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Headline Hangover
April 27th, 2008News headline writers should be considered criminal suspects until proven otherwise.
Because of my expertise in gun control policy, I receive daily feeds of news stories concerning the subject. I was rather surprised today to see two “identical” news stories with very different headlines. One headline amplified the core political story and the other amplified the bias of the reporting newsroom. That for former was a newspaper in good repute and the latter was a TV station is not a surprise.
When I say the stories were “identical”, I’ll note that the report from a television web site was a reduced version of the newspaper report, but copied their content word-for-word.
The newspaper in question is the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a truly great paper which I had the please of reading for seven years while residing in the magnificent city of Richmond, VA. They report that a state agency will review private sales of firearms at gun shows. This is a sensitive issue nationally, but especially in Virginia where we have held suspicion of the intentions of government ever since Patrick Henry said “Give me liberty of give me death.”
The Times-Dispatch rightly headlined the piece “Gingerly, panel to examine gun show sales.” Though incomplete, the headline cornered the issue of how the government will delicately investigate if private sales of firearms at gun shows contribute to guns entering the underground market (this is a useless review given the standing criminological research that concludes such leakage is minimal).
Keep in mind that the city of Richmond is in the center of the state, cradled by urban, suburban, and rural regions. It truly reflects the state’s varied populations and thus is quite attuned to neutral phraseology.
The TV station is in Washington D.C. where guns are, for practical purposes, banned. The TV station headline reads “Va. Crime Commission To Study Gun Show Loophole.”
For those unfamiliar with the debate, the phrase “gun show loophole” is a fanciful and borderline insane description of the issue. It was invented by organizations with stated goals of eliminating private firearm ownership. Aside from being a inaccurate issue statement, the term “gun show loophole” is designed to invoke fear by falsely insinuating that there is an unintended oversight in the law.
It is instructive then to see that the television station borrowed a lobbyist phrasing in order to invoke fear in their viewership, and not the more reasoned original headline provided by the newspaper.
The funny part is that biased folks in the media still don’t understand why they are losing market- and mind-share. Folks, if you repeatedly mislead people — especially in the age of the Internet and instant fact crosschecking — they will soon ignore you as an unreliable source.
‘..if you repeatedly mislead people — especially in the age of the Internet and instant fact crosschecking — they will soon ignore you as an unreliable source.’
The internet obviously improves a persons access to general knowledge, fact and figures, etc.
It’s quite easy to check and double check the validity of what someone is saying.
I think the internet is very much about programming oneself, rather than allowing mass media to program/brainwash one.
McLuhan talks of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media - ‘High-definition (”hot”) media, such as print or radio, are full of information and allow for less sensory completion or involvement on the part of the reader or listener than low-definition (”cool”) media, such as telephone or television, which are relatively lacking in information and require a higher sensory involvement of the user’
He also talks of the’global village’ -
‘describing the trend of electronic mass media collapsing space and time barriers in human communication to enable people to communicate on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media’
I wish I understood more about science and technology but it seems that by using a headset you can, with your mind alone, direct video games.
http://www.realitysandwich.com/mind_over_computer
Also, it seems you can mentally operate an electronic voice box -
http://www.realitysandwich.com/thinking_out_loud
I don’t know where all this will lead but it seems as if breakthroughs in communication and information technology are being made all the time.
I think it’s possible to imagine how perhaps with the aid of a headset we could eventually mentally pose a question and use a kind of etheric google search and get the answer to your question from a kind of etheric pool of information telepathically transmitted to you via a head set??(I’ve no idea if that’s possible). Perhaps the questioning is led by the intensity of your excitement.
The internet could be able to answer all of our questions and so be beyond us - a technological singularity - Teilhard de Chardin ’s Omega Point ? I think the noosphere could be like the Gaian mind and the Alien mind, (alien being everything that is previously unknown), and perhaps represent a new kind of leadership - it’s nice to speculate.
I came across an interesting idea about commercials, that if commercials for objects to buy, were replaced by uplifting and visually stunning and thought provoking programming, for a few minutes at a time, in place of the commercials, it would have a huge impact on the TV watching humanity.
I also found this interesting -
‘the Internet’s current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010′
‘Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.’
“In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”!!!!
‘Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today,”
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-6237715.html
So what will happen if it’s not upgraded in time, could sites like youtube somehow move onto TV?
Apparently,
‘The Times online reported recently that a data communications grid built to transfer data from the world’s largest particle accelerator may be able to function as an alternate Internet, with speeds about 10,000 times faster than an average broadband connection. ‘
‘Potential benefits of an accelerated communications network of this magnitude might include more widely accessible video conferencing (and some are speculating holographic conferencing as well), online games with hundreds of thousands of players connected together simultaneously, and the ability to download a full length movie file in less than three seconds.’
But apparently there are possible dangers with using the particle generator which seem to me more like science fiction -
‘One of their concerns is that the mini-black holes generated by this machine could eventually coalesce into a larger black hole that would then begin absorbing matter.’
Stranger still -
‘Another possibility is that new combinations of quarks could come into existence, creating a stable, negatively-charged strangelet which could turn everything it touches into strangelets as well – plunging us into a parallel universe of stable, negatively-charged strangelets.’
And -
‘Yet another theory is that high-energy collisions in the LHC could result in massive particles that only have one magnetic pole, rather than the typical north-south pole magnetism with which we are familiar. Critics worry that such particles could start a huge chain reaction, converting atoms into different forms of matter.’
http://www.realitysandwich.com/discerning_safety
At least it sounds exciting.
It all sounds suspiciously like Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the Omega Point -
‘Teilhard imagines a critical threshold, Omega Point, in which mankind will have reached its highest point of complexification (socialization) and thus its highest point of consciousness. At this point consciousness will rupture through time and space and assert itself on a higher plane of existence from which it can not come back’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Complexity/Consciousness
It’s also interesting that Mckenna said -
‘The Eschaton is conceived of as a boundaryless and causeless chaotic attractor that is drawing all space and time deeper into states of novel connection and complexity.’
Could this ‘chaotic attractor’ take the form of a black hole?
Isn’t it ironic that mankind has come to the point of risking swallowing itself up into a black hole?
http://deoxy.org/wiki/End-Point
I think this video gives a good metaphor for the kind of collective ‘coming together’ of mankind, giving birth to something greater.
- ‘Metaphormosis’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzU3H7E0DO8
The Internet itself is a giant self-organizing living system that is a bit chaotic at present but has the potential for being the first real democracy in the world. - Elizabet Sahtouris
http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/