Posts Tagged ‘damagnificent seven’

Readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic

Posted: January 5, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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During the 25 years I have taught writing, I have complained frequently about how K-12 educators pay little attention to the building blocks of grammar, punctuation, and style.

In the past, students have accepted the need to learn these elements of writing. Now that’s changed.

I am teaching a month-long course in journalism history, which requires a great deal of writing.

For the first time ever, students feel emboldened enough to complain publicly that I deduct points, generally a full grade, when they make three errors or more.

“You keep dropping me entire letter grades for tiny, insignificant grammatical errors. I’ve never had a teacher complain about my grammar,” one student wrote. “Considering most of your students are juggling school, work, and the ramifications of a global pandemic, I don’t think this is the time for harsh grading.”

Another told me he checked with a website editor who said the grammar was fine. I noted 18 errors in a submission of 500 words.

Here’s what I wrote to all of the students:

After more than 25 years as a journalist at The Associated Press, Newsweek, and ABC News, I decided to teach writing. Since I joined academia, I have written and edited seven books. I’ve also written for newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and online publications. 

As such, I take writing quite seriously.

If a writer fails to understand the basic tenets of grammar, punctuation, and style, myriad problems occur.

First, readers and viewers get hung up on the errors, known as creating “noise” in communications theory. For example, I once did a major investigation of prisons, which began with a visual of geese over a Wisconsin jail. I referred to the geese as Canadian geese. Such birds are called Canada geese. At least 100 of the 20 million viewers of the documentary scolded me for the error. That means that at least 100 people stopped watching something important because I made a style error.

Second, readers and viewers may question the accuracy of the information provided if basic rules are not followed.

Third, I had the luxury of having excellent editors who would challenge almost anything I wrote. Today, there are virtually no editors who look over reporters’ shoulders for errors of grammar, punctuation, style, and most importantly, accuracy.

Lastly, if you seek employment in journalism, advertising, or public relations, you will likely have to take a writing test, which is intended to determine your abilities in accuracy, grammar, punctuation, and style.

Since this course is a writing class in the Department of Journalism, I think it’s essential that someone care about such matters.

DaTimes admits it published ‘fake news’

Posted: December 29, 2020 by chrisharper in media, Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

The New York Times finally admitted that it published fake news over the past few years.

The admission wasn’t about the coverage of the Trump administration, but the errors stabbed at the very heart of what DaTimes considers its influence: international reporting.

You shouldn’t be surprised that you haven’t heard much about the massive editorial issues because DaTimes dumped the findings on the weekend before Christmas.

Reporter Rukmini Callimachi has been at the center of the publication’s coverage of terrorism, particularly the Islamic State.

In December 2014, Callimachi unearthed what appeared to be an important discovery. Syrian journalist Louai Abo Aljoud, Callimachi reported, said he had seen three American hostages while he was being held at an Islamic State facility in 2013. Upon further inspection, however, key details failed to bear out the “news,” resulting in an editor’s note affixed to the story on Friday.

“After the article was published, The Times learned that Mr. Aljoud had given inconsistent accounts of key elements of the episode to Times journalists and others,” the note reads in part.

After the publication of the editor’s note, Karam Shoumali, a Syrian journalist who worked with Callimachi, tweeted that he told the reporter about errors in the story. But she refused to change the details.

The tweet stands as evidence that as early as late 2014, less than a year after Callimachi jumped from the Associated Press to DaTimes, colleagues expressed concerns about her methods and conclusions.

But there’s a lot more. A key figure in DaTimes’ podcast, “The Caliphate,” which Callimachi created, was a fraud. Last September, Canadian authorities charged Shehroze Chaudhry for carrying out a terrorism hoax. Chaudhry was a key figure in “The Caliphate,” a 12-part series created in 2018. 

On Friday, DaTimes finally came clean. An editor’s note atop “Caliphate” admitted the collapse of key episodes. “In the absence of firmer evidence, ‘Caliphate’ should have been substantially revised to exclude the material related to Mr. Chaudhry. The podcast as a whole should not have been produced with Mr. Chaudhry as a central narrative character,” the note reads in part.

DaTimes failed to listen to various reporters from the news organization itself. This frequent problem has existed at the publication in past misadventures, such as Jason Blair and Judith Miller. 

Last week top editors who worked with Callimachi admitted their errors. But some reporters were not assuaged. C.J. Chivers, a former foreign correspondent and now a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, was among the first Times reporters to complain to editors. 

“You discouraged people from using the fire alarm, and when some of us did use the fire alarm anyhow, we found the alarm was not connected to anything,” Chivers reportedly told the group. 

But there is a more fundamental question that runs through these problems at DaTimes, mainly since it is far from the first time that such egregious errors have happened. 

