On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:46:27 -0800, Christopher D. Green wrote: >Mike, > >I agree with almost all of this, except that you seem to have mistaken >cable "news" television for science (or scholarship more generally). >It's not about finding facts. It's about keeping the viewers entertained >until the commercials come on. It's a business. Note, it doesn't >actually matter much what the facts of Eliot Spitzer's affairs are to >anyone but his family (either you wouldn't vote for a man who buys sex, >or you think it is irrelevant to his job as a government official), but >it is entertaining (for many) to see him grovel a bit and perhaps get >just a hint or two of the sordid details.
Although today's news organizations often appear to be in the infotainment business in contrast to their old "straight news" orientation in long past where the news division was not expected to turn a profit but instead was to serve the public by providing it with useful information, afflicting the comfortable, and attacking those in positions of power, especially public officials, who abuse their power. The area of "investigative journalism" is representative of this view; consider the short Wikipedia entry on it (Standard disclaimers apply), see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigative_journalism In earlier times this was also called "muckraker journalism", see the Wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker Perhaps one of the greatest or classic example of such journalism was the work of Jacob Riis who's "How the Other Half Lives" showed many how the immigrant poor lived in the slums of Manhattan's Lower East Side; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Riis and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Other_Half_Lives More recent examples include the release of the Pentagon Papers, Woodward and Bernstein's reporting on the Watergate break-in and related crimes, the Iran-Contra drugs for guns deals, and Syemour Hersh's reporting in the New Yorker on the Iraq war; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh The PBS series "Frontline" continue to provide documentaries in this vein and the PBS news hour related news programs try to maintain high standards in reporting and, perhaps the most important role the new media has, speaking truth to power when it tries to lie. Unfortunately, the playwrght and sceenwriter Paddy Chayefsky anticipated what might happen to network news when it was expected to justify its existence through ratings and market share in his screenplay for the Sidney Lumet film "Network"; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_%28film%29 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_Chayefsky (By the way, Chayefsky's novel "Altered States" was a great read and was a great portrayal of academic research gone wrong -- Ken Russell completely botched making a movie out of the novel, so don't confuse the movie for the book). Today, journalism as a business is pretty much a joke. Journalism as a professional career which has at its core getting the "true story" instead of the "official version" or the "spun version", which holds to its code of ethics (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards ) still plays a significant role in telling us about the world and why it operates the way that it does. >By the way, what are they doing to Washington Square? I was there a >couple of days ago and it looked like a WWI battlefield. Renovation of the park. See: http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/washington_sq_park/reconstruction.php In the first stage of rennovation, the western part of the park (i.e., where most of the drug dealers hunt out and the chess tables used in "Searching for Bobby Fischer" were located) was closed down and re-landscaped. The fountain was also moved to make it aligned with the Arch, that is, now one will be able to see the fountain through the arch if looking south on Fifth avenue. One reason why the fountain was "off center" was because there was a road going through the park which connected Fifth avenue to what is now LaGuardia place (a continuation of West Broadway above Houston Street). Buses would come down Fifth avenue, goe through the park, and wind up south of the park. The Sixth Avenue elevated subway, now long gone, came up from downtown along West Broadway and turned westward at what is not LaGuardia Place and West 3rd street until it reached 6th avenue/Avenue of the America and turned right/north uptown. Today, the IFC Center/theater is at the junction of where West 3rd St ends and the el would have turned. Now the eastern part of the park in being renovated which is what you saw. For more info including some of the background issues, see: http://www.thevillager.com/villager_238/washingtonsquareparkrenova.html and http://www.flickr.com/photos/70118...@n00/sets/72157603687378665/ and http://gothamist.com/2008/01/24/washington_squa_6.php and from the NYU student newspaper: http://nyunews.com/topics/locations/washington-square-park/#/news/2009/09/21/park/?ref=ajax -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=1189 or send a blank email to leave-1189-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
