Miasma in the House of Bite Me
Grassroots journalism & current events, cyberculture, technology, privacy, with a little new criticism, feminism, postmodernism, radical pedagogy, & new media theory thrown in.
Ernie Pyle, the original embedded reporter. I just read an article about a one-man off-Broadway play based on the war reporting of Ernie Pyle. Meanwhile, the IU School of Journalism is reprinting three dozen of his dispatches. It is interesting that Pyle, perhaps the original embedded reporter managed to report honestly about the horrors of war in spite of perhaps a more sweeping censorship department that read everything coming from the front. Pyle's description of Normandy (previously discussed) is a classic contrasting a beautiful day on the beach, the human and material wreckage, and even empathy for German prisoners of war. And then there was some black humor of surviving near misses that could have come out of Catch 22 or Slaugherhouse 5. His unfinished final dispatch reads like poetry:
"Dead men by mass production--in one country after another--month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.
"Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.
"Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them."
I held my breath until Corante supported RSS, and now, whew, I can breathe again. They did a nice job. And now Berkman's favorite Meryl Streep lookalike, Donna Wentworth, is subscribable. [Scripting News]
How Vietnam Halted SARS. Vietman fought the SARS outbreak openly and aggressively and was declared by the World Health Organization to be the first nation to contain and eliminate the disease. By Seth Mydans. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]
Just a few key paragraphs summarize how Vietnam was different than other SARS sites:
What she did not yet know was that they had gathered to view a miracle. She was the only survivor from among the six most critically ill patients infected when SARS broke out in the Hanoi French Hospital more than two months ago.
Her survival became a hopeful symbol for Vietnam, which on April 28 was declared by the World Health Organization to be the first nation to contain and eliminate the disease. Vietnam earned that distinction by going 20 straight days without a new case after recording 63 infections, including the six critical cases. Five people had died
[...]
The country's success was not a miracle, said Aileen Plant, who led the fight against SARS in Vietnam for the World Health Organization. "This was real, old-fashioned infectious disease containment," she said. "It all comes back to the same thing, which is stopping infected people from infecting other people."
After a crucial meeting on March 9 with members of the World Health Organization, the government decided to fight the outbreak openly and aggressively, Ms. Plant said. A task force was formed, information gathering was centralized and virtually the whole government was mobilized to deal with the infection and its consequences.
[...]
Vietnam's luck was that the disease had entered the country through just one infected person, an American who brought it from abroad. The Vietnamese capitalized on this luck by moving fast to confine the outbreak to the hospital.
[...]
At the urging of Dr. Urbani and his colleagues, Vietnam closed the hospital to new patients and visitors on March 11. Most of the hospital's staff remained inside, some falling ill, others watching their colleagues sicken and die.
"The net effect probably was that they gave SARS to each other and not to the outside world," Ms. Plant said.
Ms. Men, 46, is a pediatric nurse at the hospital, but she often helped out in other wards. It is impossible to know exactly how she was infected, but on the evening of March 1, she said, she spent some time in the room of Mr. Chen, who was critically ill.
In the following days she began to suffer headaches, fever, diarrhea and exhaustion. "It was strange," she said. "A strange, overpowering tiredness."
When she checked herself into the hospital, two other nurses had already fallen ill, but, she said, "it never entered our heads that we could die."
[...]
An immigration screening system was set up, soon to be bolstered by seven $50,000 infrared machines at airports and border crossings to detect people with high temperatures, Mr. Huang said. Hundreds of electronic thermometers are being bought for use by immigration agents.
"Today one of my professors told us about an article in the Sacramento Bee called State of Denial. When I went to go read this article I found I had to pay $1.95. Tell me, how many copies of the paper could I get for that price? At least two, maybe four, or even eight! Now tell me, what sort of value is that to me? None. I won't pay $1.95 for one article. Because the Sacramento Bee is charging so much they are effectively locking away the past in their vaults." [Grant M. Henninger]
Another reason not to lock away your content behind a cost figure that is perceived to be too high by the user but too low for a credit card-based transaction (at least until micropayments are a reality).
And, of course, a friendly reminder that you can usually get this type of article for free from your local library!
