Car Alarms

Car Alarms

Thankfully, I do not here car alarms sounding off that often any more. Instead, I regularly hear mocking-birds mimicking the pattern. Todd does not believe me but other people have heard the same thing.

Also, Bill Moyers' speech to the National Conference for Media Reform is an interesting read.

One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

Stuff like this sounds straight out of Chomsky:

"In other words," says Jonathan Mermin, "if the government isnt talking about it, we dont report it." He concludes: "[Lehrers]
somewhat jarring declaration, one of many recent admissions by journalists that their reporting failed to prepare the public
for the calamitous occupation that has followed the 'liberation' of Iraq, reveals just how far the actual practice of American journalism has deviated from the First Amendment ideal of a press that is independent of the government." Take the example (also cited by Mermin) of Charles J. Hanley. Hanley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Associated Press, whose fall 2003 story on the torture of Iraqis in American prisons before a U.S. Army report and photographs documenting the abuse surfaced and was ignored by major American newspapers. Hanley attributes this lack of interest to the fact that "it was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source."