The insurgency is in its last throws

Sock and awe:

Louis C.K. — Everything’s Amazing, No One’s Happy

(h/t Kathy Sierra)

I'll get right on that

'The corruption of the profession'

What Josh Said:

Of all the shortcomings of the establishment press today, none is more central to the corruption of the profession than the decision to prioritize balance over accuracy. That corruption is visibly on display in the current coverage of the McCain campaign's policy of deliberate lies. And you won't find a better example than Cathleen Decker's piece in yesterday's LA Times.

Read into the article and you'll see numerous instances of McCain's repeated use of false claims and lies and one instance Decker is able to dig up of an Obama campaign claim that arguably leaves out some information.

But the conclusion and packaging of the article is that both candidates deceive equally and that they do so because it works. (There was another example, though not quite as egregious, by Jonathan Weismann last week in the Post.)

We hear a lot about the steep and perhaps terminal decline of the business model underlying daily print newspapers. But this corruption in the basic conception of the craft -- which is actually related to the economic decline -- gets discussed much less.

This is what gives liars a clear strategic advantage over non-liars. And it's an open question whether McCain's level of dishonesty turns out to be so great that it overwhelms reporters' unwillingness to report accurately on it.

They're baaaack

It's been move-in time all over the neighborhood as the students return to campus. Rental trucks have been showing up every day. Today was the most intense: A huge apartment block between here and the UT campus opened for move-ins, and when I rode by on my bike this afternoon I lost count of the U-Hauls when I reached 20. Traffic on Nueces Street was severely backed up into the evening.

I've been grousing about all the big new buildings in the neighborhood, but the new housing stock already seems to be exerting downward pressure on rents. The three-bedroom unit downstairs from me, which I think is a bit overpriced, is still vacant a week before classes start, and a house down the street has lowered its advertised rent by more than 10% (it was way overpriced and probably still is). I don't like seeing empty apartments, but as a tenant I like it when prices stay reasonable.

And until the landlord finds someone to move in downstairs, it's always quiet. And I can be noisy if I want.

Not the future yet

I'm at the annual convention of the Assn. for Education in Journalism and Mass Comm. A leading topic of discussion is dealing with digital media and the online world, from a lot of perspectives. We find that we must be not just aware of but conversant with digital tech and applications.

There is no Wi-Fi in the meeting areas.

What year is it again?

I guess I'm now a triple threat

After last week's kayaking foray, I realized that I enjoyed getting the upper-body exercise from paddling around the lake. I sometimes ride my bike to the lake, jog on the nice hike 'n' bike path they have there, then ride home. Today I decided to add some arm work, and I rented a kayak for an hour or so before heading home.

Fun! I enjoyed paddling about. The west part of the lake has some nice scenery, including high rock cliffs. Toward the end of the lake is an island with a dog park; I saw lots of dogs and their people there.

I was quite tired on the bike ride home. And now I'm sunburnt; I should have brought some extra sunscreen. But overall it was a good workout. The rental fee is high enough that I won't be doing this every week, but it's good for an occasional change.

Get your animation on

My fave Webcomic, Get Your War On, the animated version!

The academy may not be the answer

Doug Fisher says journalism schools "are unlikely to lead the 'revolution'" in teaching new journalists how to succeed in the digital world. Short summary: J-schools are generally very, very bad at looking forward.

Case in point: The J-school here recently denied tenure to a leading blog scholar. We have several folks who can teach digital skills, but it remains to be seen how well prepared our grads are going to be for a world of online media. I'm still in the early stages of learning about it all myself, so I don't have much to say about it yet.

"Dog-whistle" frames

Following up on my previous post: Newsday's John Riley presents a good example of how a frame can be implicitly invoked without being stated directly, but rather by how the communicator includes certain things and excludes others.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has been running an ad attacking his Democratic opponent Barack Obama as the "biggest celebrity in the world" and associating him with former scandal tarts Britney Spears and Paris Hilton (both of whom, I've read, are in fact Republicans). McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, explained: "What we decided to do was find the top three international celebrities in the world. And from our estimations, Britney and Paris came in second and third. From our perspective, we have in this ad the three biggest celebrities in the world."

