Comparing Global Medias

Today, via Geeky Mom Laura Blankenship, I discovered an article in TechCrunch, about a site that lines up the front page of CNN or other news sites with those of Al Jazeera, France 24, BBC, NPR, or several others, so that visitors may compare for themselves the differences between the stories covered, from which perspectives, to what degree of detail and whether or not it is through first hand reporting or some other source. Unfortunately, CNN seldom compares favorably, hence the URL for the site, http://wtfcnn.com/.

Sadly, the disaster which is cable news in this country is, in large part, media giving the people what they want and not, as some would believe, some vast elitist conspiracy to keep the masses hypnotized by mindless infotainment so they are distracted which they go about undermining the foundation of our society. If you need evidence of that, compare an hour of the domestic feed of CNN in the US to an hour of the feed on CNN International. The network caters to its international audience not just with an hour of news the focuses on international subjects, but with broadcasts that are more serious in tone, and that devote much less time to entertainment and puff pieces.
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What’s Wrong with Arizona?

It’s refreshing to see the media doing their job from time to time.  Notice how carefully Arizona State Representative Cecil Ash avoids saying that he believes President Obama was born in the United States of that the President’s birth certificate is legitimate, and You really should not go beyond this to avoid specific problems that could arise. tadalafil 20mg cipla Penegra is the Indian version of cheap cialis viagra . Studies have indicated that cialis prescription at least thirty million men or more are impotent in the world. That is when you buy prescription female viagra Kamagra; make sure you are getting right treatment with right drugs. how Anderson Cooper presses him to clearly define his position, without being unnecessarily rude or confrontational.

Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Media Review

I am late with this this week, due to a number of commitments Friday, over the weekend and Monday. Please accept my apologies.

February 26 – March 5, 2010
Compiled by Scholars at Risk

Book of the week: No University Is an Island
The Times Higher Education, 3/4

Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets
Leslie Kaufman, The New York Times, 3/3

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“Internationalized Academe Is Inevitable,” but Will We Do it Well

“The internationalization of higher education is inevitable,” Mr. Levine, a former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, said in a speech on Wednesday to the Association of International Education Administrators whose members are meeting here this week.

In internationalization, “some bold universities will lead,” Mr. Levine said. “Others will be populizers. And others will hold onto the past and will be destined to fail.”

via “Internationalized Academe Is Inevitable, but Its Form Is Not,” The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The quotation above is from a short version of a longer article the was published in the February 26 print edition of the Chronicle.  A recurring point of tension at that meeting, and one that is also clear from the comments on the report linked above, is that there is a tension between the need to internationalize curricula and the costs of doing so. Like so many sectors of the economy, higher education is experiencing significant financial challenges and this is the problem.

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Journalism and Online Discourse

However, while blogs have created hundreds of prominent new voices in the national media, social networking sites like twitter have only reinforced the position of people and institutions who were already prominent in other media.  Not a single person has risen to become a prominent national media figure just through their tweeting.  However, popular TV shows, musicians, and politicians have gained two million followers or more through the medium.

Given this, it is a legitimate worry that the decline of blogging, and the rise of social networking, will mean that the media status quo that was once threatened by the Internet will now be reinforced by it.  Rather than new media functioning as a democratizing force, it  could become yet another tool of the status quo.  Maybe once in a while it will be used by street demonstrators against a totalitarian regime, as it was in Iran, but most of the time it will just make the already famous and the already dominant even more so.

–via “Social networking sites reinforce the status quo

Those are the conclusions that Chris Bowers  draws from a report by the Pew Internet Centers on Social Media and Young Adults that finds that blogging is on the decline among teenage users of the Internet. Teens are also commenting less on blogs. Use among older Americans, on the other hand, remains the same.

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Media Transformations

Here’s an interesting graphic showing the transition from print to online media.
Online VS Traditional News
What generates concern, however, is that online news outlets are rarely backed up by significant new gathering organizations or operations capable of conducting journalistic investigations. They have tended to rely on the news gathering operations of print newspapers, the news syndicates and major media. d

Now ABC News has announced major cuts in its newsroom.

ABC News will sharply reduce its news-gathering staff through buyouts and possible layoffs, the company said on Tuesday. ABC employees said they expected the cutbacks would affect 300 to 400 people, or roughly 25 percent of the news division’s work force.

Even viagra generic when you are driving you have easy access to them. The viagra 100 mg ingredients used in VigRx Plus are damiana, bioperin, epimedium leaf extract, and tribulus terrestris. Causes of viagra generico cialis ED: Stress is the most common cause of this condition is atherosclerosis. pfizer viagra generic Here is some information I have found. The cuts at ABC, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, are among the steepest ever made at a network news division. A spokesman said ABC News currently employed roughly 1,500 people.

In a memorandum to staff members, the ABC News president David Westin called the cutbacks a “fundamental transformation” for the division that would result in a leaner, smaller organization. “The time has come to rethink how we do what we are doing,” he wrote.

Let’s hope this isn’t a harbinger of things to come.

My Most Popular Tweets of this Week

I have not been active in social media much this week, having spent most of my time updating my web 1.0 personal site now that I am no longer with NITLE.  I thought I had finished, but I’ve discovered a few things I still want to fix:  Typos, a misplaced section divider, and other things of that nature.  If you have a chance, look at it and send your comments.  I welcome them all, whether it’s about a typo or the whole design.

Still, I did tweet a bit.  The most popular ones this week were, most to least popular:
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Some Twitter Links From Last Week

Here are the tweets containing the most popular links from last week, counting only those that contain links shortened with ow.ly. They are copied here as they were, embarrassing typos and all.

1. Netflix Gets A Huge Influx of Indie and Foreign Films http://ow.ly/12EQc NICE!!!
2. President Obama: ‘I’m a Big Believer in Net Neutrality’ http://ow.ly/13aqs
3. This is interesting! Free Online Courses Don’t Hurt Paid Enrollment, Study Suggests http://ow.ly/13agQ And it’s wise to remember last bit.
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The Colbert Report and Air America

Air America is off the air, and visitors the website are greeting with text explaining the companies bankruptcy.

It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.

In memory of a network I never actually listened to, The Indecision Forever blog has posted some of The Colbert Report’s best Air America moments. Here’s the first clip, but the best are at this link.

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Tip/Wag – Midterm Elections Edition
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

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