The Venezuelan press has been facing repression for years. This week, On the Media explores how journalists in the country are struggling to cover the standoff between two men who claim to be president. Also, how both the history of American interventionism and the legacy of Simón Bolívar color coverage of Venezuela. Plus, a critical look at the images coming out of Chinese internment camps.
1. Mariana Zuñiga [@marazuniga], freelance reporter based in Caracas, on her experience covering Venezuela's presidential standoff. Listen.
2. Miguel Tinker Salas [@mtinkersalas], professor of history at Pomona College, on the legacy of Simón Bolívar. Listen.
3. Stephen Kinzer [@stephenkinzer], professor of international relations at Brown University, on the history of American intervention in Latin America. Listen.
4. Rian Thum [@RianThum], senior research fellow at the University of Nottingham, on the internment of Uighurs by the Chinese government. Listen.
Category: Journalism
🎧 Spy vs. Spy | On the Media | WNYC Studios
A pattern of assassinations baffled Ukrainian authorities. Then an assassin came forward.
New York Times reporter Michael Schwirtz set out to investigate a series of assassinations in Ukraine with low expectations. Reporting on a homicide as a member of the foreign press is daunting enough to begin with. His assignment was formidable beacuse many of the murders were linked to Russia — a government hostile to the media at best and notorious for murdering foreign journalists at worst.
But when Schwirtz approached alleged Russian assassin Oleg Smorodinov to question him about a murder, the accused provided an unexpected bit of testimony: a confession. And on top of that, Smorodinov disclosed the specific role the Kremlin played in ordering and directing his crime.
Schwirtz published his findings in a New York Times feature last week. Bob spoke with Schwirtz about spies, state-facilitated assassination and the experience of following a true story that reads like a Russian mystery novel.
🎧 The Too-Good-To-Be-True Cancer Cure | On the Media | WNYC Studios
Despite steadily declining rates of cancer deaths over the past two decades, cancer remains responsible for 1 in every 6 deaths worldwide. It’s a scourge. So when, this week, an Israeli company called Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies captured the news cycle with promises of a complete cure for cancer within the year, the story caught fire.
The company’s technology is called “MuTaTo” — that's multi-target toxin. And, to judge from the news media this week, it seems vetted, verified and veering us all toward a cancer-free future. Reports began in the Jerusalem Post, but quickly took off, making their way into various Murdoch-owned publications like FOX and the New York Post and landing in local news outlets around the country and the globe.
A couple days into the fanfare, the skeptics started coming out: for one thing, as oncologist David Gorski points out in his blog “Respectful Insolence,” the claims are based on experiments with mice: no human trials have yet started. For another, they haven’t been sufficiently peer reviewed. In fact, the company won’t share its research, claiming it can’t afford the expense. The too-good-to-be-true story appears to be just that, built on PR puffery. But who can resist a good cancer cure?
With Mutato in mind, for this week’s podcast extra, we revisit our Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook: Health News edition, with Gary Schwitzer, publisher & founder of HealthNewsReview.org.
👓 Ilhan Omar Falls Victim to the Outrage Exhibitionists | The Atlantic
In attacking the representative over a small, unintentional slight, Donald Trump and the populist right are displaying bad faith.
👓 Five Newsroom Tips for Better Website Content | Andrea Zoellner
This post is adapted from a talk given at WordCamp US 2016 in Philadelphia.
To say journalists have a bad reputation is an understatement. In a recent poll of least trusted professions in Canada, journalists had an 18% trust rating, ranking them somewhere between Financial advisors and lawyers. So w...
👓 Yep. The Correspondent screwed up in its communications with members. Here’s how. | PressThink
A decision not to have its headquarters in New York or the US, and to base the English-language site in Amsterdam, has drawn criticism from supporters.
👓 Network Heuristics | Hapgood
There’s a story going around right now about a “reporter” who was following people shorting Tesla stock and allegedly approaching them for information. I won’t go into the w…
How journalists memorialize their interviews seems to be divided, in many ways, along generational lines, with older reporters relying more on their notebooks and younger reporters clinging to their recording devices, which were once clunky and somewhat forbidding but came into wider use around the end of the 20th century with the advent of digital technology. But it also depends on the person.
👓 Your favorite way to get around The New York Times paywall might be about to go away | Nieman Lab
Publishers are increasingly blocking those who use incognito mode to sneak around their paywalls. But browser makers may have the last laugh.
👓 Media Education and Change | Buzz Machine | Jeff Jarvis
Lately I’ve been scolding myself that I have not been radical enough — yes, me, not nearly radical enough — about rethinking journalism in our...
👓 Europe Against the Net | Buzz Machine | Jeff Jarvis
I’ve spent a worrisome weekend reading three documents from Europe about regulating the net: The revived, revised, and worsened...
🔖 Humm | Simple self-publishing: a distributed platform for free creative expression
Simple self-publishing: a distributed platform for free creative expression on Humm…
Reply to The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic | Nautilus
After all, it had been Wiener who discovered a precise mathematical definition of information: The higher the probability, the higher the entropy and the lower the information content.
In fact, it was Claude E. Shannon, one of Wiener’s colleagues, who wrote the influential A Mathematical Theory of Communication published in Bell System Technical Journal in 1948, almost 5 years after the 1943 part of the timeline the article is indicating. Not only did Wiener not write the paper, but it wouldn’t have existed yet to have been a factor in Pitts deciding to choose a school or adviser at the time. While Wiener may have been a tremendous polymath, I suspect that his mathematical area of expertise during those years would have been closer to analysis and not probability theory.
To put Pitts & McCulloch’s work into additional context, Claude Shannon’s stunning MIT master’s thesis A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits in 1940 applied Boolean algebra to electronic circuits for the first time and as a result largely allowed the digital age to blossom. It would be nice to know if Pitts & McCulloch were aware of it when they published their work three years later.
👓 About | juliaangwin.com
Julia Angwin is an award-winning investigative journalist and editor-in-chief of a startup nonprofit newsroom that will investigate the impacts of …
👓 We pressed Jill Abramson on plagiarism charges. Here’s what she said. | Vox
"What we’re talking about here are sets of facts that I borrowed."