Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

‘Museums aren’t America’s attic for its racist shit.’

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Even though I know this is a bad idea, I’m off to do it anyway!

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

We’re not going back!

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Glad to see john eastman going through some things.

Never forget that he train is barreling down on Trump, even as he dances on the tracks.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

You are here: Home / Balloon Juice / Bleg / Bleg Re-Post: School for Authentic Journalism

Bleg Re-Post: School for Authentic Journalism

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Or, to tie it to last night’s Oscars: If you approved Spotlight‘s Best Picture win, here’s a small concrete way to support the hard work of genuine journalism.

Reader Interactions

28Comments

  1. 1.

    Fred B.

    “If the US presidential elections seem like a clown show, let’s train better and authentic journalists. ”

    And exactly where are they going to work?

  3. 3.

    Gin & Tonic

    @raven: There’s been some back and forth on Twitter about whether the “agent” was truly Secret Service or a Trump hired goon. I don’t know the answer, myself.

  5. 5.

    Brachiator

    @Fred B.:

    And exactly where are they going to work?

    Exactly. Newspapers and news magazines are dying, and the rate of extinction seems to be accelerating.

    TV news is next. I ran across this user comment about Melissa Harris-Perry and the end of her MSNBC show:

    Progressive Viewers, young or older bloc, are mostly getting their news through web clips or articles, facebook or other news aggregators (like Gawker, for example.)

    Should a Progressive be dinged because they’ve move past the TV platform faster than conservatives? That plenty are chord cutters that see a TV as a screen for entertainment second to their computer/ipad/etc at this point? No.

    Of course, there is a special blindness at work here, since none of these “news sources” create original content.

  6. 6.

    WaterGirl

    @Fred B.: Not at CNN, MSNBC, or FOX, that’s for sure! We need alternatives to the wholly-owned-subsidiaries of the republican part, aka the mainstream media.

  7. 7.

    Steve in the ATL

    @raven: Christopher Morris is a BFD photojournalist. I’ll wait for details to come out, but I suspect that he was responding to something inappropriate.

  8. 8.

    geg6

    @raven:

    Sorry, but I can’t agree with the attitude your comment implies. Reporters are there to get the story and he had every right to tell this goon to get fucked for stopping him from doing his job. If this is a SS agent, he should be fired immediately. SS agents are there to protect the candidate. Period. They are not there to enforce the campaign’s press rules.

    The SS is out of control and someone needs to step in. Are they still under Treasury?

  10. 10.

    Thoroughly Pizzled

    Trump’s Secret Service codename is “Mogul.” I wonder what they gave the rest of his family.

    The Obamas got magnificent codenames: Renegade (Barack), Renaissance (Michelle), Radiance (Malia), Rosebud (Sasha)

  11. 11.

    Steve in the ATL

    @geg6: And surely a SS agent would not be wearing a gaudy purple tie? If so, everything I’ve learned from TV and cheap novels IS A LIE.

  12. 12.

    WaterGirl

    @geg6: Here’s hoping this incident helps call out the SS publicly for enforcing candidate rules about the press. If they are doing that, and it appears that they are, it’s absolutely shameful,

    Edit: the Secret Service has lost the plot. Just like the Supreme Court, they are squandering their previous reputation.

  15. 15.

    lurker dean

    he’s a well-known war photojournalist, a BFD as Steve said. from what i can tell he was trying to cover the BLM protesters at the rally. it doesn’t appear that he was any threat whatsoever to the candidate.

  16. 16.

    Gin & Tonic

    @geg6: Funny, but there was a letter to the editor in this week’s Economist pointing out that Il Donaldo’s grandfather, Friedrich Trumpf, spent some years in North America, ending up going to Canada for the Klondike gold rush where he ran a couple of hotels/inns/restaurants in Whitehorse. The bulk of his profits came from, um, catering to the needs of the itinerant miners, if you get my drift. After he’d made a bundle and the RCMP started casting a very jaundiced eye on some of those sources of income (in general, not just for him) he cashed out and went back to Germany.

  17. 17.

    Steve in the ATL

    My concern is that this isolated and unfortunate incident will reinforce the leftwing media lie that Trump has thin skin and fascist tendencies

  19. 19.

    WaterGirl

    @Fred B.: @Brachiator: Fred, I forwarded your question to Al Giordano, and I also forwarded the first part of Brachiator’s figuring he could likely address those issues better than I could.

