September 2008 Archives

Watching the debate, I found CNN's little audience reaction meter quite interesting.  If you didn't watch it on CNN, it was a line graph at the bottom of the screen, like this:



The three lines were supposed to indicate how well a sample of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents were taking whatever was going in the debating hall.  They moved up in down constantly as the candidates spoke, appearing to indicate real-time responses.  It's not really clear where the numbers came from--at one point, according to one blog, they said that there were panels of viewers in Columbus, Ohio, but the link he provided to CNN's own website doesn't work.  At rate, it was an interesting play in the inevitable contest to determine who's actually won a political debate.

Basically, having been set to review two new websites which purport to help one sort reliable journalism from "spin," or "bias," or some other bugaboo of present-day conversation about the media, I can tell you straight up that you're still better off relying on your own common sense and using a pinch of skepticism when reading anything.  If you're worried about bad coverage, read a reputable paper or its website, or maybe try the BBC.

I'm not really surprised that neither turned out to be awfully impressive.  Both sites, at root, rely on their users to review the news, and rely on a lot of people doing so in order to get at the kind of cumulative accuracy of sites like Wikipedia.  They forget, I think, that Wikipedia took years to build, and that the process of drafting an article involves dozens, in some cases hundreds or thousands, of inaccurate revisions gradually being weeded out through vicious behind-the-scenes arguments on message boards.  In the most contentious cases, especially those dealing with politics (and, indeed, news), it required the adjudication of Wikipedia's editors, long-established users with special rights to allow or forbid changes.  If you check out one of these arguments, they tend to rely on citation and other forms of verification----all of which is to say, that by the time something's reached the standard which people have compared to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it's no longer news.

The press has been making news on the campaign this week, as all of the candidates, most notably Sarah Palin, have been appearing in television interviews.  Personally, I became interested in an interview which began to be aired the week before, Bill O'Reilly's talk with Barack Obama.  While I haven't yet seen the word 'bias' in a description of it, the various responses to the interview online demonstrate how deeply the perception of bias--indeed, the simple perception of what happened--is subjective.  Even looking at the writing of people with similar political opinions, it seems impossible to find a single idea of what happened in half an hour of television.

If you happened to check www.google.com/trends/hottrends, a section of Google's website that lists the day's most popular search terms, around six in the evening, Pacific Time, this Friday, you'll know that the most Googled woman in America--in fact, the most Googled thing in the world--on that day was not Sarah Palin, as was recently the case, but Anne Kilkenny (her name spelt Ann Kilkenny, while her own spelling didn't make the top 100 searches).  Kilkenny, a resident of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin's hometown, has risen to digital fame (I should like to invite some discussion on synonyms for this term--I've seen references to "web celebrity," "e-famous," and "digital acclaim," but internet culture is still waiting for a definitive neologism) as the result of the widespread publication of an e-mail (here is a copy of a copy) she wrote to friends explaining who Palin is and criticising her terms as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska.

Back on Friday, it was pretty clear that presumptive Republican candidate John McCain's running mate was going to be either Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor and rival primary candidate Mitt Romney, or, if he decided to go out on a limb, independent Connecticut senator and serial executive-branch candidate Joseph Lieberman.  As it turned out, of course, McCain chose Alaska governor Sarah Palin (also former beauty queen, a fun fact which opponents are trying to make a political liability).  Taking a sampling across media and political orientations, I assembled as much coverage of the selection as I could find from the New York Times, Politico.com, and the website of Fox News.  Palin's name occurred around the edges of stories in all three, but none considered her a serious contender...