NewsTrust - Journalism - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

How to Use the Internet Wisely, for Your Health and Your Country's

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Howard Rheingold - May. 13 (Opinion) - Use the following methods and tools to protect yourself from toxic bad info. Use them and then pass them along to others. Promote the notion that more info literacy is a practical answer to the growing info pollution. Be the change you want to see. Although the Web undermines authority (by enabling anybody to publish), authority is still useful as one clue to credibility in a detective hunt that accounts for many other clues. Claims to authority, however, need to be questioned. I might add credibility to my assessment if a source is a verified professor at a known institution of higher learning, an authentic MD or PhD, but I would not subtract it from people without credentials whose expertise seems authentic. If you are going to grant credibility to people whose expertise is based on being a professor of something, make sure that assertion is accurate. Don't stop at simply verifying that the claim to be a professor is valid if you are looking for scientific credibility. The next step is to use the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index that derives a score from the scholar's publications, citations by other scholars, grants, honors, and awards. If you want to get even more serious, download a free copy of Publish or Perish software, which analyzes scientific citations from Google Scholar according to multiple criteria. Or use the h-index to calculate how many times other scientists have cited a particular source. Again, don't trust just one source; triangulate.

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Wikipedia and the Shifting Definition of 'Expert'

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Rebecca J. Rosen - Apr. 29 (Opinion) - How do we judge whether a person knows what he or she is talking about? How do we gauge someone's credibility? At least in part, we rely on a set of cues -- titles, university degrees, papers published, lectures given -- that have long been bound up in the concept of "expertise". If a person is deemed an expert, we are more credulous of their claims, and their words carry more weight. But expertise is a fraught commodity -- lashed inextricably to the commodities of privilege and power. Does an expert on poverty know more than someone who is poor? Are women given expert status on issues relating to women, but not others? Does expertise itself invest people with perverse incentives to maintain the status quo? How we ascribe expertise shapes whose voices and ideas have purchase in our discourse -- whose books get published, whose writing fill op-ed column inches, who sits at what tables.

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8 questions that will help define the future of journalism

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Google News - By Richard Gingras - Apr. 19 (Speech) - These are extraordinary times. These are exciting times. There has been tremendous disruption, but let’s consider the huge positives that underly that disruption. There are no longer the same barriers to publishing: everyone has a printing press, and there are no gatekeepers. There are new ways for people to both consume and share news. There are powerful new technologies that can change what journalists do and how they do it. In my view, the future of journalism can and will be better than its past.

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The Tragedy of Mike Daisey's Lies About China

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Max Fisher - Mar. 18 (Opinion) - American consumers can't do much for Central Africa or Afghanistan, but they have real power to improve Chinese labor abuses. Will they be less inclined to believe the next person who tells them how?

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'This American Life' Retracts Episode on Apple's Suppliers in China

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Brian Stelter - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - The show says it was misled by Mike Daisey, whose one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" was the basis of a program that aired in January. Mr. Daisey responded, "I stand by my work."

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Busting Mr. Daisey

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Reuters - By Jack Shafer - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - This week, the highly regarded public radio show This American Life learned a lesson that many journalists, including me, have learned the hard way: It’s almost impossible for an editor to fact-check a contributor who lies. The show, hosted by Ira Glass, just retracted its Jan. 6, 2012, episode, “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory,” adapted from Mike Daisey’s popular one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which is about working conditions in a Chinese factory that makes Apple products. Daisey’s deceptions were uncovered by Rob Schmitz, a China-based reporter for Marketplace. This American Life will air an hourlong explanation and re-examination this weekend, featuring both Glass and Daisey, about the circumstances behind the retraction. Glass and the show are to be commended for their quick response, and everybody who cares about real journalism owes a debt of gratitude to Schmitz.

