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Carpetbagger Report

TheRanter — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:12:30 +0000

Want someone who has some insightful stuff and actually posts more often than every two months?

Check out The Carpetbagger Report. Some of the stuff in his archives is really excellent.

Breaking News: Plane Crash at Heathrow

TheRanter — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:22:54 +0000

And in today’s major news headline, there was a plane crash at Heathrow airport in which eight people were “slightly injured” according to NPR news. How would I get by if the major news outlets didn’t update me on this breaking story about eight people being slightly injured eight time zones away. That’s almost one injury per time zone!

More news on this breaking story. According to the Telegraph, the injury toll has now risen to 13 persons with “minor injuries.”

And in other news, according to The Hunger Project’s best estimates, 24,000 children died today of hunger and malnutrition, which is a significant decline from the 41,000/day in 1977 when The Hunger Project started.

Drink more, earn more

TheRanter — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 23:36:59 +0000

According to a recent study, social drinker earn more — lots more. That’s all interesting enough, though it should be noted that drinking alone at home doesn’t count. What’s more interesting, though, is that barhopping without drinking apparently doesn’t count either. What’s interesting here is that, having been alerted by Paul Graham to listen to and read the news looking for the public relations firm behind the story, my first instinct is to do an internet search on the story. Sure enough, the study is all over the news with same press release cited. More importantly, though, it’s essentially a recycled version of a story that ran in 2002 (including in the Wall Street Journal) and in 2003 (new reseach, sure, but the essential story is recycled) and reprises research from 1997 and earlier.

So what’s happening here? The authors belong to a libertarian think tank and want to block legislation limiting campus drinking at colleges and, of course, want to oppose legislation to increase taxes on alcohol. So here’s a news flash from The Ranter: Drive more. Earn more. How do I know? My extensive scientific research has shown that in general, countries where people drive a lot (say in the 80th percentile or higher for miles driven per capita) have higher per capita GDP than countries where people drive very few miles (say 20th percentile or lower for miles driven per capita).

The Suit is Back! (Paul Graham article)

TheRanter — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 17:09:57 +0000

I often find Paul Graham, author of Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, interesting to read. I just came across an older article of his on the breaking news that suits are back in corporate America, as reported in April 2005 in the New York Times. And as previously reported in February, March, June and September 2004 and September 2003 and February, April and November 2002. So who cares? Here at Taken For Ranted World Headquarters, our staff of one has shown up to work in a suit, let’s see, zero times in his life. He has shown up to work in a tee-shirt or bathrobe approximately… 2783 times. So who cares about suits? Well, PR firms for the garment industry, and that’s what Graham’s article is about. He runs down how it is that the PR firms drive mainstream media reporting and how that explains why there is so much inexplicable crap in most mainstream reporting, the New York Times included.
In particular, he raises an important point that I’m always trying to explain: bias in reporting is less about the the biases within the article, than in the bias that determines what gets covered in the first place. The piece of the puzzle that I didn’t understand so well is the dominant role that PR firms play in directing reporting. Of course you know that they are trying to get positive stories out there, but the extent to which they really make the news is astonishing and Graham has some great examples.

None of that likely comes as a surprise to anyone who is reading here. What’s fun about Graham’s article is that he gives some tips on how to use the internet to identify articles that have been fed to the media by PR firms and, perhaps more importantly, to guess at who the client is. As he says:

Trend articles like this are almost always the work of PR firms. Once you know how to read them, it’s straightforward to figure out who the client is. With trend stories, PR firms usually line up one or more “experts” to talk about the industry generally. In this case we get three: the NPD Group, the creative director of GQ, and a research director at Smith Barney. [5] When you get to the end of the experts, look for the client. And bingo, there it is: The Men’s Wearhouse.

Enough of my blabbering – go check out Graham’s far better article called The Submarine

Still here? While I’m giving out reading assignments, Phil Agre another guy that I find often worth reading. His Red Rock Eater News Service had the original (as far as I know) debunking of the “Al Gore claims to have invented the internet” crap, demonstrating that this whole thing was a right-wing smear campaign to discredti Gore, which it did, of course (as I write this, that article is offline with promises to get it running in August, but Seth Finkelstein has a page of links on the Al Gore thing that is more up to date)