I just got back from two weeks in Spain and one thing I learned is that you can tell a lot about a country from its public bathrooms. Public bathrooms in the U.S., as compared to those in Spain or the Netherlands, put the lie to what Dick Armey said, as reported in the encomium […]
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Last Friday’s USA Today, which my mid-town hotel placed outside my room the day before Halloween, held a Parade-like newsprint magazine called Health & Wellness. This self-styled “practical guide to healthy living” has an October 2009 date on it and looks like a quarterly special of USA Today. Except it’s not part of the newspaper. […]
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Recent research has given a more nuanced picture of the decline of the American Indian. Two facts—and they are facts—seem to have captured the imagination of the reading public and the media: That many American Indian societies in North America were already in decline when the Europeans arrived. That the diseases the Europeans brought with […]
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Don’t the executives at Mylan Inc. ever learn? The company has filed another lawsuit against The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, related to a series of stories that the Post-Gazette ran a few months back about an FDA investigation into allegations that Mylan employees were overriding automatic safety controls. As it turns out, Mylan took care of it, […]
In her weekend story about San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s withdrawal from the race for the Democratic nominee for California governor, Associated Press reporter Juliet Williams shows how so-called mainstream reporters confuse the basic terms of political discourse by accepting the long-term labeling propaganda of the Republican party. Here’s the paragraph I want to analyze: […]
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In today’s USA Today, Al Neuharth, the founder of our national MacPaper, chimes in on the controversy that has ensued since some Obama Administration officials said what seems to me to be res ipso loquitor, which in Latin means “a thing that proves itself”: that Fox News colors its presentation of news so much that […]
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Jampole Communications celebrated its 20th anniversary a few months back and it got me thinking about the ways that agencies and clients interact. Being a “communications guy,” I turned it into a set of tips for organizations on how to work with marketing communications agencies. Here they are: 1. Judge agencies by their quality of […]
Here are some of the more than one million pages of news media, books and websites on the Internet that cite Ronald Reagan as having said, “Trust, but verify.” Many of the citers are writing about politics or foreign policy, but the sample of links below show that the citation of Reagan as having said […]
Here’s another self-serving blog entry, but at least it’s about my poetry and not my business: You can now view my complete September 20 performance at the main branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. I read some old favorites from Music from Words, plus some new poems, hot off the grill! And while I’m […]
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Here’s another example of a reporter transmitting one of the foundation myths of our current ideology as communicated in the ideological subtext of news stories, magazine articles, ads, popular fiction and TV shows: that children are naturally uncurious, anti-intellectual and uninterested in science. It’s in a Baltimore Sun article by personal finance guru Eileen Ambrose […]
Read More… from Why Does Pop Culture Tell Us Children Hate to Learn?