Currently browsing posts by Lou Lesko.
The Return of the Honest Reporter
Posted on July 29, 2010 · Leave a Comment · Twitter · Facebook
The right and the left in America don’t agree on much, but for decades, they’ve shared one basic belief: You can’t trust the mainstream media. On the left, it was the New York Times and the big TV networks beating the drums about weapons of mass destruction and leading us in to the Iraq War. Or it was the corporate control of the major media, and the consolidation of ownership. Or it was Rupert Murdoch.
On the right, it was, of course, the famous “liberal media.” And for those who came of age with the blogosphere, it was the hated “gatekeepers”, those elite, arrogant editors who controlled what made it onto the front pages – and more important, what didn’t.
I’m one of those critics, too. As the executive editor of an alternative newspaper, I spend a lot of time talking about how the daily papers and the TV stations do a lousy job covering local news. I deplore the inaccuracy and bias of my local daily; I denounce the fluffy and superficial news broadcasts that ignore the real issues. I tease my town’s gatekeepers mercilessly; you think that crap is news? Why won’t you cover the real stories?
But a funny thing is happening in 2010: As corporate control of the news slackens, and the gatekeepers become less relevant, and media becomes so hyper-democratized that any fool with a $300 computer can become a publisher, some of us are starting to miss the old days.
You see, the media world has become so wide open that Americans are choking on information – and so much of it is either so utterly biased or factually inaccurate that nobody really knows who or what to believe any more.
The Shirley Sherrod affair made that point with such stunning clarity that it surprised political observers across the spectrum. Sherrod, a midlevel Department of Agriculture employee, became the latest victim of Andrew Breitbart, the blogger and online publisher whose fabricated and altered videos shattered an entire national organization.
In this case, Breitbart posted a heavily edited video of a speech Sherrod made to the NAACP. The excerpts made Sherrod look a racist who didn’t like white people — which corresponded precisely with the political narrative Breitbart was pushing.
Of course, sleazy political activists have tried to accuse their foes of all sorts of things over the years; the most insane, inaccurate stuff doesn’t typically stick. But this time around, a combination of new media technology, a split-second 24-hour news cycle and the willingness of agenda-driven talk radio to pick up on the smelliest scraps of gossip created a perfect political typhoon. Sherrod was fired, the Obama administration looked awful — and Breitbart, completely unrepentant, basked in the glory of celebrity and his soaring page views.
The sordid episode led Van Jones — a certified liberal activist and a member of the progressive political movement that has consistently blasted the mainstream media — to make an extraordinary confession: He misses Walter Cronkite. In a New York Times oped piece July 25th, Jones wrote:
“Anyone with a laptop and a flip camera can engineer a fake info-virus and inject it into the body politic. Those with cable TV shows and axes to grind can concoct their own realities. The high standards and wise judgments of people like Walter Cronkite once acted as our national immune system, zapping scandal-mongers and quashing wild rumors. As a step toward further democratizing America, we shrunk those old gatekeepers — and ended up weakening democracy’s defenses.”
This can’t go on forever. In a country as large and diverse as the United States, democracy can’t survive without honest reporters providing honest information that has some degree of credibility. At some point, the electronic media world will shake out — the Breitbarts of the world will become the equivalent of the Weekly World News, jabbering about space aliens and Elvis Presley’s clone. The more responsible outlets — the ones that have standards and principles — will become the accepted sources of reliable news that Cronkite and CBS once were.
The good news is that there will be more of them, and they’ll offer a broader spectrum of debate. The bad news is that we’re going to face a rough interregnum — a period when the old media have lost their credibility and are on the brink of collapse, and there’s so much new information slamming into our minds unfiltered and unedited that nobody knows if we can believe anything anyone says anymore.
And for anyone who really wants to make American politics work, that’s not a pleasant thought.
Tim Redmond is executive editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He has won more than 30 journalism awards, including the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Editorial Writing. He is the First Amendment chair of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.
Sartore and Alvarez win Communication Arts Photo Annual
Posted on July 26, 2010 · Leave a Comment · Twitter · Facebook
Editorial Series Joel Sartore
Editorial Series Stephen Alvarez
586′ Deep Fantastic Pit from Stephen Alvarez on Vimeo.
The Map and the Mind
Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, examines how our intellectual technologies—the tools we use to find, store, and share information—influence the way that we think, from the map and the clock to the book and the Internet. In this excerpt, Carr looks at the map’s far-reaching effects on the intellectual lives of our ancestors.
A child takes a crayon from a box and scribbles a yellow circle in the corner of a sheet of paper: this is the sun. She takes another crayon and draws a green squiggle through the center of the page: this is the horizon. Cutting through the horizon she draws two brown lines that come together in a jagged peak: this is a mountain. Next to the mountain, she draws a lopsided black rectangle topped by a red triangle: this is her house. The child gets older, goes to school, and in her classroom she traces on a page, from memory, an outline of the shape of her country. She divides it, roughly, into a set of shapes that represent the states. And inside one of the states she draws a five-pointed star to mark the town she lives in. The child grows up. She trains to be a surveyor. She buys a set of fine instruments and uses them to measure the boundaries and contours of a property. With the information, she draws a precise plot of the land, which is then made into a blueprint for others to use.
