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Journalistic standards have become nothing more than an idealistic concept. Take the Covington kid was tried and convicted in the media for what was effectively face crime. Even a basic check of the facts would have quickly shown that the kid was innocent of the accusations laid against him. Unfortunately it took a $250 million dollar lawsuit against the Washington Post to get them to correct their previous coverage.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Their journalists finally remembered their 'standards' and wrote up a much more accurate story. Too bad it took a $250 million defamation lawsuit in order for it to happen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Fact of the matter is that journalism is dying because people don't trust journalists.

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_...

If you don't trust someone you don't value them. If you don't value someone you will try to avoid paying for their services.

They are starting new sites with a focus on local (State) level news. Most local news sites are owned by a handful of large companies.

https://www.businessinsider.co...

These people are obviously responding to a need for news that the public feels isn't being met.

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_...
https://www.acsh.org/news/2018...
https://thehill.com/homenews/m...

Simply because a website sources some of their news from large national sources does not make it fake news. Local news companies source stories from Reuters and the Associated Press all the time. Why do you think you can find the exact same article in a range of news outlets?

Presuming news to be fake simply because it comes from a different political perspective is hubris at best.

I do not think "false equivocation" means what you think it means señor anonymous coward.

You might find this website useful: https://www.cjr.org/language_c...

I know that terms like equivocation, equivocate, and false equivocation are used with little understanding in the media world, so it is understandable that you are confused.

Also, don't hide behind the AC, be bold.
Do you do run around in the real world wearing a bandana over your face?

Buzzfeed is the source downstream of all the other press agencies pushing this. The news came out that the author of the article said he didn't see them, even though he claimed he did.> have another source if you want.

This same reporter has a long line of making up bullshit.

Real questions you should be asking, what are they trying to distract from.

Unsurprisingly this is written by Farhad Manjoo, known for being a liar in the pocket of industry:

https://www.csmonitor.com/Book...
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/f...

Stick to same old ideas (i.e. stay conservative) and with every second you are more and more wrong until you're standing in the middle of the street shouting anti-gay slogans wearing nothing but a Reagan-Thatcher "love" shirt.

But it's actually Right wing == fake news and disinformation.

http://www.cjr.org/analysis/br...

Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world.
This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.
While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric.
Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites.
But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.

Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of opposing media were also a central theme of right-wing media.
Rather than "fake news" in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading.
Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it.
The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent "Bowling Green massacre."

While you're making that post, I'll remind you that you were standing up for gawker when they did this. Making the claims that people shouldn't be going after gawker for a "joke." And defending them when Sam "bring back bullying" Biddle made that statement, and that it was unfair to go after Biddle as well because it was also a "joke."

If you're asking for examples of "what the fact checkers debunk" having a less than optimal relationship with "what was said," it's been something that's been an ongoing problem for years. Here's two examples of critical views of them from 2012, from the Columbia Journalism Review and NPR, and the only thing that appears to have particularly changed much since then is who benefits most from not bringing up the important issue of "Who will fact-check the fact-checkers?"

There's a very good reason we don't allow news services that kind of power, and while I'm glad we finally got confirmation about it, let's not cheer it on to the point where this becomes normal.

Richard Nixon would beg to disagree. Not only do news services not disallow illegally-obtained information, using such is a fairly reliable way of getting a Pulitzer Prize. Especially, if the target is a RethugliKKKan, of course.

Had Assange embarrassed Trump instead of spraying water over Her Beautiful Wickedness, he would've been praised as a hero along with these guys.

one great scoop doesn't excuse months of lies, outright lies, stories we already knew, and some plainly pure bullshit.

Notable absence of any citations here...

Need I point out the irony in myself making an unsubstantiated claim about the lack of need for substantiation, you asking for substantiation, and then making your own unsubstantiated claim and getting modded up to +5 for it? Yeah, I think I do.

Here's an article about CNN firing another group of reporters, despite making more than enough money to pay them. They've had several rounds of this in recent years, firing their investigative staff, with the stated reason being a realization that they just weren't necessary anymore.

US election law isn't really equipped to deal with an entity with FB size and reach

NY Times and other national newspapers had a similar reach within the US only a short while ago... And their electoral endorsements mattered — and were actively sought-out by the politicians. Maybe, not so much any more, but there was never anything illegal or even unethical about it. You have an opinion — you voice it. If you happen to have a bigger megaphone, good for you...

Is that unlawful coordination?

Why can the media endorse a candidate, but not other corporations?

Excellant points. I agree corporations can endorse a candidate, just like newspaper can endorse a candidate. Th question is where is the line between endorsing and contributing to a campaign? It's also illegal, IIRC, to tell employees to act on behalf of a candidate or reimburse them for contributions. Would that apply to acting against a candidate rates than endorsing one? I don't know, and Federal election law is very complicated so a corporation wading into an election rates than setting up a PAC to do the same thing is, IMHO, something they nee dot be very careful to avoid running afoul of the law. It's simply easier to create a PAC and buy access on FB than do it as FB.

US election law isn't really equipped to deal with an entity with FB size and reach

NY Times and other national newspapers had a similar reach within the US only a short while ago... And their electoral endorsements mattered — and were actively sought-out by the politicians. Maybe, not so much any more, but there was never anything illegal or even unethical about it. You have an opinion — you voice it. If you happen to have a bigger megaphone, good for you...

Is that unlawful coordination?

