30 Replies to “Not Waiting For The Asteroid”

  1. The “Mainstream Media”:
    From a couple of years, say 8-9 years….
    When I see story, on page TWO, about a former PRESIDENTS’s dog getting run over, I say to myself, “self…. you need another source of information, this one is not only broken.. it’s beyond repair.
    A dead pooch.. rates page two, and NOT on a saturday! Something is amis to be sure!
    ‘Course maybe it’s just me.
    I’m not known as a trendy individual”.

  2. At the Saskblogs bbq in Regina this summer, GlobalTV sent out a ditz (20, blonde, dumb, 110 lbs max, attractive) to cover the gathering.
    She expressed surprise that we didn’t have our laptops around. She didn’t get that we were just having a BBQ.
    Her most telling statement, “I don’t read blogs.”
    Kate’s reply, “That’s okay, we don’t watch the news.”
    Game, set, match.
    Cheers,
    lance

  3. It may take a few years, or a few months, but I have a feeling the free market will sort this one out. India graduates a bajillion journalists, economists, and poli sci majors every year, many of whom will work for $3 an hour and write english better than the average Canadian or American grad.

  5. The comments by the “wired” journalists could have been written, in large part, about the teaching profession, which is in a profound morass these days.
    The major disconnect between the bureaucracy and the teachers in the trenches, whose observations and ideas tend to be more realistic–and ignored–grows wider by the year. (The unions are lousy and useless, but are not primarily responsible for this particular problem.) Most teachers are altogether disillusioned about their jobs and the serious vacuum in leadership. Most teachers I know, from one year to decades of experience, can’t wait to get out.
    ‘Discouraging for a lot of teachers stuck in jobs where intelligence and common sense are not honoured.
    Re the newspaper business, it sounds like the dead tree side deserves its demise: other forms of delivery will fill the vacuum. Re educating our kids, the demise is precipitous. However, I don’t see anything worthwhile filling that vacuum. ‘Very bad news for all of us . . .

  6. “Knowing Auditor general Sheila Fraser’s report was going to be “tough,” Chretien was prepared to receive it, thank her for her work and then say if there was evidence of theft or fraud that the police should catch the crooks and the courts should put them in jail.
    “Of course, I expected to have to take some hits in the press for a couple of weeks, but that hadn’t frightened me in the past and it didn’t frighten me now. By the time Martin was to take over, the whole issue would have been history and he could have begun his mandate without that albatross around his neck.”
    Tells you all you need to know about the Canadian media.

  7. “Instead, Chretien quotes a newspaper columnist’s assessment that the sponsorship scandal was “a mouse of an affair”
    Tells you all you need to know about Canada’s justice system.

  8. Hey Joe. Who is dispatching who where? The last I heard, cretin the librano sent our troops to afghani, and paul”i blow bono” martin sent them into combat. All that PMSH has done is try to get them the best gear possible, and he has put the whole matter out to consultation. If that is right wing. call me a neo-con……MORON! And, BTW, my sphincter has more combat experience than you and your whole generation of moonbat wimps. GO ARMY!

  9. “Management is more concerned about who owns the change than they are about creating change,”
    (…)
    “Blogging has shown me that I don’t really need the guys that own the presses anymore. I’ll probably stay in journalism, but I can’t wait to get out of the media.”
    🙂
    Truth from the moths of babes…this young online newsy just exploded the 500 year historical agenda of media…OWNERSHIP! Monopoly on info flow and info dissemination…they are still heavily focused on maintaining monopolies and selling this monopolized public influence to corporate or political interests.
    The info worm has turned…the net makes info a two way affair and news/truth travels faster than any attempt to contain it…every witness to an event with a keyboard is a journalist and every news item is challenged by readers as it’s put to the credibility test in the public forum… and this is good…free 2 way info flow…total free debate….the monopoly on “owning” the news/information is gone.
    THIS is what the MSM boardroom just doesn’t get.

  10. kingstonlad: I think you posted yor comment in the wrong window. Wanna try that again? You wouldn’t be one of those dead-tree dinosaurs now, would you?

  11. Gee Kingston I didn’t even mention the libs sending the troops… LOL
    Taking up on lookouts point. The problem I see with the teaching profession is fact that it is a beginning profession and not an end profession. Times had it that a teacher was someone who had done something for years and then decided to pass on his experience to the generation following. Now a kid goes to school for 12 years, university for 4 years and goes right back to where he started with no life experience or training beyond the class room. Doesn’t make for a good education system especially when you consider most of the professors at university have the same handicap they have nothing to teach so they just make it up as they go along.

