text:
Worst 100 Ways To Start A Novel
|Contents: 100-91 • 90-81 • 80-71 • 70-61 • 60-51 • 50-41 • 40-31 • 30-21 • 20-11 • 10-1
"But...You realise these are all extracted from The Holy Bible?"
So you're about to sit down to write the Great American Novel, huh? Well, be sure that your novel does not start with any of these phrases...
100-91 + 1[edit]
- 101. "Everybody asks me if I know Tyler Durden. I don't, so why does everybody keep asking?"
- from "Fight Club: The Author's Cut"
- 100. "Call me Dennis."
- from "Moby, the God Metaphor"
- 99 "Damn, I wish I spoke Spanish and did not have a severe learning disability that would keep me from ever learning the language during the remaining 37 years of my prison sentence here in Colombia," thought Jack.
- from "Midnight Expresso"
- 98. "It was quiet. Too quiet. ...The quiet continued unabated for the next thirty years."
- from "Kids, It's Quiet Time"
- 97. "Dr. Fick had never seen a wind tunnel generator before, let alone gotten married in one."
- from "The Ficking Wind Tunnel"
- 96. "The Marleys were dead to begin with. Ebenezer had hidden the evidence."
- from "A Christmas Carol, Take Two"
- 95. "The dog looked around the courtroom anxiously... How could he protect his master now, given the DA's evidence?"
- from "A Most Interesting Court Case"
- 94. "Andy the Cockroach awoke one morning to find he had become a clown."
- from "Clown-omorphosis"
- 93. "The Shit James was taking was consuming more time and effort than he had first anticipated"
- from "Life is Shit"
- 92. "He woke up from the unabated sleep by the clanging and cracking of the nearby elephant, blowing straw through his ass."
- from "The Life of a Common Frateurist"
- 91. "Billy Pilgrim had come unstuck in time like a car that was unstuck in a lack of traffic on an empty road"
- from "Slaughterhouse Five" (first draft)
- 90. Elmore could hear the thunderstorm outside. "Rumble rumble! Crash! Bang! Fwoosh! Bang! Boom! Rumble! Growl! Rumble rumble! FATHOOM crash crash crackle! Rumble crack! Crackle rumble grrrr rumble!", the thunderstorm remarked.
- "Dr. Bartleby Pokes Himself In The Eyeball"
- 89. "Tom!"
No answer.
No answer.
No answer.
No answer.
"What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!"
No answer.
- from "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (first draft)
- 88. "I think I've packed enough clothing to last me until the end of a short story, maybe a novella even." Jacqueline thought to herself.
- "Jacqueline Runs Out of Clean Underpants: The Novel"
- 88. "A surge of overwhelming sensation surged throught his new found body. A smell of rubber, the feel of the cold, gravelly road encapsulated his emotions like a rock submerged in a tub of perfume. Bobby the bicycle had become self aware, and there was no going back."
- "bobbys bicycle"
- 87. I woke up and headed to the bathroom to brush my teeth, but I was wrong. DEAD WRONG!
- "A Life of Melodrama"
- 86. "Aardvark," a large, burrowing, insectivorous mammal native to Africa.
- "Webster's Abridged Dictionary"
- 85. The
- "The End"
- 84. And then Voldemort rose from the dead again!
- "Harry Potter and the Bottom of the Barrel"
- 83. A cold, icy, chilly wind blasted across my ruggedly handsome face from the northwest. The wind was from the northwest, that is. My face was (and is) from the east, as is (was) the rest of me, save the scar she gave me, which I suppose came from the north of here.
- "Blah"
- 82. On the first Monday of the month of December, 2007, the market town of , in which the author THE TALES OF THE BEEDLE AND THE BARD of was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of riot as if I had just made a second copy of it. Oh, hold on, I had!
- "A perspective on my release of another book: The "Written in the style of The Three Musketeers" Edition" by J.K. Rowling
- 81. Hello! I'm Brian Blessed!
- "Brian Blessed: The Dynamite Kid (Autobiography)"
- 80. Gregory the Hamster knew it was going to be a bad day when he saw the one true ring.
- "Gregory the Hamster goes to Middle Earth"
- 79. Winner of The Booker Prize
- "Anything that has won the Booker Prize"
- 78. There it goes again, that same almost embarassingly familiar smell that always comes this time of the year.
- "Spies"
- 77. Where is my cow? Is that my cow? It goes "Hruuugh!" It is a hippopotamus. That's not my cow!
- "Where is My Cow?"
- 76. Three billion green bottles, sitting on the wall...
- "Green Bottles: Extended Edition"
- 75. You know, if I hadn't killed myself this book would have been much longer.
- "Derek's Death"
- 74. "I have come to suspect that both Michaelangelo and Da Vinci were actually controlled by God," he said, "which begs the question... what part did Michaelangelo play in this?"
- "The Da Vanci Code II"
- 73. You know you're doomed when a three-foot alien from 1745 comes and eats your mailbox.
- "Help! I'm an Alien from 1745"
- 72. Life has never been the same since I lost my bowels.
