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Which will be forever unless,

1) Everyone gets over it

or

2) People start boycotting Disney

From about 2003 to 2005, I tried to organize a Disney boycott. But that means giving up Pixar, ESPN, ABC, A&E, History, and all the rest of these. Do you have any idea how I could convince a significant number of people to agree to that?

There seemed to be some misunderstanding so:
According to http://www.cjr.org/resources/
Viacom ownes:
Cable
        MTV
        MTV2
        mtvU
        Nickelodeon
        BET
        Nick at Nite
        TV Land
        NOGGIN
        VH1
        Spike TV
        CMT
        Comedy Central
        Showtime
        The Movie Channel
        Flix
        Sundance Channel
Film
        Paramount Pictures
        Paramount Home Entertainment
Other
        Famous Music

i>Barack Obama explicitly supports Net Neutrality

Ok.

media decentralization,

Which is stupid.

and universal broadband access.

And stupider.

He supports universal file/data formats ("we will put government data online in universally accessible formats");

And stupider still.

and he understands the inherent risks to privacy created by our new technology

So he wants to regulate it. Gotcha.

And if Obama advocates reducing the NASA budget

He does. Obama cuts NASA budget So by by shuttle, shuttle replacement, and hubble, so some poor kids in cities that chased away all their jobs can get a few crumbs..

Furthermore, Barack Obama's policy regarding technology reflects a thorough and deep understanding of the underlying issues pertinent to technology and information. John McCain will never have any personal involvement in creating a technology policy promulgated by his administration; instead he will rely on his staff,

More spin. John McCain graduated with an engineering degree. Obama is a lawyer. Did Obama ever take an integral? Doubt it. But McCain flew jet aircraft for the US Navy.

Finally, to conclude from the fact that Barack Obama has accepted money from the most consistently-Democratic industrial block in the US that he will necessarily back its most outrageous demands is logically spurious.

Obama is supported by everyone major studio head and the head of every major media company. On his web site he has said, that HE WOULD WORK TO ENSURE AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE PROTECTED AROUND THE GLOBE. Period. So, if he's willing to go after the Chinese because they pirate DVDs of software, what do you think he's going to feel about RIAA?

All those rich white kids should pay for music, that's what he's going to say.

Sadly the US probably won't - It looks like Obama will be the next president, and his is planning to gut NASA's manned space program:
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/obamas_nasa_plan_gets_little_p.php

It looks like the Russians or Chinese are our last best hope to find a way off this rock.

McCain may not follow Pat Robertson, but his spiritual advisor Rod Parsley may be as bad or worse. After all, he advocates war against Muslims, prosecuting adulterers and more. Oh, but he's a conservative, so I guess this is acceptable?

It also doesn't help when Wright is taken totally out of context.

I guess that rules out McCain too. After all, McCain's spiritual advisor, Rod Parsley, advocates waging a holy war against Muslims, prosecuting adulterers and compares Planned Parenthood to the Nazis. If that isn't out there and full of hate, I don't know what is?

I guess because he's a republican conservative that this type of thing is OK or expected, but when a democratic candidate goes to a church where the ministor basically says violence begets violence it's much worse, especially when it's taken out of context.

Have you heard of John Hagee? He's a Protestant-supremacist whackbag who things that Catholics are "the great whore" and the Jews in Israel exist to be wiped out in the coming armageddon. When the guy isn't out promoting religious intolerance or genocide, he's John McCain's "spiritual guide" (whatever that means). The funny thing is that McCain doesn't feel any need to distance himself from the guy, he's /proud/ of it. Of course, all of the column inches are being devoted to Obama, but the McCain/Hagee thing is way, way creepier. For one thing, this guy will be influential on McCain if he wins the presidency, and the last thing we need is anyone else promoting stupid incendiary anti-muslim "Crusade" rhetoric within 500 miles of the White House.

http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/the_mccainhagee_connection_1.php

[McCain] is the only one who's proven his courage and loyalty under fire. The others are just talking heads.

