captbobalou

The New York Times is running an article about Dr. Peter J. Pronovost of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, who's made a career of hospital safety. His work was highlighted in a New Yorker article about 18 months ago. But this particular article highlights the nexus between political culture, physical organization, and method.

• good ideas
• health
• medicine
• political discourse

Theodore Dalyrmple has written an excellent essay in The New English Review on the dynamics of online comments.

I have long been intrigued by the potential value of comments to original stories, and revolted by what passes for discourse in most public media venues. I've toyed around with comment rating and filtering systems to play with the idea that perhaps there are mechanical methods of filtering the sapphires from the gravel, but so far have only come up with a couple of "solid" ideas.

• political discourse
• Stories of interest

In his post in Salon, Glenn Greenwald nails the behavior of the Democratic party.

Greenwald uses Jay Rockefeller's bait and switch on the health care public option to illustrate the "run left govern right tactics" that mainstream D's used to capture the House and Senate in '08, and then stall the progressive reform they were empowered to make after they won the elections.

• political discourse
• politics

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

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

Something that's been on my mind for a while. Yahoo news has been my morning home page for a while, simply because it used to be an easy way to compare coverage from AP, Reuters and Agence France Presse all in one spot.

Over the past few years I've noticed trend with AP (maybe it's always been there, I don't know). Their stories, if not simply short fact pieces, lean right 95% of the time, sometimes significantly and in a distorted manner.

• AP
• political discourse
• yellow journalism

http://martinlutherking.org/ is being run by racists, and is being hosted by the Dallas-based
company, The Planet.

A post on Reddit.com today brought the issue to my attention. As usual, I ran a traceroute on the site and found that it was hosted in the Dallas colocation facility of The Planet.

• hate speech
• 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