Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1986 Editor's Choice: 19
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Sorry if I'm repeating someone, but I'm on a tear
[Read the article: A beautiful mosaic of anti-blogger hatred]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Look, at this point, we're pretty well battered. We're losing advertising revenue.Joe Klein
I haven't had a chance to read everybody else, so if I'm repeating what someone else has already said, forgive, please. I just got done writing to the public editor of the NYT about sloppy reporting due to not understanding the scientific review process, and due to innumeracy, and I turned to Glenn's post, and saw the above from Joe Klein. Ahhhgggghhh! More unscientific and innumerate crap!
What Mr. Klein fails to understand is that the Internet isn't some single malevolent Trickster God with a mask out there doing everything from a single nasty consciousness to screw up his media. He is getting battered by the blogosphere over his accuracy in reporting, and he probably could turn it around by looking at what is said as constructive criticism -- even if it isn't always eloquently expressed. I really haven't heard that the blogosphere wants people like him to move to skid row and get a tin cup, it just wants them to do better reporting.
Confusing the blogosphere with the loss of advertising revenues, which is caused by an Internet phenomenon, but not by the blogosphere, is just plain unscientific and emotional prejudice. The advertising revenues are being lost to Internet advertising, of which the most profitable and aggressive entities are the major search engine companies. Has he not noticed that Google just decided to move directly into mainstream media territory on advertising with its ClearChannel deal? You're losing advertising Joe because people who can collect statistics on customers better than you can can also convince sponsors they can deliver a bigger bang for the buck -- because they can. Google seems, at times, to be out to own all advertising, but no one ever sees a monopolist turning until the journey to the dark side is complete.
If people like Joe Klein could come to a peaceful resolution of the war within themselves about doing a good job, and start to demand from their corporate bosses that they wanted to take the news business back to factuality instead of objectivity (reference Moyer's and Pincus), the blogosphere might get off their backs. But the advertising losses are coming from somewhere else. Telling viewers or readers that the blogosphere is to blame is -- well -- bad reporting.
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re: Where is Marshall McLuhan...
[Read the article: A beautiful mosaic of anti-blogger hatred]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Don't you mean "what's he doin'"?
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@Paul D
[Read the article: A beautiful mosaic of anti-blogger hatred]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yeah, I saw the poll article too. In reference to your question, regardless of which they choose or should choose, they are falling down because they can't make the distinction you made -- which points to either an inability to read critically, or an innumeracy bordering on math phobia when seeing something that has numbers involved.
BTW, with a nod to Paul R's post on displacement, math phobia is a real phenomenon, people who have it get unreasoning fears up to and including full blown panic attacks when asked to read or do mathematics (usually simple algebra). It is usually caused by a bad experience in a math class in their youth (like browbeating or ridicule), and requires special training to teach to. That some journalists might have it is not beyond possibility -- at my alma mater, journalism was one of the last majors one could flee to to avoid calculus just before the university made calculus mandatory for graduation, and therefore attracted a lot of people with math problems. (You'll be delighted to know one of the others was the School of Education).
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@Anonymous
[Read the article: Why I won't stay silent anymore]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Where exactly to you think the birth canal is? In Missouri? In the Ninth Ward?
There appears to be some dispute to Nurse Schafer's testimony, and even if not, there is a lot of terminology being rather blithely tossed around without keeping track of its meaning. Especially the words "alive", "delivered", and "birth".
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Oh, and one more term,...
[Read the article: Why I won't stay silent anymore]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Saw." Nurse Schafer is talking about watching an ultrasound machine, not looking at a fetus in the outside world. If you read her congressional testimony, she has to rebut a criticism from another nurse who says she couldn't possibly have seen what she says she saw, because the doctor doesn't use ultrasound for the procedure she described. Even if you believe every word of what she says, she is watching an ultrasound screen, not looking at a "baby."
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@jojo++ @Paul R @WT
[Read the article: A beautiful mosaic of anti-blogger hatred]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Part of it comes from teachers -- not surprising since they come out of the School of Ed. I once taught a pre-calc class, a sort of faster paced class that was targeted at returning GI bill students that hadn't seen their math in a while and needed to start calculus. I had this one student who was doing somewhere on the low side of passing. She came to me for help a few weeks before the final, because she "really needed" to get a C in the course. I gave her some help, and some extra problems, and she pulled through on the exam and got her C. When I asked about it afterward, it turned out that she needed to get the C to satisfy her "math requirement" so she would get her degree and be certified to teach. I asked her what she would be qualified to teach, now that she had passed my course. The answer was "K-12".
Assume that woman goes and teaches K-12, and she advises students (as high school teachers do), and her students don't take much math in high school, and then arrive at college unable to really choose between all the possible majors. How will they feel about the people who do those majors when they go out into the world to be journalists?
But I like the part about how in the old days the working class stiffs couldn't afford to avoid math, Paul. When the current crop defends the world against the growing threat of the numerati, they are defending a world that never was.