Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
News

Journal perfessor multigeek's Journal: Assassination attempts not reported 3

OK, so I'm looking at something unrelated in an Australian newspaper (Gawd! I love the internet!) and, oh, by the way, I read that there have been two serious assasination attempts recently in Paris, with a homophobic Islamic militant knifing the mayor and Chirac shot at on Bastille day.
Now, I'm pretty oblivious about some things but I do read the news most days, occasionally for as much as four or five hours a day (mostly looking for foreign policy, military or green tech stuff), but still at major sites like the WSJ, the Washington Post, LA and NY Times, The Guardian, etc. and I don't remember hearing about either of these at all.
So, is it just me or is the American media blowing it again?
Of course, for me this is always a funny question since I've sat through editorial discussions at places like Time Magazine and CNN (almost never the official ones since I'm not edit staff). So when I hear folks do the Chomsky For Dummies bit I know better. But whatever the reasons, our Old Grey Lady and her consorts aren't terribly complete.
I got reminded of this today when I got home from the New York "Not In Our Name" demonstration (many contacts made, sold as many posters as I could carry) and found that not one of the New York news sources saw fit to acknowledge a protest featuring folk like Martin Sheen and David Byrne and twenty feet from Fifth Avenue. NYT? Nada. Daily News? Nope. The Post? NY1? Newsday? WSJ? Not a syllable.
All of which is even more pathetic since Reuters had a perfectly workmanlike little piece and CNN (much of which is done here in the Big Apple, not in Atlanta) carried a good bit on the other protests, featuring one in Portland, OR.
It's odd. Here I am founding a media company based on the fundamental truth that the huge media machines blow off crucial stories and yet in my heart I still identify with the vast media machine. Time, Inc. still feels like family to me and I read reports looking first for people I knew and liked and then for the gist. Bill Moyers is still the guy whose wife argued with my mom on the board at our church (well, "society" technically, doggone hippie Unitarians). I see ads for Acela and wonder what happened to the guy who built the campaign (big Samoan-looking guy and sincerely, geekily, happily into rail), see various other magazines. catalogs, whatever, and wonder "whatever happened to..." or "Oh, brother, they *still* haven't replaced that template".
They're my family dammit, and I care about them and sympathize with them, even when I'm in a fit of rage about some new egregious thing they've done. And if I had my choice of getting rich creating my own Jan Wenner-ish media empire or being comfortably middle class and part of the Vast Media Conspiracy, well, I'm really not sure what I'ld choose.
After all, back in '95 I created a table tracking system for Sports Illustrated and their biz types used it to get them deeper into selling content to gamblers. I *know* how tainted work done for these people becomes, no matter how clean the intent or how innocent-looking the system.
That incident may have hurt me more then when the owners of my patent went ahead with pushing my fiber optics work as good for nuclear weapons. I sat in a meeting (they didn't know who I was) and listened to my baby being repurposed to better build data on "don't call it odds, call it 'how we see the game'" and knew that I was utterly helpless to take it back.
But I can't bring myself to sincerely give up on them all. I *want* Fairchild to get their act together. I'm pleased to see a regional paper do tables more like mine.
I guess that I've lost my faith but I still have it anyway. I've just gone from being a believer in a particular prophet to a believer that a prophet may, and can, come.
Hmph! This adulthood stuff really sucks sometimes.
Well, back we go to the beginning. As the Frank-man said, "Freedom of the press is limited to the man who owns one."
Rustin
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Assassination attempts not reported

Comments Filter:
  • How many patents do you hold?

    How long have you played in the IT world?

    Have you ever seen the CNN center in Atlanta? I did some work there back when I was a consultant. neat building, cool tech.
    • How many patents do you hold?
      Only one. *sigh*. My baby (in very cropped form) is 4,808,204. Unfortunately most of my other stuff was in things like tapping fiber optics where big folks with Fort Meade addresses told us to go away and mind our own business. As to what happened to the other stuff, well, it's a *long*story. (Know anybody who wants to fund fifteen inactive patent applications? Didn't think so.)

      How long have you played in the IT world?
      Oh, Lord. Yep. I'm old. My first paid job involved speccing, buying, and setting up an Osborne back in the dark ages of 1982. I did, btw, a terrible job and ended up so embarrased that I handed the job to an old friend of mine who cleaned it all up, made the client happy, and couldn't understand what I was so upset by. I should have guessed then that consulting was not my natural environment.

      Have you ever seen the CNN center in Atlanta?
      Nope. Afraid not. I've dealt with the New York folks (is it 3 Penn Plaza or 2 Penn Plaza? I always forget). The only way that CNN's distinctive tech has affected my life is their infamous internal email/posting sytem. I guess that given their decision to put hundreds of production folks where they may end up on national TV if the camera drifts their way, such an intimate comm system shouldn't be a surprise. Let's just say that the journalists know that they're kinda in a huge disfunctional family with very thin walls and shared bedrooms.
      • Oooh! silly challenge!
        I'll get a six pack of the beer of choice, a stack of my posters or some other middlin' but fun prize (their choice) to the first (if any) person who can track down where and when I was quoted in just the sort of magazine I loath.
        In other words, somewhere out there, in the magazine that could be considered the most obedient to Redmond, the most random in their reviews, and the most technologically conservative for their time, is a quote of mine.
        Hey, all PR is good PR, right? (Yeah, I was weak.)
        Rustin

"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical." -- Jon Carroll

Working...