Tag: Premium

by Brendan James

Nikki Usher wonders whether Al-Jazeera America — which debuts today — will be “must-watch-TV or not watched at all”:

AJAM’s promise boils down to more hard news: 14 hours of daily live news, news updates at the top of every hour, documentaries, investigative reports, eight to twelve-minute news pieces, and fewer commercials. But is this what Americans want? Some defenses of AJAM forget that PBS (and the BBC) already exists and is not thrillingly popular among American TV households. NPR has its own oligopoly on serious radio news. If this new channel is basically Al Jazeera English tailored for the PBS/NPR audience, we can expect a left wing approach on foreign affairs, where the U.S. Syrian rebels are activists and the Arab Spring is an unalloyed good.

What makes AJAM truly odd and unpredictable, though, is that nobody knows what its metrics of success will be, because its success is not riding on market viability. It’s riding on Qatar’s approval. The financial well for coverage of uncovered issues, the money to hire talent, the desire to keep open bureaus – all of this depends on the good will of a benefactor whose intentions are still inchoate.

Despite the expected hyperbole regarding the network’s foreign owners, Jeff Jarvis worries the network won’t stand out enough:

Here’s what concerns me about Al Jazeera America: They hired people straight out of traditional TV news; they tried hard not to hire foreigners. But what I was hoping for was a new form with new perspectives. Instead, on On the Media, the producer of the evening news, Kim Bondy, said: “It has some of the sensibility of CBS Sunday Morning. It should also look a little bit probably like Rock Center. And we’re stealing a couple of pages out of Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.” NO! This is your chance to reinvent TV news, not copy it! I’d rather they listed lots of shows and then said, “Ours will look and sound nothing like them!”

Meanwhile, Debra Kamin profiles Israel’s first international channel, i24news, which is looking to push back against AJ in English, French and Arabic:

It’s a mix that, by leaving out Hebrew, immediately signals i24’s ambition to speak to viewers beyond Israel’s borders. While English and French were obvious choices, the network’s founders say the decision to broadcast in Arabic was taken consciously to build an audience in parts of the world most hostile to Israel. “People will watch us because they hate us, and they will watch us through curiosity,” said Frank Melloul, the network’s Swiss-born 39-year-old CEO, who says he believes he can eventually compete with CNN, the BBC and Al Jazeera for viewers. “They will see how we cover the 70 percent of international news, and if they can trust that, then they will also trust how we cover Israeli news.”

by Chris Bodenner

Prospero offers a brief review of M.E. Thomas’s memoir Confessions of a Sociopath:

Ms Thomas is the pseudonym of a female law professor who is also a confirmed sociopath (as confirmed as it gets, at least, in a field of notoriously murky assessment tools: she says she was diagnosed by a professor of psychology who is also a leading researcher in the field). Blending autobiography, anecdote and research, her book is less juicy for its content than for its writing style, which amounts to an uncut expression of a sociopath’s distinctive traits. There is bombast: Thomas compares herself to God, a lion tamer and a revolutionary soldier, and observes, “I have remarkably beautiful breasts”. There is calculation (“Unless I am actively trying to convey a particular message or to seduce I would rather not talk to people”). There is deceit, presumably: Thomas claims to have averaged a 9.5% stock market return since 2004. And there is plenty of charm, too.

Some advice culled from the book:

Rule #3: The best lawyers are (probably) sociopaths

“Sympathy makes for bad lawyering, bad advocacy, and bad rule-making,” Ms Thomas writes. Sociopaths are free of this burden. They are also, she says, excellent at reading people (useful during jury selection), immune to performance anxiety (useful during trial) and craftily seductive (useful for persuading juror and judge alike).

How to apply to your own life: When in need, seek sociopathic counsel.

by Chris Bodenner

So @GGreenwald isnt a journo b/c he has opinion but @MikeGrunwald is when he endorses killing the head of @Wikileaks? http://t.co/BhlIqITJQ6

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) August 20, 2013

Contra Dish readers, Andrea Peterson insists that “no, Glenn Greenwald didn’t ‘vow vengeance'”:

Greenwald’s point seems to have been that he was determined not to be scared off by intimidation. Greenwald and the Guardian have already been publishing documents outlining surveillance programs in Britain, and Greenwald has long declared his intention to continue publishing documents. By doing so, Greenwald isn’t taking “vengeance.” He’s just doing his job.

We linked to Greenwald’s defense here. Ambinder’s take on the detention of Glenn’s partner:

I don’t like how the Guardian put Miranda on its payroll, turning him into a courier of sorts and conferring on him the patina of the legal and traditional protections afforded to journalists. That’s sloppy tradecraft and it’s cruel to Miranda.

