A Hindu chaplain was invited to say the opening prayer in the Senate and some christians slipped in to protest, disrupting the prayer, and generally making fools of themselves and presenting the face of their faith which causes those who feel religious belief is something everyone ought to get over…
I was checking on the latest news about the Creationist Museum, and found myself browsing a conservative blog site, Townhall.com. The hot issue of the day is debunking the whole Al Gore Global Warming issue. Try this post, for a taste.
What truly bugged me is that, among the innumerate and sometimes marginally literate responses, there was a kernel of actually reasonable doubt. Those who follow the actual science (a minority on that site) know that there is no doubt about the present warming trend, nor about the unprecedented rise in fossil CO2 in the last century. However, there is no certain model for the causality leading to or spawning from these facts.
Doomsayers love the fantastic, sudden, apocalyptic models of global warming that Hollywood likes to portray. It’s quite dramatic, and cannot be ruled out. However, most models show that the big and civilization-altering changes that are likely to occur will take generations to notice. The present conservative movement is more interested in the next fiscal quarter than the next generation. Therefore, this is not a “real” problem.
The real problem with the Gore campaign is that it is covered as a binary issue. Either Global Warming is a big and serious and immediate problem that requires drastic solutions, or it an imaginary scare tactic. The truth is somewhere in between. Fossil atmospheric carbon dumping is (and will be) a tiny blip in history. Maybe three centuries total out of the almost hundred centuries (so far) …
I highly recommend the work of Free Press. The answer to the question in the title of this post (from the Free Press FAQ page) is that our massive dysfunction of our media is not caused by malicious or incompetent individuals: There may well be media owners who are especially…
Long before political Bush-bashing became popular, or even widely accepted, critics still jabbed him repeatedly for his speech. Books of "Bushisms", videos of Bush's misspeakings spliced together, and comedic reproductions of the man's halting, confused language have always dominated the pop culture reception of the President. I use the word…
Is it just me, or are the interviews you see on television getting worse and worse? There are exceptionally good interviewers, of course (such as Bill Moyers). Bad interviews are the norm, however. This is a shame, because most bad interviews could be cured if only the interviewers would follow a few basic rules
Before I go further, I should make it clear that my frustration is with interviews that are serious attempts to discuss a topic with a guest in order to inform or entertain the audience. I am excluding from this critique interviews on comedy shows (such as Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert), where the interviewer is expected to interject his or her personality with more gusto or even to toy with the guest.
Without further ado, here are 10 basic rules for conducting effective interviews:
1. The interviewer needs to shut up and let the guest talk. How often is it that an interviewer just can’t hold back and ends up dominating the interview, failing to allow the guest a fair chance to talk? I’ve often watched interviews by Charlie Rose that remind me of this point. Although Charlie books some terrific guests and does some excellent work, he is one of those interviewers who is often incapable of staying out of the way. Many interviews end up being “about Charlie.” In the legal field, the trick to effective direct examination of a witness is to ask brief questions that allow the witness to “bloom” in front …