The situation where someone says, ‘Marry this man or you will be killed,’ is very extreme. People don’t say that often. What they say is, ‘Marry this man or your mother will kill herself and your university funding will be cut off.’”
Source : The Guardian
This isn’t merely the practice of journalists; rather, as Rosen points out, it’s virtually their religion. They simply do not believe that reporting facts is what they should be doing. Recall David Gregory’s impassioned defense of the media’s behavior in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when he rejected complaints that journalists failed to document falsehoods from Bush officials because “it’s not our role“ and then sneered that only an ideologue would want them to do so (shortly thereafter, NBC named Gregory the new host of Meet the Press).
Source : Salon
Angelo Izama, an award-winning Ugandan journalist and political risk analyst, isn’t convinced it means anything at all – or anything good, anyway. “A moment like this has a kind of placebo effect,” he says. “These simplistic views make it very difficult to make people address a situation that is really complex. It helps the status quo. But the status quo has failed.”
Source : The Independent
And although literacy rates are notoriously difficult to assess, there is sufficient evidence (mostly drawn from signatures) that between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time.2 (The literacy rate for women in those colonies is estimated to have run as high as 62 percent in the years 1681-1697.3)
– Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
The library is a place of safety for the bibliophile, and a cooling refuge for the city-heated mind.
Source : Paris review
Come talk about individual and collective comfort in an urban laboratory funded by multinationals when their quality of life is found jeopardized by an aggressive capitalism appears to be fairly … inappropiate.
Human life confronts itself in its entirety through books and culture. In the the short term, the loss in quality is evident, yet this cannot be remedied by restoring the narrow humanism of the classical period. – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“What works best on the Web, short or long-form journalism? The monthly audience statistics for two accomplished FORBES reporters prove that online news consumers crave both. They devour brief and timely information and seek out the in-depth coverage that news stalwarts feared would disappear in the digital age.”
Source : Forbes
MSNBC, which is owned by Microsoft, attempted to weigh in on the budding controversy by mentioning that they never used the term “ghetto.” An AOL reporter actually did some reporting, talking to experts who compared the tool to redlining and found it “appalling” and others who said it was “creepy” but useful.
Source : Polis
Collected Reading 