Why can the media endorse a candidate, but not other corporations?

This is not run-of-the-mill stuff, It is "need to know" type info of the most sensitive nature.

I wish we knew that. With the way our government has expanded the classification of documents to cover stuff that isn't the least bit sensitive in the military or diplomatic sense, there's no telling what these "classified" documents were about.

In 2011 alone, 97 MILLION classification decisions were made.

http://www.cjr.org/second_read...

"Official secrets have been reproducing faster than a basket of mongooses thanks to the miracle of “derivative classification,” and this rapid propagation has compounded the maintenance costs. Whenever information stamped as classified is folded into a new document—either verbatim or in paraphrased form—that new derivative document is born classified. Derivative classification—and the fact that nobody ever got fired for overusing the classified stamp—means that 92.1 million “classification decisions” were made in FY 2011, according to a government report, a 20 percent increase over FY 2010. Once created, your typical secret is a stubborn thing. The secret-makers’ reluctance to declassify their trove is legendary: In 1997, 204 million pages were declassified, but since 9/11 only an average of 33.5 million pages have been declassified annually."

prisoner exchange all seems to be heading in the right direction

You call that horse trading the right direction? It was a travesty of the rule of law. The US released convicted felons in exchange of Jason. It was never about Jason or press freedom or simply the human rights of an American. It wasn't even about the nuclear deal. It was all about kowtowing to the terrorists.

Just like we did with Germany after WW2 and the Soviet Union after the Cold War.

Just like? We partitioned and occupied the shit out of Germany. We still have military bases there. We still have military presence in Bulgaria, former little brother of SU and we now have Poland, the Baltic nations, Romania and Hungary as our allies. We fucking disintegrated their fucking empire.

Liberty doesn't win through the phoney "deals". The British Crown didn't "deal" with us until we captured Corn-fucking-wallis.

allow Iran to rejoin the international community

What community? From their point of view there is no such thing as "international". Islamic terrorists has no modern equivalent notion of "nation". It's Caliphate vs. Infidel-i-stan.

we have to be vigilant

It's hard to remain vigilant while stabbing yourself.

Science reporting is bad because reporters are lazy and rewrite press releases.

Science reporting is bad because major news outlets have eliminated their budget for people who can do more than this. Thirty years ago many US daily newspapers had dedicated science reporters who put out a weekly "science" section for the paper and covered big science stories as they arose. These reporters had a high degree of familiarity with science topics because this was their beat. The dedicated science journalist and the weekly science supplement are well on their way to becoming extinct.

This is part of a general shift away from expensive, financially speculative "shoe leather journalism" toward cheap, profitable "opinion journalism". This is why on breaking news stories you'll see broadcast news services filling up time with frank speculation, which is the cheapest to produce kind of "information" there is. The intersection of slashed news-gathering capability and a 7x24 news cycle leaves them in a situation like having a half pat of butter to spread on a whole loaf of bread.

This research clearly shows, the comments must be regulated — to ensure, only the certified experts are allowed to express opinions, and that all different points of view are fairly represented. The current so-called "freedom" is, obviously, putting us in danger — and it is over-rated anyway.

To keep the "playing field" level, the hitherto unregulated online news-sources (which also attract the most dangerous comments) shall be subjected to the same rules as TV-broadcasters, thus shutting down the smaller and annoyingly quirky ones among them. The respected (and, incidentally, government-supporting) establishments will thus be (smartly) helped.

Dissemination of information deemed incorrect by the benevolent and omniscient regulators, or failures to represent all points of view fairly, shall lead to the withdrawals of certification and any other licenses — easy to achieve without much fuss because a license, by definition is a permission granted by the Executive, and can be withdrawn (or not-renewed) without having to convince the skeptical Judiciary. Anybody talking about the First Amendment shall be ignored (and put on a watch-list) as a fringe crazy — this is not the 60-ies, you can not protest like that .

Regulation on slashdot hasn't worked for sometime now, though. The level of group think here is astounding. Every now and then I see a 10+ year old article on "This day on Slashdot" and notice just how much better the comments use to be on Slashdot compared to all the +5 insightful one-liners we get these days. Clearly, the mod system hasn't scaled well. Something new needs to be thought up.

This research clearly shows, the comments must be regulated — to ensure, only the certified experts are allowed to express opinions, and that all different points of view are fairly represented. The current so-called "freedom" is, obviously, putting us in danger — and it is over-rated anyway.

To keep the "playing field" level, the hitherto unregulated online news-sources (which also attract the most dangerous comments) shall be subjected to the same rules as TV-broadcasters, thus shutting down the smaller and annoyingly quirky ones among them. The respected (and, incidentally, government-supporting) establishments will thus be (smartly) helped.

Dissemination of information deemed incorrect by the benevolent and omniscient regulators, or failures to represent all points of view fairly, shall lead to the withdrawals of certification and any other licenses — easy to achieve without much fuss because a license, by definition is a permission granted by the Executive, and can be withdrawn (or not-renewed) without having to convince the skeptical Judiciary. Anybody talking about the First Amendment shall be ignored (and put on a watch-list) as a fringe crazy — this is not the 60-ies, you can not protest like that .

GamerGate is not about harassment or women. Here is a statistical analysis of #GamerGate tweets. Here is a case of GamerGate tracking down a harasser, and Sarkeesian refusing to report him. Here is a timeline of the many grievances #GamerGate supporters have against gaming journalists. Here is the transparent, open place we track our emails to advertisers on corrupt sites. Here is a blog about the corruption. Here is a discussion of one of the scum at Gawker. Here is my earlier Slashdot comment on media bias surrounding GamerGate.

