Group items tagged

"Growing numbers of observers contend that the dominant public role of our time has shifted from citizen to consumer. Indeed, respondents in polls typically cite entertainment, shopping, and other consumer activities as their top free time preferences. Commercial media and public entertainment venues offer environments carefully constructed to avoid politics and real world problems that might disturb these consumer impulses. As people in global societies increasingly enjoy the freedoms of private life, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate about many broad public concerns. The personalized society enables people to choose individual lifestyles and identities that often lead to disconnection from politics. Many citizens become receptive only to consumer-oriented messages about tax cuts, retirement benefits, or other policies targeted at particular demographic social groups. Culture jamming is an intriguing form of political communication that has emerged in response to the commercial isolation of public life. Practitioners of culture jamming argue that culture, politics, and social values have been bent by saturated commercial environments, from corporate logos on sports facilities, to television content designed solely to deliver targeted audiences to producers and sponsors. Many public issues and social voices are pushed to the margins of society by market values and commercial communication, making it difficult to get the attention of those living in the "walled gardens" of consumerism. Culture jamming presents a variety of interesting communication strategies that play with the branded images and icons of consumer culture to make consumers aware of surrounding problems and diverse cultural experiences that warrant their attention. "

"A great exercise to train your bias-detecting skills is to check on a high volume of outlets -say, eight to ten-across the political spectrum in the 6-12 hours right after a big political story breaks. I did this right after the release of the Nunes memo on Friday, Feb 2. This particular story provided an especially good occasion for comparison across sites for several reasons, including: -It was a big political story, so nearly everyone covered it. It's easier to compare bias when each source is covering the same story. -The underlying story is fact-dense, meaning that a lot of stories about it are long: -As a result, it is easier to tell when an article is omitting facts. -It is also easier to compare how even highly factual stories (i.e., scores of "1" and "2" on the Veracity and Expression scales) characterize particular facts to create a slight partisan lean. -There are both long and short stories on the subject. Comparison between longer and shorter stories lets you more easily find facts that are omitted in order to frame the issues one way or another. -News outlets have had quite a while to prepare for this coming story, so those inclined to spin it one way or the other have had time to develop the spin. Several outlets had multiple fact, analysis, and opinion stories within the 12 hours following the story breaking. You could count the number of stories on each site and rate their bias and get a more complex view of the source's bias."

"Viewers of 'Scandal,' 'Madam Secretary' and 'The Good Wife' reported increased political interest and participation in rallies, circulation of petitions and/or calling of public officials, according to a new paper co-authored by a Purdue University political communications assistant professor."

"Social media often catches blame for increasing political polarization in the United States. Does it deserve that reputation? A new study from New York University's Stern Center for Business and Human Rights finds that it does. "We conclude that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are not the original or main cause of rising U.S. political polarization, a phenomenon that long predates the social media industry. But use of those platforms intensifies divisiveness and thus contributes to its corrosive consequences," the report says. Without internal or government reforms, the researchers say, partisan hatred will continue to have "dire consequences," including further trust lost in institutions, the continued proliferation of misinformation and more real-world violence like the Jan. 6 insurrection. The researchers recommend several ways to reform social media, including investing in alternative social media platforms, empowering the Federal Trade Commission to enforce standards and tweaking algorithms to stop rewarding inflammatory content."

Wrong, wrong, wrong - to the very end, we got it wrong. Recently - as in Tuesday - the data journalist Nate Silver, who founded the FiveThirtyEight website, gave Hillary Clinton a 90 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders in Indiana. Mr. Sanders won by a comfortable margin of about five percentage points. You can continue to blame all the wrong calls this year on new challenges in telephone polling when so many Americans - especially the young - do not have landlines and are therefore hard to track down. Or you can blame the unpredictability of an angry and politically peripatetic electorate. But in the end, you have to point the finger at national political journalism, which has too often lost sight of its primary directives in this election season: to help readers and viewers make sense of the presidential chaos; to reduce the confusion, not add to it; to resist the urge to put ratings, clicks and ad sales above the imperative of getting it right."

"In the age of tweets, Instagram posts and Facebook invites, many argue today's youth is more interested in social media and the technology that accompanies it than what is going on in real life. While this belief is understandable, it's also worth noting how technology and social media have helped launch several political movements, and continue to contribute to political activism among young people."

"With billions of dollars expected to be spent on political television and radio ads in 2016, the media's role in keeping those ads honest could not be more important. A recent example in Wisconsin shows the impact and value of media fact checks of ads, a public service for voters that will be increasingly valuable as the campaign season intensifies."

"Gold and Phillip offered their insights on examples of rumors and misinformation in the 2016 campaign, discussed the competing issues and agendas they must navigate in their reporting, and chatted with students and educators about the active role young people can play as consumers and creators of news and information about political issues. The hangout was part of a special series on "Building News Literacy, Critical Media Skills, and Political Awareness Today" produced in connection to Letters to the Next President 2.0.  NLP NEWS Check out the News Literacy Project's latest developments. "

"Here's just a short list of things you're likely to see in some of these chest-thumpingly 'Murican TV spots: amber waves of grain, stars and stripes wafting in the breeze, explosions, and smiling Caucasian children. Granted, most of these things don't represent actual political issues. Political relevance aside, a bevy of (mostly conservative) politicians from, Lyndon B. Johnson to Gerald Ford to Ronald Reagan to (of course) Ted Cruz have employed this veritable art form in an endeavor to convince the voters that they should lead the free world. Because as we all know, nothing says "I got this, America" like a bald eagle soaring triumphantly over a mushroom cloud."

"WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - Dystopia is here. It's not just the "imagined place" of the dictionary definition or a future state of dystopian novels. It is very real and right now, at least for those of us trying to follow national politics. And it's not just Donald Trump. It's Barack Obama, it's Ted Cruz, it's the New York Times, it's Breitbart News. It is an alternate universe detached from the world we live in but intruding into it in painful and dangerous ways. It is a media narrative of political conspirators colluding with a dictatorial archenemy, of an intemperate and delusional leader overturning the institutions of democracy, of a "deep-state" resistance to constitutional authority. It is a dystopia of rampant hypocrisy, where obstructing legislation, supporting a law-enforcement official who strays beyond the limits of his authority, or boycotting a president's appointments is evil and undemocratic until it's your party that wants to do it."

"Facebook, Google and Twitter were supposed to save politics as good information drove out prejudice and falsehood. Something has gone very wrong"

Perhaps at some point in the past few years you've told Facebook that you like, say, Kim Kardashian West. When you hit the thumbs-up button on her page, you probably did it because you wanted to see the reality TV star's posts in your news feed. Maybe you realized that marketers could target advertisements to you based on your interest in her. What you probably missed is that researchers had figured out how to tie your interest in Ms. Kardashian West to certain personality traits, such as how extroverted you are (very), how conscientious (more than most) and how open-minded (only somewhat). And when your fondness for Ms. Kardashian West is combined with other interests you've indicated on Facebook, researchers believe their algorithms can predict the nuances of your political views with better accuracy than your loved ones. As The New York Times reported on Saturday, that is what motivated the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to collect data from more than 50 million Facebook users, without their consent, to build its own behavioral models to target potential voters in various political campaigns. The company has worked for a political action committee started by John R. Bolton, who served in the George W. Bush administration, as well as for President Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. "We find your voters and move them to action," the firm boasts on its website."

" As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem. The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work. So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network's history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump's campaign in 2016."

"How you see the role of men and women at work and at home has become an integral element of contemporary political conflict. Until recently, most of the attention has been focused on partisan evaluations of problems confronting women. A 2017 Pew Research report found, for example, that by nearly 3 to 1 (73-25 percent), Democrats believe women face "significant obstacles that make it harder for them to get ahead than men," while Republicans believe those obstacles are largely gone (63-34). Last week, however, the American Psychological Association entered the fray with the release of its long-planned "Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men." The A.P.A. guidelines argue that the socialization of males to adhere to components of "traditional masculinity such as emotional stoicism, homophobia, not showing vulnerability, self-reliance and competitiveness" leads to the disproportion of males involved in "aggression and violence as a means to resolve interpersonal conflict" as well as "substance abuse, incarceration, and early mortality.""

"Crime news got far greater play in the Times' and Strib's online editions, Maier and Tucker found, while their print editions "provided more front-page coverage of government, politics and education than did their online counterparts." Both gave more attention to sports online, and the Times had more business news online than in print, they found. Only by clicking into the depths of an online news site is an avid reader likely to find the same news stories featured online as on the front page of his or her local newspaper. These results have significant implications for the news industry and the reading public. "

"In order to deconstruct the image, let's focus on three key elements (leaving aside the placement of the 'M' in 'Time' that makes it look like Trump has red horns): the color, the pose, and the chair:"

"TV news is corrupt and incentivized to accentuate conflict over clarity, with Washington's media and politicians constituting "an incredibly corrupt and blinded, symbiotic terrarium," according to Jon Stewart. The comic-satirist and longtime TV host left no doubt that he's not softened toward the media, government or the political process since exiting "The Daily Show" during an appearance at the University of Chicago Monday."

"From Baton Rouge to Minneapolis to Dallas, it has been a fraught week in the United States. Tonight, University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor Sut Jhally is speaking at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts about race relationships in America. Jhally is the founder and executive director of the Media Education Foundation. He is best known for producing and directing films on politics, violence and social issues. Jhally spoke with WAMC about how he thinks the election of Barack Obama affected racial identity in the United States. The lecture is titled "The Crisis of Whiteness in the Age of the Black Presidency." It is free and open to the public."

"A new comprehensive study, conducted by The Media Insight Project, shows that trust and reliability in news can be broken down into specific factors that publishers can put into action and consumers can recognize. The study also finds that in the digital age, several new factors largely unexamined before - such as the intrusiveness of ads, navigability, load times, and having the latest details - also are critical in determining whether consumers consider a publisher competent and worthy of trust. The specific factors that lead people to trust and rely on a news source also vary by topic, the study finds. How much consumers value a specific component related to trust depends, for instance, on whether they are seeking news about politics or traffic and weather, let alone lifestyle. On some topics, consumers rate in‑depth reporting and expert sources more highly. In others, ease of use is of higher value. For still others, being entertained is more important. And in social media, consumers are fairly skeptical of content and want cues of trustworthiness such as clear identification of the original reporting source."

""Haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?" asked an actor in "Media Burn," an outdoor spectacle staged in 1975 by the performance art collective Ant Farm. The answer, 15 years later, is a resounding "Yes!" Now, a generation of artists who grew up with television are beginning to rebel against it. Following Ant Farm's lead, they are kicking a hole -- metaphorically, at least -- in the cathode-ray tube. Some of today's most incendiary artists derive the structure, style and subject matter of their art from mass media. Mordantly funny, frighteningly Orwellian and very much a product of the times, their work challenges the image merchants. Moreover, it constitutes a search for truth in the technetronic age, where, increasingly, perception is reality. These artists are "cultural jammers," exposing the ways in which corporate and political interests use the media as a tool of behavior modification. Jamming is CB slang for the illegal practice of electronically interrupting radio broadcasts, conversations between fellow hams or the audio portions of television shows. Cultural jamming, by extension, is artistic "terrorism" directed against the information society in which we live."