Gypsysavage’s Weblog

Vincent Campbell’s Information Age Journalism is an intelligent examination of the purposes of journalism in a new era of electronic communication. From the processes of the dissemination of news, the values of sources and news gathering, to the ideal of objectivity that is most times (if not all the time) lacking in the field, Campbell calls for a new working definition of journalism, a rare request these days.

With such a great sense of how news and information is selected for public consumption, and after urging the wider intellectual world to rediscover the use of journalism and to begin a new conversation about its current state in relation to its political reality, Campbell fails at his task in one huge way: there is no discussion in his book about electronic news media. If the issue of newsprint media in the “information age” is a task worthy of a book, then why would Campbell miss the mark completely by avoiding one of the greatest forces in the information community?

Campbell makes use of his book in specific instances as he points out the decline of newspaper audiences worldwide, supported by formidable and unnerving evidence that readers are disappearing by the thousands, but he does not speculate just where these people are going, or whether they are even reading news at all. One suggestion – and a natural inclination – would be to say that these vanishing acts are reemerging in the most independent news forums to date.

If Campbell, a lecturer of political communication at the University of Leicester, took on the issue of electronic media, he would have had one of the most complete studies of journalism I’ve read.

Whose face do you love more?

OR OR

Have Pennsylvanians really changed anything in this race? Rounding up to a 10 delegates earned in a single digit ten-point victory, Clinton is still claiming this as an important win, a mandate to continue until the convention in August. She will also still try to keep Michigan and Florida on the ballot and attempt to give credence to the argument that Pennsylvania will be a battleground State that only she can win come November. If all else fails, the longer she stays in this race, the easier it will be to secure a VP nomination.

In the coming weeks, if not days, we will begin to hear very audible and serious calls for her to concede. Enter the Clinton supporters, championing her to stay on. This will be ugly, if not entertaining.

It appears that aside from being one of the greatest novelists of the 20th Century, Norman Mailer was also quite the stud.

Harvard University, Mailer’s alma mater and a shinning paradigm of academe, has apparently reached a new low, dredging the bottom of the shithouse ’til metal scraped wood as the school purchased an entire collection of writing that chronicled the novelist’s epic philandering.

Awesome.

Included in the purchase is a 20-page sex-scene detailed by Mailer’s mistress, Carole Mallory, with whom he had an affair during his sixth marriage, and her unpublished novel based on their unscrupulous relations, according to the New York Post.

Harvard, now a manifest player in the porn industry, is said to have purchased the material after Mailer snubbed the administration by selling his archives to the University of Texas for $2.5 million. Great googly-moogly.

Who would win in a bare-knuckle boxing match… Hillary Clinton or Ann Coulter?

With record turnout at voting locations through PA today and after watching the candidates’ recycled sound bites flash on network news channels over and over again, I’ve turned my attention for the time being toward John McCain. Everything I’ve ever read about the man makes me like him, God forbid, and if it weren’t for his stance on the war, on which he rests his entire candidacy, I would consider him a wise choice for the presidency.

An old man, bitter, brooding, and often too candid about his economic ineptitude, he still represents to me a pragmatist, someone capable of running the highest office with integrity (as if that ever mattered to me), and competence.

His leftist leanings are appealing, and as someone who breaks rank at the behest of his own conscience (he never much cared to stick by his Republican brethren when it came to legislative reform), he strikes me as a wily statesman who can and will rumble with anyone for right reasons… which makes me wonder: what does he know about the war that I don’t? He’s spoken many times about the troubling and fateful implications of the military industrial complex as an American cultural problem (see, Why We Fight), and he’s been a victim of torture in a damnable war forty years ago, so why is he so adamant about this one?

And is he capable of winning this election? I’m sure. I’d like to think that if Obama wins this primary instead of Clinton, we just may have a constructive discourse on issues that have been ignored for far too long.

Well… it’s here. The closed primaries in Pennsylvania tomorrow may very well determine whom the Democratic Party sends to Denver in August. Clinton carries the elderly, who, unlike their younger counterparts, never fail to come out in droves and crush an election.

According to most polls, Clinton also carries white males making under $30,000 a year (many of whom do cling to their guns and bibles in the face of hard times, contrary to political gaffes), an enormous constituent in a state that has never played such a major roll in a primary.

Obama carries the youth, who have not failed to disappoint in a single election. But if he outflanks the steady barrage of political fire (from reactionary black reverends to pseudo-elitist, albeit truthful, remarks about white America), and earns his keep in Philadelphia and in other urban districts in eastern and central Pennsylvania, he may just narrow Clinton’s margin – or perhaps even overcome it – forcing her to face the music (in this case, Taps). He is also outspending Clinton in television advertisements by at least $6 million.

I would like to take a moment and vent: Clinton’s main argument for staying in the race was, according to her husband, to continue to discuss the issues and give people another choice to face off with McCain. That’s fine. However, almost two months after Bubba made his “let’s all chill out” remark, and after last week’s disappointing debate that showcased the bitter resentments of political backtalk and mudslinging and in which no real issues were discussed, we have had no discourse on healthcare, education, the economy, Iraq, or the constitutional issues now on the Supreme Court backburner like gun control.

Clinton herself said that the reason she is still in this race, unlike her opponent, is her “electability.” But she conceded yesterday that Obama “can win” this election . “I don’t see any contradiction at all. . . . He can be elected; I will be elected,” she said.

So what is the point, if Hillary loses this primary, or at the very least, wins it marginally by single digits, to continue running?

Let us look at the facts:

Obama: 1,635.5 pledged and projected delegates

Clinton: 1,474.5 pledged and projected delegates

Obama: 13,355,209 in popular votes

Clinton: 12,638,123 in popular votes*

At this point, I would not be surprised if Clinton continued to run despite a marginal victory in PA and in the face of fierce opposition from delegates (and after having lost the popular vote as well thus far). In an act of shear political piracy, she will attempt (yet again) to burgle votes from Florida and Michigan. These moves would entail a circus of a convention (although it would be interesting, to say the least, to see two opponents squaring off in Denver as it once used to be done in this country), but it also means that once the Democratic Party chooses its wounded and weary victor, it has weeks, not months, to maneuver against McCain, who will by that time have all the fodder to sling before he begins his final sprint toward Washington. The smell of blood is in the air.

*This excludes the projected numbers of votes in IA, NV, ME, and WA, which have not yet released their popular vote numbers, according to RealClearPolitics.com

I’ve been thinking about the term “Information Age”. If we are in such an age, and if our developing infrastructure in the past decade and a half has allowed us the kind of communication technologies to receive and digest an array of information vital to our understanding of and adjustment to reality, are we in any better situation now than before?

Certainly our “access” to instantaneous information has not allowed us to avoid disaster; we were awash with intelligence that explicitly and erroneously suggested we were in grave danger with Iraq’s former leadership, and we’re no closer to comprehending the lasting implications of Katrina and similar natural catastrophes brought on by an irreversible global climate change.

With rampant overuse of ideologues and talking heads as pundits, broadcast media for the past decade and more has employed tabloid tactics to hold onto an audience which is either slipping into the internet and reemerging in different media forms such as forums and blogging or isn’t reading news at all. I believe this is blatant protestation against the dumming-down of news.

I am not finished with this, but for now: great googly-moogly. Here’s Tom with the Weather.

The new format of the dashboard in WordPress is overly difficult. It’s frustrating to add images and videos and create tags, and the features that were in the former “presentation” “New Post” and “Presentation” categories are scattered throughout both pages. I want the old version back. The overall usability of the new format makes me want to pull my hair out. Great googly-moogly.