Finding Gravity
Finding Gravity
CNN, propagandist. Media bosses really want to bring fascism to America.
media
presswatchers.org
presswatchers.orgThe nation is not “barreling toward default,” nor is it “careening,” or even “drifting” there. It is being pushed there by Republicans.The media has had since at least 2016 to figure out how to cover irrational politics and they haven’t. They still imagine a world where Republicans want a functioning government—they don’t. Default is a win for them and stories should reflect that.
Politico
PoliticoThis unbroken stream of Musk blarney and BS should be enough to deter the press from automatically reporting the tycoon’s publicity hounding. But as with Donald Trump, the press seems unable to resist splashing coverage on Musk’s unnewsworthy high jinks, even though the stories have now become as common as dog-bites-man.They're easy stories to write that people love to read. I'm not sure how people can break out of that feedback loop. I know I have no trouble hearing about the antics and I'm not even on the SS Twitanic anymore.
IndieWire
IndieWireDuring a Q&A session held on the Warner Bros. Burbank studio immediately after the conference, Max and HBO Content Head Casey Bloys declined to answer a question from a reporter regarding Rowling’s controversial reputation and how it might affect the show.It is not nuanced. They're doing business with someone who thinks trans people shouldn't exist. Time to cancel my HBO Max subscription.
“No, I don’t think this is the forum,” Bloys said during the Q&A. “That’s a very online conversation, very nuanced and complicated and not something we’re going to get into.”
Update (4/21): If you're saying to yourself, 'what's wrong with JKR?', ContraPoints posted an amazing summary with historical context: The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.
IEEE Spectrum
IEEE Spectrum"Mastodon, a text-based social network similar to Twitter, is the most popular example of ActivityPub in action. Users can post text, share images, and follow others. But Mastodon, unlike Twitter, is not hosted as a singular service but instead a collection of independent servers that communicate through ActivityPub. Joining Mastodon means joining a server with its own community and code of conduct. Users can interact with users on other servers, but their account is hosted on the server they choose."Nice intro to Mastodon here. And speaking of apps, I have been using Ivory as my main mobile Mastodon app for a while now and I'm enjoying it more than the official app. It's great to have so many options.
The Reframe
The Reframe"It’s almost gotten to be boring, the degree to which people believe that what they refer to as “free speech” should not only allow them to say whatever they want (which it does), but should also prevent other people from understanding them to be the sort of person who says those things."Your periodic reminder that free speech does not mean speech that is free from consequences. I'm sure this mediocre cartoonist will have a career on the right's "victim" circuit. He should be shunned by everyone else for his repulsive racism.
The Onion
The OnionWe just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions.Sometimes an organization is so cartoonishly evil it takes a comedian to point it out. The Onion nails the tone of the bigoted NYT response to criticism of its reporting on trans issues.
stanforddaily.com
stanforddaily.com"Stanford’s communicative infrastructure cannot depend on the judgment of social media companies or volunteer maintainers of servers, and social media is too important for our university to leave on the hands of profit-making enterprises or well-meaning nonprofits."I think all institutions should be considering this if they believe social media is an important way to communicate.
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."I really wish this die phase would hurry up. A company can wreck a lot in the time it takes to die. (And Cory has been on a roll lately! This post is a barn burner!)
si.edu
si.edu"…where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 4.4 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come."Fun collection to browse through. I can even post this image of a Bell X-1 cockpit without attribution!
Popular Information
Popular Information"In the piece, Fuller recounts a time in 2016 he saw a man grab “a handful of beef jerky” and walk out of a Walgreens. Based on this five-year-old anecdote and a statement from Walgreens, Fuller declared a “shoplifting epidemic” and called into question a sentencing-reform measure that reduced some thefts from felonies to misdemeanors. The piece, notably, does not include any data on crime rates in San Francisco."The media wrote dozens of stories about a retail theft epidemic but it wasn’t based on reality. Why does the media choose to write about some topics frequently based on hearsay? Why aren’t there consequences or retractions with the same volume?
Ed Zitron
Ed Zitron"Yet they will always be deeply vulnerable to their own failures. They will always make mistakes, because they don’t believe they’ve ever made one. And when they start losing, they lack the capability to stop the world from falling down around them, because that starts at a point of introspection they’ve never had to reach."2022 was definitely powered by unchecked ego. This article is a great summary of cracks forming in the media myths.