Is TMZ less credible than CNN?

This afternoon, in my workplace and on Facebook, friends and I spent about an hour wondering whether we could believe TMZ’s reports of Michael Jackson’s death. “Since when TMZ is a reliable source?!?” asked a friend on Facebook. “Since when are other news sites reliable sources?” responded another friend. “Excuse me, i have to get back to watching CNN, they are quoting some facebook pages and twitterstreams on the news.”

Was it just denial that kept us from mourning until CNN (finally) chimed in? Are we prejudiced against TMZ because of the vacuity of its coverage and employ of pappaazzi? Several thoughtful responses came in to my Twitter query along those lines. (@dansinker raised a related point.) Mark Glaser, @mediatwit, anwered that ours suspicion “Shows that we have *varying* levels of trust for random tweets, TMZ, Drudge, LAT blog, AP and CNN (possibly in that order).” Erik Hersman, @whiteafrican surmised that such skepticism is “probably just hardwired into US ppl that way…I think non US ppl are more skeptical of MSM period.” Mike Janseen, @mjanssen, emphasized that that traiditonal journalism’s “sourcing lends more credibility. Without it we’re denied a way to assess the context of the information presented.”

Wikipedia, for one, has a section on TMZ critcism full of questionable ethical practices, but I nothing about inaccurate reporting. When it comes to celebrity reporting, is there any reason–  other than snobbery and disdain for pappaazzi publications– to disbelieve the gossip sites while waiting for traditional journalism organizations to pipe in?

PS, three top Michael Jackson links of the evening:

• Dan O’Neill’s Appreciation of Michael Jackson: “I fully believe, with my entire heart, that Jesus Christ Himself came down from heaven in 1982 and sat next to a man named Michael Jackson while he wrote a record called Thriller.”
• Andrew Sullivan’s obit: “There are two things to say about him. He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child.”
• At our Michael memorial dinner, one of my hosts and my wife lamented the absence of his music in the media coverage and Facebook chatter. Enter, thanks to a tip from Dan Sinker, a live tribute mix from Maseo of De La Soul. (A capella Billie Jean, insane.)

Obama eyes Lisa Madigan

Item: Obama meets with Lisa Madigan re the Senate seat.

Response:

1. So much for the notion that Obama (and Jarrett and Emanuel, who were also reported to be in on the meeting) would stay above the fray of Prairie State politics.
2. Apparently Barack  isn’t as down with his basketball buddy as he was back in ‘06 when he cut that TV ad for Alexi. Rahm & crew can’t be happy with Giannoulias‘ Bright Star problems– and are likely privvy to the rumors I hear that more ugly headlines are likely.  Could the White House be worried that Alexi is “Blagojevich all over again,” as someone speculated recently?
3. Lisa running for Senate would brighten the futures of her father and the governor.
4. Which will come first: Lisa’s decision, a state budget, or Aramis Ramirez’s return to Wrigley?

Meanwhile:

• The incumbent junior Senator, Roland Buris, just learned that the Pentagon runs its own research labs.
• The city is potentially on the hook for another $500 million in Olympics funding.
• In the dog-bites-man department, Ron Huberman is looking to bring quantitative analysis to CPS.
• Richard Lindberg’s look at Big Mike McDonald looks to provide insight on our own times, alas.

Reunited: Gladwell & Simmons

I have a friend, whose opinion I generally trust, who swears by Bill Simmons. (OK, said friend is a Knicks and Yankees fan, but that’s not his fault, he was born that way.) The only time I’ve found Simmons worth reading was during his 2006 exchange with Malcolm Gladwell. Happily, the two are back for a second round. Until Gladwell finally writes that sports book (I’d even accept, say, his co-authoring Peyton Manning’s autobiography), we can read his his exchanges with Simmons on Larry Holmes, Nick Faldo and, er, Jennifer Aniston.  (For sports-inspired critiques of Gladwell’s May 11 How David Beats Goliath piece, check out Chad Orzel, G.D, or Alan Jacobs.)

Dorkiest. Blog Post. Ever

Choosing Star Trek as the theme for my first blog post in a month is dorkalicious, no way around it. In my defense, I use this blog to point out interesting chatter I see on the internet, and lately many smart folks have chosen to comment about Star Trek; among them:

 

