Archive for October, 2008
UCLA Snoops Shows No MorePrivacy
October 31, 2008
Some 1041 patient files were violated by peeping eyes at UCLA Medical Center&;and that&;s just the ones they know about.
While the files violated included those of California First Lady Maria Shriver, actress Farrah Fawcett and singer Britney Spears, we don&;t even have 1000 celebrities in LA, even if you add 5 actors from each of the top 20 TV shows, another 5 from the top ten films, 50 musicians, the entire roster of the Dodgers, Angels, Lakers and Clippers (that last a stretch) plus comedians, politicians, artists and has-beens.
So that means people at UCLA (and probably your local hospital) are snooping on their ex&;s, their neighbors and &;that guy they brought in today&; out of boredom and unwholesome curiosity. More than 165 workers at UCLA have been disciplined; doesn&;t seem to be working. Maybe they should start actually firing and arresting people.
As CEO of workstation maker SUN, Scott McNealy was best known for his intemperate attacks on Microsoft (referring to Bill Gates and the current CEO as &;Ballmer and Butthead&;) and his uninspired leadership of the failing company.
But even a broken clock is right twice a day. As McNealy told reporters back in 1999, &;You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.&;
Tags:Brittany-Spears, Farrah-Fawcett, Maria-Shriver, Privacy, Scott-McNealy, Sun-Microsystems, UCLA Medical Center Posted in Privacy, technology, technology-journalism | Leave a Comment &;
LA Times Invents FordMalibu
October 30, 2008
The Los Angeles Times, laying off yet another 75 journalists this week, is living in the past. The paper is running a 7-part front page story about the good old days of &;The Gangster Squad&;, and how they illegally bugged and harassed gangsters like Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel in the 1940&;s.
Meanwhile, in the same issue (Sunday, October 26, 2008) a staffer writing about Barack Obama&;s outreach to Latinos in Las Vegas wrote that one of the individuals interviewed was &;trying to make a living buying and selling automobiles&; and &;pointed to two Ford Malibus in the frontyard.&;
The writer wrote me to apologize, but the accuracy of such an &;insignificant&; detail (in a Sunday paper with a circulation of one million) means either the Times editorial staff has zero knowledge about America&;s auto industry and its products (it&;s a Chevy Malibu, unless it was a Ford Mustang, Focus or Fusion) or that the factchecking and copyediting staff has been decimated in the cutbacks. (Or maybe the Times took a Philip K. Dick-like look into the future, merging the struggling automakers.)
Either way, such obvious errors call into question the accuracy of the whole journalistic enterprise. No wonder the Times wants to run a series on long-dead gangsters. As with the ghost story my editor at the Enquirer urged me to embellish, they won&;t be suing.
Tags:Bugsy-Siegel, Ford, Ford-Malibu, gangsters, General-Motors, LA-Times, Mickey-Cohen Posted in copyediting, death-of-newspapers, Journalism | 2 Comments &;
Drudge Headline of theDay
October 30, 2008
COPS: HUFFINGTON POST writer stabbed lover 220 times with screwdriver&;
Gotta give the tabloid love to Drudge&;
Tags:Drudge-Report, Huffington-Post, Matt-Drudge, tabloid-journalism Posted in Journalism | Leave a Comment &;
Barack Obama: Is the MediaBiased?
October 29, 2008
One of the most commented-on pieces on ABCNews.com is a long posting by Michael Malone on &;Media&;s Presidential Bias and Decline.&; If you wade through the 2295 words (yes, I counted), he makes some good points:
&;What I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side &; or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del&;
&;Why, to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven&;t we seen an interview with Sen. Obama&;s grad school drug dealer &; when we know all about Mrs. McCain&;s addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden&;s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media? &;
Good questions&;but Malone&;s conclusion is from left field. To editors &;presiding over a dying industry: Obama &;offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career&;With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.&;
it&;s true that Barack Obama has gotten positive media coverage since the beginning of his campaign, when any honest person would say he was a long shot. Back then (and really, for most of his campaign) he was the underdog, and certainly the media likes the underdog narrative. Then there was his youth, his personal story (up from poverty through education and hard work!) and, not least, his race, however that&;s defined.
To echo the technology journalism for which Malone is known, editors do like the &;new new thing&;&;and that ain&;t McCain. It was Sarah Palin, until journalists did the vetting job the McCain campaign should have done.
On the flip side, as Kurtz says &;Critics, including many conservatives, say the media have been too easy on Obama, and bias cannot be discounted as a factor. A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that from the end of the conventions through the debates, McCain&;s coverage was more than three times as negative than Obama&;s.&;
Yes, the press is liberal: Slate magazine is voting 55:1 Obama over McCain, for example. But the press used to love John McCain, when it perceived that he stood for something.
As a media trainer, I would fault the McCain campaign with failing to put out a positive, detailed agenda about what they were running for and delivering consistent messages supporting it. (Hint: Lower taxes and Joe the Plumber ain&;t &;Morning in America.&;)
The Politico refers to this reality here (via Andrew):
&;There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe. As it happens, McCain&;s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama&;s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.&;
Tags:Andrew-Sullivan, Barack-Obama, The-Politico Posted in Journalism, Media Training, Politics | 2 Comments &;
Zocalo LA Sucks Ass: Paul KrugmanDebacle
October 27, 2008
Sent email to Zocalo LA, &;the intellectual life of LA&;, to RSVP my attendence at Princeton Professor (now Nobel winner) Paul Krugman&;s lecture &;The Financial Meltdown and the Future of American Politics.&; Particularly wanted to see him as my son now goes to Princeton.
But after driving 15 miles to attend, the wife and I were among dozens, perhaps hundreds of hipsters turned away, as their system didn&;t return emails (&;We were full since Oct. 7; it was on the website,&; incorrectly claimed one harried organizer). Lots of people with confirmations were turned away as well.
As a long-time writer for Successful Meetings magazine and attendee of many lectures, concerts and conventions, this was one of the worst-organized events I have tried to attend.
If you want to hear Krugman you can listen here; you&;ll forgive me if I don&;t bother.
It was a good thing I missed the lecture; I might have violated Zocalo&;s &;code of civility.&;
Tags:Paul-Krugman, Princeton, Zocalo-LA Posted in meeting-planning, Public Relations, public-relations-disaster | Leave a Comment &;
Video Games Industry Sees theLight
October 26, 2008
In a rare piece of smart thinking and good economic news, the Entertainment Software Association announced the video games industry will be returning big-time to the Los Angeles Convention Center from June 2-4, 2009 and in 2010 and 2011. E3 had been ridiculously downsized and hidden in a hanger at Santa Monica airport, supposedly to save money and create a better deal-making environment by keeping the riff-raff out.
As I wrote here in 2007, &;Keeping out the gamers who want to try the games is a ridiculous strategy.&; It&;s bad business to keep out the fan boys who are the core believers and spread word of mouth.
So let the hustling and registration-wrangling begin; &;Instead of doling out registrations based on the usual invitation-only list, it will throw open the doors to any professional related to the fast-growing game industry, which is expected to generate about $50 billion in global sales this year.&;
And the fan boys will be in for an extra treat; the scantily-clad models will return as well.
Tags:booth-babes, E3, Entertainment-Software-Association, video-games Posted in public-relations-disaster, trade-shows, Videogames | Leave a Comment &;