I gave up on DaTimes a few years ago. But it would seem its loyal readers should be asking a fundamental question: If someone got away with making stuff up for six years, shouldn’t the news organization take a harder look at all other aspects of the publication?   

Trump supporters are like ISIS fighters

Posted: December 22, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

If anyone represents the disdain of the media for Trump supporters, CNN media maven Brian Stelter would be an excellent example.

Recently, Stelter compared Trump supporters to ISIS members who’d been brainwashed.

“The same pipeline that helps my children learn, helps you connect with your loved ones, also poisons some adults, and distorts their reality. The body of research about radicalization is very clear,” Stelter said. “The Internet creates more space for extremism, and the echo chamber effect accelerates the process. QAnon is one really clear recent example. But so is ‘Stop the Steal,’ and so are some corners of the anti-vaccination movement.

“The best word for what is happening in America right now is radicalization. That’s what it is. That’s what this hyped-up, right-wing media machine is doing. That’s why it feels harder to talk about politics with other people, harder to speak a common language about right and wrong.”

Stelter’s screed is reminiscent of various media attacks on Trump and his supporters—a subject of a recent analysis in Quillette by writer Kevin Mims. See https://quillette.com/2020/12/15/journalisms-ivory-towers/

Simply put, media types don’t understand Trump supporters because the two groups are almost distinctly different from one another. Virtually no one in the elite media comes from the same background as Trump supporters. For example, two-thirds of Americans—many of whom support Trump—don’t have college degrees. Alternatively, a college degree is a minimum requirement for a job in journalism. 

“As recently as the 1970s, when I first became a consumer of American journalism, daily newspapers were filled with the work of syndicated journalists such as Art Buchwald, Mike Royko, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, and Jack Anderson, none of whom possessed a university degree that wasn’t honorary. Perhaps the most storied newspaper columnist in Northern California during the second half of the 20th century was Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle, another journalist who never went to college. Visit the Wikipedia page for American Print Journalists, and you’ll find plenty of famous 20th-century reporters who lacked a college degree: Ernie Pyle, H.L. Mencken, Harold Ross, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, I.F. Stone, Hedda Hopper, Walter Winchell, and even Hunter S. Thompson,” Mims notes. 

Mims continues: “So much that has been written about black Americans lately has also been written by black Americans. The same is true of gay Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and American immigrants. But very little of what has been written about non-college-educated Americans of any race or ethnicity in the last five years has actually been written by non-college-educated Americans.”

In many cases, the elite media no longer seek non-college-educated people as readers and viewers. That may be another reason why few people in the press understand those who voted for Trump.

Whatever the case, the media might want to look for people who understand that Trump supporters aren’t brainwashed idiots akin to ISIS members.

Just Words

Posted: August 22, 2020 by datechguy in politics, Uncategorized
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The Biden campaign, planning for every contingency it seems, recently wargamed a situation where, in the event Trump won re-election, the entire West Coast would secede, and the public would wait to see what the military would do. Democratic insider John Podesta played the role of Biden in their scenario, and refused to concede, prompting the secession.

Secession is all the rage these days among the Left, which always seems to fester among the losing side in any election. (Which makes me wonder about all those polls showing Biden ahead.) Along these lines, just this past Thursday, NPR featured the author Richard Kreitner on its morning news shows, Morning Edition. Kreitner was pushing his new book, a history of American secessionism. Kreitner has previously written for the Nation and Slate and currently lives in Brooklyn, so I think it’s safe to call him a leftist.

Kreitner’s book purports to examine whether “it’s time to break up” the United States. Of course, Kreitner assured the listener, while he didn’t “want” states to secede, he also didn’t see why California should have the same number of senators as Wyoming. My way or the highway, essentially.

You hear this argument quite a bit among the Left, actually. The tyranny of the Senate. California has so many times the population as Wyoming, so why should they have the same number of senators? A cursory glance at some of Vox legal writer Ian Milhiser’s ravings will reveal similar sentiments.

Memo to the Left: California should have the same number of senators as Wyoming because California agreed to have the same numbers of senators as every other state when it applied to join the Union in 1850.

No surprise the Democrats put little weight in words. From Kamala Harris laughing off her earlier condemnations of Joe Biden’s sexual predations as merely the stuff of a “debate,” to Bill Clinton dancing around the definition of “is,” Democrats treat words as things to be twisted and manipulated, not to be backed up with conviction. Joe Matthews, a journalist for Zocalo Public Square, claimed on NPR that it was good that Kamala Harris had no conviction, because it allowed her to blow wherever “the wind blows.”

Words are supposed to mean something. To fewer and fewer Democrats, they don’t.

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