In response to Google's dramatic announcement that it is reconsidering its presence in China  after a series of disquieting acts of censorship and sabatage, the Information is Beautiful website produced this clever graphic of word searches and websites blocked in China: Incidentally, China hand James Fallows, whose Atlantic Magazine blog has interesting and measured posts on the Google announcement here and here, tells me that publishing a list of the banned words is itself a crime in China....

14 January, 2010

Responding to our post on the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing, Cameron Bode points to another section of Glenn Greenwald's trenchant analysis of US response to the failed Christmas airplane bombing: Ever since I began writing in late 2005 about this fear-addicted dynamic, the point on which David Brooks focused yesterday is the one I've thought most important. What matters most about this blinding fear of Terrorism is not the specific policies that are implemented as a result. Policies can always be changed. What matters most is the radical transformation of the national character of the United States...

04 January, 2010

A week after the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines fight, two polar-opposite American columnists — one left, one right — have come to nearly identical conclusions about the essential danger posed by airline security restrictions. From the right, a New Year's Day column by the New York Times's David Brooks decried a citizenry that "expect[s] perfection from government and then throw[s] temper tantrums when it is not achieved." [T]he Transportation Security Administration has to be seen doing something, so it added another layer to its stage play, “Security Theater” — more baggage regulations, more in-flight restrictions. At some point, it’s...

03 January, 2010

On January 1, a new law in Ireland bans publication or uttering of material grossly abusive or insulting to matters held sacred by any religion and thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion. The law carries a 25,000 Euro fine and permits some defenses. The website blasphemy.ie declares it "both silly and dangerous." It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic States led by Pakistan are...

03 January, 2010

Tim Bousquet's rules for using anonymous sources: The information gained through granting anonymity is not otherwise available. Or, put another way, granting anonymity is not a shortcut to doing the hard work of gathering solid information and good reporting. The anonymous source must have something to lose, should anonymity not be given: loss of a job, etc. Using an anonymous source must result in some positive public good. “Spinning” someone’s view is not a positive public good. Bousquet adds: When I was a reporter at a daily in the states, I had a publisher who wouldn't allow me to use anonymous sources at all. At...

03 January, 2010

An end of year column by the Globe's John Ibbitson proclaims Harper's prorogation of Parliament "a travesty...

02 January, 2010

From reporter Erin Guy's opening declaration that she's "never seen anything like this before," through her breathless retracing of hard-to-see tire tracks "right here in this yard," and her apparent inability to pronounce "'mergency vehicle," this story, from television station KOCO-5 in Oklahoma City, captures 21st century North American newsgathering with delicious acuity. But the 10-second clip of putative ambulance thief Wendy Jones, at 1:02 into the story, can have few equals in the annals of perp walks. Yes, Ms. Jones is shackled. Hattip: Buzzfeed's year-end list of 2009's 15 funniest local news reports. ...

02 January, 2010

Long-toothed newshawk Dan Badel recalls: [caption id="attachment_3999" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="Model 28"][/caption] I distinctly remember several of us standing around watching in awe in early 1976 as our trusty Remington was set aside and our first IBM Selectric was set up in the newsroom at CIGO radio in Port Hawkesbury. The entire set of characters fit on one shiny little rotating metal ball, which you could easily swap to change fonts or type size. For news copy, we used the ball that produced only oversized upper-case letters because they more-or-less matched the font used on CP wire service stories tapped out 24/7 on our...

23 December, 2009

Who knew that the US Government and various states had commissioned hundreds of comic books? Richard Graham, librarian at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, knew, and he assembled a collection of more than 180 digitized examples on the UNL website. Charles Schutlz (Peanuts), Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace), and Chic Young (Blondie) were just three of the artists who turned in stints as civil service cartoonists. Topics ranged from the benefits of treating children for lazy eye, to the wonders of DDT in the battle against malaria. Dennis the Menace had a thing or three to teach the Mitchell family about household safety. The...

22 December, 2009
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