8 posts tagged “reporting”

Swine ’flu was long predicted by the Doctor Who writers. Except that time it was caused by Daleks.

   I am so sick of the fear-mongering in the New Zealand media at the moment that has caused a rush on Tamiflu. This is not big news anywhere else, and it should not be big news here. Headlines like ‘Swine flu toll at 109’ hint at fatalities (this is not the case) and, once again, makes me question The New Zealand Herald’s agenda in all of this.
   How are your Roche shares looking today?

This was made before the US presidential election, but Craig Ferguson’s sentiments about the media remain valid. And we shouldn’t need to be “sold” the fact that we live in democracies.

More media bias? In People’s report on the failure of Rosie O’Donnell’s variety show (big surprise there), it noted:

The night was dominated by an ABC televised interview with Barack and Michelle Obama by O’Donnell's View nemesis Barbara Walters.

Um, no it wasn’t. The network and programme that won the evening in the US were CBS and its horrid Criminal Minds. And dominated is a strong word—especially when it’s untrue.
   Someone needs to tell People that Barack Obama has already won the presidential election and it can stop campaigning to make him look good. Many people think he’s doing a pretty good job of that himself.

In the last month, two New Zealanders were murdered—but I have to hand it to the mainstream media, especially TV3 and National Radio, for covering these without racial bias.
   Ten years ago, the Chinese ethnicity of the victims would have been made to be a big deal. Indeed, any crime involving east Asians was treated as more (negatively) newsworthy and coverage was, effectively, racist. Perhaps not surprising in the wake of the Yellow Peril speeches of the current Foreign Minister-outside-Cabinet during the 1990s.
   Statistics from the New Zealand Police have shown that crimes involving east Asians are not proportionally out of whack with the percentage of the population. It’s nothing for us to be proud of, mind.
   It has taken a while but New Zealand citizens of Chinese descent seem to be accepted by the media a bit better than in the previous century. The record is not perfect but this is a marked improvement.
   Their deaths were reported as those of New Zealanders. While the reporting of one woman’s funeral acknowledged her Chinese roots and her Buddhist religion, that was the extent of it. There was nothing made to be odd or strange.
   The tragedies are horrible—they should never have happened in the first place. In New Zealand, one is eight times more likely to be murdered today than 50 years ago. And that is a whole separate issue. However, I am glad that these two women were not made to be outsiders in a country they called home after their deaths, whatever might have happened in their lifetimes.

The Guardian makes it sound like Ashes to Ashes’ second episode was a ratings’ disaster. The headline: ‘Almost 1m viewers desert Ashes to Ashes’.
   That makes 6·1 million viewers in the UK, which admittedly makes the headline true, but it was obviously written by a glass-half-empty type.
   A positive headline would have been ‘Six million watch Ashes to Ashes’ because, when you think about it, six million is still a lot of people.
   In fact, six million is more than what the series première of Life on Mars managed in 2007.
   The desired effect may be to get more viewers deserting the new series if they feel things are looking down. And that will be a sad indictment on us as gullible people, watching what we are told is popular.
   On Friday, at lunch at the Villa Margarita, I asked a young Briton from Leeds what was popular in her home country.
   She replied that Heroes, Lost, Desperate Housewives and other American shows were the must-sees in the UK, just as they are here thanks to heavy promotion and good timeslots. New Zealand programmers will follow their American network counterparts, too, scheduling without regard to local tastes. There are exceptions, such as TV3 with Outrageous Fortune, but a visiting American would feel quite at home here (providing one waits several weeks to numerous months for the episodes to catch up to where the US is). The best American (or British or domestic) shows that have found limited audiences do not make it, or get stuck in bad timeslots. Americans themselves are annoyed at the dumbing-down of their networks, so what they are being fed is hardly something they have asked for.
   Does this suggest a willing globalization in television programming, shutting down local industry in favour of a commoditized broadcast? Will we have more singing and dancing competition shows and reality crap shoved down our throats?
   Few want more reality junk but it is cheap to make. Ashes to Ashes isn’t cheap, with all of its sets, photography and music usage. When in doubt about a bad decision, just follow the money.
   As if to show the power of a headline, Ashes to Ashes may still lose viewers for episode three, thanks to a weak outing last week. Life on Mars wasn’t always perfect, either, and had some off-weeks. But the producers of the new show know what our expectations are like, and I had hoped that things would remain or build on the high that Matthew Graham gave us in the pilot. Last week, things had settled too much and Ashes to Ashes felt uncomfortable in its own skin, with Gene Hunt having fewer great lines.
   Six million one hundred thousand still means that enough Britons think that Ashes to Ashes is among the best shows in the UK, and let’s hope the third episode gets us back to the high of the first, or even that of Life on Mars. I’d hate for the newspapers to think their headlines actually affect us when in reality their circulations are dropping, and for the producers pushing cheap reality and quiz fare to think they can win against properly scripted shows.

[Cross-posted] Fascinating: after our post exposing the Miranda Kerr v. Paris Hilton incident at Victoria’s Secret to be false—or at least ridiculously inaccurate, with media outlets getting the year and the venue wrong—the Chronicle’s SFGate.com still reported it. It has taken the post down now, but not before Google News found it: 

   Yes, we are feeling smug, but only because the error was so great that we can’t believe how it propagated. Even the source site, Pedestrian.tv, is amazed, having A Current Affair contact it this week over two-year-old news.
   It stresses the importance for traditional media outlets to be careful. We’re not perfect ourselves, so it’s a lesson we need to take heed of, too.

I see TV3’s Nightline has just done a story on CouchSurfing as though it were a new thing. Not unlike how the MSM were far behind the Jessica Rose story last year.
   How behind? I am hardly an early adopter, but my friend Melanie couch-surfed in 2005 and met a friend of mine in Australia, which was how she was introduced to me. So two years behind me, and three years behind the original launch.

The Washington Post knows a good blogging story when it sees one. Marc Fisher has updated his blog after the second day of the crazy judge and the missing pants saga.
   I’m sure it has crossed more than a few minds: a future where all news articles come via blogs. Scary. Though at least there are some professional journos making a good job of it.
   But it sounds like Christopher Manning, representing Custom Cleaners, is on the right track. As Mr Fisher reports:

Pearson told the defense lawyer that if the tables were turned and he were in the place of the Chung family, the owners of the Northeast Washington cleaners who purportedly lost Pearson's pants, he would have immediately written a check for $1,150—the replacement value of the Hickey Freeman suit to which the pants belonged—to provide the satisfaction that the store's “Satisfaction Guaranteed” sign promised.
   It took more than 10 minutes and numerous attempts by both Manning and Judge Judith Bartnoff to get Pearson to answer a question about whether anyone has the right to walk into any cleaners and claim $1,150 simply by saying that their suit had been lost. Finally, Pearson said that the law requires that “The merchant would have an obligation to honor their demand.“
   “So your answer is Yes?” Manning asked.
   “Yes,” Pearson said.
   The courtroom, in which it's hard to discern any support for Pearson except from his mother and her friend, broke up in laughter. Derisive laughter.
   Manning pushed ahead: Does Pearson believe that people should interpret signs “in a reasonable way?”
   “Depends on the circumstances,” Pearson said.
   Asked to answer yes or no, Pearson said, “No.”

   I have to agree with Mr Fisher’s thoughts about the presiding judge: ‘This is known as giving someone all the rope they need to hang themselves.’