Riley has his doubts:

The problem: Anyone with even a vague sense of pop culture knows that Britney and Paris are yesterday's news. Here's a link to Forbes' Celebrity 100. Paris and Britney don't even make the list any more.

Instead, the top 10, in order: Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Angelina Jolie, Beyonce Knowles, David Beckham, Johnny Depp, Jay-Z, The Police, JK Rowling, Brad Pitt.

So, they didn't pick other big celebrities, who were either men, or black, or married.

What they picked was two sexually available white women.

Commenters at Kevin Drum's blog point out that they also didn't pick liberal playboy celeb George Clooney or attractive blonde celeb (and Obama supporter) Scarlett Johanssen, both of whom are more widely recognizable.

The coded message: Obama is a black man who wants to have lots of sex with white women. Among certain groups of white folks in this country, that's a threatening image.

Note that it wasn't stated outright. An association was implied, and the further associations in the target audience were assumed. A lot of folks without the scary-sexual-black-man "schema" already in their heads missed the message completely. Some politicos call this sort of message "dog-whistle politics", because only certain people can hear it, just as we can't hear an actual dog whistle but a dog can.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Terry Nelson is part of Sen. McCain's campaign team. He produced a notorious ad in a Senate campaign in Tennessee two years ago against charismatic black Democrat Harold Ford that showed an attractive blonde woman saying she met Ford at a "Playboy party" and telling him to "Call me!" It came to be known as the "bimbo" ad. The black-guy-after-your-women message, or "subtext", was remarked upon in the political press at the time, but most of the voters it was aimed at don't read the political press. (Us pointy-head types like to think that the American populace looks to us for guidance and hangs on our every word. 'tain't so.)

Digby has more on dog-whistle politics.

So what's the relevance for journalists? A couple of things. First, journalists have to be alert for dog-whistle messages. The religious language I discussed in the post below might be an example if it were inserted deliberately (which, again, I am sure was not the case). Journalists have to understand this sort of thing in order to report on it -- and they should be reporting on it.

Second, at the very least, journalists should take care not to simply pass along the message that the source or newsmaker wants to put out -- in other words, take care not to adopt the politician's own frame. Occasionally a politician will make a straightforward declaration of facts, and there's no need to re-frame it, but more often a candidate (especially for president) is trying to frame and spin and whistle and do all sorts of things. A constant criticism of the political press is that it adopts its sources' frames rather than taking a more critical approach. It's hard work to do it the other way (Scott Adams: "Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same"), and reporters these days are more pressed for time than ever. But it has to be done.

What I'm doing here

I have to come up with a presentation for my paper at the conference next week (I'll be presenting at 10am Saturday, Aug. 9), so to kick off the process I'll write here about what got me started down the road of graduate studies.

A couple of years ago when I was a copy editor at a large-ish newspaper in Texas, a story came across my desk with a turn of phrase that struck me as out of place. As I recall, it was a profile of a young woman who had gained recognition for her work in church groups. The phrase that jumped out at me was something like "when she was 14 she accepted Jesus as her personal savior".

Now, that's a perfectly normal things to say if you're a born-again or evangelical Christian, or if you're writing for a publication aimed at such folks. This newspaper, however, was at least nominally secular. The matter-of-fact adoption of sectarian language in a city full of not only born-agains but also Catholics, Mainline Protestants, Episcopalians, Muslims, Jews, and agnostics and atheists seemed to be taking a side, if you will, in the religious discussion that happens every day in the public sphere.

I wanted to discuss it with the city desk and maybe the reporter, but I realized I didn't even know how to start the discussion. Most working journalists can talk with ease about representing points of view and "balance" and so forth, but that sort of subtle framing isn't usually discussed in the newsroom. We lacked a common vocabulary for the questions the story raised.

So I decided to go back to school to learn more. I'm focusing my study on frames; a frame is the guiding idea or concept or structure behind most of the stories in the news, both in print and on TV as well as online. One example is "horse race" coverage of politics: How does (say) Obama's big speech help his chances to get elected? That's a different question from, What does his speech evoke in his listeners, what does it promise in policy terms, what does it suggest about how he would govern if elected? Those are all different ways to frame a political story.

