I’m so old, I was taught that a news headline encapsulated a brief summary of the news article. Today, the purpose of a headline is to act as “click bait”. This screen capture from Google News illustrates the concept – the one at the bottom is the “old school” approach. The past week has seen a flood of “news” reports about immigration issues-some were mostly correct yet some, may be many, were poorly researched, left out context, and were intended…
Today’s news brings the following announcement: By modifying their lifestyle, including diet and exercise, people can lower their blood pressure just as effectively as with medication, according to a study. Researchers studied the effects of adapting the Newstart Lifestyle program, which includes a vegan diet, daily outside walks, substantial quantities of water, adequate daily sleep and optional spiritual activities. Source: Healthier lifestyle as effective as medication to lower blood pressure, study says – UPI.com Most people will read only the…
Facebook (and Youtube and Twitter) have conducted a global experiment on human populations without consent of the guinea pigs by analyzing our “Likes”. Facebook’s digital model of us is more accurate than our own understanding of ourselves. Computers need evaluate as few as 100 Likes to make a judgement more effective than a human. Analyzing just 300 Likes enables the model to know more about the subject than does the subject’s spouse. Computer models achieve “peak” accuracy when more than…
Nearly every story on Facebook this week has featured this Getty Images photo of Zuckerberg looking contrite: The photo first appeared in the press in about May of 2017. In other words, this photo is about one year old. The media has deliberately selected an old photo of Zuckerberg to make it look like he is contrite and feeling badly about the current predicament of Facebook. This assertion, however, is made up entirely by fiction writers in the media. We…
The headline to this post sounds like a headline from The Onion, but its not. National Geographic admits to exploiting their staffs own racism and misogyny to spin their stories to increase readership, the same concept as modern fake news click-bait operations: People of colour were often scantily clothed, people of colour were usually not seen in cities, people of colour were not often surrounded by technologies of automobiles, airplanes or trains or factories,” he said. “People of colour were…
The top three percent of channels got 64 percent of all views in 2006. A decade later, the top channels took 90 percent. The median views per video has plummeted to 89 in 2016 from 10,262 a decade earlier Source: Almost No One Is Making a Living on YouTube | NDTV Gadgets360.com There is now so much content on Youtube that it is very difficult for new channels to get noticed unless they have a promotional budget, outside connections, or…
A photographers notices that almost all photo journalism awards go to photographers who focus on pain and suffering, giving us a warped view of the world around us: Media reinforces and shapes public perception whether intended or not. And the same photos and photographers tend to win multiple awards in a given year, thus generations of photojournalists are led to believe that contest-worthy images must conform to a certain look-and-feel. This isn’t just conjecture. A well-known documentary photography who eschews…
The DPRK News Service is one of the funniest Twitter accounts in existence as it hilariously makes fun of North Korea and a host of world leaders and events. It’s run by 2 guys in the U.S. who launched it to share jokes between friends. Not long after launching it, the U.S. media repeatedly cites them as an official North Korean news service. “It feels like all online media outlets have prioritized being First rather than Right, like it’s some…
This problem pre-dates social media but it is likely that social media has amplified some of its effects: “We’ve gone from a culture that prized hard work, frugality and discretion as the central tenets of the American Dream to a culture that prized celebrity, bling and narcissism.” Source: Sundance film documents ‘wealth culture’ addiction spiralling out of control – MarketWatch Television has played a big role in promoting celebrities. Social media, especially Instagram but also Facebook, creates an environment for…
Staying informed is a strength, but for many people it’s mushroomed into an obsession with the news. Source: My therapy clients can’t tear themselves away from the news — and it’s messing with their lives – The Washington Post Personally, I found that certain subjects were “triggering” anxiety in me and I have cut way back on news and social media consumption. I also unfollowed or unfriended individuals who spent most of their social media time baiting people with hostile…