Salt City Sinner

Three weeks ago #OccupySLC kicked off its encampment in Pioneer Park. I had no idea at the time that the camp would still be carrying on - let alone thriving - two weeks in, and here we are at week three. The base camp, while slightly more tightly grouped and orderly than the ramshackle construction that rose up out of the park, has maintained roughly its same layout and location for the entirety of peoples' stay there so far. By now, the main nodes of Base Camp should be pretty apparent: there's the Circle-A Cafe, feeding the masses, with the First Aid tents nearby and the dish cleaning and sanitizing operation going out of the back. Most of the General Assemblies take place in a large adjacent clearing that seats a hundred people easily. The whole camp consists of about 60 - 70 "residential" tents (not counting the supply or Kitchen tents, &c.). Today at noon, Jesse Fruhwirth  hosted a media training for a small but attentive group of people (I coun...

A few days ago, I noted that despite what someone might hear on talk radio or Fox News, actual liberal bias in the news media is quite rare in my experience. Most corporate news outlets have a predictable corporate bias, but outside of first Fox News on the right, and then MSNBC on the left, little overt political agenda. I crowed that I had finally found an example of the legendary "liberal media" in the form of an article by Salt Lake Tribune  writer Robert Gehrke that was unfairly biased against lobbyists. I suppose I should have seen this coming - sort of an editorial version of washing my car only to see the rain clouds roll in. Find one example of liberal bias in a local newspaper and sure enough a national narrative will emerge - or fail to emerge - that undermines the idea that rightists are a persecuted lot never treated fairly by the mainstream press. #OccupyWallStreet started at Adbusters, a Situationist publication responsible for much of the bes...

To hear the conventional wisdom these days on the subject, you would think that pervasive liberal bias in the news media is corrosive to our democracy -- excuse me, our republic -- and so ubiquitous as to be self-evident. Despite this common sense fact, I have had a hard time since I first started consuming large quantities of high-potency political journalism finding this so-called liberal bias. I've noticed bizarre ideological blind spots in the media to be sure, but most of these blind spots seemed to line up nicely with a "corporate bias" if any simple description is accurate. On top of that, within my lifetime I've seen Fox News emerge as the most unapologetically biased and fact-light media outlet outside of Berlusconi's Italy. Indeed, virtually every example of media bias I've ever encountered, with the exception of explicitly ideologically outlets like National Review or the Nation has trended in a bland way towards protecting and benefiting the...

It was business as usual on Thursday in Utah. Liquor-control commissioners attempted to hold a closed meeting: the ostensible purpose of which was to discuss acting liquor-control director Francine Giani, and so arguably the meeting was not required to be held open to the assembled press (both the Salt Lake Tribune and KTVX Channel 4 were there and would have preferred to cover the meeting). Depending on what you determine the purpose of the meeting to be, open meeting requirements in this case are a bit of a grey area.  A little background: tensions have been brewing between the commission and Director Giani, who Liquor Control feels is acting as a liaison to Governor Gary Herbert and thereby undercutting citizen supervision by the commissioners. Come down on that one wherever you like, the meeting - much like virtually every government meeting in this or any universe - should have been open, in my opinion. What happened next is quite amusing.  Daw...

Well, this is just adorable. NPR ran a story this morning called "Spinning the bin Laden Tale" that is a pretty fair and accurate summary of the military's strategic communications operations, and how the death of bin Laden has kicked off a second battle to control the narrative (beginning with that debunked 'he used a woman as a human shield' story and continuing right up to the 'porn stash found in OBL's compound' trash that ran yesterday). As NPR notes : The war on al-Qaida is in part a propaganda struggle, fought with the aim of changing attitudes in the Muslim world. Finding and killing bin Laden was not enough. Almost as important was what came afterward: the work of telling the story of the operation in such a way as to advance U.S. interests. That's decent reporting. It's definitely an insider's perspective, arguing that the recent glut of propaganda is designed to change Muslim attitudes, without acknowledging that the STRATCOM (an...

Hey, check it out! My sister is hosting Radio Active on KRCL right now !

A casual exchange on Facebook today yielded the following fascinating information nugget from my pal Jonny Dover (big old hat tip, Jonny D): I had what is called ' source amnesia ' which is a very common psychological phenomenon where you remember a thing but you don't remember that it came from a disreputable/fictional source; this is why it is dangerous for Fox News to exist, because in time people will forget that they learned something from a disingenuous, morally bankrupt source, and ascribe to that fact more authority than it deserves... Source amnesia also explains why urban legends spread and why people are so convinced of their factuality: you hear a tall tale from a friend and then forget that it was from your pal you heard it and assume it came from a proper source such as the news. Thus convinced of its accuracy, you go on to spread it to other people. While I've seen this a few times on the left (mainly on the issues of gun control and the accuracy of the ...