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Truth And The World Of Wikipedia Gatekeepers

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

NPR - By Timothy Messer-Kruse, Andrew Lih, Steven Walling, Neal Conan - Feb. 22 (Interview) - Wikipedia is the go-to source for succinct information on almost every topic imaginable. It strives to reflect neutral truths that can be verified by reliable sources. The site, known as "The Free Encyclopedia" is written and edited by volunteers.

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Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Christian Science Monitor - By Terry Hong - Feb. 20 (Review) - 'Pure, astonishing reportage’ of makeshift life in an Indian slum. ...

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Why Wall Street Should Stop Whining

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Feb. 10 (Opinion) - When I read things like this I'm simultaneously amazed by two things. The first is the unbelievable tone-deafness of people who would complain out loud, during a time when millions of people around the country are literally losing their homes, that their bonuses - not their total compensation, mind you, but just their cash bonuses, paid in addition to their salaries and their stock packages - are barely enough to cover the mortgage payments for their new condos, the taxis they take when walking is too burdensome, and their girlfriends with expensive tastes. The second thing that amazes me is that Sherman is buying all this.

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The New York Times public editor's very public utterance

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Clay Shirky - Jan. 13 (Opinion) - Thursday, Arthur Brisbane, the public editor of the New York Times, went to his readers with a question : "I'm looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about." Brisbane (who, as public editor, speaks only for himself, not the Times) referred to two recent stories: the claim that Clarence Thomas had "misunderstood" a financial reporting form when he left out key information, and Mitt Romney's assertion that President Obama gives speeches "apologising" for America. Brisbane asked whether news reporters should have the freedom to investigate and respond to those comments. The reaction from readers was swift, voluminous, negative and incredulous. "Is this a joke? THIS IS YOUR JOB." "If the purpose of the NYT is to be an inoffensive container for ad copy, ...

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Best of the Web Today: Bad-Faith Journalism

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By James Taranto - Jan. 04 (Opinion) - It's not as eagerly awaited as Time's "Man of the Year" was back when people paid attention to Time, but PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" nonetheless manages to generate a lot of chatter, aimed as it is at those who chatter for a living. This year almost all of the chatter was negative, as the St. Petersburg Times's self-styled "fact checking" operation, which usually leans left, tacked to the right, naming as its "Lie" the claim that "Republicans voted to end Medicare." The reference is to Rep. Paul Ryan's reform proposal, which passed the GOP-controlled House as part of a budget resolution before being rejected by the Democratic Senate.

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How will technology influence the news in 2012?

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Dan Gillmor - Dec. 29 (Opinion) - Predicting the next year's news is a fool's errand, but looking at technological trends could give us a hint At the beginning of 2011, aging dictators ruled Egypt and Libya, and despotism was the nearly unquestioned reality in most of the Middle East. The eurozone was seeing trouble at its edges, but wasn't heading toward collapse. News International had successfully covered up most of its rampant bad acts, and Rupert Murdoch was on the verge of even greater control over British media and politics. Anyone who might have predicted how utterly and rapidly those realities would change might have been branded a lunatic. Which is one reason why the annual journalistic ritual of making predictions about the year ahead is a fool's errand. With that in mind, let me offer instead some observations about the technology and media trends we've seen in past months, and how they might play out in 2012. In many cases, the trajectory is deeply worrisome. But I remain an eternal optimist in the face of ...

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The Post-Truth Campaign

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Dec. 23 (Opinion) - Mitt Romney is blazing new trails in politics, where not telling the truth doesn’t seem to have any consequences.

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The World Is Ending, Please Update the Home Page

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By David Carr - Dec. 06 (Opinion) - Let’s say, just for giggles, that the word was ending. Could be an alien invasion, a pandemic or nuclear annihilation. If one of those scenarios became a news event, how would it be covered? That question was posed by Andrew Fitzgerald, one of the partic

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Restoring Factchecking

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

San Francisco Chronicle - By Craig Newmark - Nov. 29 (Opinion) - Recently, Jeff Jarvis at the City University of NY held an event on restoring factchecking to the news business. He did a really good job getting a bunch of players in this arena to play well together.