That was decades ago, and has very little to do with running a country. Since entering the Senate, he's been a pretty mediocre Senator. He's already denounced his most famous accomplishment, the McCain/Feingold election law. He knows nothing about the economy or domestic policy. He's a part of the Republican machine, which is corrupt as hell and seems to basically exist to deficit spend and pump money into the defence sector (which then pumps it back in the form of campaign contributions, aka bribes). Plus he's old and his politics seems to have more to do with personal vendettas than actually advancing America's interest. God help us all if he wins. And god help the Republican party if they manage to "pull off" 12 years of mismanagement. They may con America into giving them one more shot at the presidency, but their long-term relevance to this country's politics is what's at stake.

The music industry's moves have been terrified reactions to staunch the bleeding of millions of dollars in revenue down the drain

"stanch", not "staunch". See http://www.cjr.org/resources/lc/stanch.php

No you haven't. You have seen a near hit. A collusion is a near miss.


A "near miss" is quite correct - it's a miss which was nearly a hit. See http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html#near , http://www.cjr.org/resources/lc/nearmiss.php .

I've also heard it described as meaning "near" as in "close in space" rather than "nearly", though I can't find a reference for that derivation off hand...

http://www.cjr.org/resources/

OK. The word "wherefore" is equivalent to "why", not "where plus some old shakespeare stuff". Read this article for a quick explanation, or see here for a dictionary definition.

Iran had submitted a draft resolution asking the U.N. to condemn Iraq's chemical weapons use. The U.S. delegate to the U.N. was instructed to lobby friendly delegations in order to obtain a general motion of "no decision" on the resolution. If this was not achievable, the U.S. delegate was to abstain on the issue. Iraq's ambassador met with the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Jeane Kirkpatrick, and asked for "restraint" in responding to the issue - as did the representatives of both France and Britain.

But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq's communist, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former U.S. intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions.

Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.

"My mind is made up because of the facts."
Well then, lets see some of your data to backup that statement. As I've stated earlier, I've included links, that you glibly avoid discussing, to support my point. You simply make a statement as if it's a fact without proof. Here is another link to support the fact of media consolidation. Lets look at what media consolidation is, it is when more and more media outlets, whether they are television, radio, newspaper, etc;, are owned and controlled by a smaller and smaller group of corporations. If you had been paying attention for the last ten years, you would already have known this. Obviously your too busy playing WOW or watching Survivor... I don't know which is worse. Here is an article by Ted Turner where he discusses the folly and danger of media consolidation, terming it a "Loss of democratic debate". Remember when you said media consolidation had nothing to do with Democracy?

"they'll tell you what you want to hear"? That's merely media being responsive to the public interest.
I disagree strongly. "Responsive to the public interest."? Give me a break. Good journalism is supposed to make people question and think, not blindly accept as the dittohead's do. Also, the vast majority of talk radio is spouting this type of right wing jingoistic krap (theres that word again), and guess who owns the stations that play them? Thats right, Clear Channel, Cox, and the rest of the consolidaters. The only real place to find voices of dissent or questioning is on public or "free" radio, those stations not controlled by corporations.

"and I probably watch "Democracy Now" (something that would not exist if "media concentration" claims were true) more than Fox News."
I find that hard to believe, because if you did watch or listen to Democracy Now then you wouldn't have the "world is flat" opinion about media consolidation that you have. Check this link for details. I dare you.

"The studies get "tilted" into meaninglessness when those who make the claim that there is media concentration basically fake their case by not counting most of the media voices. So EASY to make a case that there are too few voices when you arbitrarily toss out most of the voices from being counted."
Thats a good one. You are using that methodology now. As I stated earlier, you are taking the tack that the Bush administration takes when a scientific study comes up they disagree with. They simply dismiss it because they don't like how the data came out. Thats what you are doing here. The internet is full of examples and proof of this. The fact that you argue the point makes me think that you're either:
A) A corporate shill getting paid to post this krap on /.
OR
B) Someone too scared of the truth to research anything, knowing they won't like what they find.
Which is it?
Also, what specifically do you mean by "voices"? Being vague and rhetorical are the weapons of politicians, why don't you run for office?