Our intellectual maturation as individuals can be traced through the way we draw pictures, or maps, of our surroundings. We begin with primitive, literal renderings of the features of the land we see around us, and we advance to ever more accurate, and more abstract, representations of geographic and topographic space. We progress, in other words, from drawing what we see to drawing what we know. Vincent Virga, an expert on cartography affiliated with the Library of Congress, has observed that the stages in the development of our mapmaking skills closely parallel the general stages of childhood cognitive development delineated by the twentieth-century Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. We progress from the infant’s egocentric, purely sensory perception of the world to the young adult’s more abstract and objective analysis of experience.
“First,” writes Virga, in describing how children’s drawings of maps advance, “perceptions and representational abilities are not matched; only the simplest topographical relationships are presented, without regard for perspective or distances. Then an intellectual ‘realism’ evolves, one that depicts everything known with burgeoning proportional relationships. And finally, a visual ‘realism’ appears, [employing] scientific calculations to achieve it.”
As we go through this process of intellectual maturation, we are also acting out the entire history of mapmaking. Mankind’s first maps, scratched in the dirt with a stick or carved into a stone with another stone, were as rudimentary as the scribbles of toddlers. Eventually the drawings became more realistic, outlining the actual proportions of a space, a space that often extended well beyond what could be seen with the eye. As more time passed, the realism became scientific in both its precision and its abstraction. The mapmaker began to use sophisticated tools like the direction-finding compass and the angle-measuring and to rely on mathematical reckonings and formulas. Eventually, in a further intellectual leap, maps came to be used not only to represent vast regions of the earth or heavens in minute detail, but to express ideas—a plan of battle, an analysis of the spread of an epidemic, a forecast of population growth.
The historical advances in cartography didn’t simply mirror the development of the human mind. They helped propel and guide the very intellectual advances that they documented. The map is a medium that not only stores and transmits information but also embodies a particular mode of seeing and thinking. As mapmaking progressed, the spread of maps also disseminated the mapmaker’s distinctive way of perceiving and making sense of the world. The more frequently and intensively people used maps, the more their minds came to understand reality in the maps’ terms.
The influence of maps went far beyond their practical employment in establishing property boundaries and charting routes. “The use of a reduced, substitute space for that of reality,” explains the cartographic historian Arthur Robinson, “is an impressive act in itself.” But what’s even more impressive is how the map “advanced the evolution of abstract thinking” throughout society. “The combination of the reduction of reality and the construct of an analogical space is an attainment in abstract thinking of a very high order indeed,” writes Robinson, “for it enables one to discover structures that would remain unknown if not mapped.” The technology of the map gave to man a new and more comprehending mind, better able to understand the unseen forces that shape his surroundings and his existence.
Copyright 2010 by Nicholas Carr. Reprinted with permission of W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.
Ain’t that America – Lou Lesko/Joel Sartore
Posted on July 1, 2010 · Leave a Comment · Twitter · Facebook
Often, when traveling out of the country on the Fourth of July, I am put in a position of explaining that the media’s representation of America is woefully incomplete. “You mean the United States isn’t made up primarily of spoiled celebrities and serial killers?”
“Oh no.” I respond, “we just give them a home.”
Traveling within the United States I am always thrilled to find that the vast diversity of the American landscape is alive and always growing and always changing. There is something wonderful about the people of this country. We have a tireless passion for reinvention. That spirit has resulted in monumental accomplishments which, thankfully, are still numerous enough and big enough to temper the absurdity of our missteps.
At the beginning of the financial crisis, when many pundits were writing off the United States, the most sage economists were saying the opposite. “There is too much innovation happening in some of the garages of America. You never know what the Americans will come up with next.” When I heard that I realized that the Fourth of July is as much a celebration of our independence as it is a celebration of our pioneering spirit.
I am always surprised how much I miss the United States when I’m traveling abroad on the Fourth of July. I’m also surprised that, as much as people from other countries like to criticize the US, they also have a desire to live here. When I ask the reason why, the overwhelming response is “opportunity.”
Not everything is perfect here in United States. But it is an amazing feeling to know that we always have the freedom to make things better.
Appeal to ban Furadan in Africa
Yesterday FMC, the Philadelphia based pesticide manufacturers who produce a product called Furadan, identifiable by its blue granules, banned in the USA and Europe managed to kill 5 lions and a striped hyena in the most sensitive lion area in Kenya. For many months conservationists have been appealing to their better judgement and ethical attitude towards the environment and its wildlife.
We asked them to remove this poison from lion range states but clearly that is not working. There are fewer than 200 Maasai lions left. Today we can scratch 5 more off that roster.
We are mobilizing every effort and force we have to collect as much poison as we can. National Geographic Big Cats initiative is hoping to pay Maasai for any cattle loss and to educate communities to the benefits of lions. Having FMC dig in their heels and not help nearly enough is making our job ten times harder and I fear that in this race against time, we may lose.
