– The New Hampshire Union Leader endorses Gingrich.
– Sponsorships verses failing banner ads: an interesting discussion on the future of digital news advertising:
I simply cannot believe that there isn’t a way to tell people about new products and services and special deals without pissing them off. After all, at the right times and in the right quantities, we want to know about the new furniture store that opened up just outside downtown, next month’s concerts at the arena and the new flavor of Doritos. The problem is not that we hate advertising, the problem is that we hate the kind of advertising we get.
[…]
One promising alternative to banner ads, it seems to me, is a revival of the good old-fashioned sponsorship and the copywriting behind it.
– NYPD tells officers not to interfere with the press:
The New York Police Department’s commissioner on Wednesday sent an internal message to officers ordering them not to unreasonably interfere with media access during news coverage and warning those who do will be subject to disciplinary action, after several journalists were arrested covering Occupy Wall Street demonstrations last week.
The message by Commissioner Raymond Kelly was being read at police precincts citywide.
– As more and more viewers lose trust in media, all media, due to the bias, progressives move from manipulating the news itself to manipulating fact-checks with oftentimes questionable sources.
You’re reading a wrap-up of the Sept. 22 Republican presidential debate when you land on this claim from Rep. Michele Bachmann: “President Obama has the lowest public approval ratings of any president in modern times.”
Really? You start googling for evidence. Maybe you scour the blogs or the fact-checking sites. It takes work, all that critical thinking.
That’s why Dan Schultz, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab (and newly named Knight-Mozilla fellow for 2012), is devoting his thesis to automatic bullshit detection. Schultz is building what he calls truth goggles — not actual magical eyewear, alas, but software that flags suspicious claims in news articles and helps readers determine their truthiness. It’s possible because of a novel arrangement: Schultz struck a deal with fact-checker PolitiFact for access to its private APIs.
If you had the truth goggles installed and came across Bachmann’s debate claim, the suspicious sentence might be highlighted. You would see right away that the congresswoman’s pants were on fire. And you could explore the data to discover that Bachmann, in fact, wears some of the more flammable pants in politics.
This becomes an argument about perception. The petty Bachmann example cited is flawed and simply because the entire conclusion is based on a presupposition and attempts to asininely make scientific an off-handed remark. If you want a real example of scientific measurement, why not begin with the President’s claim that there exist 57 states in the union? Oh my gosh, Bachmann split an infinitive while giving her response in the last debate. FACT CHECK! Senate Democrats haven’t produced a budget in over 800 days while pouring blame all over conservatives in the media. Crickets.
Fact-check sites are stupid because they encourage Americans to be lazy. Apathy is why we’re in our current economic mess; suddenly we care so much to replicate it again by entrusting the “facts” to a third party whose conclusions are often assumptions and bias nicely dressed up and paraded as fact. May I be blunt for a moment? People should get off their asses and learn how to use this new-fangled invention called Google. They should watch debates and engage in civics instead of shrugging off all the “boring” stuff to the pundits while simultaneously complaining about how few people seem to be making all the decisions.
– GQ thinks Ed Schultz is one of the “least influential people alive.” Confirmation of what America already thought. How loud was the pop you think, when Schultz’s ego burst?
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