11 reasons ‘investor literacy’ is a big hoax
by Paul B. Farrell
MarketWatch
April 15, 2008

Commentary: Wall Street prefers clueless, irrational investors

Arroyo Grande, Calif. (MarketWatch) — So Congress made April “Investor Literacy Month.” What a hoax, a cruel joke, yes, an insult to America’s 95 million investors.

What’s really happening? Here’s the short version: In the past five years Wall Street’s out-of-control greed (with the backing of Greenspan’s cheap-money Fed, an “anything-goes, free-market” White House and a banking industry that loves piling up debt in order to charge excessive fees) created a massive housing-credit bubble to rapidly replace their earlier busted dot-com bubble.

Then last summer the new bubble failed, exploding in our faces, nearly destroying the global monetary system. Result? These two bubbles triggered a diversionary, knee-jerk reaction: A wave of so-called “investor education” programs across the U.S. and world.

That’s the joke, the hoax, the insult. Get it? Wall Street’s greed nearly destroys the world’s economy twice in less than a decade. Solution? Bail out Wall Street, then blame it on the little guy, the Main Street investor, for not being “educated enough!” That’s a hoax. (more…)

Submitted by Josh Jasper:

How local TV embraced fake news
Americans’ first source in news is overrun by marketing videos.
by Farhad Manjoo

Note: Here is another excerpt from my new book, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. (For previous excerpts, see here and here.) The book argues that new communications technologies are loosening the culture’s grip on what people once called “objective reality.” Here, I look at how fakery has overrun local TV news.

Excerpted from True Enough by Farhad Manjoo (Wiley, 2008)

Late in the holiday shopping season of 2005, Robin Raskin began to worry about a hidden danger posed by the world’s most popular gadget: Pornography was popping up on the iPod. Raskin, a pert middle-aged woman with short brown hair and a deep, authoritative voice, considered herself an expert on how kids use technology (she’d once written a magazine column called “Internet Mom”). She approached local TV news broadcasts across the country with her iPod worries. They bit.

“There’s scores of ‘iPorn’ everywhere,” Raskin warned in an appearance on KGUN, an ABC affiliate in Tucson, Ariz. The iPod had become “a pedophile’s playground,” she said, and Apple was doing little to stem the smut. On Pittsburgh’s Fox affiliate, WPGH Channel 53, Raskin called the iPod one of the “scariest” gifts of the season. The ABC station in Columbus, Ohio, featured Raskin’s warnings as part of a report by Kent Justice, a correspondent who produces a regular segment called “On Your Side.” Justice told viewers, “If you didn’t know it, now prepare for it: Hundreds of Web sites are selling iPorn.”

Nine stations aired Raskin’s warnings. Her segments had the look and feel of ordinary local news: Super-coifed anchors offer alarmist assessments of everyday objects, story at 11. (more…)

NBC ‘Predator’ lawsuit: journalism on trial
by Douglas Lee
Special to the First Amendment Center Online
March 4, 2008

Yes, it’s only a ruling on a motion to dismiss. And, yes, in such a ruling, the plaintiff’s allegations are presumed to be true. And, yes, it’s only the ruling of a trial judge, not a ruling of an appellate court establishing new precedent.

So, yes, many reasons exist to minimize the importance of the recent ruling in Conradt v. NBC Universal, Inc. At the same time, many reasons exist for NBC to be concerned.

In Conradt, Patricia Conradt is suing NBC for the network’s role in her brother’s suicide. Conradt claims NBC, in an effort to create a sensational arrest for “Dateline NBC: To Catch A Predator,” recklessly orchestrated a police action that caused her brother to take his life.

On Feb. 26, 2008, Denny Chin, a U.S. district judge sitting in the Southern District of New York, held that Conradt’s case could proceed. While he dismissed seven of Conradt’s claims, Chin ruled that the most serious of her allegations — that NBC had violated her brother’s civil rights and had intentionally caused him emotional distress — warranted a jury trial. “[A] reasonable jury,” Chin wrote, “could find that NBC crossed the line from responsible journalism to irresponsible and reckless intrusion into law enforcement.” (more…)

From Skeptic.com:

In this week’s eSkeptic, Steve Salerno discusses the fundamental flaws of broadcast journalism as a tool for informing viewers.

Journalist-Bites-Reality!
by Steve Salerno
eSkeptic.com
February 13, 2008

How broadcast journalism is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for informing viewers is almost nil.

