Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

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Truth #3 – George Carlin moves to the center (NSFW language)

More than 40 years ago, George Carlin started explaining to us all the intimate details of the 7 dirty words you can’t say on television.  In addition to being very funny and very rude, his routine also illustrates how someone can move from being at the absolute margins of our culture into the mainstream.  Take a look.

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Some great back-to-school videos

In addition to this blog, I also run a Tumblr at http://ralphehanson.tumblr.com.  I use that to post quotes, photos, videos and the like with little comment or context.

Here are a few videos I’ve posted there lately that would make great pre-class entertainment (that’s what I use them for).  Students, you may just find them fun.

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#1 Party School

The Princeton Review has continued to release its list of university “honors” this week in an effort to promote its annual college guide.  Most notorious of these is the “Top Party School” list which no university wants to find itself on.

This year, West Virginia University found itself in the unfortunate position of topping the list for the third time.

The ranking is based on non-scientific surveys of students who often take delight in trying to make their school come out high in the party rankings.

WVU has long experience in dealing with the publicity about its party reputation.  Its basic strategy is making sure the school has good relations with the press at all times and engaging in search engine optimization to make sure that other, more positive stories show up high in the searches about the university.

 

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Comment Updates

If anyone has tried to comment in the last month, chances are your words got lost in the sea of comment spam that has been inundating the blog.

As of today I have added new anti-spam tools, including the ever annoying CAPTCHA codes (where you have to type in the the hard to read string of letters and numbers).  I’m hoping this will help tame the tide of spam so I can actually see the real comments!

I look forward to hearing from you all.

Dr. H

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And we are back with new Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

After a month or so summer break, Living in a Media world is back with some fresh Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

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Link Ch. 3 – News Corporation Splitting in Two

In the summer of 2012, News Corporation announced that it was planning to split the company in two.  One company would be devoted to publishing, the other to film and television.  Watch this space for updates.

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Link Ch. 1 – Who’s doing the communicating? Fox and CNN get health care decision wrong; everyone turns to blog for accurate news

Among my Seven Truths They Don’t Want You To Know About the Media is Truth #2 -There are no mainstream media (MSM).  Of course we have big and small media; however, we use all kinds of media and our old legacy media hold no special status.

Want some evidence?

Yesterday we got a bit of news.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare, was constitutional.  Now I don’t care how you feel about this story, pro or con.  But no one can deny that this will likely be one of the most important stories of the year.

And everyone in the news media knew that this story would be breaking at 10 a.m. on Thursday, June 28th.  The decision coming down was definitely not a surprise.

And yet…

Both CNN and Fox News initially got the story wrong.  As the brilliant satirical news commentator Stephen Colbert put it to the networks, “You suck at news!

In their effort to be the first to report it, both cable news networks initially reported that the court had overturned the individual mandate requirement that everyone purchase health insurance or pay a fine/tax because the court rejected the argument that this was justified by the commerce clause of the constitution.  Except that that that Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion went on to say that the mandate could be justified under congress’s authority to levy taxes.

And so… two of our biggest sources of breaking news got the story flat out wrong.

Meanwhile, a little blog that typically draws a few thousand readers a day, SCOTUSblog, was the authoritative news site that everyone turned to for immediate and accurate news about the decision. And on a day that several bigger web sites had trouble staying online because of heavy demand, SCOTUSblog had server capacity to spare despite drawing hundreds of times more traffic than normal.

What can we learn from this?

  • Niche, speciality news sites can often do a better job of reporting narrowly focused news as can big legacy news organizations.
  • In our modern media world, there’s no such thing as mainstream media.  We have lots and lots of media choices, big and small, that are all capable of being influential in different ways.
  • And Fox News and CNN are really not all that different.  Both are apparently more concerned with being first and drawing an audience than with getting a story right.
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Link Ch. 3 – 8 Years Later – Supreme Court Declines to Take Up Janet Jackson Wardrobe Malfunction Case

Eight years ago, singer Janet Jackson exposed her breast for 9/16ths of a second.  As a result, broadcast network CBS was fined more than half a million dollars and a near-decade long battle over what could or could not be broadcast on network television was launched.

Today, The Hill reports that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the lower court ruling that threw out the fine on the basis that the punishment for showing “indecent content” was “arbitrary and capricious.”

This is essentially the same point the court made in the Fox and CBS fleeting indecency cases about a week ago.

According to Chief Justice John Roberts the case does not give a clear path to indecent content on broadcast channels today because broadcasters now know that such content is not allowed.

Unless you are Nancy Grace.

If you are Nancy Grace you can show your nipple to the world for an even longer amount of time than Janet Jackson did and have no one talk about $550,000 fines.

And if you ask me, Nancy Grace exposing herself, however accidentally, is a much more serious offense.

The Janet Jackson Super Bowl “Wardrobe Malfunction”

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McDonald’s Urban Ad – 1976

An “urban ad” for McDonald’s from 1976.  Somethings are better left forgotten…. (Thanks to BuzzFeed for finding this!)

1976 urban ad for McDonald's

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