Jessica Biel is going to name her first child Batmo.
Because I hate to shop I asked Pam to buy me a new dress shirt when she was out this afternoon. She came home with five shirts. "But I saved $141.36!!"
There's a parallel universe where that logic makes perfect sense, and she lives there.
Hurricane Sandy is being cited as evidence of global warming. Al Roker opined on The Today Show this morning that this is the new normal. NYC Mayor Bloomberg said global warming was responsible for the hurricane and re-electing the President was the best way to ... change the weather?
I don't know enough to say if global warming is for real, never mind the result of human activity, but it does seem odd to label something they called "Frankenstorm" as the new normal.
I'm a Rick Reilly fan. He moved from Sports Illustrated to ESPN The Magazine a few years ago but I read his column on their web site. The story for this column is local; Queen Creek is on the SE side of Phoenix. But mostly it's a very good story:
Special Team
As long as we're doing links, my friend Jim sent me this one. You know I think it's cool! And now I'm going to keep my eye out for neon signs.
The Dingman Collection.
Denotation - the formal definition of a word.
Connotation - the informal meaning most people assign to the word.
Example: "She's blonde." The denotation, she has blond hair. The connotation, she's an airhead.
I don't understand the word journalist. Does the word's denotation include objectivity, or at least the individual's best attempt at objectivity? Is there the expectation that the one who calls themselves a journalist will do their best to present both sides of an issue and refrain from advocating for a particular viewpoint? They can have strong opinions, but does being a journalist require they keep those to themselves?
Or is that my flawed connotation?
A few weeks ago Chris Matthews went ballistic after the first presidential debate with a wild rant over the President's bad performance. It clearly showed his bias for Pres. Obama as he railed against Romney and his untruths and hypocrisy. But I'm pretty sure Matthews would call himself a journalist.
I swore off Meet the Press after that incident.
I check several national news sites a couple of times a day. I'm a news junkie. One of those sites is Slate.com, but I'm about to assign it to the box labeled "Chris Mathews." The imbalance of Slate's articles and the tenor of those articles is easy for anyone to spot. I am not a Romney advocate but a quick slide down their headlines list shows several articles clearly critical of his positions and the near total absence of anything similar re. the President.
Slate considers their writers journalists.
Hmmm.
Lest this be understood as a criticism of a "liberal press" I'm sure the talking heads (screaming heads?) and writers over at Fox consider themselves journalists, too. Nobody seriously considers them objective, do they?
So is it just me who thinks journalism should refrain from advocacy? Am I the last naive news junkie?
Is there a news site that just reports?
3 comments:
James is a news junkie. He reads Drudgereport, AZCentral, AP... He can't stand Fox News and MSNBC
(1) What?!! You now own five shirts that were made after 2002?!? Unbelievable.
(2) I've never seen the word "unbiased" (or a synonym of same) associated with the definition of "journalist" or "journalism". Naïve, no. Unrealistic? Perhaps.
(3) Love the teardrop pic.
The years of Walter Cronkite are long behind us. There are a few examples of quality objective journalism, but mostly rare. Years ago, there were only a few news channels, but with the rise of the Internet and cable TV, there are many more choices from which to consume news. In short, they lost their ability to self police. Anyone with a website can call themselves a journalist and the sensational is what gets readership/viewers. As such, the media market moves in that direction. We know that eating vegetables (Cronkite style journalism) is better for us, but when given the choice, society as a whole choses the cheap, surgar-laden snack (sensational journalism). The best you can do is read Fox, CNN, MSNBC and figure reality is somewhere in the middle. But that's just an opinion and it is worth as much as it cost for me to give it to you...
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