A lot of framing happens unconsciously; working journalists tend to apply "default" frames that they carry around with them. A reporter who's on the cops or the City Hall beat for years may start unwittingly identifying with the people he or she covers, and frame stories from their point of view. A middle-aged white reporter will make different assumptions than a young black one will. Over time, the journalistic product will tend toward a certain sort of uniformity, as certain values of the news organization assert themselves.

This all requires not only journalistic but also sociological study to comprehend and bring together. I'm still in the early stages.

My conference paper is an early stab at collating and classifying the frames in common use, from the cultural and mythological (the "hero", the "good mother", etc.) to the specific. It is a beginning, not an end. I expect I'll be at this endeavor for some time yet.

Comments welcome, as always.

Catching up

I apologize for the nonexistent pace of posts lately. I'll try to get caught up this week.

This past weekend my good friend and former co-worker Nora from Fort Worth came to visit. We took a dip in the 68-degree waters of Barton Springs Pool, rented a kayak and paddled around Lady Bird Lake, saw a movie, and just hung out and caught up on things. I have sore shoulders from the kayaking expedition, but it was well worth it.

In a week I leave for the AEJMC convention in Chicago. I'll spend this week working on the presentation of my paper.

Things are going to hell, sign # 483

A storefront down the street, last year:


The same storefront, now:

Oh, GREAT

The last thing I need on the way to the bus stop:

Last week's hailstorm

Last Wednesday night around midnight an impressive hailstorm blew through Austin from the west. It also had lightning, thunder, and high winds. I'm lucky not to have west windows, but the sideways hail did a lot of damage elsewhere. I found several hailstones that measured 2 inches across.

According to the newspaper, trees were down all over town; some landed on houses. The state Capitol grounds lost eight big old trees. I saw some of that damage from the bus today; if I get over there with my camera before it's all cleaned up I'll post a pic or two.

My neighborhood seems to have escaped the worst of it. A lot of branches came down, and one landed on the car in the picture at right. Nearly every west-facing window lost some glass. Two-inch hail does a lot of damage when it's being driven by tree-felling winds.

The impressive fallen tree below blocked a busy street for hours Thursday before the city crews could get the offending branches cut away and cleared. Removing the rest of it will be quite a chore for whoever owns that house.

I got in!

My paper, "Toward a Taxonomy of Frames", was accepted to the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. I will be making a presentation of some sort at some point in the convention, which is Aug. 6-9, 2008, in Chicago. I haven't received the details yet.

Mainly because the airlines and the government are working hard to make air travel more and more difficult and oppressive, and partly because I can, I'll be going there on Amtrak. The main down side is that the terrain doesn't change -- it's prairie pretty much the whole way from Austin to Chicago. But, hey, the train!

UPDATED: Utah Phillips, 1935-2008

UPDATE: Utah Phillips died Friday night, May 23, at his home. He was a genuine folk hero, and like so many others, he left before his work was all done. Now it's up to the rest of us.

Obit and some remembrances here and here. Amy Goodman pays tribute at DemocracyNow. Labor Beat has a video tribute. (Thanks to Majikthise for the last set of links.)

Original post:

I just got back from a benefit concert for Utah Phillips, a folk singer, organizer, historian, humorist, raconteur and agitator who's been a personal hero of mine for a number of years now. Utah has had congestive heart failure for some time, but it took a turn for the worse in February, and he can no longer leave his home in Nevada City, California, to perform and earn a living.

A lot of folks have organized similar benefits across the country. If there's one in your area, go. You'll likely hear some good music and meet some fine folks.

The one here in Austin was organized by Veterans for Peace and my ability to , which appears to be a good group of people. Utah, himself, is a veteran of the Korean War, and his experience there was enough to turn him off of violence forever. Quoth he: "I will never again, in my life, abdicate my right and my ability to decide who the enemy is."

Utah recently said, via the Utah Phillips blog maintained by his son: "My body is weak but my will is strong, and I keep my disposition as sunny and humorous as I’m able. It’s hard enough being disabled without being cranky as well."

Donations can also be sent directly to Utah at P.O. Box 1235, Nevada City, CA 95959.

The photo above was taken from Utah's Web site, linked above. Photographer not named. The site itself is © 2000-2008 by Christopher Dunn.

Done!

I finished my final term paper and graded the last stories. All done as of Tuesday night. Got decent grades, too.

