Archive for the 'journalism' Category

fox screws up, innocent family hurt

September 1st, 2005

Sensationalist “journalism” at FOX misidentifies family as terrorists:

The LA Times reports that featured Fox News contributor John Loftus incorrectly identified a La Habra, CA, home as that of a terrorist. The family of five who lives there has been harrassed ever since.

Loftus, whose “Inside Scoop with John Loftus” is a feature of Fox Network News television every Sunday at 11:20 AM, gave the family’s address on the air, saying that a terrorist connected with the July 7 London bombings lived at the address. Directions and satellite photos were briefly available on-line until police intervened and had them taken down.

cbc unplugged

August 28th, 2005

Great source of CBC blogs and podcasts.

Save NPR and PBS

June 14th, 2005

Sign the petition.

Houston Chronicle 1, Bill O’Reilly 0

May 18th, 2005

Fox blabbermouth Bill O’Reilly started ranting about a Houston Chronicle editorial. Except he made the whole thing up:

On The O’Reilly Factor cable television program Tuesday night, the popular host included a segment that took the Houston Chronicle to task for an editorial that had run the same day. The editorial was entitled Cold comfort: Florida’s sex offender law has emotional appeal, but it’s not the best way to stop sexual predators from preying on children.

At the start of the segment, O’Reilly stated that the Chronicle had “taken a lot of shots at me, so it must be left of center.” O’Reilly’s name has appeared only once in a Chronicle editorial, which concerned not O’Reilly, but Fox News’ suit against Al Franken for his use of the phrase “fair and balanced.” The suit was thrown out of court.

O’Reilly then read what he said was a quote from the editorial. Unfortunately, not one word of what O’Reilly read appeared in the Chronicle editorial or anywhere else in the paper. He and his staff apparently confused someone else’s commentary with the Chronicle’s.

Canada Revenue minister April Fools’ locals

April 2nd, 2005

John McCallum told CBC radio he was launching a pilot project in Ottawa called “E-file or Else,” with long delays and even a 5 percent surcharge for paper filers.

we <3 sciam

March 30th, 2005

Scientific American has a great op-ed satirizing creationism:

There’s no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don’t mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there’s no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

fake news

March 19th, 2005

no, not the daily show. the times has picked up on the bush administration’s practice of making fake news reports with fake reporters and passing them off as real:

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The “reporter” covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department’s office of communications.