The subtext of the entirety of the “Week in Review” section in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times was decidedly right-wing, especially when it comes to social/value issues. The section was, in fact, a textbook in advanced propaganda techniques, to whit: Ideological subtext through photographs: On page 2 of every “Week in Review” is a montage […]
Holiday commercials are starting to appear in TV and radio. I love to look at them for clues to the current state of things. For example, one of the TV commercials that Wal-Mart is running for the 2010 holiday season is a cross-cut between two families Christmas morning, the kids opening the presents under the […]
Read More… from Wal-Mart presents a realistic picture of fatherless childhood
In this past Sunday’s “Week in Review” section, New York Times’ food writer Mark Bittman describes the shared emotions of millions of people when approaching the task of cooking the sacred and sacrificial bird of late November. Does Bittman describe an experience of joy? Or the satisfaction of completing an important family task? Or reverence […]
Business Week has published a list of the best places to raise children and surprise, surprise, the Top 10 are all small suburbs or rural towns except for Honolulu. All these suburbs are without mass transit and most have very low minority populations. The Business Week Top 10 for raising children includes: Tinley Park, Illinois […]
I know I’m late to this trend, but it seems to me that there has recently been an enormous increase in the number of news stories in which the essence of the plot reduces to someone caught doing something very bad or very good on video or cell phone camera, which then goes pandemically viral […]
Read More… from From a news plotline trend, a practical tip for both journalists and PR writers.
Argument by anecdote is when you prove a point with a story. It is a very compelling argument, because people like stories about other people more than they like cold, hard facts. Too often, though, the argument by anecdote is used when the facts are stacked heavily against a position. If you don’t have the […]
Read More… from The argument by anecdote: every demagogue’s best friend
The Associated Press did its own poll about the attitudes of the American public when it comes to health care and health care reform. The results demonstrated once again that the politics of selfishness reigns supreme in the United States today and that we’re still in the age of Reagan, in which self-interest trumps all […]
Read More… from The politics of selfishness trumps decency once again
The latest “Week in Review” in this Sunday’s New York Times has one of the most odious examples in recent memory of what I call Pop Darwinism—inferring a basis in genetics or natural selection of behaviors that the writer wants to proffer as the norm, e.g., women want one mate while men like to spread […]
Kicking around the Internet this week is a Friday, November 6 Bankrate.com article by Marilyn Kennedy Melia titled, “Could you be saving too much?” The premise of the article is that “About 10 percent of the population is accumulating too much retirement savings in the sense that they could have saved significantly less and still […]
Read More… from To Those Lost Souls Who Are Saving Too Much and Could Be Spending More
Whenever Congress talks of raising taxes on the wealthy, as in the current House bill on healthcare reform, people complain that it isn’t fair for the government to take a greater percentage of wealth from people who are successful. Inherent in these statements is the belief that at least in the U.S., if you earned […]
Read More… from Praise and Blame is Harder to Assess than You Think