I've been taking it sort of easy since then. With luck and determination I'll catch up on this blog. I have pictures.

Oh boy

Now I have concrete evidence I've been at the computer too long.

I was sitting at my desk grading a student story on paper, and as I read to the bottom of a page, I ... pushed the Down arrow on the keyboard.

As soon as I'm done with this semester (10 more papers to grade, 1 term paper still not finished) I'm gonna do NOTHING for as long as I can manage it.

Um ... wha?

Can someone explain Jean Baudrillard to me?

I'm trying to follow the bouncing ideas (or simulacra of ideas) in Simulacra and Simulation and it's just all higgledy-piggledy.

The best I can come up with is:

Kiri-kin-tha's First Law of Metaphysics: Nothing unreal exists.

Baudrillard's response: Nothing real exists.

My brain is tired.

A bit of an update

I haven't been posting much because school has gotten real tough. So if you don't see updates, that's what that means.

My big looming deadline at the moment is a research paper that I will submit to an academic conference by April 1. But first the paper is due in class tomorrow, Monday. So I'm charging hard to get it turned in on time and reasonably complete.

It's about framing -- the way news media select and arrange facts and images to create a coherent story. That may sound sinister, but it's generally not; reporters can't tell you every fact they find out because it would be too much and would be a senseless jumble. So they and their editors figure out "what's going on here" and produce a story explaining it. If they've done their jobs well, then you, the reader, will be better able to make sense of things.

Where it gets interesting, from a researcher's standpoint (or a media critic's), is when you consider how the reporters and editors decide what to put in, what to leave out, and how to frame the story. A lot of factors enter into these decisions: the reporter's personal experience, the routines of news gathering, the news organization's corporate culture and priorities, outside influences such as PR reps and spinmeisters, and the wider culture itself. Some of these influences are so familiar that we take them for granted and don't question them.

I'm interested in questioning these influences. I did it some when I worked at a newspaper, and now I hope to do research that sheds more light on the frame-building process, in a way that reporters and editors can use. My main interest is cultural influences.

But that's a big project, and my research paper at hand is a bit smaller: A review of other researchers' framing studies. There are few broad themes in framing research, and I'm looking for some, in hopes of helping focus future scholarship.

That's if I manage to finish this paper in the first place. So back to work I go.

Toy store humor

Toy Joy put up this display (actually a larger version; they must have sold some mugs) shortly after the New Hampshire primary.

Lao, 1992-2008

I got two cats, Gaea and Lao, littermates, in 1992. Yesterday was Lao's last day on Earth. He had been diabetic for nearly three years and had kidney difficulties as well. The veterinarian said his heart probably gave out. (Gaea is doing well.)

It was a reasonably swift end, as these things go. Only last night, as was his custom, he hopped onto the bed to snuggle up to me and let loose a mighty purr. It was his favorite thing. (That's him as a kitten on the right, scanned from one of those old-fashioned "photograph" thingies.)

His second favorite thing was napping in the sun.

He had a good run. I'll miss him.

My neighborhood. Let me show you it.

Not long after I moved to Austin I took a few pix of the things I see when I walk around the neighborhood. Les voilá. (The foliage shown is thicker than it is today because these were taken in September.)

Here's the view of 28½ Street from my kitchen window, flanked by two big Magnolia trees.

One thing I had to get used to in Texas is that some evergreen trees have actual leaves instead of needles, including magnolias, live oaks and some other type of tree in the yard here that so far I haven't identified. Austin doesn't look nearly as barren in winter as Kansas or even Fort Worth.

(I'm using the term "winter" loosely; it was cold for a week or so, and cold at night for a couple weeks more, around the end of December and the first part of January.)

Right outside my door, at the top of the stairs, is a morning glory vine that finds its way up into a big pecan tree. I've heard of morning glories but this was the first time I've seen them up close; the flowers bloom blue in the morning, turn purplish by afternoon and die by nighttime. Unlike some flowering plants they keep it up, a few blooms at a time, for months -- at least this vine did.

Toy Joy is the oddest thing in my neighborhood. It has a lot of funky things inside. A good place for gift shopping if you do that sort of thing. Those things along the edge of the roof are plastic nuns. There's a vegan bakery and coffee shop, Dhaba Joy, attached on one side.

