Big Smoke

'cause it's hard to see from where I'm standin'

The Achilles Heel of the Free Press

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A quick and dirty guide to propagandizing in America, in three steps:

Step 1: The Craven

Unlike a number of other countries, our news media is entirely composed of private for-profit enterprises, which is why historically the city with the most newspapers – New York – is the one that invented what we call “yellow journalism” in the name of business competition and was a strong example of “tabloid journalism:” Fact-neutral sensationalism crafted specifically to entice readers, not necessarily impart information, so as to maximize newspaper sales, subscriptions and ad revenue. The name of the game was profit margins, as evinced in the very terms themselves: ‘Yellow’ because the cheap paper the news was printed on was yellow and ‘tabloid’ because the newpapers themselves were smaller with condensed print; both cost-saving adjustments incidental to the pejorative definitions they picked up.

In the enterprises on this front – in which the New York market exemplified but other markets also followed – competition required and requires slavish adherence to two principles:

a) The need to scoop stories the fastest, which puts pressure on fact-checking.

b) Embellishment and hyperbole just a hair’s breath short of the legal definition of libel.

There is a third principle, not strictly necessary but can be helpful, which is that of partaking in an overt political stance, where a paper can generate a market niche by catering to a constituency that no other paper caters to. This is not to say that such a political stance is necessarily ideological on the part of the paper’s publisher – quite the opposite; it is often-times business decision, a mercenary undertaking that can and has been shifted as markets themselves have – but it also has a bearing on how the news can be colored if not compromised.

While journalistic standards have since been codified – after all, the publisher Joseph Pulitzer who owned the New York World, a scion of sensationalist pablum, also established an award for integrity in reporting – if not universally enforced, the profit motive has never gone away, and we see it in varying degrees in just about every paper still in print, which means journalistic integrity has, is, and will always take second priority to financial profit.

By comparison the market for national television news was somewhat less competitive, being more of a cabal between the Big Three – NBC, CBS and ABC and their local affiliates – but it was Ted Turner in Atlanta that revolutionized the market and the manner in which television news was shown through the creation of the CNN, whose innovation was that of the 24-hour News Cycle. That cycle, unlike morning and evening papers or the evening television news, didn’t change reporting – because fact-finding can only happen but so fast – but it did change how the information was disseminated. Emphasis was given to two sectors, which are quite similar to the original principles, and indeed similarly non-conducive to journalistic standards:

a) The excruciatingly short deadline to be the first to report on a piece of news.

b) The need to fill all 24 hours with stuff that will glue people to seats.

The former has obvious effects on fact-checking – there is no incentive at all to fact-check, as it doesn’t matter how wrong a story is if it is incredibly popular and thus promotes ad revenue; it can always be “corrected” later on – but the latter only magnified the need for sensationalism. The network created shows like Crossfire and the Situation Room, in which any and all issues are depicted as “controversial,” with two opposing viewpoints, with equal treatment of pundits on each side of the issues discussed. This can be gamed, which is exactly what CNN’s progeny and main competitors Fox News and MSNBC did, which brings us to the second step.

Step 2: The Stupid

In cases of issues in which natural controversy cannot adequately fill the time – because there is already an expert consensus for one stance that cannot be answered by the opposition – the controversy must then be manufactured. The easiest and cheapest solution is to undermine expert opinion by literally giving time to opposing arguments, no matter how banal or insipid, and thus “even the playing field” by presenting conclusive scientific, sociological, legal or political analysis as unproven, if but for the sake of continuing the debate and thus granting a reason to keep watching.

This is lucrative so long as the opposing view has a market; ie: an audience. They will tune in to see their worldview defended, as political stances can indeed be sold – though in this case the media enterprise attempts to butter its bread on both sides by presenting both sides.