"The ability to purchase media outlets is part of freedom of the press, not a favor to be granted by the FCC."
The Freedom of the press has nothing to do with creating media monopolies. When a single company owns more media outlets in a given market it gains unfair advantage. You may have trouble understanding this concept... Perhaps you should read up on American history, particulary the beginning of the 20th century during Theodore Roosevelts period. Do you know what a VNR is? That is essentially "fake news" that PR firms create to push a specific point of view of product. These VNR's are then played on local news stations and the average viewer assumes they are "real news" pieces by real journalist

It isn't so much MTV as it is its communication powerhouse parent Viacom... Big V + M$ = Oh noes! Look out Apple!

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/4/objective-cunning ham.asp Re-thinking Objectivity

a snippit:

But our pursuit of objectivity can trip us up on the way to "truth." Objectivity excuses lazy reporting. If you're on deadline and all you have is "both sides of the story," that's often good enough. It's not that such stories laying out the parameters of a debate have no value for readers, but too often, in our obsession with, as The Washington Post's Bob Woodward puts it, "the latest," we fail to push the story, incrementally, toward a deeper understanding of what is true and what is false. Steven R. Weisman, the chief diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times and a believer in the goal of objectivity ("even though we fall short of the ideal every day"), concedes that he felt obliged to dig more when he was an editorial writer, and did not have to be objective. "If you have to decide who is right, then you must do more reporting," he says. "I pressed the reporting further because I didn't have the luxury of saying X says this and Y says this and you, dear reader, can decide who is right."

I didn't know anything about what GP was talking about either. cnet always has a pro-MS tone for my likings most of the time.

Anyway, googling around you can find some very interesting sites that link him with cnet.

In 1999 the Columbia Journalism Review published an article citing the Daily Oklahoman as being the worse newspaper in america. I doubt Gaylord II has improved it much.

Mistake-free copy is exceptionally rare. Despite this, most newspapers rely on the reporter to fact check, simply because verifying every fact of a story takes too much time. The role of a journalist is to report accurate, timely information-- and sometimes, sitting on a good, otherwise solid story because a source can't be recontacted is as much a disservice as printing rumor, innuendo or government propaganda.

Who Owns What might do you as a starting point, but if you find one that has more online media included, I'd like to hear about it too

What, the aliens in the National Enquirer are not real? How about the inch in the article, isn't that what scientists use worldwide?

We forget so often that the chinese government isn't stupid, and maybe not even evil.

Maybe not evil? Are you serious? Please go learn about some of the things the "warm and fuzzy" Chinese government has done before posting such BS.

They have reasons for why they do what they do.

And they are all wrong.

3 mio.? 4 mio.? maybe 5 mio. people could die during an all-china civil unrest.

Is it better to die that to live as a slave? How many millions of people has the Chinese regime already killed in the 50+ years that it has been in power?

China has jammers. Your Channel IST would quickly become little more than a Chinese TV Marti.

Interesting analysis. I wonder what the effect might be on Disney's many subsidiaries.

Parent is incorrect on all accounts (as noted by several good replies). Please, for the love of all that is good in the world, mod him down...

Not only is the parent incorrect about who directed, produced, created Toy Story 2, to suggest that Disney was bought out by Pixar is laughable. Disney is not just Mickey Mouse. Disney owns a hell of a lot of other things...

Maybe I'm reading a little too far into this here.. but wasn't there speculation a while back that Steve Jobs wanted to get in on the cell phone industry? ESPN (owned by Disney) just started its own cell phone company with mobile video (sports highlights) and whatnot.. I don't know, but it seems to me like this is as much a play for Steve Jobs to get his hands into areas he's wanted to get into but hasn't had the appropriate gateway. If you look here at the list of companies Disney actually owns, Steve has access to more than you'd initially think: http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/disney.asp

Actually, it is more complicated than that. The cable company is buying the programming and aggregating it. So, they are buying from someone else. If, for example, you like Nickelodeon you are getting your programming from Viacom. Viacom for their part also sell MTV and MTV2 (among others). Typically Viacom will sell the cable company a bundle that includes MTV, MTV2, VH1, BET, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central. Nickelodeon is only available through such a bundle. Furthermore, they often require that the bundle be made available to all cable subscribers.