• Eugene Volokh is bothered by Chekhov’s accent: I don’t recall his pronouncing it Pawel Andreiewich Chekow (though maybe I missed something).
• Juliet Lapidos looks at toruture in Star Trek, and calls up the famous Four Lights episode. 
• Peter Suderman: There are things to love in Abrams’s Star Trek, yet very little of the original series’ appeal remains. Rather than concern itself with politics, ethics, or social organization, Abrams’s Star Trek focuses on familiar quests for individual self-discovery…. it’s about adolescent heroes coming to terms with themselves and their pasts, struggling with friends, rivals, and enemies while searching for power and place in the world. Where the original was poorly fashioned and outwardly focused, this one is gorgeously designed and self-obsessed. It’s personal rather than political, aesthetically pleasing at the expense of conceptual depth. 
• Reihan Salam asks, where are the Black Vulcans? There were no black Vulcans at the highest levels of the Vulcan Science Academy. This could mean that black Vulcans are a very small minority. Yet Tuvok’s wife, T’Pel, was also a black Vulcan. And so the pool of black Vulcans couldn’t be trivially small. Or perhaps endogamy is relatively common across Vulcan ethno-somatic groups. But doesn’t this strike you as an affront to the iron laws of logic? If ethno-somatic endogamy is not particularly common, one assumes that sharp “racial” distinctions would erode over time. ..The iron laws of logic do cast doubt on another hypothesis, namely that the late emergence of black Vulcans in the Star Trek universe suggests human-like discrimination against Vulcans who vary from the phenotypic norm. 
• Devin Faraci: the movie just kept working, even though the script was obviously shoddy and half-done.
• Phil Plait reviews the film’s science: Drilling a hole to the center of a planet is not a simple matter! Planets tend to be thousands of kilometers in radius so that’s a heckuva hole. A problem with deep mines is that the pressure of the overlying rocks tends to collapse the hole. A cubic meter of rock weighs in at about 2-3 tons, and there are billions of cubic meters of rock above such a hole. You could try to use a beam weapon to vaporize a hole, but the rock to the side would keep flowing in. You’d never get anywhere.

 

(Is it a coincidence that a disproportionate amount of thoughtful Trek commentary is found on the right side of my RSS reader?)

The Clarovista’s soggy mattress

The Clarovista is the (re-branded) culmination of the largest construction project in my Chicago neighborhood of Edgewater in a couple of decades. I didn’t oppose the development, enjoyed watching the construction unfold over the last few years, and have looked forward to the business my new neighbors could might bring to some of my favorite local spots, including Third Coast Comics, Ethiopian Diamond and Metropolis Coffee.  I didn’t join the chorus of boos that objected to the construction of an Aldi’s on the ground floor—in this economy, business development is welcome, even if its not a sexy brand.

The Clarovista's mattress, getting soggy, after a week

 

 

My curmudgeonly hackles have been raised by the property failure to keep its sidewalks free of snow and garbage over the last few months. The capper has been the appearance and steadfast presence for the last week of an abandoned mattress steps from the building’s main entrance on Granville St. I’ve chronicled the mattress’s week via Flickr; through the wonders of Page Rank, these photos are now for anyone searching “Clarovista.”

Upon my discovering the mattress last Thursday afternoon, I called the 49 Ward’s Alderman, Joe Moore –the Nation’s “Most Valuable Local Official, neighborhood bloggers’ opinions to the contrary. (Through some districting quirk, the 49^th Ward, which is comprised for the most part by Rogers Park north of Devon, extends through a sliver south to encompass the Clarovista and some properties owned by Loyola University. ) A woman in Ald. Moore’s office named Ann promised to take care of it. I’ve checked in on the mattress twice a day since, on my morning jog and on my walk home from the train, and it has held together, despite frequent April showers. 

I have to admit that I’ve come to appreciate the mattress—I’ll have mixed feelings if I return Friday night to find it gone.  

 (As you can see, the mattress is snuggled up against one of those new fangled parking meters that are causing so much sturm und drang. I’ve seen the LAZ Parking coin collectors step over the bedding whilst collecting coins—I wonder if a city-employed coid collector or meter maid would be more likely to call the local Streets & San office to arrange a pick-up?)

The Economist Misses Facts on El Salvador

The Economist is one of the few English-language media operations that regularly reports on Latin America, so I am slightly hesitant to point out some obvious errors in its report on the build-up to Sunday’s presidential election in El Salvador.

1. The Economist asserts that since the cessation of the war in 1992 the FMLN has been “fielding former guerrilla commanders as its presidential candidates.” Now, I’ve never been a close follower of Salvadoran politics, but as a resident of LA in the early-90s, it was hard to miss the candidacy of Rubén Zamora, who ran and lost as the FMLN candidate in the 1994 election.  Far from being a guerilla commander, Zamora was a social democrat from, at least, the 1970s.

2. The Economist refers to Mauricio Funes, the FMLN’s winning candidate in Sunday’s election “as a fresh, moderate politician in the mould of Barack Obama or Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.” Referring to Lula as “fresh” seems odd, given the fact that he’s been a national political leader for 30 years,  first ran for office in 1982, and started the first of his five runs for the presidency 20 years ago.

3. Like others before it, The Economist portrays the Salvadoran civil war as a simple conflict of moral equivalency in which “an American-backed army battled Cuban-supplied left-wing guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).” Before it writes up Sunday’s results, The Economist might want to send someone to find Mark Danner’s thorough 1991 New Yorker piece on the1981  El Mozote massacre,  and the U.S. role in it. Or one could listen, below in Spanish, to the recollections of Rufina Amaya, a  survivor of the massacre.