Despite the many, many articles putting the word GamerGate next to the words "misogyny", "wu", harassment" and the like there is no evidence -- No Evidence -- actually associating GamerGate with any of those things, save a very tenuous link related to how the hashtag was coined and some third party trolls who it turns out harass GamerGate supporters more than GamerGate opposers.

This is yet another example of how the once great Slashdot has fallen. I can remember a time where to be moded up, you needed to have great depth in your thought or informative support with links, or really, really clever/funny. Now, apparently you just have to be gratuitously liberal.

Let me bite the cough, interesting troll for a second. How is Murdoch trying to destroy the US? By providing an alternative point of view than offered by the other 4 networks? That is bad why? I thought smart, informed people, like people who read this forum seem to think they are, LIKE to see differing viewpoints then weigh them. I thought smart, informed people would be against just a small group of people controlling all thought. It doesn't bother you that most media members with a near monolithic bias control what you read, see, hear? You want there to be less choice?

Or is it, you think Fox news is inherently more inaccurate. Like say, in the Trayvon Martin case where NBC altered the 911 tape to make it sound like Zimmerman said something racist, when he did not? Not to mention the other 3 letter networks biasing opinion by showing a picture of a sweeter Trayvon when he was younger, not the larger man he grew into. Or, failing to mention he was suspended from school, his racists facebook presence, or the fact that the neighborhood in question had been terrorized by recent crime and he was walking near windows? In the whole debacle, on Fox got it right and reported something near the truth. (whether the shooting was justified is another matter. Shouldn't we at least have the correct facts?"

Or, if you hate the uber-rich using their money so much to influence media, then can you explain the absence of complaining on these forums about George Soros giving million in grants to fund left leaning journalists. Not to mention the undue influence and bias of Hollywood/tv elite doing the same thing. Or, is it just only bad in your "mind" when people from outside your narrow perspective do these things?

Perhaps you should look in the mirror first. Perhaps YOU are the shallow minded one, who only reads from biased, dishonest sources. Perhaps YOU need to broaden your outlook to other forms of thought, and not be so very scared of challenging ideas. Perhaps YOU should understand that the US needs far more saving from the likes of NBC than FOX.

Or, perhaps I should stop even dreaming about it because this is modern slashdot, where ideas and support does not matter.

-Maize

Ps. Notice the supporting links I used were from more liberal sources?

> And in adjusted dollars, IBM was triple the size

Not quite. See the correction of the original source of that:
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/misleading_and_incomplete_cove.php

You really really don't know how the world works, do you?

As for no resources, I don't suppose you've stop to think about where the people who make your (non food) goods live, where the hospital you'll drive to for care as you age will be, where the doctor who prescribes your medicine will get his education, etc, etc. You depend heavily on the productive output of cities. Furthermore unless you're paying the big bucks for Satellite or one of those fancy long range tight beams then the reason you have internet is gov't subsidies paid for by city dwellers.

Oh, and there's lots of cities in Europe that are doing just fine, thank you.

But hey, don't let reality get in the way of a good 'ole libertarian rant.

What about: you're noticing it more because Fox does it more? There's been several studies, notably from Columbia School of Journalism, where Fox scored very poorly on an objective metric. For example, Fox was compared to various TV and print sources, from the Wall Street Journal to Al Jazeera, on a single standard - whether they got the titles and discriptors of their quoted source people and interview subjects right - that is, if they said somebody was a Psychiatrist, did that person actually have that degree, or was it maybe in Psychology or Sociology instead - If they said somebody was a retired Colonel in the US Air Force, was that person actually in long enough to retire, and did they make that rank, and so on. Did they call the Third Assistant Dean of Women's Studies at Stamford, the Dean of English at Stanford? Fox scored very low on that study (incidentally, NPR did better than PRI, but the top of the list was the BBC, which beat both the WSJ and the Christian Science Monitor). The range was very broad, with the top institutions getting these details right about 98-99% of the time, and yet Fox was one of only two news sources which had a week where they were actually wrong more often than right on that particular metric. The other one was the aforementioned Al Jazeera.

You can probably find most of the studies that involve Fox by using the search function built into this page: http://www.cjr.org/ (Columbia Journalism Review), although some papers may not be indexed, and I won't be at all surprised if many of the primary sources are paywalled. If they are, I hope some person with access from within the University system can help with more info. The general feud that has developed between Fox anf the CSJ is well known, and I'm not claiming either side is completely free of biases, but some things stand out - I remember the attribution accredations study because it confined itself to a particular metric that was as well defined as most metrics in the hard sciences.

In Iowa, emails of teachers/professors are considered a part of public record and can be requested. I know that Iowa probably has different laws.