Thus one would expect the the cable company will offer a subscriber any combination of these channels for the same rate. The consumer really does not get a cost benefit if the cost for any one or all of those stations are equal. If the consumer is driven by some moral guidelines and really only wants Nickelodeon, then this form of unbundling will provide benefit (but no cost savings over having all those channels).

The ownership web is very convoluted. It gets messier when you realize that the same company may own (directly or indirectly) cable providers, broadcast stations, and cable programming. This puts DISH into a bind (as happened previously). DISH will be asking for content from cable programming who is incentivized to make it more expensive so that their cable provider is a better value. The FCC would need to require both cable providers and cable programming to allow unbundled channels. This would add freedom to the market, but would most likely result in an initial increase in rates followed by reduction of rates with the dissappearance of many channels.

From the Columbia Journalism Review website:

Film

        * Sony Pictures Entertainment
        * Columbia TriStar
        * Sony Pictures Classics
        * Screen Gems

Television

        * Sony Pictures Television
        * AXN
        * Animax Japan
        * SoapCity
        * GAME SHOW NETWORK (50% with Liberty Media)
        * Movielink (jointly owned with Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. Studios)

Music

        * Sony BMG Music Entertainment (50% with Bertelsmann)
            Labels include: Arista Records, BMG Classics, BMG Heritage, BMG International Companies, Columbia Records, Epic Records, J Records, Jive Records, LaFace Records, Legacy Recordings, RCA Records, RCA Victor Group, RLG - Nashville, Sony Classical, Sony Music International, Sony Music Nashville, Sony Wonder, So So Def Records, Verity Records
        * Sony/ATV Music Publishing (joint venture with Michael Jackson)
        * Music Choice (venture with Time Warner, EMI, Motorola, Microsoft, and several cable companies: Cox, Comcast, Adelphia, Time Warner Cable)

Other

        * Sony Electronics
        * Sony Computer Entertainment America
        * PlayStation
        * 989 Sports
        * Sony Connect Inc.
        * Metreon

if you limit the amount each person/group is able to contribute, then it levels the playing field for speech.

No, it doesn't. People and groups with enough money don't need to "contribute" it to anyone - they can buy their own advertisements and commericals. It's only us poor schlubs who have to give money to other groups before we can pool enough in one place to buy an ad. Limiting political contributions just tilts the playing field even more.

It's the equivalent to saying that the guy who can buy a 100 foot tall speaker is just exercising his free speech by drowning everybody else out.

So we'll ban 100 foot tall speakers... or will we? People are going to hear about candidates and issues somehow, and until the collective IQ rises a few dozen points my bet is that "somehow" will still be "biased mass media" - your 100 foot tall speakers. You can't ban biased political media; you can just try to restrict who gets to produce it - and all the proposed restrictions I've seen are likely to backfire. They hit the poor first (by limiting political contributions and thus restricting political speech to non-collective entities) and the non-connected rich next (by restricting political speech to "the news" rather than the commercials). Here are the untouched 100 foot tall speakers that will still be able to drown everybody else out; the best we can hope for after "campaign finance reform" is that the individual oligarch's biases will cancel each other out.

Just because the NY Times, CNN, the LA Times, and the Washington Post dare to print something other than Undying Praise for the Fatherland does not make them left-leaning. It makes them journalists doing their jobs. I think the non-U.S. news coverage of the same events is more aggressive, such as the CBC, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the BBC. I take the truth as an average of these sources, along with some help from FAIR and the Columbia Journalism Review.

If I want left-leaning, I can go to the Independent Media Center, the Alternative News Network, The Raw Story, or the Fifth Estate.

"With high federal offices being given to the wives, sons and daughters of senior members of the Bush administration, the Hearst Corporation executives that publish Popular Mechanics magazine probably didn't worry about the ethical considerations of hiring a cousin of Michael Chertoff, a former Assistant Attorney General and the new Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as senior researcher."