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Craig Newmark driven by philanthropy, fact checking

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

San Francisco Chronicle - By James Temple - Nov. 23 (Interview) - In early March, some 16 years after launching his namesake mailing list, Craig Newmark fully pivoted in the direction he'd been leaning all along. The founder of the for-profit - but certainly not for-maximum-profit - Craigslist launched a full-fledged philanthropic venture, Craigconnects. The goal is to leverage the power of the Internet to identify, connect and empower sustainable nonprofits. Eight months after the launch, and with the holidays upon us, it seemed an appropriate time catch up with Newmark.

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The facts about the fact checkers

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Politico - By Ben Smith - Nov. 02 (Opinion) - Mostly true: Roughly half the political universe loves each item churned out by the booming industry of political factchecking. The other half despises it. It just depends whose pants are adjudged to be on fire any given day.

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Attack of the Attack Ads: Citizens United and the 2012 Elections

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

PBS - By Evelyn Messinger - Oct. 16 (Opinion) - In 2012, two tidal waves will reconfigure the American electoral system and the news media that cover it. A tsunami made of money will buoy up the structure of entrenched political power, while a huge wave of personal technology will disrupt it. I can predict both of these events with certainty because they've happened every election year over the last couple of decades. Still, the changes in 2012 may be dramatic. Angry citizens around the world have been using a potent combination of mobile phones, social networking and broadcast television to upend established political orders. Now it's Americans who are angry, and this election could spark a new level of activism leveraged by these same tools. At the same time, this will be the first general election since the so-called "Citizens United" Supreme Court decision, which tossed out the last vestiges of regulations limiting campaign financing. Among other effects, this will translate into a record numbers of attack ads next fall. Taken together, these two changes may profoundly affect our democracy, and they deserve a closer look.

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World of Class Warfare - The Poor's Free Ride Is Over

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Show - By Jon Stewart - Aug. 21 (Comedy News) - Taking half of everything the bottom 50% have in America would raise $700 billion.

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Party Line

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 11:13:52 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Charlotte Allen - Aug. 12 (Review) - Those liberal leanings distort the news in subtle but telling ways. Groseclose dissects a 2006 story in the Los Angeles Times that linked a record low number of black freshmen at UCLA to the passage 10 years earlier of Proposition 209, a ballot initiative that forbids public institutions from considering race in admissions and hiring. The reporter, Rebecca Trounson, had quoted six sources, not for factual information but for their opinions. Five of those sources expressed conventional left-of-center views, complaining, for example, that the campus was insufficiently “diverse” and accusing UCLA of practicing racism. Only one source, former University of California regent Ward Connerly, architect of Proposition 209, suggested that fewer black high school graduates might be academically competitive, or that some blacks might have chosen to attend historically black colleges instead of UCLA. Not only did Trounson not examine the tortuous routes that UCLA’s admissions committee (on which Groseclose served at the time) followed to get around Proposition 209 so as to maximize black enrollment, but she failed to report a record number of black transfer students to UCLA that fall so that the black student population actually increased slightly. She also failed to notice what might have been the real story: the huge increases in Asian enrollments at UCLA, to the point that white people, once the overwhelming majority, now constituted only about a third of the overall student population.

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A Push to Redefine Knowledge at Wikipedia

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Noam Cohen - Aug. 10 (Opinion) - “MAKING fun of Wikipedia is so 2007,” a French journalist said recently to Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation that runs the Wikipedia project. And so Ms. Gardner, in turn, told an auditorium full of Wikipedia contributors and supporters on Thursday in Haifa, Israel, the host city for the seventh annual Wikimania conference, where meetings and presentations focus on the world’s most used, and perhaps least understood, online reference work. Once routinely questioned about its reliability — what do you mean, anyone can edit it? — the site is now used every month by upwards of 400 million people worldwide. But with influence and respect come responsibility, and lately Wikipedia has been criticized from without and within for reflecting a Western, male-dominated mindset similar to the perspective behind the encyclopedias it has replaced. Seeing Wikipedia as The Man, in so many words, is so 2011.