Aaron Brown of CNN, Walter Cronkite and other broadcast journalists have been hired to appear in videos resembling newscasts that are actually paid for by drug makers and other health care companies, blurring the line between journalism and advertising.
Mr. Brown and Mr. Cronkite, the former CBS News anchor, are the new hosts of video "news breaks" produced by a Boca Raton, Fla., company called WJMK Inc. that are shown on local public television stations between regular programs. They are replacing Morley Safer of CBS, who has appeared in hundreds of the videos but has concluded, according to a "60 Minutes" spokesman, that the work does not meet the standards of CBS News.
Based on information that it received yesterday, CNN said it was reviewing its decision to allow the participation of Mr. Brown, who has not yet appeared in a video.
The hosts of the videos, standing on an elaborate news-style set, provide a general introduction to segments that profile health care companies or their products. According to WJMK documents, the companies pay WJMK about $15,000 in connection with the segments and other services and are allowed to edit and approve the videos, which are two to five minutes long.
Now Walter Cronkite can do whatever he wants, but Aaron Brown not only isn't supposed to endorse any particular advertiser's product, but he isn't allowed to join political parties, take positions on political issues except in designated editorials in what is called the "news hole" of broadcasts, rather than as part of the "ad hole."
Unless that line is utterly blurred. Or maybe it is just blurred for famous faces with big contracts, while ordinary reporters are banned from marching in peace marches or any other kind of political activity--or can be fired, as recently happened to a reporter in California.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, I'd say.
I'd also say that corporations find a lot of reasons to blur the boundaries between ads and news whenever it is convenient for them to sell more ad space.
And further, I'd say that this boundary on supposed "political" speech, and "objective" reporting is utterly illusory and absurd. I don't know about hawking soap or real estate or whoring for drug companies, some of the most loathsome capitalists out there. I have all kinds of ethical problems with taking money from companies that protect their patents while people in the continent of Africa are dying of AIDS and living on $1 a week. Yeah, if Aaron Brown or Walter Cronkite is doing that, I hope they have all kinds of trouble sleeping at night. My standards are a bit higher.
But in the end, I don't think folks in journalism realize how much they commodify and sell in their supposed "news hole" each and every day.
I left some thoughts on Don Park's site, but all I really want to say here is that I would bet good money the Google/Blogger folks are working on this already, as well as the Moveable/TypePad folks. If they aren't, they should be, and if they just got the idea from me here, I will be happy to send a bill for my consulting fee. [G]
Don Park: "Wiki is like a fun house for cheery gully dwarves, endless interconnected rooms with five-feet high ceiling and no housemaids." [Scripting News]
If Blog is an one-mensional animal with a single continuous stream of consciousness, Wiki is a N-dimensional animals with many segmented strands of consciousness. While the two are related on the surface, they are two very different beasts.
UI-wise, Wiki is like a fun house for cheery gully dwarves, endless interconnected rooms with five-feet high ceiling and no housemaids. Think neck pains and perma-mess.
John Palfrey asked me to debate Jon Bonne at MSNBC about the value of citizen blogging in the 2004 presidential election. I reluctantly agreed, figuring I'd get slimed with all kinds of gratuitous boasting about how they check facts, and know all the insiders, and have big budgets, etc etc. I wasn't disappointed in the first round. He begins his rebuttal to Citizen Bloggers in NH with this gem: "The elusive part of the feedback loop in election reporting has always been the voter." That's like saying the elusive part of skiing is snow. The elusive part of cooking is food. The elusive part of sex is (use your imagination). I'll have a rebuttal tomorrow. [Scripting News]
Students enrolled on the Gothic Imagination course, which looks at 18th to 20th century art, architecture, literature and music, were given 5GB of music on their iPods.
Assignments included looking at how the music related to other art forms of the day.
A course entitled War, Politics and Shakespeare incorporated war-related music, asking students to make connections between a variety of protest songs and a selection of Shakespeare plays.
As well as specific music functions, the iPods also offered a way to share other students' work, with some assignments being downloaded on to everyone's machine.
The Karma of Literature... BookCrossing.com