Is it not interesting that the Hearst Corporation http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/hearst.asp thinks a person from the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security is better suited to tell the truth than a real, educated journalist? (It is a good idea to visit cjr and educate yourself on what other media stations are likely only to publish what SDHS approves, like "National Geographic":
http://www.terrorize.dk/911/pentagon2/

Is it not also interesting that their article that is supposed to debulk the truth, read page 6 in that so-called "facst" article, in no way what so ever proves that a plane hit anywhere near the Pentagon, only provdes loose slander?
http://www.terrorize.dk/911/pentagon1/

Is it not nice to know that most of the free world view it as a fact that the fires in the Pentagon were started by arson?

Is it not comforting to know that most of the, in reality, free world now - like 63% of Canada - now view it as a FACT proven beyond all doubt that WTF 1, 2 and 7 were destroyed by controlled demolition?

http://www.terrorize.dk/911/
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/10/326074.html
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20051026 163300114

There's much more to Disney than the Disney name:
http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/disney.asp#movies

It may be you don't like any movies by any of those companies. Just wanted to point out that it's a bigger population of movies than one might first think. Of that list of companies, I think Miramax probably has the best reputation. It's a good bet you like something by them.

You raise a good argument that contentious issues are hard to cover but bad references are quickly removed. So the burden of proof is on the editor which can be quite hard sometimes.

For example - The reason why Clinton's trashing of the White house was not covered in the Clinton article is that the entire affair was fabricated. (reference below)

"According to statements from the General Services Administration that were reported on May 17, little if anything out of the ordinary occurred during the transition, and 'the condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy.'" (http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1689)

Further the Clinton article does have major scandals listed and many major scandals have entire pages of details dedicated to them. Clinton's impeachment is mentioned in the 3rd paragraph, scandals have an entire section in the table of contents, and the section on his presidency mentions shady business deals, marijuana use, and draft dodging. It really does not seem "Whitewashed".

The Bush article may seem overly negative to you but from a world and historical perpective Bush is really amazingly corrupt and disingenuous. As a result the article contains more detail on him. Part of this is because people feel that American media has really not reported on Bush's failing to the level that Clintons every move was analyzed.

(Try reading some media watchdog organization newsletters like http://www.cjr.org/ (only one remembered offhand) which critique papers for disinformation.)

The shuttle was originally sold as a cheaper way to get things into space. It's not meaningfully cheaper. They said it would cost $28 million per launch. As of January 1986, (in the same 1980 dollars), it cost over $200 million per launch. They said it would turn around in seventy-two hours. As for reliability, how many fatal failure modes does the shuttle design have? What sort of improvement over the final Apollo design is that?

Which of its original design goals has the shuttle actually met?

Like a proper little Darwin

Like a proper little Darwin

I'm glad that you're admitting your position is conjecture, because then it will easier to admit that it's wrong.

The "if you look hard enough" argument doesn't hold water here simply because you don't have to look very hard to find that the overwhelming evidence supports the reality of human-mediated global warming. Just because there happens to be extreme, obstinate polarization on an issue (and lots of google hits on each side), doesn't mean both sides deserve equal consideration. Unfortunately this is exactly what happens in the press in a misguided to effort to give "equal time"-- see this great piece on this topic at the Columbia Journalism Review.

There certainly is a sociology to science, and some truth to what you suggest--that scientists are biased toward proving themselves right. But, in fact, Kevin Dunbar has done a lot research looking at how scientists reason, and found that the more senior the scientist, the more skeptical and pessimistic they are about the import or validity of new results from their lab. With increased experience comes some jading from having seen enough studies not work out. Plus, with increased stature comes a higher perceived standard that one's work must meet, more attention and scrutiny from fellow luminaries, and just a lack of need to "prove oneself" to the field. So when the heavy-hitters in the National Academy of Sciences band together to say something, it pays to take them very seriously.

Anyway, when scientists compete theoretically, it tends to be over pedantic aspects that may be essential to the field, but have little bearing on the "big message." And as your parent poster notes, in the case of global warming, you're talking about the unanimous consesus of whole bodies of scientists--thousands of scientists in dozens of subfields. That's not the kind of position that can be dismissed with "oh, they just want to make themselves look good."