Doing journalism makes you a journalist. As Joshua Foust points out, the transitive property does not apply. (I am not a corporate strategy consultant, and I would not be one if my spouse’s company suddenly paid for me to fly stolen documents to my husband somewhere.)

Greenwald is doing real journalism. If extra protections are afforded, they are afforded to him. If extra scrutiny is warranted, he should get it. I know the Snowden case is a boundary case, that it is of an echelon that other leak cases are not and that there are real first amendment equities involved. I also know that the government takes leaks of this magnitude — and consider the totality of what’s been leaked and what precedents it sets, not just the stuff we like (the U.S. stuff), but everything — terribly seriously. As all governments do, and have done, and will do. A separation between spouse and source is a foundational principle of how reporters approach complicated stories involving secrets and classified information. IF you do choose to involve your spouse, or you and your spouse work together, then you cannot reasonably complain that your partner was harassed for no reason whatsoever. Decisions have consequences.

by Patrick Appel

Dave Roberts is taking one:

I enjoy sharing zingers with Twitter all day; I enjoy writing long, wonky posts at night. But the lifestyle has its drawbacks. I don’t get enough sleep, ever. I don’t have any hobbies. I’m always at work. Other than hanging out with my family, it’s pretty much all I do — stand at a computer, immersing myself in the news cycle, taking the occasional hour out to read long PDFs. I’m never disconnected.

It’s doing things to my brain.

I think in tweets now. My hands start twitching if I’m away from my phone for more than 30 seconds. I can’t even take a pee now without getting “bored.” I know I’m not the only one tweeting in the bathroom. I’m online so much that I’ve started caring about “memes.” I feel the need to comment on everything, to have a “take,” preferably a “smart take.” The online world, which I struggle to remember represents only a tiny, unrepresentative slice of the American public, has become my world. I spend more time there than in the real world, have more friends there than in meatspace.

Connor Simpson rounds up reaction to Roberts’ decision:

Some people were dismissive to Robert’s plight, calling it as another trend story we’ve seen before. And those notions aren’t exactly wrong. The Verge’s Paul Miller concluded his year-long absence from the ‘net this year, revealing that it’s didn’t make him any happier. He had modest goals of looking at the flowers and reading and writing more, just like Roberts. It didn’t work out that way, though. He ended up slitting his time doing other just-as-meaningless things.

Others were much more sympathetic. “I relate entirely to [Robert’s] story of total internet-writing burn out and have no idea how so many don’t have it,” wrote The Guardian‘s Jim Newell, who then compared the difficulties of quitting to a smack addiction.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader shifts the focus to South Korea:

Both sides of the dialogue on “hookup culture” start from the assumption that hooking up is inherently wrong. As a US-born, UK-naturalized ethnic Korean who moved to the motherland five months ago to get in touch with my “roots,” I challenge that assumption. Korea lacks a normalized hookup culture, and its societal views on sex can only be described as pathological.

Between Confucianism and Christianity, there is no education in school or open discussion on sex, so the population is astonishingly ignorant of safe sex and contraception.  Even with the 15th largest economy and a fertility rate of 1.24, the overseas adoption rate is the highest in the world. Upon marriage, most women quit work and reduce sex, stopping entirely after childbirth. Husbands sleep in a separate room from their wives, who sleep with the baby.

Not surprisingly, the sex industry is rampant: an estimated 20% of men in their 20s visit a prostitute weekly.

Paradoxically, Korea is both one of the top exporters of prostitutes (they go upscale to Japan, Australia and the US on holiday visas) and of johns (who go down to SE Asia for “golf and business” trips). This helps explain why Korea has the highest rate of plastic surgery in the world.  It’s less to do with generation divide, affluence, distance from the war, etc and simply a matter of economics: whether a woman’s path is marriage or prostitution, a few grand on a nip/tuck is a rational investment.

Now I’m not saying all these problems will miraculously disappear if Koreans start hooking up. But if they had a more relaxed – and more importantly, open – attitude towards sex and equality between the sexes, there might be some chance of restoring sanity.

For more stats on the subject, go here.

(Image via twinkiesandeggs)

By Tracy R. Walsh

That was the wisecrack a British intelligence agent made while destroying journalists’ computers in the basement of The Guardian – one of many strange details in Alan Rusbridger’s surreal account of Snowden-related press intimidation. Rusbridger says the tactics won’t work:

Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents; we just won’t do it in London. …. The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood the absolute threat to journalism implicit in the idea of total surveillance, when or if it comes–and, increasingly, it looks like “when.”