  12. Bias and hiring practices aside. Positions and opinions are tested on blogs.
    As far as one-way maggot infested MSM news corporations, scratch that, propaganda machines are concerned, the talent pool is necessarily drying up.
    As Wayne Gretzky said, “I don’t go to where the puck is, I go to where it’s going.”

  13. When I was a journalist about half of my colleagues went to Ivy League schools and many of those even had masters degrees in journalism, usually from Columbia. But the reality is that journalism has a very low entry cost. All a good reporter needs is curiosity and drive.
    The reason journalists are able to hold themselves in such high esteem is not the pedigree of their degree, but the fact that they wiggled their way into a position at one of the limited number of organizations that control the distribution of information. This would be the local newspaper with a printing press and carrier network, a wire service with bureaus worldwide or a Reuters and Bloomberg with pricing feeds in the financial markets.
    But thanks to the Internet this control over the access to and distribution of information is rapidly being eroded, and many of these journalists — though they don’t yet realize it — may soon clinging to the debris of their shattered organizations.
    Glenn Reynolds often says this and he’s right: if media organizations returned to basic reporting, their bureaus, access to info and distribution channels would give them a fighting chance in the creative destruction now taking place. But instead, they are largely throwing nuts and bolts reporting aside because they believe they have the special intelligence to shape opinion and influence events. And, thus, their credibility disappears faster than a taxpayer’s dollar in an NDP budget.

  14. lookout,
    Interesting correlation between the teaching ‘industry’ and the MSM. It’s all one-way.

  15. Nothing proves the point better how absolutely marginalized the MSM is becoming than contrasting the treatment of Swiss efforts to get control of their immigration problems with this blog entry in the Brussels Journal and the Guardian’s smarmy hit piece on the same subject. I just by coincidence came across the two this morning.
    The MSM can’t die fast enough.

  16. Interesting ‘news’ report at the top of CTV’s Question Period.
    They report that Australia’s ‘Conservative’ leader, John Howard, has called for an election. The video clip accompaning the ‘news’ shows Howard stumbling and falling.

  17. Lookout Here in BC the teachers had a choice to make a few years back, be classified as professionals or trade unionists, they chose the latter. The teachers got exactly what they deserve in their choice, a union mentality, and so you shall be treated.

  18. Thanks Penny,
    “Last year, there were 639 rapes in Switzerland. 309 of the 489 identified perpetrators, i.e. over 63%, were foreigners.
    198 homicides were committed in Switzerland in 2006 (3). Of the 226 identified perpetrators, 51% were foreigners. There were 9272 assaults with bodily damage and 8568 identified assailants. Almost 50% of the assailants were Swiss residents of foreign extraction. (4)
    All these and statistics on kidnappings, theft, burglary etc —- all the specialty of foreigners– may be gleaned in the 2006 Statistical Report on Crime, issued by the Swiss Federal Police.
    The term “Foreigners” includes the foreign-born as well as the Swiss-born children of such foreigners. Switzerland does not grant birthright citizenship. In this, and in its tough naturalization requirements, Switzerland remains, in some ways, the last remaining outpost of sanity in the Western world.
    As there seem to be no accessible statistics as to who the criminal “foreigners” are, one has to build a mosaic picture out of the little bits and pieces that are available.
    It is common knowledge here that Albanians and other European Muslims commit crimes far out of proportion to their numbers; indeed, I have been told of muggings and rapes of hikers on pristine mountain trails, committed by gangs of Albanians, Kosovars or Macedonians. The names one reads in drug and smuggling arrest reports are usually Balkan-Muslim or Turkish.”
    Statistics don’t lie. The MSM, however, does.

  19. The media are dragging the masses down with them. Kinsella took full advantage of the ‘tuned out’ voters that wanted the MSM to tell them what to think in the La L’otario election. When I mentioned the info that I was getting off the net I got the ‘look’…like I was a cult member.
    Yes lookout ..it is keenly connected to the so-called education.

  20. All the Commies who run and control the MSM should be delighted with the advent of the Internet and blogs.
    This great development by the capitalist world has finally made information and news the domain of the great unwashed, the proletariat, the people, my peoples etc.
    ISN’T THEIR CREDO ALL ABOUT … THE PEOPLE???
    A little venting here if you don’t mind.
    Hey Jack bin Layton! and all your pals in the press … ‘working families’ (code for commoners) have a right to report the news and editorialize on it … don’t they? … What is more important than the little people, whom you claim have a right to anything and everything imaginable?
    Thanks for that, the reporting of truth and reality is well underway to your chagrin I am sure.
    On the rights from, all we really need (besides love) is some liberty in the arena of freedom of speech, free enterprise and self-reliance.
    We don’t need the MSM propaganda machine and hopefully on-line education for home schooling with finally rid of us the teachers union monopoly as well.
    Things are improving and if Islam doesn’t kill us all we my yet see a wonderful freer more transparent society developing over the next couple of decades. The will go a long way to ridding of us of the Leftists who ruin our world since they can only work in the shadows of deceit and fraud.
    But I bloviate …

  21. OK, so I read the comments.
    Let’s play “pretend”.
    Let’s pretend these oh, so innovative* html coders can do what they want. This will solve the problem?
    Ladies and gentlemen, the issue is content, not form. (echoing chip @11.25am)
    Sigh. To innovate – to put new ideas into practise. How…progressive.

