Have a sense of proportion, people! (This is probably a variation on what my statistics teacher said, that the lottery was a tax on people who never learned probability.)

futurejournalismproject:

Via Columbia Journalism Review:

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, unsurprisingly, hasn’t done a whole lot of digging on the News Corp. hacking scandal. Or perhaps it has dug, but it’s been so far behind on the story that it hasn’t been able to advance it.

But today it has a scoop on the hacking scandal—one that implicates a non-News Corp. paper, suggests in the lede that bribing cops may not have been unusual, and raises questions about a man who will help determine the professional and, possibly, the legal fate of James Murdoch, Son of Rupert.

What’s the scoop that “suggests that the practice may not have been unusual,” as the WSJ writes in its lede? That twelve years ago, a Sunday Mirror reporter testified in a libel case that he paid a cop £50 (about $82 at current exchange rates) for a story tip.

To put that in context, which the Journal utterly fails to do, recall that Murdoch’s News of the World paid a minimum £100,000 ($163,000) in bribes to police officials, according to The Guardian. That, of course, and perhaps 4,000 cases of phone hacking—crimes, folks—plus the payment of hush-money settlements and other cover-ups involving figures at the highest levels of News Corp., the Journal’s owner.

Oops.

July 22, 2011 10:18 am ET by Eric Boehlert

One week ago, Rupert Murdoch’s longtime aide, Les Hinton, was forced to resign as publisher of theWall Street Journal because of the central role he’d been playing for years in News Corp.’s unraveling phone-hacking scandal. Hinton’s resignation, unthinkable just four weeks ago, signaled the severity of News Corp.’s woes in America.

Now another Murdoch publisher, Paul Carlucci, who oversees the New York Post, may be facing renewed questions from prosecutors about his business past and what role he played in a News Corp. computer hacking scandal that unfolded right here in the U.S.

The allegations were part of a larger anti-competitive practices scandal that has already cost Murdoch’s company hundreds of millions of dollars in legal setbacks and settlements, and a scandal that highlights what appears to be a culture of corruption inside News Corp.’s American operations. It’s a culture that flies in the face of Murdoch’s  insistence that the hacking at his British tabloid represented an isolated incident.

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It’s enough to make you vent your own reactor core. I suppose next they’ll be telling us we should be reassured they have triple redundancy in their PR functions.

As Japan struggles to contain a growing nuclear crisis — with more than 200,000 people evacuated, an explosion at one power plant, and possible meltdowns in several reactors — the American nuclear industry faces a different challenge: how to position itself in the intense public-relations battle that has already started.

This morning I interviewed a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry trade group, to get a sense of the message being pushed by an industry that, with support from President Obama as well as the Republican Party, has been in the early stages of a renaissance.

The most striking claim made by NEI spokesman Mitchell Singer: Americans should be “reassured” by the crisis unfolding in Japan.

“There hasn’t been any significant release of radiation. So obviously they must be doing something right at this point,” said Singer. While acknowledging that the crisis is still in early stages, Singer argued in our interview, and earlier to the Wall Street Journal, that Americans should be reassured because the industry will learn from the accidents in Japan, where fail-safe systems have themselves failed.

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Recently, in a Facebook “discussion” someone claimed “I’m not blaming anyone,” apparently unfamiliar with William J. Ryan’s classic and timeless analysis. I don’t blame the discussant, as this lack of awareness reinforces a system of particular consequences.

Well, they’re at it again. We have a structural problem with unemployment in this country, and the Wall Street Journal, anecdotally, I might add, seeks to blame the unemployed and the government. Like the targets of original “blaming the victim” analysis, this is baseless (and self-serving) ideology.

MONDAY, AUG 9, 2010 11:50 ET

BY ALEX PAREENE

iStockphoto

Did you think that the massive unemployment crisis was caused by profitable multinational corporations and banks sitting on “mountains of cash” combined with collapsing consumer spending due to the fact that so many people are without work and those who have work have had stagnant wages for decades now? You fool! The Wall Street Journal highlights two stories today that explain the real problem: Lazy would-be workers receiving too many unemployment benefits and high government taxes!

While the actual “data” show a miserable climate in which there are millions more jobless people than there are job openings (there are 3 million openings and 17 million jobless, according to the “chart”), the Journal’s Mark Whitehouse found anecdotal evidence of employers who desperately want to hire people, but simply can’t find any applicants. Sure, “many employers are inundated with applicants,” but “a surprising number” can’t find anyone to hire, anywhere!

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Thoughtful debate is to be found in places other than Letters to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal where, in Friday’s edition, under the ad hominem heading “Mr. Reich’s View Seems to Be Far From This World,” the editor gathers what the Journal apparently considers insightful responses to my…

Goodness, WSJ! Valdez? Bophal? Superfund?

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has used the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to criticize government regulation of industry. This is merely the latest in a long history of using environmental and industrial disasters to attack government and advocate for less regulation.

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