- "Tracy Beaker and the Colostomy Bag"
- 71. I was just an ordinary 12 year old boy, how was I supposed to know that gummy worms would eat me?
- "Goosebumps: The Best of"
- 70. I believe this is the first child's Beauty Contest you have stayed at, Miss Worsley?
- "A Child of No Importance"
- 69. Alice was beginning to get very tired of sleeping in a hotel, and of having nothing to do - once or twice she had peeped out of the window to see what her brother was doing, but it certainly had no conversation in it. "Conversation," she thought out loud, "involves more clothing."
- "Alice in Amsterdam"
- 68. I thought the king had more affected women than men.
- "King Queer"
- 67. My father had a large estate in China - I was the seventh of seven sons. He sent me to Beijing at five years old, where I worked seven years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound rent boy to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in Huo, with whom I continued four years.
- "Gulliver's Trafficking"
- 66. I'm getting chilled to the bone. What can Daddy be doing all this time? He's been gone three years.
- "Orphanygmalion"
- 65. Wait, that didn't happen.
- "The Earth Explodes"
- 64. I have Piles.
- "The Amazing Adventures of Andrew's Arse-Grapes"
- 63. The End.
- "Insert Novel Here"
- 62.
Chapetr One: Cahpetr One: Chapeter One:
- No, wait
Chpter One: Chapter nOe: Chaptwr One
- Dammit
Chapte rOne
- What the hell? I almost had it.
Chzapter One
- Dammit.
- "Sarah Palin's Autobiography"
- 61. In the realm of Zotagar dragons turned the sky black with the shadows of a hundred thousand wings. They also turned the land brown with the feces of fifty thousand asses and yellowed the rivers with the urine of approximately twenty-five thousand dragon penises and twenty-five thousand dragon vaginas.
- "Dragon Quest of Zotagar"
- 60. So there I was, being pulled down the interstate by my dick...
"Yuri Kaufman's Anthology of Extremely Painful Things To Do To Your Dick if You're the Sort of Person Who Enjoys That Kind of Thing"
- 59. "I really need to piss!" belched Jared.
"Life in a Glass"
"Tourettes Guy: The Ethics and Group Dynamics of Pin the Tail on the MOTHERFUCKER!"
- 57. I look down under the blacklight down at the hotel sheets. Everything seems to be in order. I might actually write a good review of this place. Wait...is that a dead hooker under the bed? Oh, wait, it's only Starla. Well, that's one number I won't be dialing. Or so I thought...
"Assfault Jungle: Putting the 'Ho' back in 'Hotel'"
- 56. I woke up one morning with my mouth full of pussy and decided to call it quits.
"Dark Meat"
- 55. I was very naive as a child, so when Michael Jackson told me he was only a harmless Jack O'Lantern, how was I to know not to cut open his head and look at his pumpkin brains?
"Tales From Jacko's Head"
- 54. I began to die.
"My Death So Far"
- 53. The man and black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger decided he had better things to do and gave up.
"Dark Tower Series Book I"
- 52. It wasn't sexy at all.
"Jenna Jameson, An Autobiography"
- 51. Fact - The Priory of Sion - a European secret society founded in 1099 - is a hoax created by some mad frenchman, and in real life is probably not worth worrying about, but hey! I'm trying to sell millions of copies of my novel here folks!
"Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code - first draft."
- 50. Suddenly, my face exploded!
"Explosions", James Joyce
- 49. She was undeniably fat,
"The realists", C. LaReux
- 48. You push the BELLY BUTTON!!! Ha Ha Ha Ha!!! Oh, novel, I thought you said "Start a Navel"!!! Ha Ha Ha!!!
"Punny McRetard's Big Book of Komedy"
- 47. I as lying aak in bd ith my had burid in my pillo, trying to chas th lusive fairi of slp through th darknss ith no avail. Onc again th morning ould b tird, rstlss and gry.
"Th Day th Kys Btn Q and R Fll Off My Typritr and Th Amusing vnts That Lad Up to That Situation."
- 46. And they lived happily ever after. Like, really happily. Want to know how happily? Well, I'll tell you. We've got time.
"Happy As Hell"
- 45. Who is Chuck Norris?
"What! You don't know who am I? Just wait for me to come for you!" - Atlas Shrugged
- 44. "Cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt fuck cunt cunt cunt cunt heroin cunt cunt cunt cunt Sco'lan' cunt cunt cunt. Faithermore, cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt. Did ah mention cunt?"
"Planespotting" - Irvine Welsh
- 43. First, set the mood. Imagine a nice, calm scene, like a roadside. Then add a classic character, but one vague enough so as not to breach copyright. Let's say...a chicken. Yes, a chicken. Now...well, now, things get complicated.
"How to Tell a Joke" - Michaael Hunt
- 42. I wanted to do a fucking detective thing, or a fucking bodice ripper. Anything but fucking science fiction. I'm surrounded by dateless wonders who get me to sign their fucking towels.
"Suicide Note" - Douglas Adams
- 41. Ha ha ha, very amusing. Go on, take it back and pay for it. Go on.
"Steal This Book" - Abbie Hoffman
- 40.
