Alisa Miller : The Bad News About The News
Please watch this.
Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why — though we want to know more about the world than ever — the US news media is actually showing less. Eye-opening stats and graphs. (Recorded March 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 4:29.)
Hideaki Akaiwa = super hero. I had this in my queue for a while. Just never got to posting it. And then the news yesterday about the quake…jeez.
This is Hideaki Akaiwa. When the Tsunami hit his home town of Ishinomaki, Hideaki was at work. Realising his wife was trapped in their home, he ignored the advice of professionals, who told him to wait for the army to arrive to provide search and rescue.
Instead he found some scuba gear, jumped in the raging torrent - dodging cars, houses and other debris being dragged around by the powerful current, any of which could have killed him instantly - and navigated the now submerged streets in pitch dark, freezing water until he found his house. Swimming inside, he discovered his wife alive on the upper level with only a small amount of breathing room, and sharing his respirator, pulled her out to safety.
If he had waited for the army, his wife of 20 years would be dead.
Oh, and if that’s not enough badassery for one lifetime, Hideaki realised his mother was also unaccounted for, so jumped back in the water and managed to save her life also. Since then Hideaki enters the water everyday on a one man search and rescue mission, saving countless lives and proving that two natural disasters in a single day - and insurmountable odds - can’t stand in the way of love. This man is my hero.
holy shit.
truth.
Even with his family safe, Akaiwa continues to patrol the streets here on the lookout for other desperate tsunami survivors. In his red fanny pack, he carries half a bottle of tea, some water, two packages of cigarettes, a flashlight, Swiss army knife and a lighter.
he’s basically a metal gear solid character.
Uh-mazing.
Must-Watch Interview of the Day: As promised, Nine Network’s A Current Affair sits down with bullying victim Casey Heynes, who became a hero to many after standing up to his tormentor in dramatic fashion.
[caseyheynes.]
MY HERO
“In fact viewership of al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners.”
“The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s oft-quoted observation that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.
And so, among the many benefits we have come to believe the founding fathers intended for us, the latest is news we can choose. Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.
It is also part of a pervasive ethos that eschews facts in favor of an idealized reality. The fashion industry has apparently known this for years: Esquire magazine recently found that men’s jeans from a variety of name-brand manufacturers are cut large but labeled small. The actual waist sizes are anywhere from three to six inches roomier than their labels insist.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter that we are being flattered into believing what any full-length mirror can tell us is untrue. But when our accountants, bankers and lawyers, our doctors and our politicians tell us only what we want to hear, despite hard evidence to the contrary, we are headed for disaster. We need only look at our housing industry, our credit card debt, the cost of two wars subsidized by borrowed money, and the rising deficit to understand the dangers of entitlement run rampant. We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at the heart of good journalism: facts — along with a willingness to present those facts without fear or favor.”
From: Ted Koppel, longtime managing editor of ABC News’ Nightline, in a Washington Post guest editorial on the death of real news
Facebook Introduces High-resolution Photo Sharing
One of my biggest Facebook pet-peeves has been how the site displays your photos. Anything that gets uploaded in a higher resolution then a typical cell phone photo gets saved as a very crappy low-res picture. Looks like that is finally changing and Facebook will now be saving images in a higher resolution and even adding a lightbox function much like Flickr’s.
ABOUT GODDAMN TIME
So disappointed.
co-signed.
Aw, man…I was kinda liking where things were going.
Still, looking on the bright side: Lie to Me comes back a month and a half early!
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I’m Samit Sarkar, a 26-year-old reporter for Polygon. You may also know me from my four-plus years as an associate editor at Destructoid.
I’m a stickler for proper English — grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. — so if you see any mistakes in my writing, let me know. And if you see mistakes elsewhere, let me know, because I’ll want to point them out here and laugh (à la English Fail Blog). I might even put some on The Grammar Nazi, a Tumblr that I contribute to.
You can contact me at samit [dot] sarkar [at] gmail [dot] com, or on Twitter (see below). I’m also on Facebook.
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