Ryan Chittum is stunned:

Greenwald’s paper has been threatened by its own government with prior restraint and had its hard drives smashed in its basement to make a (stupid) point. This is police-state stuff. We need to know the American government’s role in these events–and its stance on them–sooner rather than later.

Dan Kennedy thinks the same thing could happen in America:

We are already being told that such thuggery couldn’t happen in the United States because of our constitutional protections for freedom of the press. … But in fact, there is nothing to stop the U.S. government from censoring the media with regard to revelations such as those contained in the Snowden files–nothing, that is, except longstanding tradition. And respect for that tradition is melting away, as I argued recently in this space.

And J.D. Tuccille believes the British government wanted scare reporters across the globe:

That the act was intended as a public message certainly makes more sense than the suggestion that U.K. intelligence authorities are unaware that, in the Internet age, a story reported by an American reporter living in Brazil working with a colleague (Laura Poitras) in Germany, based on information delivered by a whistleblower who has taken refuge in Russia, can be cut off by threatening a single British newspaper. … This wasn’t a serious attempt to stop The Guardian from publishing stories about the intelligence community; it was a baseball bat across the knees as a lesson to all journalists.

by Patrick Appel

Bouie examines the effects of felony disenfranchisement laws:

You can see the effects most clearly in black turnout rates. The nation’s 27 million African American voters are concentrated in the South and in Northern urban centers. Almost two-thirds—66 percent—voted in last year’s presidential election, giving African Americans higher turnout than any other racial group. But unlike with other groups, there was an odd gender gap: While more than 70 percent of black women voted, only 60 percent of black men went to the polls. The difference, according to Bernard Fraga of Harvard University, is explained entirely by the huge number of black men who are disenfranchised.

Supporters of disenfranchisement seek to purify the body politic, to punish wrongdoers who don’t “deserve” to vote. But this desire for punishment sidesteps whether felon disenfranchisement actually accomplishes anything of value. I’ve never seen good evidence that it does. Why the laws have survived legal scruitiny:

Most of the South’s restrictive voting laws were outlawed and overturned by the courts—but for the most part, felony disenfranchisement measures were not. In the 1974 case Richardson v. Ramirez, the Supreme Court ruled that denying felons the right to vote was permitted under Section 2 of the 14th Amendment. Section 2 spells out penalties for states that deny citizens the right to vote for any reason “except for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” Because of that exemption, the Court determined that—unlike with other voting laws—states did not have to prove they had a “compelling interest” in denying felons the vote, making these laws tough to challenge. Six years later, the justices set the bar even higher, ruling that it wasn’t enough for plaintiffs challenging the laws to prove that they had discriminatory results; they also had to prove discriminatory intent.

Meanwhile, Chait argues that voter ID laws, like felony disenfranchisement laws, are aimed at repressing the minority vote:

[I]f voter-I.D. laws were solely designed to prevent fraudulent voting, rather than to winnow minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies from the electorate, why would they be paired with a host of other measures that do not prevent voter fraud but do winnow Democrats from the electorate? In addition to imposing a photo-I.D. requirement, North Carolina Republicans reduced early voting periods (which minorities disproportionately use), prohibited voting stations from extending voting hours when lines are too long, prevented voters who mistakenly go to the wrong precinct from casting a provisional ballot, and a host of other measures.

by Brendan James

A reader takes issue with the idea of starting restaurant reviews on opening night:

Luke O’Neil’s argument that restaurants should be reviewed as soon as they open shows a complete lack of understanding of how a restaurant gets put together and underplays the complexity of the process. His analogy to theatre previews is apt. I’m a Broadway theatre professional and can attest that the preview process is not a mere courtesy to work out the kinks – it’s an essential part of the creative process. Indeed, I have never seen a musical that is remotely the same on opening night as it is at first preview. There are fundamental things that can only be learned by performing the show in real-time, in front of a real audience. I am certain the same is true for restaurants.

Preview theatre audiences know that they are buying an early sneak-peek at a show. As a foodie myself, I know that hitting a restaurant in the first week or two will mean sacrificing perfected operations for a priority view. There’s no attempt to hide the story by the operator.

A first preview review of “Wicked” would not review the show that tens of thousands have since seen. A first night review of Momofuku Ssäm Bar would also not be a review of the restaurant you can now go visit. Early reviews serve neither the reader nor the broader goal of establishing a written history for the industry at large.