Idoruby William Gibson. On page 28 Laney is interviewing for a job with Slitscan, some kind mass media operation akin to People magazine or Facebook:
"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week old boiled potato that lives by itself in the dark, in a double wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly the sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."
It's like watching a scandal unfold from behind the scenes. I'm guesstimating the whole thing unfolds over a period of a year, give or take any number of months. Somebody approves a grant and in exchange somebody becomes the owner of a substantial piece of property and only pays a fraction of its market value. At least I think that's what the scandal is.
Anyway, questions get asked, an investigation starts but is quickly squashed and it's all set to quietly fade away until the miscreants decide they need to cover their tracks. They put together a small group of guys and set them to work editing the records to eliminate any reference to the Prime Minister's wife.
Mr. Matsuda is hanging with the miscreants when they cook up this scheme and he files a formal complaint. Shortly thereafter his complaint is withdraw and he mysteriously falls ill and ends up comatose in the hospital where he remains for the rest of this story. His sister is The Journalist and she is distraught by what happened to her brother, but she has no evidence of what happened to him being anything other than an act of god.
Meanwhile the DCB (Dedicated Career Bureaucrat), one of the guys on the crew rewriting the records, is not happy about this work. He has always prided himself on doing a good and proper job that would be beneficial to the people, and this business of altering records has got him mentally crosswise. It gets so bad that he eventually kills himself, which causes a small scandal. What's going on with this guy? Happily married, career bureaucrat, commits suicide? He leaves a suicide note, but his wife keeps it quiet, for a while.
Now we have Ryo, the handsome young college student, nephew of DCB, who starts to become politically aware and runs into Ms. Matsuda, The Journalist, whowants to interview his aunt, the widow of DCB.
DCB kept meticulous records of the alterations he made on the official records. He put his record of alterations on a flash drive and gave it to his supervisor before he died.
Ms. Matsuda gets hold of some dirt and gets the story published, This irritates the miscreants and they unleash an army social media warriors on her. The have a secure room full of cubicles with a couple of dozen people in there, all bent to the task of raising cain on social media.
6 episodes, 45 minutes each.
I'm watching this show and I'm thinking this is exactly what's going on in the US, and has been since forever. Shoot, the same thing is going on all over the world.
Cast
I've been thinking I should include the cast of characters from these shows, because we watch so many, and there are so many actors that some of them are bound to appear in other shows. But putting together a cast list is a fair amount of work. Most of the cast listings found on the internet give the actor's name and the character's name, which is great, but they don't tell you their role. With foreign films the character's name doesn't help much because they are mostly unpronounceable. We hear what they are calling other characters, but often times the spoken version of the name is just a breath or a grunt and are incomprehensible. When my wife and are talking, trying to figure out what's going on on-screen, we mostly refer to characters by the role they are playing - the fat thug, the skinny detective, the girlfriend, terms like that.
So I decided to ask Google: Can you tell me the names of the actors in the Japanese TV drama 'The Journalist', their characters names and their roles? And presto, this very cool list appears:
The cast of the 2022 Japanese TV drama The Journalist, available on Netflix, includes Ryoko Yonekura as an investigative reporter, Go Ayano as an elite public servant, and Ryusei Yokohama as a student intern. The series is based on the 2019 movie of the same name and the book by Isoko Mochizuki, but features different characters.
Main cast and characters
Ryoko Yonekura as Anna Matsuda (The Journalist): A determined and seasoned investigative reporter for the Toto Newspaper. She is known as a "maverick" in the news industry and is tenacious in her pursuit of the truth behind government corruption scandals.
Go Ayano as Shinichi Murakami: An elite bureaucrat in the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. He becomes entangled in the government conspiracy.
Ryusei Yokohama as Ryo Kinoshita: A university student working as a newspaper deliveryman. He becomes motivated to uncover the truth and finds himself drawn into the scandal.
Hidetaka Yoshioka as Kazuya Suzuki (DCB): A public servant who was initially involved in the corruption but takes his own life after providing the original documents to the Ministry of Finance.
Shinobu Terajima as Mayumi Suzuki: Kazuya Suzuki's determined wife. After her husband's suicide, she joins Anna to expose the corruption.
