https://t.co/HSdNfODnIP — Paul Epps (@paulepps) March 10, 2024 I took a digital SAT recently. I’ve got a BA in Journalism and an MS in Computer Science, so I’m very well-rounded, like a sphere. I eat standardized tests for breakfast. The English portion, or Reading or whatever they call it now, seems much easier to me. I got 800 (out of 800) on that. There’s no more “read a column and a half of text, then answer 10 questions about it.” You read a paragraph, answer one question and move on. There are no more analogies. There are no obscure vocabulary words. Math is still math, although as noted in the story, if you’re getting a lot of answers right, then they start serving you harder questions. I got 780 on the Math portion. TL;DR: It’s an easy test. I got an almost perfect score and believe me, kids, I’ve been… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Journalism
Journalism 101 for Non-Journalists
Hunter Biden Sues Laptop Repair Shop Owner Citing Invasion of Privacy. — The Washington Post The lawsuit is an implicit admission that the laptop that was given to the FBI and Rudy Giuliani was in fact Hunter Biden’s laptop. The only way the laptop could be responsible for invading his privacy is if the material disseminated from it was in fact authentic. Pretty much everyone now knows and admits that the laptop is authentic, and pretty much everyone knew in October of 2020 that the laptop was authentic, including the corporate media and social media that were propagating a lie formulated by the CIA that the laptop was “Russian disinformation.” What we know for sure is that the media lied [about the laptop] and it’s Journalism 101 that when you make a mistake, as you’re going to do as a journalist, even big ones, the first thing you do is… Read more →
Lying Your Way to the Top
For more than a decade, I have been saying in all kinds of venues, in my written journalism, in speeches, and in interviews, that the most bizarre and surreal aspect of American journalism is that getting caught lying is no barrier to advancement and success. Specifically, I’ve long said, as long as you lie for the right people and causes mainly to advance the interest of neo-liberal global economic institutions, or do the bidding of the U.S. security state, then, I said, you can lie for as much as you want and it will not have any impact whatsoever on your career in corporate journalism. But that formulation that I’ve long endorsed is far too generous to the point of being misleading. Indeed, it’s actually untrue to say that getting caught blatantly lying has no effect on one’s career in corporate journalism. I was wrong about that. It does have… Read more →
We Cannot Remain Silent, Except When We Can
We cannot remain silent about Elon Musk’s reckless decision to suspend numerous journalists’ Twitter accounts. — Center for American Progress, AFT and other progressives The New York Post responds: “Journalism is the cornerstone of free speech,” 14 progressive groups fume. “An attack on journalism” is an “assault on one of our fundamental pillars.” No, progressives can’t “remain silent” when that happens — unless, of course, it’s The Post reporting a story that’s unfavorable to a Democratic nominee for prez, as with the paper’s 2020 scoop on Hunter Biden’s laptop. When Twitter banned The Post for that, you could’ve heard a pin drop from the supposedly high-minded defenders of “journalism” and “free speech.” Read more →
Julian Assange and the Farce of US Press Freedoms
The eleven-year persecution of Julian Assange was extended and escalated on Friday morning. The British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, approved the U.S.’s extradition request to send Julian Assange to Virginia to stand trial on eighteen felony charges under the 1917 Espionage Act and other statutes in connection with the 2010 publication by WikiLeaks of thousands of documents showing widespread corruption, deceit, and war crimes by American and British authorities along with their close dictatorial allies in the Middle East. This decision is unsurprising — it has been obvious for years that the U.S. and UK are determined to destroy Assange as punishment for his journalism exposing their crimes — yet it nonetheless further highlights the utter sham of American and British sermons about freedom, democracy and a free press. . . . But putting oneself in Assange’s position, it is easy to see why he is so eager to avoid… Read more →
Hiding the Facts from Readers Is the Opposite of a Journalist’s Job
From the National Review: As you may have heard [I actually didn’t hear, for reasons that will soon become clear], on Friday night there was a mass shooting in Austin, Texas, in the Sixth Street entertainment district. Fourteen people were shot; as of this writing, one has died. This apparently wasn’t one of those loser-shoots-up-his-school mass shootings, but one of the more common shootings involving “some kind of disturbance between two parties,” as the police put it. So the shooter didn’t kill himself or wait around for the police and force them into shooting him. He fled, and the police, naturally, put out a description of him. The Austin American-Statesman, the local daily, refused to publish that description. Instead, it put this editor’s note at the end of its report: Editor’s note: Police have only released a vague description of the suspected shooter as of Saturday morning. The American-Statesman is… Read more →
The Knowledge of What They Really Are
Let’s express this as clearly as it can be expressed. Any journalist who treats unverified stories from the CIA or other government agencies as true, without needing any evidence or applying any skepticism, is worthless. Actually, they are worse than worthless: they are toxic influences who deserve pure contempt. Every journalist knows that governments lie constantly and that it is a betrayal of their profession to serve as mindless mouthpieces for these security agencies: that is why they will vehemently deny they do this if you confront them with this accusation. They know it is a shameful thing to do. . . . Even when they learn that they deceived millions of people by uncritically repeating a story that the CIA told them was true, they will — on the very same day that they learn they did this — do exactly the same thing, this time with a one-paragraph… Read more →
An Underwhelming Correction
Here’s a pretty underwhelming correction: ?"Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so."https://t.co/PnQm0aJyOu pic.twitter.com/GEzAJmhWDY — Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) March 15, 2021 As a journalist, either put a goddamn name on the source so we can verify the information, or verify it yourself before publishing, not two months later, after everyone’s already assimilated the original bullshit as truth. Now a question: Why would anyone believe what they read or hear in the media anymore when “news” is attributed to anonymous “sources” and published without knowing, or apparently caring, whether or not it’s true? Read more →
A Positive Human Future?