    Here is his reply:

    True, and people today are working online, not just in writing but with viral videos (some of which on Narco News TV get millions of views). One of our graduates was recently in the news after getting arrested for reporting in Bahrain:

    The present and future of news is not in print or cable news. It’s becoming more and more decentralized. In developing world countries where so many of our grads work it’s even more important, such as with our Egyptian and other graduates who were at the center of the Arab Spring. In Latin America is where we have trained the most and they’ve been a big part of the hemisphere’s leftward shift. (Hell, one of our former professors is now president of Bolivia!).

    People can read more about Authentic Journalism including links to some of the work these folks are doing.

  21. 21.

    Brachiator

    @Steve in the ATL:

    My concern is that this isolated and unfortunate incident will reinforce the leftwing media lie that Trump has thin skin and fascist tendencies

    That’s funny!

  23. 23.

    Brachiator

    @WaterGirl:

    People can read more about Authentic Journalism including links to some of the work these folks are doing.

    I couldn’t get the link in this reference to work.

    The other part of the reply was very interesting. Thanks.

  25. 25.

    raven

    This thread is pretty dead but MSNBC just showed a different angle and, Secret Service or not, that dude needs to lose his job!

  27. 27.

    Fred B.

    @WaterGirl: I do appreciate your reply. In principle I agree. However, I think it is a bit naive because I don’t believe there is much time left. The news be it either tv or print or cable is by in large controlled by corporations. So people are either inundated by crap or important stories never see the light of day. WRT to internet, people go to the sites that align with their beliefs. So the brilliant investigative reporters will only be “seen” by the true believers who agree with them.So realistically how do you you change that, in a timely fashion.

    It is not going to be by internet reporters, bloggers etc because their reach is too small, given how far along we are to an authoritarian state. The powerful people will not give up their power easily.

    God, I hope I am wrong

  28. 28.

    mclaren

    Once again, largely pointless. The business model for journalism is going away. Print journalism, internet journalism…none of it has any way to make money. The internet has destroyed journalism, period, by wrecking the market for advertising.

    Only google and yahoo and facebook are making money from advertising in 2016, and they’re not hiring journalists.

    See “The Search For New Business Mode: How newspapers are faring trying to build digital revenue” by the Pew Research Center.

    They aren’t. There is no business model anymore that supports journalism. Bruce Sterling and Eric Clemons have been hammering away at this for years. See Eric Clemons’ “Why Advertising Is Failing On the Internet,” 22 march 2009.

    Here’s a great talk about the webpage obesity crisis. The crisis turns out to be a byproduct of the unsustainable advertising ecosystem today, in which only 3 companies make any actual money from ads on the web — google, facebook, and yahoo — but thousands of investors are dumping money into funding web advertising companies. The economic model is out of balance. A lot more companies are putting money into advertising on the web than are getting out. Eventually most of those companies will go broke, because everyone can’t keep getting more money out of the system than the revenue that’s being generated. The excess comes from investors, and at some point soon the investors will want a return on their investment.

    Google is mainly responsible for the extreme bloat in web pages because it turns out you need increasingly elaborate code and more and more javascript and other junk to read a websurfer’s cookies and direct targeted ads to that person and collect stats and do all kinds of elaborate things encapsulated in the google analystics and google api web ecosystem. But this means that increasingly bloated infrastructure gets built on top of simple web pages, so you now need to serve 50 megs of webpage javascript and other junk just to serve a couple of pages of text content. Then you need to counter adblockers, and so on, and pretty soon it all gets so overbuilt and so unsustainable that web pages won’t load properly, and there’s a crisis.

    This is a screenshot from an NPR article discussing the rising use of ad blockers. The page is 12 megabytes in size in a stock web browser.

    The same article with basic ad blocking turned on is one megabyte. It’s no model of parsimony, but still, what a difference a plugin makes.

    If you look at what the unblocked version pulls in, it’s not just videos and banner ads, but file after file of javascript. Every beacon, tracker and sharing button has its own collection of scripts that it needs to fetch from a third-party server. Each request comes packed with cookies.

    More cookies are the last thing your overweight website needs.

    These scripts get served from God knows where and are the perfect vector for malware.

    Advertisers will tell you it has to be this way, but in dealing with advertisers you must remember they are professional liars.

    I don’t mean this to offend. I mean it as a job description. An advertiser’s job is to convince you to do stuff you would not otherwise do. Their task in talking to web designers is to persuade them that the only way to show ads is by including mountains of third-party cruft and tracking.

    The bloat, performance, and security awfulness, they argue, is the price readers pay for free content.

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