Supporting cast
Yusuke Santamaria as Shinjiro Toyoda (nasty, creepy villain): A political public relations strategist and special adviser to the Prime Minister.
Tetsushi Tanaka as Tomoya Tada: An official who serves as the bureaucratic voice for the Cabinet.
Tokio Emoto as Daiki Sato: A former colleague of Shinichi Murakami.
Kaho Tsuchimura as Harumi Yashiro: A member of the opposition party in the National Diet who pressures for a reinvestigation of the corruption scandal.
Masato Hagiwara as Kohei Matsuda: Anna Matsuda's late father, also a journalist.
So maybe AI (Artificial Intelligence) has some use after all.
The Washington Post is not endorsing any of the people running for President. This has caused considerable excitement. Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post and Amazon among other things, has written an explanation of why there is no endorsement. You can read it any way you want: he doesn't like Kamala, he does like Trump, or you can take him at his word. I think it's pretty good.
The credibility gap can be bridged by independence.
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.
Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.
Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.
Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.
I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.
When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.
You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.
Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves. (It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area.)
While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it. I am so grateful to be part of this endeavor. Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed.
The TechCrunch/Last.fm controversy has been all over the net over the weekend, and there’s not much that I can add to it factually. The one thing I will say, though, is that TechCrunch has behaved irresponsible: not so much for the original story - everyone gets it wrong sometimes. But when you get it wildly wrong like this, what you don’t do is use weasal words to try and cover up the fact that you’ve got it horribly wrong. For example:
“From the very beginning, I’ve presented this story for what it is: a rumor. Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true. But I still don’t have enough information to determine that it is absolutely false either. What I do have are a lot of unanswered questions about how exactly Last.fm shares user data with the record industry.”
In a word, this is bullshit. It’s Daily Mail-style journalism, posing a statement as just “asking questions”. And even when Schonfeld got a detailed statement from Last.fm on exactly what data it gives to record companies (answer: no more than they could get just by looking it up on the public Last.fm site), he doesn’t retract the story.
TechCrunch got it wrong, and instead of retracting the story and apologising, it’s trying to wriggle out and say “it’s only a rumour”. Sorry, but that’s bullshit. And please, please, I hope no one brings up that old chestnut of “it’s only a blog, we don’t have to adopt proper standards for reporting”. The moment you can have a serious effect on a company or individual, you owe it to the world to be sure of what you say.
One thing though: This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no”. The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it. Which, of course, is why it’s so common in the Daily Mail.
The only bit I would argue about is that you won't know if your post will have a serious effect until you post it. If you are running a no-bit blog like mine you might think you are having no effect on the world. Websites that are getting a zillion hits a day probably should be a little more careful, but that isn't what gets you the hits, is it?
On the other hand I will post something and then days or weeks or months later I will notice other people saying the same thing, so maybe I am having some influence (dream on chuck-a-geddon). More likely clear thinking people eventually arrive at the same conclusion and I just hadn't noticed anyone else saying the same thing until after I said my piece.
I am disgusted with the US Government and the constant stream of bullshit they produce. Oh, I don't blame them, most people don't have the time or inclination to think about world affairs, they are perfectly happy with listening to whatever the government tells them.
If that information generates an emotional response, so much the better, that's what those yahoos in charge want, people who are fired up enough to follow them into the breach. Or over the cliff.
In the forlorn hope of slowing our descent in madness, I give you a couple of items. The first is from our friends at RT, formerly known as Russia Today which is no doubt Putin's mouthpiece, much like The New York Times and the Washington Post are Biden's. The second is an hour long video about Izzy Stone, independent gadfly reporter. I haven't watched the whole thing, come on, it's an hour long, but it seems to be pretty well done.
The West tries to bar its own people from accessing alternative information on the conflict in Ukraine, Russia’s deputy UN envoy says
Washington and its allies have turned into a new “collective ministry of truth,” rigorously preserving their narrative on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN Dmitry Polyansky told RT on Thursday. The West has launched a massive smear campaign against Russia in the media and on the internet, the diplomat believes.