The media asked for emails of an administrator of the Des Moines school district and the emails were released.

http://www.cjr.org/resources/?c=sony

Sony Pictures Entertainment (Film)
Columbia Tristar Motion Picture Group
Columbia Pictures
Sony Pictures Classics
Screen Gems
TriStar Pictures
Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia
Columbia Films Producciones Espanolas
Columbia Pictures Producciones Mexico
Sony Pictures Animation
Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive
Sony Pictures Studios
Sony Pictures Technologies
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Sony Pictures Releasing and Sony Pictures Releasing International
Sony Music
Columbia/Epic Label Group
American Recordings
Columbia Records
Epic Records
Roc Nation
Star Time International
RCA/JIVE Label Group
Arista Records
Battery Records Black Seal
J Records
Jive Records
LaFace Records
Polo Grounds
RCA Records
Verity Gospel Music Group
Volcano Entertainment
Provident Label Group
Beach Street Records
Essential Records
Flicker Records
Reunion Records
Sony Music Commercial Music Group
Legacy Recordings
MASTERWORKS
RCA Red Seal
RCA Victor
Sony Classical
Sony Music Latin
Day 1
Sony Music Latin
Sony Music Nashville
Arista Nashville
BNA Records
Columbia Nashville
RCA Nashville
Music Choice Video and Mustic Network
Sony/ATV Music Publishing
SYCO (Partnership)
VEVO (Partnership)
Sony Pictures Television Group
Crackle
SET Africa
SET India
SET Latin America
SET Max
SET PIX
SET Portugal
SET Russia
SET Singapore
SET en Veo (Spain)
SAB
AXN
AXN Mystery
Animax
Channel 8
Cinemax (Latin America)
Cinemax Brazil (Latin America)
Cinemax Prime (Latin America)
FEARnet (US)
GSN (US)
HBO Brazil (Latin America)
HBO Caribe (Latin America)
HBO Family (Latin America)

Oil is fungible

"Oil is a fungible commodity, sold on the global market to the highest bidder, as McAuliff points out."

It has nothing to do with some grand conspiracy. It's a simple matter of supply and demand. America is competing on the world market for cheap energy. The locality of drilling only determines who gets first sale profits and the quality of the crude. Other than that, the highest bidder gets the oil. Simple as that.

Now personally, I think we should maintain our strategic reserve for times of natural disasters and regional conflict (war). The idea of tapping into it to spook the speculators is flat out wrong. It's also not working anymore. The hedge fund managers are starting to become immune to this political tactic.

Agreed. And I think there is another point that is missed on the consumer. If you owned an oil company or you have stocks in said petro company where is your incentive to lower prices? There isn't any. You are making cash hand over fist. I mean, no one is bitching about he cost of their IPad when Apple is sitting on a 100 billion worth of cash. But then again, some folks think Apple is "green."

Oil is fungible

"Oil is a fungible commodity, sold on the global market to the highest bidder, as McAuliff points out."

It has nothing to do with some grand conspiracy. It's a simple matter of supply and demand. America is competing on the world market for cheap energy. The locality of drilling only determines who gets first sale profits and the quality of the crude. Other than that, the highest bidder gets the oil. Simple as that.

Now personally, I think we should maintain our strategic reserve for times of natural disasters and regional conflict (war). The idea of tapping into it to spook the speculators is flat out wrong. It's also not working anymore. The hedge fund managers are starting to become immune to this political tactic.

I was ready to rail against this, but after reading the article, it's all shit.

I can see 500 million reasons to believe it's all true.

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent page-one story today on how federal agents caught Google deliberately breaking the law so it could make money off sites selling drugs online. That case ended with a settlement in which Google avoided criminal prosecution by paying the feds more than half a billion dollars.

The Journal Takes Us Inside the Google Drugs Sting

http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/frozen_planet_freezes_out_clim.php?page=all

They are acting like its because of everyday scheduling concerns, but notice that ALL of the networks which chose to remove an episode singled out THAT particular one. BBC refuses to name the other countries that won't be seeing the AGW episode, but we know that Discovery Channel (e.g. the USA) won't be broadcasting it... surely it would upset advertisers (e.g. US Chamber of Commerce, who have become active denialists) to show that episode.

This and the emails are part of an effort to keep AGW from becoming a major election issue at a time when it is tangibly starting to hurt Americans.

Note that Discovery Channel is not owned by ESPN, ABC, Disney, or any other third party. It's owned by Discovery, Inc. - full stop. National Geographic Channel, likewise, is not owned by any third party. It's a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Geographic Society.

Right about Discovery, wrong about Nat Geo.

Last I checked, it was owned by News Corp... (well, most of it anyway)

http://www.neatorama.com/2008/07/07/who-owns-what-on-television/ (Somewhat dated)
http://www.cjr.org/resources/?c=newscorp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geographic_Channel

Er, your username 'erroneus' is quite apt because (1) erroneous is misspelled, and (2) I didn't use either "inVentivize" or "incentivizive" in my post. And both incent and incentivize exist in the dictionary as verbs, but incentivize is in more common usage, and the masses, fortunately or unfortunately, decide the future of language, because language is a living thing.

"Incentivize" is a neologism so it is still not recognized by many spelling checkers, but it clearly does exist in the dictionary -- even the OED. However something you may not know is that the word "incent" is also a neologism, and it appeared nine years after the word "incentivize" (1977 vs. 1968 respectively).

I can also point you to a modern source that I think justifies the usage: Peter Diamandis of the X-Prize Foundation is famous for saying, "You get what you incentivize". Saying "You get what you incent" just wouldn't sound right -- and almost nobody would understand what was actually meant by that, because almost nobody in recent mainstream media/press/culture actually uses the word "incent"...

And not for the best...