For a more insightful take on the election, look to Esmeralda Bermudez’s LA Times article on young Salvadoran-Americans who were involved with the election in their motherland.

Mapping LA

I began the week annoyed by practices of some newspaper websites, but I’m ending it with praise for the LA Times efforts to involve residents in an effort  map the county.

Readers have commented on 86 of the 87 neighborhoods we proposed, the one exception being Griffith Park, which has thousands of visitors daily but few homes. Many of the comments offered specific advice, or criticism. Some gave vivid remembrances of places where the reader grew up or once lived. Others disputed the name we had given an area as too narrow or, in some cases, too unknown….The purpose of the finished map is twofold: We plan to use it as The Times standard for defining where events take place within the city. It will also become the basis, along with maps of the the rest of the county and region, for interactive projects in the works.

In praise of journalistic legends

I spent Thursday in the company of giants in the field of journalism at Columbia University’s conference on Watchdog Journalism. (Some Columbia Journalism students and recent grads blogged today’s sessions; Twitter coverage here.)

In responding to one of my twitter reports, Dan O’Neil pointed me to a piece he wrote last year that articulates some of the thoughts  that rattled around my head today as listened to courageous journalists from around the world:

It’s good for me to take a break from whining about this or that city official not calling me back, or some municipal department that turned down my Freedom of Information Act request, or some agency that provides partial data rather than every field I requested. I’ve got it made. For some, it really is life or death, captivity of freedom, torture or awards. And there are legends of this business that still live and breathe. Let’s try to keep them free, and appreciated, and keep working as hard as we can, wherever we are.

Green economy, transparency, and high-speed rail: fads or keepers?

Early this morning, I groggily asked the twitterverse about three buzzy concepts about which I find myself increasingly skeptical: the green economy, high-speed rail, and transparency. (Unsurprisingly, perhaps, all three have been embraced by the new administration.) Some places where I see my skepticism reflected

Michael Levi tried to separate Green Economy folderol from reality:

Just because “green” and “jobs” are both in demand doesn’t mean that policies focused on creating “green jobs” make sense. In fact, a close look at the economics of “green jobs” suggests that if we try to find a lasting solution to these challenges with a single set of policies, we might fail to deliver on both fronts…Indeed, most comprehensive economic models that look at the long-term effects of aggressive climate policies consistently forecast a small net decrease in national job growth.

I mentioned him last year, but Roger Kemp remains one of my favorite high-speed rail hype debunkers. In testimony submitted  to the Scottish Parliament (pdf) in November, Kemp spoke highly of high-speed rail, but sounded the themes he expressed on WBEZ’s Worldview last year: train lines take a long time to build, and are most efficient in dense areas.

Construction of the French and Japanese high-speed networks started in the 1960s and construction of new lines continued for more than 30 years. In 30 years from now, the priorities in Britain are likely to be rather different from today and the need to reduce energy use is likely to be far more important. I am convinced that rail has a vital role in transport policy but am unconvinced that 300 km/h services to Scottish centres of population are necessarily appropriate.

Likewise, a study penned by Kemp in 2007 found that

“As the efficiency of cars progressively increases, the difference in emissions between cars and high-performance trains will narrow and it will be increasingly difficult to make an environmental case for transferring people on to diesel-powered railways….It’s not politically correct to say so, but the Government is better off encouraging families into low-emission cars and getting business people, who tend to travel alone in large cars, to catch the train.”

I”ve less to point to with regards to my questons about the transperancy push.  The term has become so widely used, in varying contexts (by politicians, activists, developers) that I wonder if it has lost some of its meaning? I also think that sometimes, in government, private sector and NGOs, a little opacity can serve the greater good. Finally, there’s the “so what” question: more information may be available, but who uses it, and to what ends?

A Monday kvetch about newspaper websites

There are better places to read about what’s wrong with newspapers’ websites, so I’ll be brief:

• Why is the New York Times hiding the audio of its interview with President Obama? Hearing it talked up on MSNBC and NPR, I headed to the Times site to load it onto the iPod for my morning run.  There is no mention of Saturday’s interview on the home page; after some digging, I find an article about, and transcript of, the interview, but when I dig around long enough to find a summary and transcript of the interview, I only find excerpts of audio.
• Why can’t the Chicago Tribune learn to link correctly? This article about airfare price cuts (which oddly isn’t listed on its Travel page) mentions travel sites like BestFares.com and Vayama.com without including links; a mention of The Travel Team Inc includes an apparently auto-generated link to a seemingly irrelevant Tribune page. This would have been silly in 1998; in 2009, it’s ridiculous.
  
• NPR’s David Folkenflik apparently watches Jon Stewart, as his story this morning (watch out for the apparently new NPR.org popups) on the failings CNBC lifts, with no shame or attribution, from Stewart’s much discussed rant last week. Wouldn’t it have been cool if the journalist had done the story before the comedian?