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Reporter Makes Case For Ditching Debt Ceiling : NPR

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

All Things Considered - By Mary Louise Kelly - Jul. 27 (Interview) - In the latest issue of The New Yorker, James Surowiecki argues that the United States doesn't need and shouldn't have a debt ceiling. Mary Louise Kelly talks with Surowiecki about his reasoning.

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Phone hacking row shows News Corp is no ordinary news company

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Jay Rosen - Jul. 20 (Opinion) - Rupert Murdoch's news organisations are not in the news business. What they crave is influence Watching the phone hacking crisis crack wide open over the last few weeks has left me puzzled about its ultimate causes: what is it about News Corp that has produced these events? I don't think we understand very much about this. We can say things like, "Ultimate responsibility goes to the man at the top," meaning Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO. And that sounds right, but it still doesn't explain how any of it happened. "The key people are criminals, liars, or willfully blind..." We could say that, but then we would have to explain how so many of them ended up at one company. Puzzles like these have led many people to the conclusion that there's a culture inside News Corp, that is in some way responsible, and I basically agree with that. Mark Lewis, lawyer for the family of Milly Dowler, said after Rebekah Brooks resigned: "This is not just about one individual but about the culture of an ...

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Debate: The news industry

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - By Jay Rosen, Nicholas Carr, Tom Standage - Jul. 16 (Opinion) - There is no question that the internet is transforming the news industry, just as it has reshaped so many other industries. And, as in those other cases, the internet's impact has both positive and negative aspects. Does this, on balance, strengthen or weaken the news system? This question is not merely of academic interest, or self-interest on the part of journalists. Through an accident of history, the news industry is a largely commercial venture that provides important public goods: serving communities, facilitating public debate and holding those in power to account. This debate will hinge, I suspect, on the effectiveness and sustainability of the new models of accountability journalism that the internet makes possible.

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Robert Fisk: Why I had to leave The Times

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Independent - By Robert Fisk - Jul. 16 (Opinion) - These past two weeks, I have been thinking of what it was like to work for Murdoch, what was wrong about it, about the use of power by proxy. For Murdoch could never be blamed. Murdoch was more caliph than ever, no more responsible for an editorial or a "news" story than a president of Syria is for a massacre – the latter would be carried out on the orders of governors who could always be tried or sacked or sent off as adviser to a prime minister – and the leader would invariably anoint his son as his successor. Think of Hafez and Bashar Assad or Hosni and Gamal Mubarak or Rupert and James. In the Middle East, Arab journalists knew what their masters wanted, and helped to create a journalistic desert without the water of freedom, an utterly skewed version of reality. So, too, within the Murdoch empire.

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NewsTrust - Journalism - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

How to Use the Internet Wisely, for Your Health and Your Country's

Wikipedia and the Shifting Definition of 'Expert'

8 questions that will help define the future of journalism

The Tragedy of Mike Daisey's Lies About China

'This American Life' Retracts Episode on Apple's Suppliers in China

Busting Mr. Daisey

Truth And The World Of Wikipedia Gatekeepers

Behind the Beautiful For­evers

Why Wall Street Should Stop Whining

The New York Times public editor's very public utterance

Best of the Web Today: Bad-Faith Journalism

How will technology influence the news in 2012?

The Post-Truth Campaign

The World Is Ending, Please Update the Home Page

Restoring Factchecking

Craig Newmark driven by philanthropy, fact checking

The facts about the fact checkers

Attack of the Attack Ads: Citizens United and the 2012 Elections

World of Class Warfare - The Poor's Free Ride Is Over

Party Line

A Push to Redefine Knowledge at Wikipedia

Reporter Makes Case For Ditching Debt Ceiling : NPR

Phone hacking row shows News Corp is no ordinary news company

Debate: The news industry

Robert Fisk: Why I had to leave The Times

Behind the Beautiful Forevers