If the US presidential elections seem like a clown show, let's train better and authentic journalists. Pledge today:https://t.co/ASQhix0YMB
— AlGiordano (@AlGiordano) February 26, 2016
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.
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?
raven
So this journalist gets in a secret service agents face and yells “fuck you, fuck you” and then whines when he gets his ass thrown on the ground. Discuss.
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.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: Me neither, I bet we find out. The dude is definitely packing but that doesn’t mean much I guess.
Brachiator
@Fred B.:
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:
Of course, there is a special blindness at work here, since none of these “news sources” create original content.
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.
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.
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?
geg6
@Steve in the ATL:
Yes. This. I think he’s from TIME.
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)
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.
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.
geg6
@WaterGirl:
I’m sure Trump is supplying their favorite things in vast quantities: hookers and blow.
raven
@geg6: Skip the interpretation of emotion.
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.
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.
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
WaterGirl
@lurker dean: Sadly, in this case, that’s probably not a joke.
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:
WaterGirl
FYWP
Brachiator
@Steve in the ATL:
That’s funny!
WaterGirl
@WaterGirl: Sorry, that was supposed to be a reply to geg6 at #13. FYWP
Brachiator
@WaterGirl:
I couldn’t get the link in this reference to work.
The other part of the reply was very interesting. Thanks.
WaterGirl
@Brachiator: Yeah, FYWP was messing with me on this post.
And it’s still messing with me!
Go to authenticjournalism dot org
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!
kc
Nope.
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
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.