The 103rd Block: You've never been completely honest
Journalism, medicine, politics... all that.
This week…
The power at my place is unstable, which has decreased my Internet time, thus, my news consumption. I have also been spending a little bit more time tending to the new sprouts and shoots for the garden. As such, fewer links for this week. Nonetheless, here are some stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Something weird is happening at the Toronto Star
Max Fawcett opinion piece for Canada’s National Observer:
[Toronto Star’s new CEO Marina Glogovac’s] tweets are bad since they speak to her inability to sort fact from fiction on a crucial issue of public importance. The decision she made to delete them without disclosing why might actually be worse, given she’s now charged with leading a company in the business of fighting disinformation, not spreading it. But it’s the likes on her Twitter profile that she didn’t delete that tell the real tale, given that they’re marbled with anti-establishment, pro-convoy sentiments and include support for anti-vaccine personalities like Theo Fleury and Novak Djokovic.
Let’s make journalism work for those not born into an elite class
Alissa Quart for CJR:
Elite journalists tend to graduate from the same small cohort of colleges; a 2018 study published in the Journal of Expertise found that “only a handful of select schools feed the mastheads of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, suggesting the importance of networks.” Many are the beneficiaries of what has been called journalism’s “professionalization”—a process, media professor Silvio Waisbord wrote, that “entails a unified project of occupational differentiation and the definition of common skills, norms, and ethics.” Many were trained to abide by the profession’s legacy norms in journalism schools or in newsrooms. These are places whose demographics still fail to match the audiences they strive to serve.
What I read, watch, and listen to…
I’m reading Kausik Datta’s essay on the way home from homoeopathy, on OpenMind.
I’m watching the French presidential debate.
I’m also watching “You’ve Never Been Completely Honest,” a short documentary by Joey Izzo about a 1970 “leadership seminar” for male employees of a multilevel cosmetics marketing company that exposes the dark side of the multibillion-dollar self-help industry.
More stray links:
At the gate of disaster: A case study on the promotion of climate science rejectionism by mainstream news outlets and e-commerce companies by University of Victoria’s Sean Holman for Facts & Friction.
Radical right activities in Nusantara’s digital landscape: a snapshot by Munira Mustaffa for GNET.
Chart of the week
The Americans are drowning in spam, write Margaret Harding McGill and Sara Fischer for Axios, but surely so are the rest of the world? Does anyone have the stats for that?