Who is the God about whom each item on this list is allegedly true: He “was the biggest healer in Antiquity, even raising the dead. They called him Savior and Redeemer. He was born of a mortal virgin mother, but had a divine Father. He walked on water. He was not…
This is how the Lorraine Hotel looked last night (January 13, 2007) at 9 pm. I had never been to Memphis until this weekend, so I had never before visited the Lorraine (it is now a preserved historical site). It was eerily quiet last night, not at all the way…
This post is one of a continuing series of summaries I am creating regarding the sessions I attended of the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, Tennessee. Much more information about the conference, including audio of all of the sessions (and video of many) can be found at Free Press.
The academics that spoke at this particular session (“Media Scholars’ Policy Research Review”) were proof that academics (the people and their topics) can be exciting.
Mary Kaplan is the associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication, as well as the founder and director of the Norman Lear Center. Kaplan has focused his research on the content and regulation of local television news.
The Lear Center studies “entertainment.” Broadly defined, this is the “attention economy” which is no longer a separate economy from anything else. Entertainment has expanded like an empire to consume all other activities. Media and journalism are mere branches of entertainment.
Kaplan reports on research establishing that local TV news is, by far, the most important source of news and information for Americans. Almost unbelievably, 65% of Americans say that local television news is their number one source of information.
I write “unbelievably,” based on the widespread lack of serious news content. The fluff of local newscasts drives me to distraction. See an earlier post on local TV news at this site. Kaplan is troubled that most of the content of local news is “soft.” News directors of TV stations have repeatedly told …
A recent post on Daily Kos reported on the U.S. House of Representatives passing a bill to loosen Republican restrictions on stem-cell research. Although it sailed through the House and looks set to pass the Senate, George W. Bush has threatened to veto it, and it has not yet gained…
Friday evening, I did something I rarely do: I watched one of those pseudo-news shows, the kind that generally focus on soft news that everybody but me seems to be interested in. Generally it is some kind of pop culture junk like Brittany’s latest antic (WHO is Brittany anyway and why does everyone but me know her by first name?). But a Friday night spent under a cozy quilt, nursing a slight malaise left from New Year’s, left me sprawled in a recliner with a TV remote and nothing worth watching. I happened to catch Primetime, an ABC show that left me deeply disturbed.
The show was about the Milgram experiment conducted in the early 60s and a 2006 similar replication of the experiment. In 1961, just a few months after the trial of Adolf Eichmann began, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram began an experiment to test to what degree people would obey authority even when it was in direct conflict with their personal beliefs.
The subjects of the experiment were people like you and me. They were asked to participate in experiment about whether pain assisted the learning process. The second individual, complicit in the experiment, was set up in another room as the “student.” The “teacher”, the actual subject of the experiment, was placed in front of a panel of switches labeled with increasing voltage. Whenever the “student” missed a question, the teacher was directed to flip the next highest voltage switch, giving the student an apparent electric …