Posts Tagged ‘journalism’
Sensationalism and how NPR completely missed the point
January 19th, 2010 • chatter
Tags: journalism, npr, photography, sensationalism
As you all know, Port-au-Prince got hit by an earthquake last week. It was devastating and heavily destroyed the city. The Western media has spent the last 7 days showing non-stop images of the area and reported on it ceaselessly. Why? Mostly because Americans believe there isn’t anything else going on in the world and they — the media — know we love sensationalist pieces. I’ve been so put off by this I haven’t bothered actually keeping up with any developments about what’s going on. It’s not that I don’t care the people on the ground, it’s that I don’t care about what’s being reported because, aside from this earthquake, what’s coming out of Haiti is the same story for the last twenty or thirty years.
However, there’s a new kid in town: gigabytes, and probably terabytes, of images relating to the disaster plastered all over the news, news sites, Twitter, Facebook, and who knows where else. I’ve looked at what’s been posted at Boston.com out of curiosity. Mind you, not morbid curiosity, but sheer curiosity of what’s going to be posted. I wanted to be greeted with images of people being helped but instead all I got where above-ground mass graves, people being crushed, and people in the hospital. This is what I’ve got a problem with. Everyone in the world knows this has happened, we all know people have been injured and have died, but we also know that there’s been a huge surge of UN and rescue forces dropped into Port-au-Prince to help. Where are the images of those people, helping to clear away the rubble, devastation, and piles of bodies? Nowhere to be found it seems.
Then I read the following article from NPR about disaster photography helping to dull our sensitivity to such issues. The author questions when photos of a disaster go from informative to sensationalist. That’s easy to figure out: when every photograph is of devastation and nothing else. There are scant photographs of the doctors, search and rescue techs, military personnel, and even Haitians helping out. It’s all dead bodies and crumbled buildings. This is when reporting is nothing more than sensationalism. Garsd then goes to question how this occurred and while I agree that six Saw movies have helped to dull our collective senses, the blame lies squarely at the media for not only showing minute after minute of this but actively promoting and pushing it into our faces.
This “new” genre of “gore pornography” has been around for decades now. Horror movies latched onto this back in the days of grindhouse and the Internet certainly was awash in it in the 90s. It’s nothing new, it’s just new to the media. The NPR article fully misses the point that we as humans didn’t naturally become desensitized to images of decomposing bodies, we had media outlets shove them down our throats. While scanning Reddit the other day, I had the displeasure of seeing a picture of a small child being tossed, literally, onto a growing pile of bodies. For the first time in years, I was actually disgusted by this. Not because of the image itself, but because someone was there to take an entirely unnecessary photograph and by the gutless media outlet that published it.
Jasmine Garsd and NPR miss the point of why this happens and don’t bother to look in the mirror. She also offers up the quaint tidbit that she “people who have told me they never donated money to a cause before”, therefore letting all the readers know she is acquainted with some pretty selfish individuals. Thank you for letting everyone else know your friends are just a little bit “better” than the rest of us.
So, Nexus One or not?
January 6th, 2010 • chatter, phones
Tags: google, journalism, nexus one, t-mobile, technology
Yesterday, Google announced their first foray into direct sales of a phone running their Android OS. Most tech bloggers and readers weren’t surprised by any of it as it had all been leaked out before. There’s a few reviews out there, which make interesting observations based on two key things about the device:
What I find more important than the reviews themselves are the slowly coming negative comments about a device that, up until roughly Christmas time, no one outside of Google had ever touched. These comments are coming out from various tech bloggers and their disappointment with the device and then squarely blaming ol’ Goog without looking at themselves directly. Reading sites such as Engadget, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, CrunchGear (the illiterate son of TechCrunch), and countless others during the months of November and December showed nothing but admiration and idolization for the device, all without as much as a peep about it from Google officially. They too know that all the higher ups at Google loved all the free press and speculation, even if the device that was to be released was the worst phone released in recent memory. All of this then makes it difficult to get a clear draw on the phone itself without combing all the reviews that are currently up, most of which are still excited about the device but realize its flaws. Of course, one still has to rule out those out liers which either completely lambaste the phone or purport it to be the iPhone’s death knell — I read one such review just about an hour or two ago from one of the aforementioned sites, whose big shot owner lauded the phone and said it was the best phone on the market to date.
If I were to look at reviews alone, I’d be fairly convinced that no one has a clear idea if the phone is worth a purchase or not, but they do know that it’s a very nice phone with some very nice capabilities. I came across a worthwhile price breakdown of current smartphones on the market. While I think the “average” plan of 1000 minutes is a bit high personally, it’s probably a lot more average than I care to think. The whole top 70% of the infographic is what most people care about but I’m very interested in the total cost of ownership over two years. Then I came across the following price breakdown for current T-Mobile customers as well as new customers. I took this and compared it to Ben Ferguson’s TCO breakdown over two years with only a data plan.
I’m going to guess that a lot of people aren’t going to pick up on this but the plan that Google wrangles you into with T-Mobile is $20 more expensive than the Even More PLUS plan with the same amount of minutes. That’s a very sly move, Google. I’m not concerned about how much profit they’ll make off of these walled plans but it does make me wonder why new customers get hit with a $20 fee every month for an already set T-Mobile plan. I can say that it’s a pretty slick move on both parts; I wonder what kind of Nexus One premium Verizon customers will get to enjoy in the next month or two when it’s released on the Big Red network.
With my Sidekick LX ailing pretty heavily these days, the Nexus One is looking like an upstanding option. As usual, T-Mobile’s always on the lower end of phone hardware in comparison to Verizon and AT&T, they now have another smartphone to help prop up their sales of Blackberrys. I’ve been considering jumping ship to Verizon for the Droid but I absolutely hate their plans and extortion level early termination fees, and I will be damned if I’m switching to AT&T’s working-not-working network for an iPhone. Will the Nexus One be the phone that helps me stay a customer of the purple T a few more years? We’ll know at the end of the month when I try to order one.