From: http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/audit_notes_hb_gary_federal_ba.php

For one thing, it turns out that the firms involved here are large, legitimate and serious, and do substantial amounts of work for both the U.S. Government and the nation’s largest private corporations (as but one example, see this email from a Stanford computer science student about Palantir).

and:

And perhaps most disturbing of all, Hunton & Williams was recommended to Bank of America’s General Counsel by the Justice Department — meaning the U.S. Government is aiding Bank of America in its defense against/attacks on WikiLeaks.

They did remove names, and they got no one killed.

You might be right; two minutes of Google searching did not turn up any information about people who actually got killed.

Your dedication to the facts is awe-inspiring. Pray tell why you thought it did get people killed previously. Probably you were believing as your talking head of choice demanded.

As far as names? Simon Hermes, Mohammed Moubin, Gul Said. "On and on it goes, name after name of "collaborators" with the U.S. military, name after name of people whose lives are now in direct danger." -- http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/the_assange_leaks.php

It's clear that there will be names included. Some names are necessary to tell the story, especially where complicity is involved.

The people who said they were gonna get people killed are the people who actively do indeed actually kill real people, have been for years, plan on doing it for years still

Assigning some sort of moral equivalence to assassinating an informant and bombing the wrong building or shooting the wrong target makes you look like a moron. I hope you know that.

Wait, how many times did we try to kill Castro? Also, the government wants us to believe that they can reliably drop smart bombs down chimneys, and they also want us to believe that bombs just fall on the entirely wrong building because of equipment failure, when they spend umpteen hojillion dollars to make sure each one goes where they want it. We all know that dropping the bomb down the chimney was a one in a million shot. What we don't know is that our troops shoot up civilians all the damned time. When you win, you end up operating the government that receives the reports of wrongdoing, so you can make lots of them just vanish. You crucify a couple of assholes and you walk away whistling while scrubbing the blood of innocents from beneath your fingernails, and you get to keep your position.

How about when he plead guilty to 25 counts of hacking computer networks in the 1990s, including a Canadian telecommunications firm and NASA, while he and his cronies monitored the police who were trying to find them and left messages for the detectives? I'm sure it was just the "pursuit of truth" at work, no egotism at all.

This is precisely what I would do were I in his position; I would mislead and antagonize my enemy while monitoring their activity to determine the effectiveness of my efforts. You are suggesting that he be less effective. Have you thought any of these arguments through or are you typing the entire comment with your knee?

Or how about when the rape charges came about and he claimed it was a CIA conspiracy. Bad enough to make those claims without any evidence, of course, but then when one of his own Wikileaks members called him on it, he tried to claim he never said it, only that he "had been warned it might happen." Now we have a repeat. With no reason to believe this is anything but a business deciding they don't want to be associated with a group on a US watchlist and an Australian blacklist, it's declared it is the victim of "financial warfare by the US government."

When you are attacked it's reasonable to assume that the attack comes from those who have the most to gain from it.

And on the possibility that it's a business protecting it's business interests? "This is likely to cause a huge backlash against Moneybookers. Craven behaviour in relation to the US government is unlikely to be seen sympathetically." Apparently they're cowards for not standing up for Wikileaks.

That is correct. Nobody including Assange said it was an irrational decision, but it is an irresponsible one if you love freedom. However, it's not called Freedombookers.

hey held back 15 thousand pages to protect people's names while they tried to sort through them. Google it.

I believe it. But "trying not to leak names" and "not leaking names" are not the same, and there is a real risk of death to the people trying to help save the lives not only of US troops but their own countrymen. For what? Daily incident reports that largely tell us nothing we don't know? That drone attacks are less successful than the spokesman says? That an Afghan policeman was shot by the Afghan army when he was smoking hash in the shower, got spooked and started firing at them? Does anybody in the world not know that the government of Afghanistan is weak yet? Is this "insight" really worth even the potential of getting people killed?

They asked the pentagon to tell them which name to remove, the pentagon told them to go to hell.

You make this sound like a bad thing. The Pentagon was supposed to help Assange with his goal of disseminating classified information to unauthorized sources? You think anybody involved wants to touch that with a 10 foot pole, which would be illegal for them to do in the first place? Especially anybody with the clearance to actually read the damn things without committing another crime? It was a false request, designed to paint them as uncaring when he did what he was going to do all along.

They did remove names, and they got no one killed.

You might be right; two minutes of Google searching did not turn up any information about people who actually got killed.

As far as names? Simon Hermes, Mohammed Moubin, Gul Said. "On and on it goes, name after name of "collaborators" with the U.S. military, name after name of people whose lives are now in direct danger." -- http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/the_assange_leaks.php

The people who said they were gonna get people killed are the people who actively do indeed actually kill real people, have been for years, plan on doing it for years still

Assigning some sort of moral equivalence to assassinating an informant and bombing the wrong building or shooting the wrong target makes you look like a moron. I hope you know that.

War sucks. Maybe this war should never have been started; maybe it should end tomorrow. But these are not, not nearly, the same thing.

In one of your approximately eight billion posts in this thread saying basically the exact same things over and over again you asked for reasons that Assange is an egotistical, self-centered prick. How about from human rights groups?

Mr. Assange asked what the groups were doing to analyze the documents already published, and asked whether Amnesty in particular would provide staff to help redact the names of Afghan civilians, according to people familiar with the letter.

An Amnesty official replied to say that while the group has limited resources, it wouldn't rule out the idea of helping, according to people familiar with the reply. The official suggested that Mr. Assange and the human-rights groups hold a conference call to discuss the matter.