Western governments seek to spread views that are “beneficial to them but do not always correspond to the reality,” Polyansky said, adding that they ultimately seek to put their own population into a “bubble of lies” that makes it hard for an ordinary person to distinguish between factual information and a distorted picture of what is happening on the ground in Ukraine.
“That is behavior of a Ministry of Truth,” Polyansky said. The diplomat also said that Western governments try to dismiss any alternative information as fake or simply block access to it. He particularly pointed to the Western nations banning Russian outlets like RT and branding any information coming from Moscow or the Russian media as “propaganda.”
Here's the video:
I.F. Stone's Weekly (1973) | A Film by Jerry Bruck, Jr.
reelblack
I wonder if the USA has any propaganda outlets operating in Moscow. I know there are Voice of Americaradio broadcasts, or at least there used to be. Don't hear much about them any more.
I'm looking at a report from my stock broker about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I'm reading along and it mentions a report from IFX. IFX? Never heard of them. Turns out it is a subscription news service. Dial up their webpage and they have this announcement:
My increasing feelings of irrelevance also came with a corresponding pressure to cover what, for me, were the less and less interesting topics that my editors felt would be better at maintaining my impact—general-interest arts stories and mainstream popular culture. That pressure, I felt, came largely from the huge moving electronic graph that now hangs over most newsrooms, tracking the articles causing the most reader interest in real time.
Well, that kind of explains why the only news we get these days is useless bullshit. The news organizations have thrown in the towel and are catering to lowest common denominator, i.e. the giant herd of unwashed idiots who make up 99% of the population.
I found this bit about a benevolent capitalist in a story about the origin of Weekly World News:
When rival tabloid The Star went to a color format, Pope was forced to follow suit. That left him with an unused black-and-white printing press, which he saw as an opportunity to return to the bizarre news of the early Enquirer. In the summer of 1979, a small staff supervised by editor Phil Bunton, stationed inside the Enquirer offices in Lantana, Florida, began work on what would become Weekly World News.
Paul Kupperberg (Editor, 2004-2007): I remember the Enquirer from its grisly early days when I was a child. It was kind of a rag in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Stuff like “Boy Trapped in Old Fridge Eats Own Foot to Stay Alive.” It was kind of spooky to a little kid.
Sal Ivone (Managing Editor, 1981-1988): Pope was stuck with this black and white printing facility near Montana. He basically said, “OK, let me just publish another magazine.”
Barbara Grover (Editorial Assistant, 1981-1985): They had moved the color printing up to New York and told people at the publishing house he’d create a new newspaper in black and white so they could keep their jobs. I worked there as a clipper at first.
Iain Calder (Editor-in-Chief, The National Enquirer, 1973-1997): He could’ve gotten rid of it, but Gene was friendly with the family that ran it. He felt he couldn’t have them, plus a lot of other people printing it, not have jobs. So he and I sat down and kicked around all kinds of different things to do on black and white paper. Finally, he said, “Why don’t we do what Reader’s Digest did?” Reader’s Digest, when it started out, took the best stories from around the world and reprinted them. He said, “Why not just do the best stories, the really wacky stories?” So that’s what we did.
Found this quote in a post on Bayou Renaissance Manthis morning, and it inspired me to comment. Republishing it here.
"Look at the endless coverage of what Maddow said about what Hannity thought about O’Reilly’s harassment of soft-porn star Megyn and how much she might make at CNN." - Fred Reed
That's why I don't watch TV News, or soap opera's for that matter.
I don't think you can blame the reporters for what gets published. They may have written something great or something worthless, but it's the people above them, the editors and publishers who decide what gets published. The publishers decide what kind of slant they want their publication to have, and the editors implement it.
The Publisher's agenda is overwhelmingly driven by newspaper sales, the prime directive at every successful newspaper. This is done by stirring up shit: sex, drugs, politics and dirty money. This covers most of what you see in newspaper.
But what's the point of being a media mogul if you can't bend the world to your will, at least just a little? So there might a thin string of stories getting published in a particular newspaper of a particular subject that I didn't cover in the previous paragraph.
We need a better national newspaper. USA Today, is okay I suppose, but I've never found much meat. Seems to be mostly fluff.