Even worse are the lazy journalists who report it. After a New York Times piece last week claimed bisexual males were "lying" based on results from a highly questionable study, I reminded their editors of this excellent piece Blinded by Science in Columbia Journalism Review.

This kind of sloppy reporting is perfect for lazy journalists-- it's a three-for-one deal. They get to break the news, and then later they have a second story when real experts point out the flaws, and a third when the people finally get discredited. More evidence of the shameful state of journalism in this country.

Here's why Rathergate and Easongate aren't covered: the right-wing blogosphere is full of shit and partisan to the point of gleefully ignoring facts which don't fit into their desired conclusion. The Rathergate situation is notable for being the first time in any of the big right-wing blogosphere campaigns I've witnessed that there has been any grain of truth to the story. Hint, hint: anybody who still superscripts the "th" in "Rather" is a total fucking dumbass since the proportional-width typewriters of the '60s could do that. The Ward Churchill issue was pressed by the mainstream media, so doesn't count.

Yeah, because a bigger network would never take over a failing network just to get a few strong series and gut the rest in favor of novel programming. Why, you'd have to be NBC looking at Sci-Fi to do something like that; Sci-Fi would never be involved in such a ... hey, wait a minute.

Man, you know nothing about media convergence, do you?

UPN, Paramount and the Star Trek franchise are all owned by Viacom
Sci-fi and NBC are owned by General Electric and Vivendi.

Yeah, or like Sonic should be on the ... hey, waitaminute again...

False analogy: Sega backed away from the console market. When Paramount gives up ownership of all it's television networks, then you can make that analogy (hint: not gonna happen).

Yeah, because a bigger network would never take over a failing network just to get a few strong series and gut the rest in favor of novel programming. Why, you'd have to be NBC looking at Sci-Fi to do something like that; Sci-Fi would never be involved in such a ... hey, wait a minute.

Man, you know nothing about media convergence, do you?

UPN, Paramount and the Star Trek franchise are all owned by Viacom
Sci-fi and NBC are owned by General Electric and Vivendi.

Yeah, or like Sonic should be on the ... hey, waitaminute again...

False analogy: Sega backed away from the console market. When Paramount gives up ownership of all it's television networks, then you can make that analogy (hint: not gonna happen).

Yeah, because a bigger network would never take over a failing network just to get a few strong series and gut the rest in favor of novel programming. Why, you'd have to be NBC looking at Sci-Fi to do something like that; Sci-Fi would never be involved in such a ... hey, wait a minute.

Man, you know nothing about media convergence, do you?

UPN, Paramount and the Star Trek franchise are all owned by Viacom
Sci-fi and NBC are owned by General Electric and Vivendi.

Yeah, or like Sonic should be on the ... hey, waitaminute again...

False analogy: Sega backed away from the console market. When Paramount gives up ownership of all it's television networks, then you can make that analogy (hint: not gonna happen).

This may be an interesting read for anyone concerned by scientific coverage in the media [cjr.org]. It basicly says unless you're a scientist it's very hard to determine what's a well thought out theory and what's not, and journalists try so hard to balance the coverage of the well known and unknown that they often will given too much exposure to a theory well understood in scientific circles to be junk.

Columbia Journalism Review | Blog-Gate

Yes, CBS screwed up badly in 'Memogate' -- but so did those who covered the affair

By Corey Pein

Bloggers have claimed the attack on CBS News as their Boston Tea Party, a triumph of the democratic rabble over the lazy elites of the MSM (that's mainstream media to you). But on close examination the scene looks less like a victory for democracy than a case of mob rule. On September 8, just weeks before the presidential election, 60 Minutes II ran a story about how George W. Bush got preferential treatment as he glided through his time in the Texas Air National Guard. The story was anchored on four memos that, it turns out, were of unknown origin. By the time you read this, the independent commission hired by the network to examine the affair may have released its report, and heads may be rolling. Dan Rather and company stand accused of undue haste, carelessness, excessive credulity, and, in some minds, partisanship, in what has become known as "Memogate."

