The expression ‘both sides’ is an important clue that the question itself is improperly framed. The notion that there are exactly two sides to every story is a byproduct of politics, not the search for knowledge.
Joshua Engel responds to the Quora question, “Is the climate change debate being effectively argued? Are we hearing equally from both sides?”
CityBeat’s string of whiny editorials continues.
This time, Kathy Y. Wilson, author of the column “Your Negro Tour Guide,” complains that last weekend’s Bunburry music festival didn’t have any bands that “vaguely interested” her, despite her claim that she’s a fan of “all kinds of music.” She’s also upset that it was full of so many darn white people!
Wilson also takes a number of weak jabs at festival founder Bill Donabedian, who put his personal reputation (and probably his credit score) on the line to organize this ambitious event. The first annual festival drew headliners Jane’s Addiction, Weezer and Death Cab for Cutie, and met attendance expectations of 55,000 people.
I didn’t go to Bunburry this year. I was out of town for one of the nights; I’ve already attended one three-day music festival this summer; and there weren’t any bands I wanted to see enough to justify buying a $46 one-day pass. But it would be absurd for me to dismiss this festival because it didn’t cater to my specific musical tastes.
I love the first comment from an anonymous reader:
If you couldn’t find one artist in the lineup that interested you then you’re not a fan of “all kinds of music”; you don’t like alternative/indie rock music, which was the genre of this festival. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but there are different genres of music, and sometimes festivals cater to a specific one.
I’m not sure what CityBeat’s new owners are thinking, but they must be attempting to reduce the publication to tabloid-quality journalism. They should’ve kept Kevin Osborne and laid off Kathy Wilson instead.
Jeff Jarvis responds to ABC’s recent story on U.S. Olympic uniforms being made overseas:
I want a “Made in America” audit of ABC News. This is a serious request. ABC News, please tell us:
- Where are your studio and field cameras made? In America?
- Where are your monitors made? In America?
- Where are Diane Sawyer’s outfits made? Where are her shoes made? Where is her makeup made? In America?
Canadian Supreme Court ruling scraps royalty for music downloads
The court essentially said that it shouldn’t matter how a copy of work is delivered — whether it is bought in a store, ordered through the mail or downloaded digitally, the same copyright rules should apply. [...]
It doesn’t make sense to distinguish between two methods of selling the same work, the court said.
The TV Business May Be Starting To Collapse
Henry Blodget argues that newspapers were in trouble for many years before people started paying attention to the warning signs. And it was nearly a decade before companies like The New York Times started feeling the pain.
And now, he says:
The same is almost certainly true for television.
In our household, as in many households, television consumption has changed massively over the past decade, especially over the past 5 years.
[...]
In other words, in our household, and in many other households like ours, the same thing has happened to the TV business that has happened to the newspaper business:
The user behavior that supported the traditional all-in-one TV “packages”–networks and cable/satellite distributors–has changed.
The Cincinnati Enquirer has posted a photo gallery of Cincinnati’s re-opened Washington Park, which consists of other people’s photos found on Instagram, Flickr, and Twitter. (Maybe they no longer employ any photographers of their own.)
Unfortunately, they either threw this thing together quickly or didn’t realize that Cincinnati isn’t the only city with a Washington Park. Their gallery currently includes a shot of Washington Square Park in New York (pictured above). I assume they will go back and remove it as more people point this out to them.
(Thanks to Jake Mecklenborg for the tip.)
CityBeat’s whiny rant about driving and parking downtown
This week, CityBeat published a bizarre editorial about how hard it is to drive and park downtown. It appears the author was unaware that Taste of Cincinnati—an event attended by approximately 500,000 people every year— was going on, and was shocked to find that Fifth Street was closed and all the parking garages were full or expensive.
Brian Griffin of Cincinnati Blog writes:
Get out the big box of tissues! CityBeat’s Maija Zummo is upset about the Pony she got. Her pony, in this case, is the vibrant Downtown/OTR we had last weekend, with about a thousand things to do. She had two things she wanted to do and didn’t seem to be aware of the other 998 things going on, and therefore is pissed that traffic and parking were problems for her.
As downtown Cincinnati starts accumulating more things to do, parking is going to keep getting harder. This is especially a problem for older cities like Cincinnati that were planned before cars existed and simply don’t have enough room for every resident and visitor to park a car. The answer, of course, is that we need quality transit to move people around quicker and easier.
CityBeat was sold to new owners in March, and they’ve already made some staff changes. It’s possible that the new owners are intentionally trying to focus less on downtown and cater more toward suburban readers. That would be terrible timing, since even the most extreme anti-city media outlets are finally admitting the success of downtown.
Still, a part of me thinks this article was a work of satire.
SNL Needs to Get Over Television
Mick Jagger hosted the finale of Saturday Night Live last weekend, and despite the offbeat paths the show could have followed—maybe an Exile on Main Street parody set in a puke-stained mansion along the French Riviera?—it stuck mostly to satirizing this season’s preferred target: television.
Of the 152 live sketches aired this season, a whopping 58 percent (88 sketches) were television parodies of some sort, whether political debates, game shows, or fake newscasts. Of course, SNLhas skewered television since its inception. As “Baba Wawa,” Gilda Radner gleefully lampooned the popular broadcast journalist’s speech impediment; Dana Carvey’s Church Lady hosted aTonight Show for the devout; Wayne’s World poked fun at amateurish cable access fodder; and even dimwitted Hans and Franz somehow landed an exercise show in which they mainly flexed and chastised their girlie-man viewers. But the world has changed since the days of Baba Wawa, and SNL’s present-day devotion to mocking its own medium feels anachronistic, a lazy holdover that prevents the show from fully satirizing society as it exists today.
Bring back more original characters. Fewer political parodies.
Some media outlets are so afraid of looking biased that they don’t fact-check politicians’ claims and simply report both sites as equal arguments. Unfortunately, this mentality is also creeping into coverage of scientific issues.
Author Seth Mnookin tells NPR’s On The Media:
I think you see that a lot in science coverage and medicine. You have someone making an outrageous claim, and even if everyone in that field lines up on the other side, it’s presented as scientists’ debate.
Mnookin blames the media for giving credit to the theory that the MMR vaccine causes autism. The scientific paper that is often cited to back up this theory was published in 1998 but publicly retracted in 2010, after it was found to be flawed and fraudulent. As a result of more parents refusing to vaccinate their children, measles infections have hit a 15-year high. (On the bright side, some pediatricians are ‘firing’ families that refuse to have their children vaccinated.)
Fortunately, there is at least one field where journalists have not sunk to the all-arguments-are-equal level:
You don’t see it in business. If someone came along and said, “Hey everyone, my company is actually as valuable as Apple,” no business reporter would write a piece saying, “John Doe, who just started this company, claims that his company is as valuable as Apple. Apple Computer says, actually, it has more cash than any other company in the world,” because it would be ridiculous. But you do get that in science and medicine and in politics.
DVDs and Blu-rays will now carry two unskippable government warnings
An ICE spokesman tells me that the two screens will “come up after the previews, once you hit the main movie/play button on the DVD. At which point the movie rating comes up, followed by the IPR Center screen shot for 10 secs and then the FBI/HSI anti-piracy warning for 10 secs as well. Neither can be skipped/fast forwarded through.”
So to encourage people not to engage in piracy, they’re going to force everyone to watch yet another annoying, time-wasting, gratification-delaying warning screen that can only be avoided by engaging in piracy. They’re purposefully making the movie-playing experience worse for honest paying customers.