Fantasia and the Narrative Fallacy

As a new parent, I introspect constantly about the impact various media will have on my ten-month-old daughter's neural and moral development.  I seem to find major problems with nearly everything we try watching together, whether it's a disappointment with the Euclidean oversimplifications and anthropomorphism of everything in Inai Inai Baa, or a skeptical wariness of preachy Sesame Street.  While I certainly don't think it's healthy to be obsessed with a particular, fictitious, red monster, I usually convince myself that my criticisms are slightly overbearing, and that, as important as the first year of neurodevelopment is, thirty seconds a week of three triangles and a rectangle suddenly becoming a penguin is not going to force my daughter into a compartmentalized world-view or stymie an appreciation of the profound, true complexity of the cosmos.

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Hot Luntz

Political Consultant Frank Luntz is arguably the most influential man in the world.  His distinguished career as a director of focus groups for the Republican Party, frequent commentator on Fox News, consultant for conservative political parties in Australia and the United Kingdom, and author is tempered with the unapologetic dishonesty of his mission and that of his company, the Word Doctors.  The Word Doctors's work is, as Luntz himself describes it, "testing language and finding words that will help (our) clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate."  In other words, Luntz is an unabashed propagandist in the grand tradition of Big Brother and Napoleon the Pig.

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Edutainment: Stewart's Feud with Hannity

Ted Koppel and Howard Dean, among others, have pointed out that the Daily Show is a platform where young people get their news.  Host Jon Stewart skewers recent headlines, engages in witty banter with guests, and provokes regular public feuds with Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, the respective hosts of the number one and two rated cable news shows on television.  On Tuesday, Stewart called out Hannity for mixing together clips from various tea-party protests to make a recent event look better attended than it actually was.  On Wednesday, Hannity admitted the deception and apologized.

According to a September 2009 report by the Pew Research Center, 72% of Republican viewers rate Fox News coverage as favorable, with only 43% of Democratic viewers and 55% of all viewers feeling the same way.  Fox News also had a 25% unfavorable rating, the highest among cable news networks.  This 25% roughly corresponds to the young, liberal demographic that shares Jon Stewart's views.  As the Pew Research Center concludes from the study, "partisan differences in views of Fox News have increased substantially since 2007." 

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News Corp's Armageddon

For the past few years, subscription-based print media has been unable to compete with the awesome power of the Internet at making stuff free.  In January of this year, the Atlantic's Michael Hirschorn suggested in his article "End Times" (about financial troubles at the New York Times) that then typical projections for a gentle, gradual shift to electronic editions of major newspaper brands might be naive:

Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The (New York) Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company. In December, the Fitch Ratings service, which monitors the health of media companies, predicted a widespread newspaper die-off: “Fitch believes more newspapers and news­paper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010.”

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Fear Profiteering

Time's feature on Glenn Beck suggests he is perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the Obama paranoia cottage-industry (other than Winchester and Smith & Weston).  While one should always be wary of enemies with advice, and I'm no friend to Republicans, hitching your wagon to that star doesn't seem to be a long term strategy.  What are people going to do when they realize that Obama isn't the anti-Christ?  Or perhaps I'm being too charitable.  Some of these people might not ever figure that out.  Still, if I was a Republican, I'd be looking at this graph and rethinking the focus on tactics at the expense of strategy.

If you really want to learn more about Beck, Salon has an article about "The 5,000 Year Leap," Glenn Beck's required reading, and W. Cleon Skousen, its John Birch Society author.