Mr. Assange then replied: "I'm very busy and have no time to deal with people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses. If Amnesty does nothing I shall issue a press release highlighting its refusal," according to people familiar with the exchange.

Later, WikiLeaks posted on its Twitter account: "Pentagon wants to bankrupt us by refusing to assist review. Media won't take responsibility. Amnesty won't. What to do?"

-- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703428604575419580947722558.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLESecondNews

These are reall

A fair number of the GPs quotes seem to come from mepja.org, or at least are among those also quoted there.

I find both the original references, and the refutation links interesting.

The first refutation link is to a wiki (wikiquote), which one can imagine being subject to propaganda struggles on popular pages. The second refutation link describes the quote being refuted as from some entirely different sources than the GP's. One can't help but wonder, when a quote is attributed to different sources. Of course, the GP's quotes are from sources obscure enough that researching them becomes more than an idle moment's diversion from work as well.

The parent's CAMERA.org link is to a page debunking a few particular "sources of misinformation". It is hard to tell, from the sidelines, whether they've cherry-picked particular statements that are provably false, or whether they have chosen a small set of examples fitting a larger pattern. The sources quoted, as well as those used for verification, are obscure beyond the idle endeavor.

But in as much as I have no first hand evidence, and no experience with any of the sources or organizations involved, I have no basis to place trust in either side. CAMERA evidently has its stated goals, as described:

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, or CAMERA, a media watchdog founded to combat what was perceived as anti-Israeli press coverage...

Columbia Journalism Review

...devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East. ... non-partisan organization, CAMERA takes no position with regard to American or Israeli political issues or with regard to ultimate solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict. ...Frequently inaccurate and skewed characterizations of Israel and of events in the Middle East may fuel anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice.

CAMERA's stated policies.

I would have more trust if they were an academic organization, or if they were interested in busting myths about both Israelis AND Arabs/Palestinians, instead of being specifically a defense of one side.

And this, really, exhausts how far I'm willing to research a set of topics I have no personal stake or influence in, on whim alone. Someone wants to compensate me for my time, I'd develop more interest in chasing down these quotes.

But it does show that you can trust quotes only as far as your personal knowledge, and your sphere of trust goes.

Excluding single-payer advocates has the effect of pushing the set of options considered "mainstream" to the right. If I was advocating for single-payer, I wouldn't exclude advocates of (British style) nationalized health care, since they would help serve to make my views appear more moderate. As for the Obama plan, it's based on the reforms implemented in Massachusetts under Mitt Romney, and (at the time) promoted by the Heritage Foundation, which to me qualifies as at least moderately conservative.

As for Alan Simpson, he isn't just a token conservative; he's one of the co-chairs. And the earlier quote indicates that he has total disdain for Social Security. He has also repeated the old zombie lie, "It's a bunch of IOUs".

If Obama was centrist, he would have balanced the commission by appointing an ardent defender of entitlement programs as the other co-chair; someone who is in favor of taxing the rich. Let's look at what the Democrat co-chair has said:

We’re going to mess with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security because if you take those off the table, you can’t get there. If we don’t make those choices, America is going to be a second-rate power, and I don’t mean in fifty years. I mean in my lifetime.

The Economist has a pathetic leader this week criticizing Obama for hammering BP and raising the ridiculous idea that his corporate-friendly administration is anti-business.
It actually (really!) calls the president “Vladimir Obama” and writes:
The collapse in BP’s share price suggests that he has convinced the markets that he is an American version of Vladimir Putin, willing to harry firms into doing his bidding.
The normally sober Economist has gone off the wagon here.
First, it knows better than to “suggest” what “the markets” think. Second, that blew up in its face rather quickly. Instaputz points out that BP shares soared 10 percent on news of the $20 billion fund the Economist’s spin here is obnoxious. If anything ends up ruining BP, it will have been its own actions. Go read this The Wall Street Journal piece for a look at the company’s negligence.
And BP should have to pay for all the associated costs of its actions, not just the actual bill for cleaning up the oil.they will be very, very costly.
Moreover, a company’s market capitalization is based on expectations for future earnings. This disaster will surely make it harder for BP to get drilling rights that investors expected it to have just two months ago. The political climate for offshore drilling has just undergone a seismic change.
Another big factor in BP’s share decline is pure uncertainty. Investors don’t like it. Right now, the only thing certain is that BP’s hole is going to be spewing toxic oil into the Gulf of Mexico for at least another two months

From the WSJ's article on the Deepwater Horizon.

BP also skipped a quality test of the cement around the pipe—another buffer against gas—despite what BP now says were signs of problems with the cement job and despite a warning from cement contractor Halliburton Co. ....

Halliburton, the cementing contractor, advised BP to install numerous devices to make sure the pipe was centered in the well before pumping cement, according to Halliburton documents, provided to congressional investigators and seen by the Journal. Otherwise, the cement might develop small channels that gas could squeeze through.

In an April 18 report to BP, Halliburton warned that if BP didn't use more centering devices, the well would likely have "a SEVERE gas flow problem." Still, BP decided to install fewer of the devices than Halliburton recommended—six instead of 21.

BP said it's still investigating how cementing was done. Halliburton said that it followed BP's instructions, and that while some "were not consistent with industry best practices," they were "within acceptable industry standards."

