That new futuristic Macbook Pro is carved out of lightweight aluminum, which means you could probably toss them down some (carpeted) stairs and still have the damage be less than what that Steve Job's heart-attack rumor on CNN did for the Apple stock.
It's annoying to still have to answer questions about a fake story, but Jobs, ever the showman, found away around the inquiries with his typical nerdy flair:
Mr. Jobs deflected questions both on the company’s financial state, saying that it would report its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings next week, and on his health. He displayed a slide showing that his blood pressure was 110 over 70, adding that questions about his health would cause his blood pressure to rise.
Yeah so stop it guys, unless you actually want Steve Jobs to have a heart attack! Then where would we all be? (Using PC's and Zunes, ugh.)
With everyone feeling the crunch of the market lately, why didn't media execs hit upon the idea sooner that the answer to all their problems lay in the Mecca of the East? The shining city on the hill of Industry, Abu Dahbi represents what a lot of overspenders with a lot of money can do: be the best next best thing to Dubai, without all the George Saunders freak outs and Brave New World overtones. So that explains why big media companies like CNN and the BBC are pouring resources into the UAE state, snapping up space in the the Abu Dhabi Media Zone, a 200,000-square-meter campus that might as well have its own indoor ski slope.
But does Abu Dhabi offer the press a Catch-22? That is, if Thomson Reuters or HarperCollins' set up shop in a government-assisted facility, will Abu Dahbi expect quid pro quo and be looking for a promotional slant towards the city? CONTINUED »
I like to watch the debates on PBS with all the original gangstahs, but it's always great to go on a forum or Youtube the next day and see what was going on at CNN. By now, the "squiggle lines" at the bottom of the CNN screen — where 30 undecided voters in Ohio get dials and turn them up or down while reacting to candidate's statements — are pretty addicting, if only for how goofy they look. Seriously, we're going to decide who wins this election by a seismographic of some guys in Ohio? It's more of one of those quirks CNN has added to the debates to draw viewers to their coverage, like an extra application box on Facebook.
But those hypnotizing squiggles might actually be influencing your opinion on the candidates more than you think:
CONTINUED »
Newly minted media darling Campbell Brown, the host of CNN's Election Center, is moving quickly to establish her "Cutting Through the Bull" brand of campaign coverage. Brown has been praised, and attacked, for calling out Obama and McCain and their surrogates for total douche moves. Last night was no different, when she addressed the issue of race baiting. (See here.)
But before you go calling Brown a partisan "journalist" who's in the tank for the Democrats, recall that she's just as comfortable calling out the Obama campaign: CONTINUED »
Most assessments today of last night's presidential debate are grim. Under a picture of Barack Obama and John McCain squared off in Tennessee, the Drudge Report presented a single-word critique: "Boring." Politico is calling it the "worst debate ever."
We beg to differ. Instead, how about worst electorate ever?
CONTINUED »
Always looking for the next big thing in television news media — Katie Couric, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Anderson Cooper, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and Mike Huckabee have all received the treatment — it appears we're ready to move on to our next nominee: Campbell Brown. The NBC veteran who left the network just a couple months after losing the Today show vacancy Couric left to Meredith Vieira, Brown signed with CNN and became a respectable, albeit benign and forgettable, asset.
That was until she started practicing journalism and calling out lies for what they are: lies. And calling out non-answers for what they are: non-answers. And you know what that got her? Glowing treatment from the New York Times' Jacques Steinberg!
We've been here before, of course. Andrea Mitchell did this once. But now that Campbell Brown, host of CNN's Election Center, made John McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds look like a hapless fool and called out Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, we have a new national journalist hero! CONTINUED »
In August, Bloomberg News prematurely declared Steve Jobs dead. In fact, he was still very much alive, and Bloomberg had merely published the Apple CEO's 17-page obituary by accident. Nevertheless, it left employees, the technology community, and shareholders a bit jittery. Then last week, CNN erroneously reported almost the same thing! Except this wasn't a matter of Wolf Blitzer getting punk'd by a source — it was a matter of its citizen journalism site iReport.com posting an anonymous item claiming Jobs suffered a heart attack. Also not true. But that didn't matter to shareholders, who sent Apple's stock price plummeting when the tech blogs picked up on the rumor and before the company could shoot down the claim and reassure everyone. (Shares rebounded by day's end, though they ended down three percent.) As it turns out, a one "Johntw" posted the report, and now he's sort of in serious trouble. Because CNN, it appears, does not like being made a fool, so they've turned over Johntw's computer trail to the Securities and Exchange Commission. CONTINUED »
CNN tried to cut down on costs by recruiting a lot of "non-traditional" and "all-platform" reporters, while spinning it as this sort of citizen journalist thing. In actuality, it was really just a desperate attempt to get bloggers writing for them for free without giving college credit. Fair enough: There is nothing wrong with being creative in these harsh economic times. (Gawker's Nick Denton calls it "assuming that the economy is so volatile that most of you would like a little bit more predictability about your own income." Cute, right?)
But problems arise when you stop fact-checking these non-journalists' work, and a story is reported true without any sourcing. Especially if the story involves Steve Jobs having a fake heart attack and ends up causing a massive crash of Apple's stock: CONTINUED »
ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and the Associated Press are suing Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and Attorney General Lori Swanson for enacting a law to expand the amount of space news orgs have to remain from polling stations. Previously, the law was the crews had to stand 100 feet away from the booths (inside the buildings), but with the new statutes, that 100-foot circle would start outside the buildings, pushing the networks farther away:
"As a polling reporter moves farther and farther away from the polling place, the likelihood of a voter getting into his or her car and driving away, or of melding into a crowd of non-voters, increases.
