Time traveling polaroids

Earlier today I came across this "feel-good" article at the Los Angeles Times. Old Polaroid yields eerie development — a long-dead uncle

A random garage sale purchase surprises a 13-year-old with a picture of a relative he had never known.Old Polaroid yields eerie development — a long-dead uncle A random garage sale purchase surprises a 13-year-old with a picture of a relative he had never known.

The opening of the story sounded interesting, and I read the story, expecting it being about how a box of photos contained some photos of family member or something. Of course it wasn't. It was about a boy going on garage sales, and finding a polaroid camera:

At the third garage sale, he spotted an old Polaroid Impulse — a cool find, given that a lot of popular online photo filters imitate what these cameras used to do. He bought the Polaroid for $1. But it didn't work when he took it home. After looking at some videos on YouTube, he realized he needed another antique: film. He cracked the camera open and found a bit of history inside: a classic photo of a young guy and girl hanging out.

As I read that, I went "WTF???". He "cracked the camera"? Has the journalist writing the story never seen a polaroid? Doesn't he know how it works? There is no way a polaroid would stay in the camera, and there is certainly no way that the chemicals would work and produce the picture so many years later.

What's more: I posted a link to the story on my facebook wall, saying it sounds fishy, and one person mentioned that the clothes and the camera doesn't fit together. The clothes are from the seventies, while the Polaroid Impulse is from 1988. Obivously the camera has the ability to travel in time.

According to the article, the uncle died 23 years ago, which would barely make the 1988 photo possible, but the whole article makes it clear that the photo was taken some time before his death ("The family thinks the girl in the photograph was a high school girlfriend").

Two seconds of reflecting over the story would have told the journalist that it didn't pass the smell test.

Press freedom on the decline

I am not one of the bloggers who believe that the so-called new media (blogs, twitter etc.) will take over the role of the old media (newspapers, TV etc.). Rather I believe that blogs and other alternative news sources can add as supplements to, and fact checkers of, regular media. There are many reasons I believe this, and I am probably to some degree colored by the fact that I grew up with a father who was a financial journalist, but whatever the reasons behind my stance, it's very much dependent upon the existence of a free media.

This is why a new report by Freedom House disturbs me.

Their press release sums it up pretty well.

New Study: Global Press Freedom Declines in Every Region for First Time Israel, Italy and Hong Kong Lose Free Status

Journalists faced an increasingly grim working environment in 2008, with global press freedom declining for a seventh straight year and deterioration occurring for the first time in every region, according to Freedom House's annual media study. The rollback was not confined to traditionally authoritarian states; with Israel, Italy and Hong Kong slipping from the study's Free category to Partly Free status.

The actual report is linked from the press release, and it's well worth reading. Even if you disagree with my stance on old vs. new media, most, or all, of the limitations on press freedom will also but limits on blogging, podcasting etc.

For democracies to work properly, it's necessary for the population to have access to independent reporting, so it's especially disturbing to see several democracies on the list of "partly free" countries.

Talking Points Memo is an All Spin Zone

A study of six months worth, of O'Reilly's Talking Points Memo editorials using propaganda analysis techniques shows that O'Reilly's claims of it being a "No Spin Zone" couldn't be futher from the truth. The study was conducted by three academics from the Indianna University School of Journalism, and was presented as an article in Journalism Studies

Indianna University has issued a press release: Content analysis of O'Reilly's rhetoric finds spin to be a 'factor'

Commentator uses name-calling more than once every seven seconds in 'Talking Points Memo'

Bill O'Reilly may proclaim at the beginning of his program that viewers are entering the "No Spin Zone," but a new study by Indiana University media researchers found that the Fox News personality consistently paints certain people and groups as villains and others as victims to present the world, as he sees it, through political rhetoric.

The IU researchers found that O'Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.

"It's obvious he's very big into calling people names, and he's very big into glittering generalities," said Mike Conway, assistant professor in the IU School of Journalism. "He's not very subtle. He's going to call people names, or he's going to paint something in a positive way, often without any real evidence to support that viewpoint."

Maria Elizabeth Grabe, associate professor of telecommunications, added, "If one digs further into O'Reilly's rhetoric, it becomes clear that he sets up a pretty simplistic battle between good and evil. Our analysis points to very specific groups and people presented as good and evil."

For their article in the spring issue of Journalism Studies, Conway, Grabe and Kevin Grieves, a doctoral student in journalism, studied six months worth, or 115 episodes, of O'Reilly's "Talking Points Memo" editorials using propaganda analysis techniques made popular after World War I.

The reason why O'Reilly's show was choosen, was exactly because he claims that it's a "No Spin Zone" - as the authors said "The promo of his show as a No Spin Zone -- that's where he opened the door for us."

While the findings are hardly surprising, they are still interesting.

What the IU researchers found in their study, "Villains, Victims and Virtuous in Bill O'Reilly's 'No Spin Zone': Revisiting World War Propaganda Techniques," was that he was prone to inject fear into his commentaries and quick to resort to name-calling. He also frequently assigned roles or attributes -- such as "villians" or downright "evil" -- to people and groups.

Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Conway, Grabe and Grieves found that O'Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.

The seven propaganda devices include:

* Name calling -- giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
* Glittering generalities -- the oppositie of name calling;
* Card stacking -- the selective use of facts and half-truths;
* Bandwagon -- appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
* Plain folks -- an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are "of the people";
* Transfer -- carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
* Testimonials -- involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O'Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.

Among the findings:

* Fear was used in more than half (52.4 percent) of the commentaries, and O'Reilly almost never offered a resolution to the threat. For example, in a commentary on "left-wing" media unfairly criticizing Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzales for his role in the Abu Ghraib scandal, O'Reilly considered this an example of America "slowly losing freedom and core values," and added, "So what can be done? Unfortunately, not much."
* The researchers identified 22 groups of people that O'Reilly referenced in his commentaries, and while all 22 were described by O'Reilly as bad at some point, the people and groups most frequently labeled bad were the political left -- Americans as a group and the media (except those media considered by O'Reilly to be on the right).
* Left-leaning media (21.6 percent) made up the largest portion of bad people/groups, and media without a clear political leaning was the second largest (12.2 percent). When it came to evil people and groups, illegal aliens (26.8 percent) and terrorists (21.4 percent) were the largest groups.
* O'Reilly never presented the political left, politicians/government officials not associated with a political party, left-leaning media, illegal aliens, criminals and terrorists as victims. "Thus, politicians and media, particularly of the left-leaning persuasion, are in the company of illegal aliens, criminals, terrorists -- never vulnerable to villainous forces and undeserving of empathy," the authors concluded.
* According to O'Reilly, victims are those who were unfairly judged (40.5 percent), hurt physically (25.3 percent), undermined when they should be supported (20.3 percent) and hurt by moral violations of others (10.1 percent). Americans, the U.S. military and the Bush administration were the top victims in the data set, accounting for 68.3 percent of all victims.
* One of O'Reilly's common responses to charges of bias is to come up with one or two examples of "proof" that he is fair to all groups. For example, in October 2005, Dallas Morning News columnist Macarena Hernandez accused O'Reilly of treating the southern border "as the birth of all American ills." O'Reilly responded by showing a video clip in which he had called Mexican workers "good people." He called for a boycott of the newspaper if it did not retract Hernandez' column.

"Our results show a consistent pattern of O'Reilly casting non-Americans in a negative light. Both illegal aliens and foreigners were constructed as physical threats to the public and never featured in the role of victim or hero," the authors concluded.

The actual study can be found here: Villains, Victims and Virtuous in Bill O'Reilly's 'No Spin Zone'