and water lines first laid more than a century ago. The problem is that the municipalities and water districts need to […]
The weekend brought the news that conservatives had injected pro-Republican, pro-Christian values into the social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools, in many cases rewriting or retouching history. The right-wingers were also able to block every attempt others made to interject more about Hispanics into the study of Texas and U.S. history and culture. […]