captbobalou

Funny...sad too.

• journalism
• media

I just stopped reading an editorial provocatively entitled, "You will lose your private health insurance." (http://bit.ly/7wlpwQ) I thought it might help clarify what precisely is being debated in the House and Senate these days on health care.

• civil discourse
• health
• media
• political discourse

I LOVE this new feature: http://www.nytimes.com/timeswire/index.html

It works great, provides great content, and I suspect I'll be using this as my NYTimes interface from here on out.

Just as an aside, I think the Times approach of subtly introducting new features is the right way to do things: it provides a good soft-launch to assist in debugging, and if it doesn't work, they can just as quietly retract the feature and work on it until it they can make it work well.

• good ideas
• journalism
• media

Yesterday there was a story that was covered all over the place (Reddit, Wall Street Journal, American Spectator) that stated that Seymour Hersh implicated Dick Cheney in an assasination plot that former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

I didn't even bother to click thru the links because the source was a newspaper in Pakistan, a country well-known for producing journalists who employ J. L. Austin's idea of performative utterances to make fantasy reality.

• civil discourse
• journalism
• media
• political discourse

I just can't hold back today. My morning news gorge begins with Yahoo! news and today I just can't take it: every other section has a story that speculates on some event that may or may not happen, whose outcome fits someone's political agenda, and the news outlet was just too lazy to fact-check the assertions contained in the story.

• journalism
• media
• political discourse