I didn't bother with pix but there are three pizza places within half a block of 29th and Guadalupe. Conan's is the best. One stays open till about 4am on weekends. That's a nice college-town contrast from Fort Worth, where if you got the pizza jones after about 11 your only choice was a frozen über-puck from 7-11. But I digress.

This lovely hot-doggery is, sad to say, closed now. I had a veg chili dog there, and it was reasonably tasty. But overpriced.

One of two video stores two blocks apart that cater to cinephiles. (The other, Vulcan Video, isn't visually interesting.)


I get my health-food necessities at Wheatsville. One big draw of the neighborhood I moved into is that I can walk here. Austin is the most friendly city I've lived in for getting by without a car. Except for one weekend when I had to rent a car to take one of my cats to the emergency vet, I haven't been behind the wheel since August. There are places I have a hard time getting to sometimes, but OTOH I never have to find a place to park.

The Spider House is a funky coffeehouse behind the funky video store (owned by the same people) that has live music sometimes and apparently has a long history with the counterculture crowd. I used to like going there to hang out, but the last few times the service has ranged from indifferent to hostile, so it's off my list. It's still cool to look at. These pix are from the alley in back.

Martin's Kum-Bak, a.k.a. Dirty Martin's, is an old-fashioned burger joint and soda fountain. I don't go in much but I like the building.

And we're back! Thanks for taking the tour. Please visit our gift shop on the way out.

Austin Marathon, spectator's view

Last Sunday was the Austin Marathon. I ran this race in 2004 and enjoyed it. This year I'm not in shape for even a 5K, but I like watching races, so I joined a classmate outside his apartment to see the runners go by. We were near the 9-mile marker, and the field was both full and half-marathon competitors. I haven't seen the numbers, but there were several thousand all told.

I got a late start (waking up early is still an alien concept) and missed some of the leading runners but still saw most of the field. I brought my camera.

Here's the 3:20 pace group. In a pace group, one or two people who can keep a steady speed agree to lead whoever wants to come along to finish the race in 3 hours 20 minutes. When I ran the race in 2004 I was with the 3:15 group part of the way. Pace groups are great for camaraderie and support.

It was a cool morning; you can see the runners' breath in the chilly air. As running weather it's just about perfect.

We were right next to a DJ who was playing upbeat tunes to give the runners a boost. When he played "Shout" some of the runners threw their hands in the air.

Same thing when he played "YMCA". People were having a great time.

That's my Mass Comm Theory professor on the right. This was her first half-marathon, and she walked it with her friend, but she told me later that she's eager to do another one and run hard the whole way.

That's one of the fun things about racing: Every time out is an accomplishment, and you can go out and do it again if you want to. Runners are real supportive of one another, too. If I ever heft my lardbucket self out the door regularly again, I'll be out there racing too.

This really isn't supposed to happen

In the box today I found four pieces of mail intended for the apartment downstairs.

One is from the county tax office. One is from the university. One is from a bank. None of them appear to be junk mail.

The fourth is a mass mailer from the Postal Service itself, labeled "Identity theft prevention tips."

The Gang of 500

One topic I find coming up a lot these days, both in my classwork and in my readings of interest, is the Gang of 500. That is the name given by Mark Halperin to the political insiders in Washington, D.C. -- journalists, upper-level politicians, people with various kinds of influence -- who collectively embody the "conventional wisdom" and whose influence, it seems to me, is out of proportion to both their numbers and their worthiness. (Atrios calls them the "Villagers". I may use both terms interchangeably.)

I'll have more to say about them later. Just wanted to introduce them.

Okay, okay, I have a blog

A friend from Fort Worth told me that she gets a lot of questions about how and what I'm doing since I moved to Austin in August 2007, and suggested that I start a blog. It sounded like a good idea, so here it is.

I'm a Ph.D. student in journalism at the University of Texas, in my second semester so far. Austin is a cool place to live, but I have rarely had time to go out and enjoy it, since I still haven't figured out this "time management" thing.

What will go in this space, I hope, is some stuff about the things I'm learning in class and studying, and some things about life in Austin, and whatever else I find interesting enough to share.

Comments are welcome and appreciated.