But CBS's critics are guilty of many of the very same sins. First, much of the bloggers' vaunted fact-checking was seriously warped. Their driving assumptions were often drawn from flawed information or based on faulty logic. Personal attacks passed for analysis. Second, and worse, the reviled MSM often followed the bloggers' lead. As mainstream media critics of CBS piled on, rumors shaped the news and conventions of sourcing and skepticism fell by the wayside. Dan Rather is not alone on this one; respected journalists made mistakes all around.
Full article...

Columbia Journalism Review | Blog-Gate

Yes, CBS screwed up badly in 'Memogate' -- but so did those who covered the affair

By Corey Pein

Bloggers have claimed the attack on CBS News as their Boston Tea Party, a triumph of the democratic rabble over the lazy elites of the MSM (that's mainstream media to you). But on close examination the scene looks less like a victory for democracy than a case of mob rule. On September 8, just weeks before the presidential election, 60 Minutes II ran a story about how George W. Bush got preferential treatment as he glided through his time in the Texas Air National Guard. The story was anchored on four memos that, it turns out, were of unknown origin. By the time you read this, the independent commission hired by the network to examine the affair may have released its report, and heads may be rolling. Dan Rather and company stand accused of undue haste, carelessness, excessive credulity, and, in some minds, partisanship, in what has become known as "Memogate."

But CBS's critics are guilty of many of the very same sins. First, much of the bloggers' vaunted fact-checking was seriously warped. Their driving assumptions were often drawn from flawed information or based on faulty logic. Personal attacks passed for analysis. Second, and worse, the reviled MSM often followed the bloggers' lead. As mainstream media critics of CBS piled on, rumors shaped the news and conventions of sourcing and skepticism fell by the wayside. Dan Rather is not alone on this one; respected journalists made mistakes all around.
Full article...

BBC is doing it's readers a disservice by calling the second article "an alternative view". It's not an alternative, because it has almost no relevant informative content that would help answer the question in the title of this discussion.

Mr. Olshansky just gives a long history of people believing that immortality can be achieved using som quackery (since they lived in quacky times), then just claims as a fact that there is no reason to believe we can dramatically extend our lifespan. He doesn't give any evidence to that, doesn't provide any arguments or counter-arguments, his strongest "argument" is that gerontologists will not succeed, because a certain Ko Hung, a famous Chinese alchemist living in the 3rd century, didn't. And then, again without arguments he finishes his diatribe by saying the same boring lie that we should not work on extending life, but improve physical and mental health instead.

BBC should be doing analysis, not just striving for the false balance. Read this excellent article by Chris Mooney: Blinded By Science: How Balanced Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality. Even though an uninformed person may think that it's Aubrey de Grey (with his scary beard) is on the fringe, in fact the point applies to his opponent.

And if you don't have time to read another FA, this picture makes the point almost as well.

1. The US government has a history of using its citizens in classified research wihtout their consent:
   
   "From the end of world War II well in to the 1970s, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Defense Department, the military services, the CIA and other agencies used prisoners, drug addicts, mental patients, college students, soldiers, even bar patrons, in a vast range of government-run experiments to test the effects of everything from radiation, LSD and nerve gas to intense electric shocks and prolonged 'sensory deprivation.' Some of the human guinea pigs knew what they were getting into; many others did not even know they were being experimented on."
   
   The Cold War Experiments , Budiansky, Goode and Gest,
   U.S News and World Report , January 24, 1994
2. The US government is good at keeping involuntary experiments on its citizens secret. The news media will not report it:
   
   "Suddenly, at the close of 1993, the public was bombarded with "news" about the feeding of radioactive substances to pregnant women and mentally retarded students, about the unethical irradiation of workers, soldiers, medical patients, and prison inmates, and about the government's own internal fears that these experiments had 'a little of the Buchenwald touch.'
   ...
   I am among those who persistently tried to get national media coverage of this outrageous example of government wrongdoing. To say that the media were reluctant to listen would be an understatement. The fact is that, for more than a decade, documentation was ignored and facts were misreported."
   