The story makes it sound like the police union is doing their damnedest to provide cover for their members. They might be, but there is another side to this story that didn't get mentioned. So I weighed in with my two cents:
There is a problem with making anything available to the public. That
problem is that some people will choose the most salacious sound bites
and scenes in order to create a click-bait item for the web. The more
they can make it appear scandalous, the better. This kind of stuff can
inflame the passions of all kinds of people, even smart, educated
people, if they aren't paying attention. And that can lead to all kinds
of trouble. Nothing better than a riot to sell newspapers, or
advertising space. So I can understand the police department wanting to
keep control over what gets released and when. Maybe if more journalists
had real jobs, we wouldn't have so many muck rakers raking muck, and
this wouldn't be a problem.
Funny how the more news coverage we get, the less actual news. Everybody just reports the same story over and over and over again. There are two things I want to know that I haven't heard anything about. One is how come nobody noticed this nut case was on the verge of going off the deep end? This could be explained by any number of factors, and I doubt we will hear anything substantial until the trial. The other is what happened to the woman who stopped him? I heard she was wounded, and then ... nothing. Where's the Presidential medal for bravery? Where's the ticker tape parade? Where is any recognition at all?
Health insurers' 'obscene' profits smaller than Hershey's
This was the title on an Associated Press story in the paper this morning. I am not going to bother looking for it since my previous experience with AP tells me I won't find it. They have their copyright rules. This story was on page 2 and not on the front page since The Oregonian puts up a PDF of their front page every day. Can't go putting AP copyright stuff on-line. Anyway it got me steamed, so I wrote a letter to the editor:
Hoo boy! You have really done it this time. What a load of hogwash. Who paid you to print this garbage? And to do it under the banner of "FactCheck | Your Report Card On Accountability" is unconscionable.
Since you seem to think your readers are very stupid, I will explain it to you as though you were very stupid. You are comparing apples to oranges. All of the companies that you are comparing the health insurance companies against all make things. Making things is difficult. You need buildings, equipment, staff and inventory. Your profits have some relation to how much stuff you actually produce.
Insurance companies do not make things. They are essentially glorified bookkeepers. They have no inventory, they have no equipment. Their goal should be to minimize the the amount they charge for administering their health insurance plans. And your article is only talking about their profits. It makes no mention of their expenses. How much are they charging to process claims? And where are the executive bonuses getting counted? Under expenses, or under profits?
How would you feel if your tax accountant was basing his fee on the amount of taxes you paid? You paid $10,000 in taxes last year, my fee is $1,000. $500 for my actual time spent working on this, and $500 for my profit. Or maybe grocery store clerks should be paid this way. You bought $100 worth of groceries, your checkout fee is $10, $5 for my time, and $5 for my profit.
The house in Kazoo was a total bait and switch. I am appalled at the idiocy of realtors. "You must have the offer in today." So I do. Next day. "Oh yeah, it takes three months to close on a short sale." Thanks a lot.
It turns out that buying a short sale is a huge waiting game, especially with this backlog and very few are actually sold as short sales. Another real estate farce.
How it typically works is like this (as I can remember):
Homeowner (HO) can't make mortgage payments.
Notifies lender.
Lender says sell it.
House goes on market.
No buyers.
HO asks lender for short sale approval, lowering the asking price below what they owe.
Lender says ok and listing price is lowered.
Interested bargain hunters respond with offers, giving the lender a better idea of the current market.
Lender drags feet on approving short sale.
Offers expire and bargain hunters move on.
Now what is really little known, NOT reported at all, and hard to prove but easy to visualize is this:
The original HO took out (or equitied out) a 95%+ (or adjustable) mortgage (or some such nonsense) and that requires PMI (private mortgage insurance).
Then their mortgage resets, they lost their job, tired of making payments, divorce, whatever. Life has hiccups. The bank doesn't care. They will get paid from the PMI, terms not really known. They know the value of the house since they got bids. The bank recoups enough from PMI to let them sit on the house indefinitely.
The house sits empty, PMI insurance paying the mortgage.
Eventually the bank sells the property after it's loss is covered.
