Here’s another example of a reporter transmitting one of the foundation myths of our current ideology as communicated in the ideological subtext of news stories, magazine articles, ads, popular fiction and TV shows: that children are naturally uncurious, anti-intellectual and uninterested in science. It’s in a Baltimore Sun article by personal finance guru Eileen Ambrose […]
Read More… from Why Does Pop Culture Tell Us Children Hate to Learn?
On my JetBlue flight to New York yesterday, I was served a small bottle of water and a little pouch of chocolate chip cookies. Both “food products” tried to create additional value beyond the food/drink by latching on to a cause: The packaging of Chocobilly’s Chocolate Chunk Cookies has the slogan, “Cookies with a cause” […]
Read More… from JetBlue Wants You to Feel Good About What You Eat, But Should You?
The top economic story of the early week was the wonderful (sic) news of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) that “more than 80% of top economists believe that the recession that started almost two years ago is finally over. But most don’t expect meaningful improvement in jobs, credit or housing for months to […]
I wondered the other day how the media would spin the news that our President won the Nobel Peace Prize. The answer was what I suspected it would be, but didn’t state in my post of October 9: In its effort to even-handedly present two sides of an inconsequential question—does President Obama deserve the Peace […]
Conflation is when you confuse or equate two things that are not equal or do not have similar characteristics. In the article titled “In Polanski Case, ‘70s Culture Collides With Changed World” on the front page of today’s New York Times, Michael Cieply uses conflation to try and demonstrate that back in the 70s, sex with those […]
I like Barack Obama. I voted for him for president. I like his domestic agenda for the most part. I like the empathy he expresses for the downtrodden. I applaud the initiatives he has undertaken that won him the Nobel Prize for Peace, just announced a few hours ago, even as I am sorely disappointed […]
There have been two views in the news media concerning the new frugality, the idea that we in the U.S. are spending less on personal stuff than we did before the recession. Those who say the recession has wrought a deep and permanent change in our spending habits, so that any adults alive today will […]
No sooner did I post a rant about syntactical mistakes that editors (and teachers) hate to see, in yesterday’s blog on ways to get the media to toss away a news release, when low and behold—I pull from my mailbox an incredibly embarrassing example of the offense that gets made fun of by editors perhaps […]
Every day, reporters and editors endure an overwhelming tide of news releases and story ideas—in their email inboxes, in the mail, by fax. From this ocean of information they hope to fish out a few stories that are truly newsworthy to their audience. Some stories cry out for coverage, and I don’t just mean acts […]
Read More… from Six ways to get the media to throw out your news release
The back page of the first section of yesterday’s New York Times had one of the most cynical, manipulative ads I have ever seen. From The Center for Consumer Freedom, the headline reads in ultra big letters: YOU ARE TOO STUPID, with junk or junky food standing in for several letters: A donut standing in […]