Throughout the war, media outlets in Israel have played a key role in helping to build a consensus for the bombardment of Gaza.More recently the widening gap...#AlJazeeraEnglish #BidenNetanyahuGap #GazaBombardment #IsraeliMedia #IsraeliTelevision #MediaAnalysis #TheListeningPost #WarCoverage
Biden-Netanyahu Divide reveal in Israel
First ep of the new podcast from veteran media analyst Bob Garfield drops tomorrow.
Bully Pulpit is a wry and pointed take on politics, media and society from longtime public radio personality Bob Garfield. His astute cultural criticism, infused with wit and humor, has earned him many prestigious journalism awards, as well as praise such as “very brave” and “national treasure.”
"We don't consider argumentative to be an insult, we consider it to be an art form."
https://www.booksmartstudios.org/p/introducing-bully-pulpit-with-bob
#BullyPulpit #BobGarfield #BooksmartStudios #Podcasts #MediaWatchdogs #MediaAnalysis #Media #Misinformation #Disinformation #Propaganda
I've had a long interest in trying to find intelligent and informed discussions, online and elsewhere.
After doing my Google+ user estimate, I started thinking about how to even measure what "intelligent conversation" might be. I'd been running some quick and periodic searches, just looking at the number of results found, for topics or authors' names of interest to me, against different sites. Those were revealing.
Eventually I ran across the Foreign Policy list of Top 100 Global Thinkers. Which is, in some ways, about as pretentious as it sounds. On the other, it was a list compiled by someone other than me of currently-living people whose ideas were generally considered to have merit.
And they are (almost) all very googleable.
So I wrote a Very Simple Script to run Google searches on the 100 names, across about 100 websites, domains, and/or TLDs. And in about 5 minutes discovered that Google really doesn't like you doing that and starts sending you to CAPTCHA pages. So the 10,0000 queries got spread out over a few weeks.
I threw in a few other queries to try to get a sense of general content. The word "this" (one of the most common English language words) was a proxy for "how many pages are there -- almost every English language page will contain "this", and the distribution should be fairly uniform across sites. The arbitrarily selected string "kim kardashian" was chosen as an exemplar of non-intellectual content, giving rise to the concept of the FP:KK ratio -- the relative frequency of pages mentioning any of the FP100 versus those mentioning a certain societal member.
The selection of sites was somewhat arbitrary, though I tried to at least get representative samples. I broke up the reporting by social sites (Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, etc.), media sites (further subdivided), top colleges, international educational sites, and more.
Blogs were the knock-out surprise. There is a lot of substantive content, especially at Wordpress. In part that's because many other sites, including academic (much of Harvard) and media, run on Wordpress, and are indexed as "wordpress.com".
Metafilter has amazingly high signal:noise ratio. The site is tiny, about 369k pages, compared to Facebook's 2,660,000k pages. But the FP:KK was 32.75, versus 2.1 for Facebook.
Google+, which so many people tout as higher quality than Facebook? 0.39.
(Higher FP:KK is "more intellectual", on this scale).
Reddit and Quora also did well.
Alternative media generally fared better than mainstream, though The Economist and Financial Times are both excellent. Surprisingly, NPR's website did far worse than PBS -- TV beat radio on quality.
Mother Jones, The Nation, TruthDig_, Jacobin, Alternet, and The Real News all posted very high ratios.
(Many media scores were highly skewed by single individuals, notably The New York Times, by its columnist, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman. Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, the Pope (Benedict, at the time), and a few other names also proved to be strongly popular at specific sites.
If this post isn't enough for you, an even longer write-up, and tables, at "the Dreddit": https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/