   The Radiation Story No One Would Touch,
   Geoffrey Sea, Columbia Journalism Review, March / April 1994
3. When the US government conducts experiments on secretly influencing human behavior, using 'unwitting', i.e. involuntary, test subjects is considered essential:
   
   "... On December 17, 1963, Deputy Director for Plans Helms wrote a memo to the DDCI, who with the Inspector General and the Executive Director-Comptroller had opposed the covert testing. He noted two aspects of the problem: (1) 'for over a decade the Clandestine Services has had the mission of maintaining a capability for influencing human behavior;' and (2) 'testing arrangements in furtherance of this mission should be as operationally realistic and yet as controllable as possible.' Helms argued that the individuals must be 'unwitting' as this was 'the only realistic method of maintaining the capability, considering the intended operational use of materials to influence human behavior as the operational targets will certainly be unwitting. Should the subjects of the testing not be unwitting, the program would only be 'pro forma' resulting in a 'false sense of accomplishment and readiness.' ' [Memorandum for the Record prepared by the Inspector General, 5/15/63]"
   
   Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Behavior Modification,
   Appendix A, XVII. Testing And Use Of Chemical
   And Biological Agents By The Intelligence Community,
   Joint Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence,
   U.S. Senate, 95th Congress, 1977
4. The US government is currently conducting experiments to investigate the ability of modulated beamed energy, including electromagnetic, to influence human behavior:
   
   "Scores of new contracts have been let, and scientists, aided by government research on the 'bioeffects' of beamed energy, are searching the electromagnetic and sonic spectrums for wavelengths that can affect human behavior."
   
   Wonder Weapons: The Pentagon's quest for nonlethal arms is amazing. But is it smart?, archived copy

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/6/mooney-science.as p Screw you, you are wrong.

Have you ever seen a crack baby?

Have you? According to researchers, the "crack baby" is a myth. Which isn't to say crack is not harmful, but the effects of having addicts for parents might be far worse than in utereo exposure itself.

This isn't just some plant god gave us to smoke.

No, it was meant to be chewed. This use of the coca leaf was practised for hundreds of years without the nasty side effects we see with crack.

It flat out kills people and ruins whole country's.

While it certainly has killed people (as has alcohol and other drugs), the ruin of countries tends to come not from the use of the plant, but by the war between the people growing and those who want to stop it. Some of the latter have motives just as dubious as those making money from the drugs.

Crack hit the streets in 1984, and by 1987 the press had run more than 1,000 stories about it, many focusing on the plight of so-called crack babies. The handwringing over these children started in September 1985, when the media got hold of Dr. Ira Chasnoff's New England Journal of Medicine article suggesting that prenatal cocaine exposure could have a devastating effect on infants. Only twenty-three cocaine-using women participated in the study, and Chasnoff warned in the report that more research was needed. But the media paid no heed. Within days of the first story, CBS News found a social worker who claimed that an eighteen-month-old crack-exposed baby she was treating would grow up to have "an IQ of perhaps fifty" and be "barely able to dress herself."

Soon, images of the crack epidemic's "tiniest victims" -- scrawny, trembling infants -- were flooding television screens. Stories about their bleak future abounded. One psychologist told The New York Times that crack was "interfering with the central core of what it is to be human." ...

But the day never came. Crack babies, it turns out, were a media myth, not a medical reality. This is not to say that crack is harmless. Infants exposed to cocaine in the womb, including the crystallized version known as crack, weigh an average of 200 grams below normal at birth, ... "For a healthy, ten-pound Gerber baby this is no big deal," explains Barry Lester, the principal investigator. But it can make things worse for small, sickly infants.

Lester has also found that the IQs of cocaine-exposed seven-year-olds are four and a half points lower on average, and some researchers have documented other subtle problems. Perhaps more damaging than being exposed to cocaine itself is growing up with addicts, who are often incapable of providing a stable, nurturing home. But so-called crack babies are by no means ruined. Most fare far better, in fact, than children whose mothers drink heavily while pregnant..."