  23. I found it curious that the article had the user-generated content (UGC) table. What does MSM have to do with UGC?
    The MSM online guys think their salvation lies with the presentation? From what I see, UGC is successful in spite of the presentation. There is nothing fancy about blogs, youtube, bulletin boards, etc.
    One to many content/communications is rapidly being replaced with many to one (or many). Graphics will do little to change this.

  24. Western Canadian, id, joe, and bluetech, I hear you. As a teacher, I’ve always marched to the tune of a different drummer than 99%—really!—of my colleagues. (How many elementary school teachers either visit or post at SDA?) In honesty, I’ve truly educated the kids I’ve taught. In the old days, a lot, and now, once in a while, that’s been valued by the powers that be. (Interestingly, my Educational Assistants, who see me in action all day, every day, have been among my greatest cheerleaders: “Boy, do we learn a lot from you!”) The unions are a big problem: they haven’t seen a kid’s right they don’t support, even though such rights compromise to subvert teachers’ authority and ability to teach.
    So, I hear the criticisms and quite agree, though there are good teachers out there. Of course, they often need to be “subversive” to teach what the kids really need versus the propaganda and academic pap downloaded from above.
    Mirabile dictu, there also happen to be a few fine educational initiatives out there—always undermined by the foolish rubrics of the very system that promotes them . . . which brings me to Tenebris’s astute observation that just changing the presentation of the MSM isn’t a panacea. Though, if reader feedback’s not censored and there’s the true two-way street WL Mackenzie Redux refers to, the MSM would definitely be quite transformed. If this is the kind of thing the journalist techies are talking, good thing.
    (John West, penny, and chip, excellent observations, IMO. Thanks.)

  26. “…masters degrees in journalism
    Is that one step up from a Ph.d in basket-weaving?”
    No, its the entry pre-requisite.

  28. Nice site. I cruised by a while back for a previous “Not Waiting for the Asteroid” article.
    Penny, thanks for the link to Brussels Journal.
    “Switzerland has been a haven for foreigners at least since the Roman emperor Vespasian’s father lived and worked there as a banker.”
    A single sentence that should cause American journalists to weep for their wasted lives.
    There were circulation scandals a few years back for several newspapers. Millions of dollars of advertiser payments were returned. The fix was to start counting newspapers copies that were price discounted more than 50%.
    Meanwhile, from the Journalism Credibility Project done by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Liberalism’s role in our collapsing credibility from 1997:
    “The liberalism of the mainline media is as blatant as a thunderclap.” – Ross Mackenzie, then editor of the editorial pages at the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch.
    And a telling comment on Poynter Online said, “But why, I ask, has there not been some sort of collaboration of the greatest minds in journalism and the greatest minds in business to come together and think out this problem? Many journalists and newspapermen and women aren’t business people, but I have no doubt there are brilliant, innovative minds that could solve the problem.

    Until then, I’ll continue my civic duty    .”
    Sounds like InstaPundit’s “I’ll start acting like it’s a crisis when the people saying it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.”
    As for “brilliant, innovative minds that could solve the problem,” journalism may not be the place to look to, per another post at Reflections of a Newsosaur.
    But there is one underlying reason why newspapers will not be able to take advantage of the opportunities so well presented in your paper: They simply lack the intellectual capacity.

  29. Well I know a few journalists…. guys I grew up with for the most part…yep the guys who went from high school to university liberal arts and lit courses to journo school to small town paper to big town paper to network TV…
    Out of the 6 who are practicing in this “profession” one took a minor in business and economics. He now runs a small town paper.
    All are handicapped in terms of understanding technology ….. all are liberal/left in political views.
    All are painfully devoid of what I would call ambition or desire to excel ……
    Based on my experience with these individuals and with the results from every other contact with representatives of the MSM … I’d say a sorry lot.

  30. And still these liberals isist to say all humans came from apes what a load of bull poo and they still call birds glorified reptiles thats also a load of bull poop AND IF ONE OF THOSE EVOLUTIONISTS CALLS ME A FEATHERED REPTILE I,LL GET VIOLENT I,LL PICK THEIR EYES OUT SQUAWK SQUAWK

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation