More for Russian friends
больше информации для вас
bol'she informatsii dlya vas
Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
Thursday, March 17, 2022
Friday, August 10, 2018
Is compassion fatigue inevitable in an age of 24-hour news?
Elisa Gabbert
The Guardian
Originally posted August 2, 2018
Here is an excerpt:
Not long after compassion fatigue emerged as a concept in healthcare, a similar concept began to appear in media studies – the idea that overexposure to horrific images, from news reports in particular, could cause viewers to shut down emotionally, rejecting information instead of responding to it. In her 1999 book Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, the journalist and scholar Susan Moeller explored this idea at length. “It seems as if the media careen from one trauma to another, in a breathless tour of poverty, disease and death,” she wrote. “The troubles blur. Crises become one crisis.” The volume of bad news drives the public to “collapse into a compassion fatigue stupor”.
Susan Sontag grappled with similar questions in her short book Regarding the Pain of Others, published in 2003. By “regarding” she meant not just “with regard to”, but looking at: “Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing our capacity to react. Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb. So runs the familiar diagnosis.” She implies that the idea was already tired: media overload dulls our sensitivity to suffering. Whose fault is that – ours or the media’s? And what are we supposed to do about it?
By Moeller’s account, compassion fatigue is a vicious cycle. When war and famine are constant, they become boring – we’ve seen it all before. The only way to break through your audience’s boredom is to make each disaster feel worse than the last. When it comes to world news, the events must be “more dramatic and violent” to compete with more local stories, as a 1995 study of international media coverage by the Pew Research Center in Washington found.
The information is here.
The GuardianOriginally posted August 2, 2018
Here is an excerpt:
Not long after compassion fatigue emerged as a concept in healthcare, a similar concept began to appear in media studies – the idea that overexposure to horrific images, from news reports in particular, could cause viewers to shut down emotionally, rejecting information instead of responding to it. In her 1999 book Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, the journalist and scholar Susan Moeller explored this idea at length. “It seems as if the media careen from one trauma to another, in a breathless tour of poverty, disease and death,” she wrote. “The troubles blur. Crises become one crisis.” The volume of bad news drives the public to “collapse into a compassion fatigue stupor”.
Susan Sontag grappled with similar questions in her short book Regarding the Pain of Others, published in 2003. By “regarding” she meant not just “with regard to”, but looking at: “Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing our capacity to react. Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb. So runs the familiar diagnosis.” She implies that the idea was already tired: media overload dulls our sensitivity to suffering. Whose fault is that – ours or the media’s? And what are we supposed to do about it?
By Moeller’s account, compassion fatigue is a vicious cycle. When war and famine are constant, they become boring – we’ve seen it all before. The only way to break through your audience’s boredom is to make each disaster feel worse than the last. When it comes to world news, the events must be “more dramatic and violent” to compete with more local stories, as a 1995 study of international media coverage by the Pew Research Center in Washington found.
The information is here.
Monday, April 16, 2018
The Seth Rich lawsuit matters more than the Stormy Daniels case
Jill Abramson
The Guardian
Originally published March 20, 2018
Here is an excerpt:
I’ve previously written about Fox News’ shameless coverage of the 2016 unsolved murder of a young former Democratic National Committee staffer named Seth Rich. Last week, ABC News reported that his family has filed a lawsuit against Fox, charging that several of its journalists fabricated a vile story attempting to link the hacked emails from Democratic National Committee computers to Rich, who worked there.
After the fabricated story ran on the Fox website, it was retracted, but not before various on-air stars, especially Trump mouthpiece Sean Hannity, flogged the bogus conspiracy theory suggesting Rich had something to do with the hacked messages.
This shameful episode demonstrated, once again, that Rupert Murdoch’s favorite network, and Trump’s, has no ethical compass and had no hesitation about what grief this manufactured story caused to the 26-year-old murder victim’s family. It’s good to see them striking back, since that is the only tactic that the Murdochs and Trumps of the world will respect or, perhaps, will force them to temper the calumny they spread on a daily basis.
Of course, the Rich lawsuit does not have the sex appeal of the Stormy case. The rightwing echo chamber will brazenly ignore its self-inflicted wounds. And, for the rest of the cable pundit brigades, the DNC emails and Rich are old news.
The article is here.
The Guardian
Originally published March 20, 2018
Here is an excerpt:
I’ve previously written about Fox News’ shameless coverage of the 2016 unsolved murder of a young former Democratic National Committee staffer named Seth Rich. Last week, ABC News reported that his family has filed a lawsuit against Fox, charging that several of its journalists fabricated a vile story attempting to link the hacked emails from Democratic National Committee computers to Rich, who worked there.
After the fabricated story ran on the Fox website, it was retracted, but not before various on-air stars, especially Trump mouthpiece Sean Hannity, flogged the bogus conspiracy theory suggesting Rich had something to do with the hacked messages.
This shameful episode demonstrated, once again, that Rupert Murdoch’s favorite network, and Trump’s, has no ethical compass and had no hesitation about what grief this manufactured story caused to the 26-year-old murder victim’s family. It’s good to see them striking back, since that is the only tactic that the Murdochs and Trumps of the world will respect or, perhaps, will force them to temper the calumny they spread on a daily basis.
Of course, the Rich lawsuit does not have the sex appeal of the Stormy case. The rightwing echo chamber will brazenly ignore its self-inflicted wounds. And, for the rest of the cable pundit brigades, the DNC emails and Rich are old news.
The article is here.
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
The candy diet
Seth Godin
Seth's Blog
Originally posted January 4, 2017
The bestselling novel of 1961 was Allen Drury's Advise and Consent. Millions of people read this 690-page political novel. In 2016, the big sellers were coloring books.
Fifteen years ago, cable channels like TLC (the "L" stood for Learning), Bravo and the History Channel (the "History" stood for History) promised to add texture and information to the blighted TV landscape. Now these networks run shows about marrying people based on how well they kiss.
And of course, newspapers won Pulitzer prizes for telling us things we didn't want to hear. We've responded by not buying newspapers any more.
The decline of thoughtful media has been discussed for a century. This is not new. What is new: A fundamental shift not just in the profit-seeking gatekeepers, but in the culture as a whole.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."*
[*Ironically, this isn't what Einstein actually said. It was this, "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." Alas, I've been seduced into believing that the shorter one now works better.]
Is it possible we've made things simpler than they ought to be, and established non-curiosity as the new standard?
The blog post is here.
Seth's Blog
Originally posted January 4, 2017
The bestselling novel of 1961 was Allen Drury's Advise and Consent. Millions of people read this 690-page political novel. In 2016, the big sellers were coloring books.
Fifteen years ago, cable channels like TLC (the "L" stood for Learning), Bravo and the History Channel (the "History" stood for History) promised to add texture and information to the blighted TV landscape. Now these networks run shows about marrying people based on how well they kiss.
And of course, newspapers won Pulitzer prizes for telling us things we didn't want to hear. We've responded by not buying newspapers any more.
The decline of thoughtful media has been discussed for a century. This is not new. What is new: A fundamental shift not just in the profit-seeking gatekeepers, but in the culture as a whole.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."*
[*Ironically, this isn't what Einstein actually said. It was this, "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." Alas, I've been seduced into believing that the shorter one now works better.]
Is it possible we've made things simpler than they ought to be, and established non-curiosity as the new standard?
The blog post is here.
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
Fake news invades science and science journalism as well as politics
By Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus
STAT News
Originally published December 30, 2016
Here is an excerpt:
Science itself never falls victim to this sort of distortion though, does it? We wish that was so. Take, for example, a conspiracy theory about cloud trails from jet planes that was published in a peer-reviewed journal. How about a study linking vaccines to autism long after such a connection had been thoroughly debunked? That one was published in a public health journal. Or this fake news whopper: HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. A peer-reviewed paper made that claim until it was retracted.
We could go on. But as you’ve gathered by now, science in its current state isn’t exactly keeping us safe from bogus research. Predatory publishers continue to churn out papers for a price, with minimal peer review — or very often no peer review — to vet the results. Unscrupulous researchers use those and other soft spots in the scientific publishing system to get away with presenting wild theories or cooking their data.
Journalists who don’t fact-check deserve criticism, whether the topic is politics, entertainment, or science. But the real trouble with fake news is when there’s a kernel of truth in the pile of garbage. That’s especially problematic in science: scientists continue to dress up weak findings in flashy clothes, all the better to publish with. Then their universities often bolster this flimsy work with frothy press releases that journalists fall for.
The article is here.
STAT News
Originally published December 30, 2016
Here is an excerpt:
Science itself never falls victim to this sort of distortion though, does it? We wish that was so. Take, for example, a conspiracy theory about cloud trails from jet planes that was published in a peer-reviewed journal. How about a study linking vaccines to autism long after such a connection had been thoroughly debunked? That one was published in a public health journal. Or this fake news whopper: HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. A peer-reviewed paper made that claim until it was retracted.
We could go on. But as you’ve gathered by now, science in its current state isn’t exactly keeping us safe from bogus research. Predatory publishers continue to churn out papers for a price, with minimal peer review — or very often no peer review — to vet the results. Unscrupulous researchers use those and other soft spots in the scientific publishing system to get away with presenting wild theories or cooking their data.
Journalists who don’t fact-check deserve criticism, whether the topic is politics, entertainment, or science. But the real trouble with fake news is when there’s a kernel of truth in the pile of garbage. That’s especially problematic in science: scientists continue to dress up weak findings in flashy clothes, all the better to publish with. Then their universities often bolster this flimsy work with frothy press releases that journalists fall for.
The article is here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)