"Second, as distance increases, it becomes harder to discern those who are voters from those who are not.
"Third, as distance increases, the statistical reliability of the sample itself decreases because it becomes impossible to interview in the scientifically selected pattern (e.g. every fourth voter, every fifth voter, etc.)."
You can see how this be a problem: After polling, most Republicans veer off to the right of a building to go to McDonalds, while most Democrats tend to get in their car and crumple into a tiny ball to cry. It would be really hard to get a random sampling of the pollsters.
Jack Cafferty is one harsh bitch: After the CNN commenter made some vaguely racist remarks towards the Chinese during the Olympics, he is now prepping for a comeback by launching not-so-vague insults in Sarah Palin's direction.
Here's Cafferty on the Palin/Couric interviews: CONTINUED »
All out of ideas for relatable, real news stories about the presidential election, CNN is now shooting relatable, fake news stories about the presidential election.
You see, because many people get confused when it comes to statistics, dialectics and history, major news outlets have taken to filming segments in which correspondents say things like, "Whichever candidate's Halloween mask sells more is going to be president." Or they'll interview women like Cindy Michaels, at right, who so resembles Sarah Palin in this stupid, hateful world that she gets mean voice mails making fun of her glasses.
After the jump, a piece discussing both those things and containing an interview with a black Barack Obama supporter named John McCain. Watch it and see if you can avoid cringing at the part when all the stories collide and the correspondent asks the black McCain who kind of looks like Obama to wear the white McCain's Halloween mask.
The "spot Anderson Cooper's boyfriend" game started at least as far back as 2006, when we spied a one Julio Cesar Recio, then 24, enjoying outings with Silver Fox. Now downtown gossip queen Michael Musto kicks off the fall season of stalking Cooper's love interests by laying down a smidgen of a plant: "No, wait, this is better. Anderson Cooper. Jonathan Chase. Discuss at length." A subtle nudge toward somebody's manhood? Or a command to search on IMDB? CONTINUED »
Thanks to Campbell Brown actually doing her job, John McCain will not be sitting down with Larry King. The Republican nominee canceled his softball interview with the network after Brown went "over the line" during a segment with McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, trying to get him to name one redeeming quality about Sarah Palin that made her qualified to be commander-in-chief, should John McCain act his age and keel over. Bounds couldn't name a single qualification, which meant Brown asked the question again and again, showing just how backed into a corner the GOP's nominee might be. All this must've upset McCain, who supports the war in Iraq and the war with the media. Which is why his camp yesterday notified CNN that he was pulling out of his King interview. Yes, the one sit down where the only challenge would be to let the question asker fart more than you.
During an interview about Hurricane Gustov with Barack Obama, CNN cut away to a picture of a rat on one of the levees. No big deal, that sort of B-roll whoopsie happens all the time when you're in the field of breaking news.
Except……didn't this also happen in 2000 when Bush ran against Gore? That scenario involved the word "rat," which stayed on the screen longer than the rest of the title (democ-rat), while showing pictures of Al.
You have to think that both times were a fluke, because as far as subliminal messages go, these aren't quite as subtle as the "hang" signs in McCain's ad against Obama.
There was this one time when NBC News' Andrea Mitchell practiced journalism.
Now, CNN's Campbell Brown gone and done it!
Here she is trying to get John McCain's spokesman Tucker Bounds to give just one example of Sarah Palin's readiness to be commander-in-chief should McCain somehow get elected and then die.
If you don't have the four minutes to spare, we'll sum it up for you: He can't.
More importantly is Brown's refusal to let Bounds off the hook. What's this — follow up questions and holding people accountable? New!
Here's Anderson Cooper taking a break from over-analyzing the DNC to uncomfortably chat with HuffPo's Rachel Sklar about his invented Jewish identity. Silver Fox says when he was a kid, he always wanted a bar mitzvah because all the other kids were having them. A few short years later, all the other kids were also having sex with women.
[HuffPo]
The cable nets were fishing for a "buyer's remorse" story last night, and their hook caught something.
Leading up to Hillary Clinton's speech, anchors and pundits were wondering whether the ex-candidate was going to 1) heal and unite the Democratic party; 2) get fully behind Obama; 3) remind Democrats of what could've been. She accomplished all three, and CNN found this Hillary supporter to make the case that after seeing Clinton's speech, some Democrats still aren't behind Obama and wish it would be Clinton heading to the White House. An even better "get," of course, would've been an Obama supporter who listened to Clinton speak last night and suddenly turned to her side, casting off his Obama vote and wishing Clinton had been named the nominee. But we can't make ratings miracles, people.
Fox News just wants to make sure you knows who loves you, baby. The network took out a page in the Chicago Tribune yesterday to print this CNN attack ad, which references the historic Gerald Ford smear campaign.
Despite this, and vocal criticism from the media that CNN's "expansion" project is just another word for cutbacks, the network is doing just fine: Its Biden-Obama announcement coverage on Saturday was 137 percent ahead of Fox in the ratings, and with 743,000 viewers in the coveted 25-54 demographic, was the highest-rated hour on cable.
A difficult feat, considering Fox won the lottery to provide all the raw footage from the DNC to the other networks. This is one of those scenarios where the numbers speak for themselves; flies, honey, vinegar, and all that.
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When it comes to finding a cable news bar to drink at while "reporting" from Denver, there are, like the cable news offerings, options for liberals, conservatives, and people with no opinion whatsoever. [Gawker]
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