The cement job was especially important on this well because of a BP design choice that some petroleum engineers call unusual. BP ran a single long pipe, made up of sections screwed together, all the way from the sea floor to the oil reservoir.

Companies often use two pipes, one inside another, sealed together, with the smaller one sticking into the oil reservoir. With this system, if gas tries to get up the outside of the pipe, it has to break through not just cement but also the seal connecting the pipes. So the more typical design provides an extra level of protection, but also requires another long, expensive piece of pipe.

"I couldn't understand why they would run a long string," meaning a single pipe, said David Pursell, a petroleum engineer and managing director of Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., an energy-focused investment bank. Oil major Royal Dutch Shell PLC, in a letter to the MMS, said it "generally does not" use a single pipe.

BP's Mr. Gowers said the well design wasn't unusual. BP engineers "evaluate various factors" to determine what design to use for each well, he said.

Despite the well design and the importance of the cement, daily drilling reports show that BP didn't run a critical, but time-consuming, procedure that might have allowed the company to detect and remove gas building up in the well.

It's possible that they are simply covering their ass, but it's also possible that Halliburton learned from the Montara accident and was arguing for extra safety measures

As an engineer, I tend to find solid definitions to be quite agreeable. As a scientist, I know that everything could be all wrong and we should do more research... Actually, while words are often misused/misspoken (especially with Bush), it is also important to understand that language is not static. Language is as organic as our culture (for better or worse). New words are coined all the time. Some words are made and forgotten. Other words are only used in certain industries. Marketing terms are made up on an almost daily basis, and the ones that stick seem to find themselves in our everyday language. So, as for "normalcy", this predated W's word juggle: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=normalcy http://www.cjr.org/resources/lc/normalcy.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normalcy I too find many words very annoying... like, "a whole nother". What is this word "nother"? Logic takes over and says quite clearly what a person means. While I don't like it, it's akin to riding over linguistic pot-holes. I'm not going to fix every little thing. Given time it won't need fixing, because it will be "proper". ...and this ends another rant of "things that bother the hell out of me".

You mean imply. And I implied no such thing. One can be critical of a web site and still find it useful. And in fact I use Yelp a lot.

The best Internet journalism that I follow is http://www.democracynow.org/ Notice how Democracy Now interviews people on the other side all the time.

Don't forget the Columbia Review of Journalism, http://www.cjr.org/

Considering Marvel has had many owners, I doubt this will make any difference. Heck, Disney is probably buying this because its suddenly extremely profitable to make movies based on comic book characters, not because they feel there's a need for a Disneyfied Thor or Dr Strange.

I know this is slashdot and we're supposed to see every change as being a corporate conspiracy against us, but frankly, Marvel could use some direction from Disney. A lot of the artwork in Marvel comics is terrible. Its a company that always seems mismanaged to me. The Disney people really understand audiences and producing quality produts.

Considering Disney owns Touchstone, Miramax, Pixar, ESPN, Lifetime, A&E, and a few dozen radio stations, I doubt they are going to suddenly go against the Marvel audience and make any serious changes. Frankly, Marvel is very much kiddified to begin with, so Im not sure what grittiness you're hoping to preserve.

except the rule of law is still being eroded under Obama, just as it was under Bush. Obama is the same on state secrets, illegal domestic spying, and other issues the left railed against under Bush. Now they're swept under the rug.

http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/obama_and_state_secrets_shhh.php?page=1

Note: When the Columbia journalism school is calling the media as a whole to task for catering to the president, you know something is deeply wrong.

First: I do agree with the need for professional journalists.

Looking at that stuff, looking at, essentially, the conversation on the business side that newspapers are having with themselves—it made me realize something about the weakness of these institutions in the era of the Web that I had not understood before. Which is that the Chinese wall, right, the idea of advertisements as separate from the journalists, was successful enough and widespread enough and essentially honored in speech, if not always in action⦠that was a serious enough barrier that it actually kept the journalists themselves from thinking through their own business model. A lot of working journalists, and especially print journalists, are in the position of being sort of kept women. They don't really understand where the money comes from but, you know, their particular sugar daddy seems pretty flush, so they just never gave it much thought. And then one day the market crashes and they suddenly discover, "Wait a minute, we were a business? And our revenues had to exceed our expenses every year? Why wasn't I informed?"

http://www.cjr.org/overload/interview_with_clay_shirky_par_1.php?page=3

He points out a possible irony in all this...traditional news, where the journalists are shielded from the sponsors, my end up faring worse than the lifestyle magazines and whatnot. It's the sponsors who pay the bills, after all.

In the end, if people are willing to read or watch these publications that don't maintain a line between content and advertising, then that's where everything is going to head, regardless of which approach promotes objectivity. Like an earlier reply seems to say, there are times when people are done the disservice of being given "both sides"-style objectivity theater instead of true objectivity.

I am not willing to accept increased regulation in the area of speech or press. Even if well-intentioned, telling people what they can and can't publish is thoroughly Un-American and IMO pretty evil. We're just going to have to see how it shakes out.

What about having a couple of media companies owning almost all the newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations in the entire country?

Except there aren't just a couple of media companies that own own almost all newspapers or radio and TV stations in the US. There are literally dozens of media companies.

Falcon

In IMAP clients, where you are forced into the folder paradigm, it can be a little weird using GMail. And you end up with lots of extra folders from clients that don't play nice with it, even if you follow Google's instructions on setting up your clients.

Other than that, I prefer GMail's setup because after a certain number of messages, folders become unwieldy. In my mind, tags + search is just a much more modern way to deal with large amounts of information. You worry about defining exactly what you want (scalable), rather than worrying about where to find it (not scalable). The latter system serves us well outside the computer but it can be difficult for people to "unlearn"...

Clay Shirky says it well: http://www.cjr.org/overload/interview_with_clay_shirky_par.php?page=all (check out the 8th response on)

A student I knew did a story on Obama and NASA. I can't remember all the specifics, or his resources, but some of the report was that Obama favors social programs over space exploration. Here[LINK] is a link to the first report I could find on Google given back in 2007. It basically says that Obama wants to delay the space program for 5 years and put the money into education.

I too believe that general education here in America has a lot to be desired, but there are so many life saving and other useful technologies that have come from the program. For a simple example, NASA came up with the first prototype of creating Velcro. Who would have thought.

I don't believe that Obama has some affinity to keep the program around, and he never mentioned prior to the speech given last month that he grew up on Star Trek, or loves what they do at NASA. My worry is more then changing management, it's that he will try and take this out of the budget completely.

On November 4, engineers and scientists throughout NASA and academia scratched their collective heads and asked, "Which Obama is the real Obama?"

Now, we have the answer. Obama recently returned to the idea of sacrificing NASA programs in favor of his political agenda.

As Obama dismantles the American space program, perhaps we Americans should look to Japan for leadership in the peaceful development of space.

fact #1
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link #1 Barack Hussein Obama has pledged to increase taxes on capital gains from 15% to a stunning 20%.

fact #2
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link #2 "[Barack Hussein Obama] says he would delay NASA's controversial moon-to-Mars program five years in order to fund education initiatives."

fact #3
-------
link #3 Paul Krugman, an economist at MIT, states "If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance -- nobody knows how big -- that we'll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won't happen."

These so-called education initiatives are simply remedial-education programs that target African-Americans. Yet, we already spend more money per student in public school than nearly all other Western nations. Specifically, we spend 35% more than the Germans.

Lack of money is not the problem. The problem is African-American hatred of education. Many African-Americans regularly fail exit exams, which many state governments require high-school students to pass before they may receive a high-school diploma. Exit exams typically test knowledge at the 8th-grade level. A 12th-grade student who fails such a simplistic exam must be a student who has deliberately refused to learn.

Yet, Barack Hussein Obama and his close friend, Pastor Jeremiah Wright, claim that African-American failure in public schools is the fault of non-African-Americans. Obama claims that exit exams are racist. Obama intends to cancel exit exams and other educational standards.

Here is the clincher. Instead of using all that revenue (from gutting important government programs and greatly increasing taxes) on universal health care, Barack Hussein Obama intends to waste billions of dollars on remedial-education programs. He wants to cater to his core constituency: 90% of African-Americans regularly votes for him due to the color of his skin.

My guess is they rose from their graves, took pen in hand, signed up for the loans and then returned to their crypts. Of course, it could just be that the people who thought Boiler Room was a training tape were crooked as all Hell.

People with senile dementia were talked into changing 30 year fixed rate mortgages with low monthly payments into the more exiting and "fun" Adjustible Rate Mortgages. The hard sell was king, think Glengarry, Glen Ross .

Here's a quote from the article linked above:

Allegation

1. Handed out copies of the movie Boiler Room as a training tape

2. Partnered to sell its PayOption Arms with a brokerage owned by a five-time felon, whose convictions included gun-related charges

3. Forbade loan officers to check borrower income on certain loans

4. Ran an "art department" in its Tampa office, where documents were altered

5. Settled allegations of institutionalized marketing deception that covered two million customers

6. Developed "FastQual," a program designed to approve borrowers in twelve seconds

7. Incentivized brokers and loan officers through "yield spread premiums" and other compensation schemes to put borrowers into more expensive loans

8. Tapped two kegs of beer at weekly staff meetings

Institution

A. Citigroup

B. Countrywide

C. Ameriquest

D. IndyMac

E. Merit Financial

F. New Century

G. All of the above

Some of the mortgage companies were handing out Boiler Room as a training tape. (No accounting for taste, I'd have used Glen Garry Glen Ross.) In other words, they knew they were committing fraud, an took a movie about fraud and said, "We need to be like those guys."

The people who bought houses they couldn't afford are relevant to the current crisis only in that they are the product that these mortgage brokers were selling. This is no different than, say, if someone in the meat industry said, "I got some tainted meat, real bad, but folks won't know though, I've got a special process that covers it up." They knew that these were bad loans, and not knowing wouldn't be an excuse because it was their business to know and to refuse loans to people who couldn't pay. So, corruption or incompetence, take your pick (really? a little from column A and a little from column B.).

Understand, the mortgage brokers were not trying to make money in the traditional way that is done with a mortgage (loan out money, have the person pay it back with interest, make a profit). No, they were collecting mortgages to be sold on the open market, after being sliced, diced and repackaged into complex derivatives.

To get product to sell, they went after people with senile dementia, and helped people lie about their ability to pay back the loans they were taking out. They knew they were selling fiction. Of course, some of the buyers knew they were buying fiction, too, which they could then sell to their "little people" customers. How much people knew and when they knew it I don't know, but they should have paid attention to Warren Buffet, who called them Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now we are recieving the payload, and we all get to pay to bail out these corrupt, incompetant charlatans.