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Looks like the FCC has “demonstrate[d], once again, that at present it is difficult, if not impossible to apply public interest pressure to TV stations via the Commission’s license renewal process.”

A Chicago/Milwaukee appeal was made to the FCC over a lack of local and regional political coverage from area broadcasters: less than 1% went to non-federal election coverage in the month prior to the election.

Also interesting how they cut up the types of coverage:

As for the style of the stories, or “frame,” as the CMPA study put it, most went to “horse race” stories (guesstimating a candidates’ electoral chances at the moment) and “strategic” stories (”how the candidate was using an event to reach particular groups of voters”). Strategy and horse race items dominated coverage. Issues-oriented features counted for less than a fifth of air time.

It’s another election year which means that politics are flying.

From a story on NASA forcibly downplaying global warming:

The report did not directly accuse them of lying, but used more nuanced terms such as “mendacity” and “dissembling.” The space agency complained those terms were unjust.

And I enjoy how the New York Times describes a John McCain statement:

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. McCain has steadfastly refused to set dates for withdrawals of troops and envisions a long-term American presence in the country. But last month, in the general election battleground state of Ohio, Mr. McCain did a semantic dance and said he expected that most American troops would be home from Iraq by 2013.

Aha! I knew there had to be a word for misusing review quotes. From this week’s World Wide Words:

Such extracts from reviews are called “pull quotes” in the jargon;massaging them into more favourable versions is “quote doctoring”. Another word, with apologies to Stephen Potter, is “quotemanship”(or “quotesmanship”). “Contextomy” is yet another term, one used principally by academics in reference to literary misquoting. The ending “-tomy” means cutting up and has here been neatly reversed into “context”. It was created by the historian Milton Mayer in 1966 in reference to a much more significant issue, the misquoting
of the Torah for propaganda purposes by Julius Streicher, editor ofthe Nazi paper Der Stürmer in Weimar-era Germany.

From an Ars Technica article entitled YouTube University gets failing grade from prof, students. The original analysis is here

Juhasz breaks the issues down into a set of what she refers to as “binaries”—tensions between opposites that have to be balanced for proper teaching.

Those binaries were:

1. Public/Private
2. Aural/Visual
3. Body/Digital
4. Amateur/Expert
5. Entertainment/Education
6. Control/Chaos

Because of constructive criticism of some of my organization’s archaic language, I asked the Mission Based Massachusetts Listserv, a nonprofit discussion list, what terms they use in place of “poor people”. Below are all of the responses I got, which were awesome!

Some terminology…

• low-income
• under-resourced
• under-served (Barbara humorously notes that “overserved” is a euphemism for intoxicated)
• people living in poverty
• historically and persistently marginalized groups

(thanks Michelle, Felicia, and others who are quoted below)

Some general strategies…

• Use a preposition: Instead of “poor children” the phrase “children from low income households”. Therefore, it’s not the subject themselves, but rather their circumstances. (thanks Barbara!)
• Use a specific measure, like “125% of the federal poverty threshold” or “50% of area median income,” whatever’s most appropriate in the context.
• For a grant proposal, look at the language the grantmaker is using and follow their lead. (thanks Dennis!)

…read more

As so often happens in politics, the quarrel between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton came down to a matter of direct objects. Both “reject” and “denounce” are transitive verbs — they act upon a direct object — but the candidates weren’t talking about the same objects. The object of Mr. Obama’s denunciation was Mr. Farrakhan’s opinions, particularly his anti-Semitic comments, whereas Mrs. Clinton was urging her opponent to reject the minister’s support. The thrust of Mrs. Clinton’s challenge was that her opponent was merely highlighting a particular disagreement with Mr. Farrakhan, while still accepting his — and his organization’s — backing.

From an article in the NY Times on Clinton and Obama’s differing arguments regarding Farrakhan. Noting this for it’s interesting perspective that they’re essentially arguing about different direct objects.

A good World Wide Words this week. I read it weekly, but of particular interest is language that has to do with numbers. Like decimate, which originally referred to the Roman military practice of preventing mutiny by killing one-tenth of the soldiers (drawn by lots).

World Wide Words takes on its misuse:

It feels right to me when it’s used, as H W Fowler wrote in 1926, of “the destruction in any way of a large proportion of anything reckoned by number”.

White’s criticism of “terribly decimated” seems fair, because it’s innumerate, as does “incredibly decimated”, from a recent US newspaper report quoting a librarian complaining about a 15% budget cut. It also seems incorrect to use decimate for indivisibles (“Some have set out to decimate the soul of this great country”), to imply complete destruction (“a totally decimated population”), the killing of an individual (“He protects his brother from the thugs intent on physically decimating him”), the destruction of a named fraction (“A single frosty night decimated the fruit by 80%”), or the part of a whole (“disease decimated most of the population”).

I was having a hard time explaining exactly what Fred Turner means by the conclusion of his book I wrote about earlier. It really seems difficult to explain things without using informationalist rhetoric.

This makes me think of the About Wealth Bondage page:

Wealth Bondage is pervasive, the horizon within which postmodern life, in every aspect, appears to us as a Market….

All interpretations of Wealth Bondage are themselves inside Wealth Bondage and as such are provisional, for there is not “outside” of Wealth Bondage.

I’m not entirely sure what the heck that means, but if I were to be all thinky, I could try to connect the idea of Bakhtin’s Dialogic:

everything anybody ever says always exists in response to things that have been said before and in anticipation of things that will be said in response.

with the idea of memes and suppose that certain rhetorical “memes” (like peer-to-peer informationalism or market exchange) are able to, within the diologic, competitively displace other rhetorical memes.

viz. - namely, as follows, that is to say; introduces and element or list

vis-a-vis - (1) face to face with another (2) In relation to or compared with: Canada’s role vis-a-vis the United States in Afghanistan (3) as opposed to

[Bakhtin explores] the idea that language is indeed ambiguous, but whereas deconstruction would highlight this ambiguity as the inability of words to convey precise meaning, Bakhtin welcomes this vagueness of language as a means by which to create meaning dialogically. Indeed, in describing the nature of the polyphonic novel, Bakhtin sees the entire scope of human life as a dialogic process whereby we find meaning only through our interactions with others.

From a thesis entitled “What Hath Bakhtin Wrought? Toward a Unified Theory of Literature and Composition” by Lee Honeycut