This of course has the adverse effect of undermining facts themselves, as by definition in this format they cannot end a debate with a clear victor, for that would cause one half of the audience to stop watching (and, arguably, the other half as well for after the controversy is concluded there is no ‘news’ to watch). Indeed, nothing can end the debate, because the debate itself is profitable for the private media organization: In fact, the more extreme the stance, the more emotional the response, and the more likely people will watch it. Scholarship is debased by design.

Step 3: The Evil

With such a system in place, it becomes patently easy for interested parties and propagandists to game media sources that are amenable and suppress the few that attempt to resist. The best way to defend a lie is to attack the very idea of truth, which is child’s play in the format by which Americans receive their news.

Need an expert? Pay somebody to pose as one. Fox News has so many discredited “experts” that an entire cottage industry – Late Nite contemporaries of Jon Stewart – has risen to quantify and criticize them, but that industry has had absolutely no effect on Fox News’ popularity or viewership: It merely profits off of the opposing view, for the simple reason that the debate is never concluded. If no expert is willing to lie on television, launder source material by reporting on reporting of bloggers and lumpenpundits: Effectively, wallow in rumor and hearsay.

Need to muddle an issue? Run counter-articles and claim that the opposition is lying and/or compromised. Because the industry runs on confirmation bias, people will accept what is effectively an auto-immune disease for investigative journalism because it bolsters their preconceptions. Breitbart and the Drudge Report have taken extreme stances that even the New York Post and the Washington Times have failed to venture, knowing full well that their readership will never abandon them, to the point where they will regurgitate articles from RT – the modern Pravda – derived almost entirely of anecdotes, misrepresented statistics or straight lies. Alternatively, simply just out-shout the competition: Internet memes, as evinced by the racist Pepe the Frog character, have been weaponized and can be produced and disseminated faster than anything ever before.

The danger of this situation is that its solution is not fact-based high quality reporting, because by its very nature it is quicker on the draw, cheaper and thus far more prolific than the effort and expense required for quality. It drags truth down on equal footing to lies and then outproduces its competition. It is still, at heart, a business venture. This is also why counter-propaganda fails to work: Liberal venues such as Buzzfeed, Vox and the Huffington Post have established their business models on this phenomenon, but they are not nearly as large, rich or as numerous as those on the right: They simply can’t compete for volume, though they have proven that even self-described free-thinking liberals can fall victim to confirmation bias, as in their zeal they also play fast and loose with fact-checking.

In such a manner these enterprises not only profit off markets all too willing to hear what they want to hear, but they have the effect of maintaining and cultivating those markets, creating a self-supporting propaganda machine that puts our facile and blundering attempts in the Cold War and the Second World War to shame, and absolutely dwarfs our comparatively cute attempts in the last century.

New URL

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Big Smoke has moved from bigsmokestreetcorner.com to bigsmoke.nyc, following the decade-long wrangle the city had with having its own top-level domain. New York City now shares this distinction with other nominal city-states (Hong Kong, Singapore) as well as cities that apparently want to be associated with being tech savvy (London, Paris, Berlin) but as far as I’m aware it’s the only city whose domain extension is exactly three letters. It is also the only city to limit its domain to locals, so there’s a fair bit of impish glee in being able to snag one.

The old URL will redirect to the new one, and kinks will eventually be worked out. Eventually.

I’ll say this about Vista

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It’s turned me into a veritable expert on computer hardware.

After the saga of getting it up and running, the crashes have finally stopped. I can’t get the thing to crash anymore, and I finally have all 8 gb (4x2gb) of RAM installed.

The mobo’s an nVidia 570A SLI, which means it’s two generations ago – back when they were making Pentium Ds – the first of the dual-cores and slightly faster (if twice as greedy in the power market*) as the following models. The thing’s set to run default at 800 clock speed on a theoretical maximum of 16gb of RAM. ‘Course, when the damn thing was made, getting 8gb to run at anything took fiddling with more power than the mobo was set to give.

As it turns out, after a week or so of this newly configured Vista machine crashing two hours into any application – usually with an error logged to nVidia’s video card drivers crashing (and I’ve used every new licensed driver / beta driver / unreleased OEM driver I could get my hands on) – and no more than half an hour on any application that makes use of DirectX 10 and/or PhysX, my first instinct was to give up and reduce from 6gb to 4gb and check to see if that made the stability better**. (8gb, when I can get it to start by fiddling with the DIMM voltage and loosening up the timing, can’t run the desktop for more than half an hour, let alone a game) Read the rest of this entry »

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  • Published: Mar 21st, 2009
  • Category: Meta
  • Comments: 1

Damn you, Microsoft

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Decided that 3.2 gb of RAM on a 32x OS wasn’t enough, so I got 4x2gb RAM and an upgrade copy of Vista Ultimate 64x so I could use it.

Things I learned since updating to Vista in the 22 hours between coming home with the DVD and being able to install programs on a relatively stable machine:

  1. Vista does not like my Plextor PX-760A DVD-RW, and won’t run either of its install DVDs from it. It does, however, like the LG budget DVD-RW in my other computer, despite it being an older model.
  2. Vista does not like my Linksys LNE100TX NIC, and will not support it. It will use a Netgear GA311 NIC, but lists it as a Realtek NIC for some undefined reason.
  3. You can’t upgrade XP Pro to Vista 64x; only to Vista 32x. Which begs the question why an upgrade copy comes with a 64x DVD.
  4. 4x2gb DDR2 RAM does not work on the default 5-5-5-15 BIOS settings and 1.8 DIMM voltage of an nForce board, despite being required to; instead preferring 6-6-6-18 2.2v. Anything less results in crashes due to underpowering. Of course, this leads to the next point:
  5. Vista computers crash more often than XP computers, most often due to overheating from constant CPU usage and RAM caching.
  6. Ironically, most programs do not utilize the extra 4.8gb of RAM I upgraded Vista for.

So between researching I/O errors, SATA controller errors, CMOS settings, BIOS settings, DIMM settings, formatting the hard drive, replacing multiple peripherals, running extensive diagnostics, updating firmware and drivers, and spending $600, I have a machine that crashes every half an hour or so. I’ve gotten it so it doesn’t just randomly blackout and restart; now it thankfully gives me a BSOD so I can tell it to restart in the middle of whatever I was doing.

I suppose I could have waited for Windows 7, but who wants a brand new OS from Microsoft? Hell, their only worthwhile OSs thus far are heavily-patched ones: 98SE and XP SP2. I feel duped.

Also, the room here is very dusty. (cough)

  • Author:
  • Published: Mar 16th, 2009
  • Category: Meta
  • Comments: None

This and That

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There could be a rant about the counterproductive methods of Critical Mass, the Bike Clown Posse or cyclist activists in general (who are, to a man, all nutcases above and beyond their pedestrian counterparts).

There could also be an insinuation that such is far too limiting a subject when Mexico’s declared an actual war on drugs (with actual fighting) or how Pakistan’s imploding, but without focus the blog would lose its voice.

There could thus be a rant about alternative school methods – Charters and other public funding of private education – and how they work in the political short term but fail to address the problem of universal public eduation as a whole.

But right now there’ll be a nod to a general malaise over lack of focus at work, as handily illustrated by this comic from Subnormality.

Or this.

Now This Is Meta

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There, but for the grace of god: A blog about a cartoon lampooning blogs on a news site whose business model revolves around blogging. This is what they must have meant about dittoheads.

Do I think the blogosphere (to speak of ancient memes) is squeezing out mainstream press for readers and ad dollars? Kinda. But the genre is not the same: Bloggers don’t soberly report the news. They comment on the news. It’s an infinite opinion piece. News and news analysis are two different things that, I believe, cannot be further apart. (Do ya hear me, MSNBC? Huh? Do ya?)

With that posit, bloggers may only be one third of what killed the newspaper model. Read the rest of this entry »

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