It is the measure of the media’s obsession with its “pedophiles run amok!” story line that so many of us are on a first-name basis with the victims: Polly, Amber, JonBenet, Danielle, Elizabeth, Samantha. And now there is Madeleine. Clearly these crimes were and are horrific, and nothing here is intended to diminish the parents’ loss. But something else has been lost in the bargain as journalists tirelessly stoke fear of strangers, segueing from nightly-news segments about cyber-stalkers and “the rapist in your neighborhood” to prime-time reality series like Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator.” That “something else” is reality.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in a given year there are about 88,000 documented cases of sexual abuse among juveniles. In the roughly 17,500 cases involving children between ages 6 and 11, strangers are the perpetrators just 5 percent of the time — and just 3 percentof the time when the victim is under age 6. (Further, more than a third of such molesters are themselves juveniles, who may not be true “predators” so much as confused or unruly teens.) Overall, the odds that one of America’s 48 million children under age 12 will encounter an adult pedophile at the local park are startlingly remote. The Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute puts it like so: “Right now, 90 percent of our efforts go toward protecting our children from strangers, when what we need to do is to focus 90 percent of our efforts toward protecting children from the abusers who are not strangers.” (more…)

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The Whoppers of 2007
December 30, 2007
by Brooks Jackson, with the staff of
FactCheck.org

We review some notable political falsehoods and distortions of the year.

Summary

The year 2007 wasn’t a good one for political honesty. Though not even technically an election year, it provided a bumper crop of falsehoods and distortions nonetheless.

Presidential candidates kept us busy:

Misinformation came both from Congress and the White House: (more…)

Republicans Debate in Des Moines
FactCheck.org
December 12, 2007

More exaggerations and mis-statements in the final GOP debate before the Iowa caucuses.

Summary:

Read the detailed analysis here.

The 90-minute debate was sponsored by the Des Moines Register and televised nationally on CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and C-SPAN3. It was the final debate among GOP candidates before the first-in-the-nation Iowa presidential nomination caucuses, which are scheduled for January 3.

Art? My little boy could have painted that…
by Sanchez Manning
Hampstead and Highgate Express
December 6, 2007

A Toddler with a nice line in tomato ketchup paintings has duped the art world into buying his work online.

Two-year-old Freddie Linsky’s artistic creations were posted by his mother Estelle Lovatt on the online gallery Saatchi.com and had respected art critics swooning.

Ms Lovatt, a freelance art critic and lecturer at the Hampstead School of Art in Kidderpore Avenue, added over-the-top descriptions to her son’s pieces.

One of Freddie’s paintings made up of red and green splodges called Sunrise is captioned: “A bold use of colour inspired by Monet’s plein air habit of painting, drawing on the natural world that surrounds us.”

She also wrote: “Freddie W. R. Linsky paints over and over, making us curious to know what is going on.

“It seems that one stroke is being repeated – the same stroke or one very close to it, hence the possibility of the infinite opening up of the structure of time.”

It began as a prank. But when buyers from all over the world started snapping up little Freddie’s artwork, Ms Lovatt kept up the pretence. (more…)

Submitted by Peter Markus: An out of focus, wind blown blue piece of paper, lint or maybe even a feather dangling in front of security camera lens is declared a ghost by the locals and the media at this “haunted gas station. No arrests were made.

Parma, Ohio, November 11, 2007:

On August 17, 2007, Bill Moyers commented on the Rove Legacy on his PBS Bill Moyers Journal. Yesterday, The Village Voice ran James Ridgeway’s Grime Pays: a chronology cataloging Karl Rove’s “legacy” of dirty political tricks starting in the early 70′s.

Here’s the Moyers video (via MediaChannel.org), followed by a few highlights from the Voice article:

Here are highlights from The Village Voice, Grime Pays article:

1970: Rove pays visit to Chicago campaign headquarters of Alan Dixon, a Democrat running for state treasurer. Disguised as a volunteer, Rove steals official campaign letterhead and sends out 1,000 invitations to people in the city’s red-light district and soup kitchens, offering “free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing” at Dixon headquarters. When hundreds of homeless and alcoholic Chicagoans show up at a fancy Dixon reception, Rove succeeds in embarrassing the candidate. Dixon still wins the election.

