Dr. Andrew R. Cline of Rhetorica.net has completed his first analysis an Echo Chamber interview with his perspective the Bill Plante interview. He posted it on his site yesterday, and I’ll repost it here as well. Analysis Open-source Project: The Echo …

Dr. Andrew R. Cline of Rhetorica.net has completed his first analysis of The Echo Chamber documentaries. He posted it on his site yesterday, and I’ll repost it here as well. Analysis Open-source Project: The Echo Chamber Interview: CBS White House Corr…

Would it be accurate to describe the news of the 40s and 50s as less censored? I don’t think so. How about the tone of the news: war, economy, politics, …?

Also, after Corey Pein’s discredited “analysis” of memogate … well, what can CJR possibly be thinking?

Ask more, tell less … indeed.

At one session the APME attendees and those of the affiliated meeting of the Associated Press Photo Managers were asked to say whether they would have published certain grisly photographs on page one — a shot of Nicole Brown Simpson’s corpse, the burned bodies of American civilian contractors hanging from a bridge in Falluja, and so forth. Electronic voting allowed members of the audience to identify themselves by job (as editors or photo editors), and the embedded readers were also asked to vote. One of the photos rated was the iconic Abu Ghraib photo of a prisoner standing on a box, hooded, with wires attached to each hand. Of those who identified themselves as photo editors, 96 percent said that they either ran or would have run the photo on page one. But 71 percent of the embedded readers said it should not have been run on page one. Asked about the propriety of running photos of terrorists holding hostages, 60 percent of the photo editors were in favor of printing the pictures, but 78 percent of the readers were opposed.

Why don’t readers want to see these things? [Good question, did you ask them? - ed.] Why are so many people avoiding the hard task of keeping themselves informed about what is going on in their government and society? [Uh oh ... avoiding? - ed.] Why is ignorance so widespread at a time when higher education is more widely pursued than ever before? [Ignorant! We're ignorant! King Journalism is dead, long live the King! - ed.]

1. The narrative bias *beginning-middle-end* is most affected by the conduit metaphor; allowing both a lecture without interrupting questions (or even often at the conclusion), and an end that is almost certainly artificial in completeness and finality.

2. re:The old rhetoric of journalism cannot operate in a new noetic field–at least it cannot continue to so operate and hope to survive in its old form for very long….Let’s look at one example: The inverted pyramid structure of news articles. This is an artifact of objectivist, one-way rhetoric. Is the “gap” between the legacy new’s objectivist rhetoric and the transactional universe influencing the changing noetic field?

I’d be surprised if there is an easy fix for the paragraph marker between blockquote tags, but if you find it please let us know.

The big fixes on the preview would be to turn off the auto centering and perhaps a better background/text combination that would be easier to read.

Thanks! But with everything you need to do based on your last update, if it doesn’t get done tomorrow – no big deal.

I noticed that and probably should have posted something immediately about the screw up.

The problem, I think, was a paragraph tag inside of the blockquote tags and how that was handled. I was not able to see that in the preview template. Hopefully, Andrew will work on the preview template soon.

For the record, the only words I authored above are: The objectivist journalism profession is still goal oriented (and ideological in that sense):

Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men. (here)

Rosenstiel writes, “What is disappearing is an idealism about the potential of TV as a medium to better our politics and society.” That sounds like advocacy. That sounds progressive. That’s not a statement devoid of a cause, looking to objectively communicate a undistorted map of reality.(here)

For any journalist who understands his real job– helping the public life of this nation work well…

Stop right there. The ultimate job of the press, in Satullo’s world (and in mine), is a pragmatic one: "helping the public life of this nation work well." This view, we should tell you, has rivals. One of them says the ultimate job of the press is to help no one, advance no agenda. "We’re the watchdogs and the truthtellers and we advocate nothing. End of story." I call it the View from Nowhere. Satullo isn’t on that side. And this affects what he thinks about the bloggers.(here)

Coleman also lets slip something that tells us quite a bit about the mentality of today’s press:

Powerline is the biggest link in a daisy chain of right-wing blogs that is assaulting the Mainstream Media while they toot their horns in the service of … what? The downtrodden? No, that was yesterday’s idea of the purpose of journalism.
(here)

re: What would happen if journalists began doing more asking than telling and then giving those they ask the space and time necessary to give good answers?

The world of Big Media used to be a high-trust environment. You read something in the paper, or heard something from Dan Rather, and you figured it was probably true. You didn’t ask to hear all the background, because it wouldn’t fit in a newspaper story, much less in the highly truncated TV-news format anyway, and because you assumed that they had done the necessary legwork. (Had they? I’m not sure. It’s not clear whether standards have fallen since, or whether the curtain has simply been pulled open on the Mighty Oz. But they had names, and familiar faces, so you usually believed them even when you had your doubts.) (here)

Rosenstiel argues that networks have “abdicated their authority with the American public.” They have exchanged prestige for profit. Network news moved closer to a cable news model, cable news is winning and network news is ceding. As a result, the format or structural bias is different: from “journalism of verification” to “a journalism of assertion”.

That’s interesting as I think in terms of “trust me” journalism. From “authority” to “assertion”. (here)