If you were a farmer in Nebraska 100 years ago when the Titanic went down, you wouldn’t have known about that for about six months. Today we’re bombarded with news, almost all of which is bad, and yet people wonder about the epidemic of depression and anxiety. What is journalism’s vision of a positive human future? Where are the people who are being praised for bringing about a positive human future? Where is the news about virtue and heroism in the world? Read more →
The New York Times vs. Trump
Slate has published a transcript of what it calls the New York Times “crisis town-hall meeting.” The transcript shows that Times executive editor Dean Baquet seems to fault readers for their failure to understand the Times and its duties in the era of Trump. “They sometimes want us to pretend that he was not elected president, but he was elected president,” Baquet said. “And our job is to figure out why, and how, and to hold the administration to account. If you’re independent, that’s what you do.” This was followed by 75 minutes of Q&A with staffers in which, by my count, every question except one could be summarized as “Why can’t we call Donald Trump a racist more often?” In terms of figuring out why and how Trump was elected, I feel sure that “Can you believe what stupid racists Republican voters are?” moves us further from rather than… Read more →
BuzzFeed Journalists Walked Off the Job — What Happened Next Will Blow Your Mind!
BuzzFeed journalists just walked off the job in 4 cities. Here’s why. Vox Seriously though, in the absence of BuzzFeed “journalists,” where can I find a quiz to learn if my cat is going to kill me?! Read more →
Sources Say . . .
We can never allow our sources to make allegations, contentious statements or vituperative attacks behind a cloak of anonymity. It weakens our credibility and gives the sources an opportunity to benefit at our expense. It is fundamentally unfair to the other party and thus biased. . . . If a source wants to make a vituperative attack on an individual, organisation, company or country he or she must speak on the record. — Reuters Handbook of Journalism Read more →
Thomas Jefferson: Jim Acosta vs. Ernie Pyle
My fellow Americans – I see that journalists are now positioning themselves as putting their lives on the line for America. Some poor fool at CNN was afraid of being murdered when he showed up at a Trump rally and people chanted “CNN sucks!” He’s not exactly Ernie Pyle, is he? A CNN reporter at a Trump rally is like a guy wearing a Yankees jersey to a Red Sox game. “You suck” doesn’t mean “I want to murder you.” I have never heard anyone advocating violence against journalists except other journalists. It’s all they talk about. There’s going to be violence against journalists! Our lives are in jeopardy! In the event of violence against journalists, no one will happier than journalists, because they will blame it on President Trump. Meanwhile, in a journalistic spirit of peace and rapprochement, the New York Times has just added a woman to its… Read more →
Every Male Journalist Will Be Famous for 15 Minutes
Either for a sex-related termination or for botching another “bombshell” Trump story . . . Read more →
A Fake News Taxonomy: 7 Types of Mis- and Disinformation
First Draft makes an interesting effort to classify different types of misinformation (the inadvertent sharing of false information) and disinformation (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false), based on the type of content, the motivations of those who create the content and the ways that content is disseminated Here are the categories they came up with, in descending order of intent to deceive: Fabricated Content: New content that is 100% false Manipulated Content: Genuine information or imagery is manipulated Imposter Content: Impersonation of genuine sources False Context: Genuine content is shared with false contextual information Misleading Content: Misleading use of information to frame an issue/individual False Connection: Headlines, visuals or captions don’t support the content Satire or Parody: No intention to cause harm but potential to fool We used to have the Five W’s: who, what, when, where and why. Now we have the Eight P’s:… Read more →
Things to Do in Cincinnati When You’re Bored
Cops: Teens beat man because ‘they were just bored’ — NBCNews.com Strange piece of “journalism” from NBC News . . . basically just a rewrite of a story in the Cincinnati Enquirer in which a 45-year-old man named Pat Mahaney received a senseless, brutal beating from six boys, ages 13 and 14: Mahaney was taken to Mercy Mount Airy Hospital, where he was treated for four days before being released Tuesday. Police said doctors had to insert a tube down his throat to remove all of the blood from his stomach. A tube remained in his right nostril as blood continued to seep out of his head, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, and his left eye is heavily blackened. Police said the teens admitted that Mahaney had done nothing to provoke being kicked and punched repeatedly in the face while he lay helpless on the ground. One of the boys allegedly… Read more →
The Star of the Phillipines
Via Steven Landsburg | The Big Questions: One year ago today, somewhere in the Phillipines, a reporter checked his web logs and wondered where all the new readers were coming from. Today we celebrate the first anniversary of one of the most unfortunately worded headlines in the history of journalism. Read more →