1971: Rove drops out of college to devote full time to College Republicans, where he becomes protégé of dirty trickster Lee Atwater, the group’s Southern regional coordinator. Rove becomes executive director, then national chairman.

1972: Under mentorship of dirty trickster Donald Segretti (who later went to jail for Watergate), Rove paints McGovern as “left-wing peacenik,” in spite of McGovern’s World War II stint piloting a B-24. Rove also works as staff assistant to George Bush Sr., then chairman of Republican National Committee (RNC). (more…)

From Media Lens: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media:

Media Alert: From Blair to Brown – The Killing Will Continue
July 23, 2007

The first truth of American foreign policy is that it is formulated to maximise corporate profits and state power. The second truth is that it is perennially sold to the public as a mission to spread freedom, democracy and human rights. The third truth is that the first two truths apply regardless of whether the Republicans or Democrats hold power.

But this cannot be true. After all, America led the 1999 Nato campaign to stop “the Serbian genocide machine” in Kosovo, as the Guardian observed in April of that year. (Peter Preston and Patrick Wintour, ‘War in the Balkans,’ The Guardian, April 4, 1999)

Although the word genocide is rarely used now that the basic facts have become undeniable, Kosovo continues to be almost universally acclaimed as an example of “humanitarian intervention”. Indeed it is used as circumstantial evidence for the purity of US-UK motives in Iraq. In reviewing the “legacy” of Tony Blair, Polly Toynbee wrote:

“Abroad, Blairism was a noble ideal of liberal interventionism: sheer force of moral argument brought a reluctant US to the rescue of Kosovo and the downfall of genocidal Milosevic.” (Toynbee, ‘Regrets? Too few to mention any in particular,’ The Guardian, May 11, 2007) (more…)

An opinion by Roger Kimball, co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion about an exhibition called “Wrestle” at the Bard Hessel Museum. This article was published in the June 2007 issue of The New Criterion.

Editor’s note: At the end of this article there is additional commentary from Roger Kimball about an upcoming exhibition by Chinese artist Wenda Gu at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College called the green house, on display from June 6 through October 28, 2007.

Last month, a friend telephoned and urged me to travel to Bard College to see “Wrestle,” the inaugural exhibition mounted to celebrate the opening of “CCS Bard Hessel Museum,” a 17,000-square-foot addition to the college art museum. It sounded, my friend said, spectacularly awful. She’d just had a call from her husband, a Bard alum, who had zipped through the exhibition while doing some work at the college. Huge images of body parts—yes, those body parts—floating on the walls of a darkened room, minatory videos of men doing things—yes, those things—to each other, or to themselves, all of it presented in the most pretentious fashion possible. It really was something … special.

Well, these folks are not naïfs. They’ve both been around the avant-garde block and back a few times. If they said an exhibition was ostentatiously horrible, then it was likely to be something worth taking some trouble to avoid—unless, that is, your job description includes regular stints as a cultural pathologist, in which case it is something that duty requires you to inspect, docket, and file away for the instruction and admonition of future generations.

This is my unhappy position. So, one fine May morning I motored up to lovely Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, home of the elite, super-trendy Bard College. Bard is one of those small educational institutions whose ambient wealth has allowed them to substitute avant-garde pretense for scholarly or artistic accomplishment. (more…)

News Analysis: Boston Bomb Hoax Scares Up More Guerrilla Business
May 14, 2007
By Becky Ebenkamp
Brandweek

A $2 million fine and Senate bill can’t cage envelope-pushing efforts.

“Now more than ever!” is the rallying cry for guerrilla marketers three months after a misunderstanding over a stealthy street stunt promoting Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force brewed a Boston bomb scare.

Some marketing agencies say the headline-making hoax has actually increased business despite a bill making its way through the Senate that would impose harsher punishments should such a hoax happen again.

Early reports after the Jan. 31 hysteria had many speculating marketers would steer clear of this big-bang/small bucks school of buzz building. After all, Cartoon Network gm/evp Jim Samples resigned; parent company Turner Broadcasting and guerrilla agency Interference agreed to pay $1 million in compensation to Massachusetts and another $1 million to support federal homeland security.

“The smarter clients I spoke to [realized] that a $2 million fine equals $120 million in publicity,” said Peter Shankman, president of New York-based pr/marketing agency The Geek Factory. “They said, ‘Just get the damn permits first!’” (more…)