When shall we three meat again It was the best of times, it was the wordt of time Alas, poor Yorick, I blew him well
"Work in progress" - the million monkey workshop
- 39. The girl screamed once, only the once. The man tugged his wang out and made his escape.
"Nookie and crosses" - Ian Rankin
- 38. In the beginning, the Big Bang created everything.
"The Bible" - first draft
- 37. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my head ever since.
- "Incidentally, don't ever get raped by a domestic cat." he said. "Do you know why cats always howl when they have sex? They have barbed penises that destroy the vagina on the way out and it ruins you for all the other cats."
- He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.
"The Great Gatsby" - first draft
- 35. "I begin the sequel to my popular first book while writing in this bunker under Berlin. In this time of reflection, it occurs to me that I may have been wrong about a few things. I am here faced with a choice. I could either catalogue these wrongs and oversights for you, gentle reader, in hopes of finding eventual enlightenment and maybe absolution, or I could simply poison and shoot myself and have somebody set me on fire. I don't know. We'll see where the day takes me."
"Mein Kampf II" - unfinished draft
- 34. "
My life has been, As King of Saxony, I have, Jesus, who am I kidding? I'm not prepared for this! I haven't written anything before in my life! Fuck it, I'm doing it. Now where was I? Do I have enough parchment for this? Shit! I'm running out of ink!"
"Autobiography of Ethelred II, 'The Unready'"
- 33. "It was too quiet. He had just killed his billionth victim and still he craved more. All he had to do was remember the 157,539 digit code for the airlock else the world would implode within 4 minutes. But, he thought, there was still time for a cigarette break."
"The Little Book of Kermit"
- 32. "Jenkins stretched an index finger, pointing furiously at the Packard Bell iMedia 2315 with 19" Widescreen TFT with an impressive 2GB memory which has the ability to run multiple applications simultaneously." Times a wastin" he said in a bizarre French accent. He stood up and left the room, oh and by the way he ends up being the killer at the end - oh shit sorry, fuck I've ruined it!. My parents were right I shouldn't have quit my job at PC world! FUCK! ."
"Jenkins is the murderer - FUCK not again"
- 31. "Their are a bunch of Niggers everywhere."
"Identifying a street (actually, a boulevard) named after Marting Luther King: The KKK's comprehensive guide to American travel"
- 30. "In the beginning there was nothing. Today there is something. Go base your faith on THAT you dickfucks and leave me, my wife and kids alone!"
"The Bible - The Gospel of Jesus."
- 30. "Its two in the morning, Old Country Kitchen is closed, my kids are gone, and im all out of Viagra. God please take me now!"
"The Autobiography of Bob Dole"
- 29. "The air was still like a dead body. Convenient really as one was lying in the gutter like a rolling pin. Convenient really as that's what was used to kill him. The Detective slipped off his pants. No way was he going to let this one go to waste whilst it was still warm. But he didn't kill him. Or did he?"
"Detective Fetish"
- 28. "It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times."
"The Greatest Work Known to Man - A Thousand Monkey's Working at a Thousand Typewriters"
- 27. "I-O-U 1 novel."
"The Art Of Procrastination - Unknown author"
- 26. "I farted. That's when everything went downhill..."
"The Great Book of Immature Humour"
- 25. "I have constant fear that someone's always there."
"Therapy Sessions with Jim"
- 24. "Dude, I lost the Ring"
"Lord of the Rings: Gandalf's Memory Weakens with Age"
- 23. "White man came, across the sea"
"A Hypocrite Wanker's Memoir"
- 22. "The End"
"A Backwards Story"
- 21. "Yee be yonder, ho. Ma nizzle shizzl; in in ma manor wit ma homeboy knights sire!"
"Old English Philosophies with Snoop Dogg"
- 20. "Welcome to Uncyclopedia"
- 19. "I have this weird feeling that people keep following me."
"God - The Bible"
- 18. "Some stayed dry and others felt the pain."
- "Chocolate Rain: The Novel"
- 17. "It is often saisd12hgchm78kl09-';0-=;l'431/*+"
- "The Joys of Owning Cats"
- 16. "With a spring in his step, John failed to pass his kidney stone."
- "Chronicle of a Death Unforeseen"
- 15. "Slowly, ever so slowly a shot rang out... well not really rang out more like it wimpered out. See the gunpowder got wet, why was it wet? Well yes the drill instructor did tell me never use my musket to discharge my little gun but how was I to know I would need to defend myself from a wild mob of kitten huffers?
- "The operation and maintenance of the blunderbus musket"
- 14. "Shut up! 50 years ago we'd have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass! You can talk, you can talk, you can talk! You're brave now, motherfucker! Throw his ass out, he's a nigger. He's a nigger, HE'S A NIGGER!!! A NIGGER! LOOK, THERE'S A NIGGER!! Ooohhhhhh! Alright, you see? This shocks you, it shocks you to see what's buried beneath you stupid motherfuckers! It was uncalled for you to interrupt my ass you cheap motherfucker! You guys have been talkin, and talkin, and talkin'. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know! What's the matter? Is this too much for you to handle? They're going to arrest me for calling a black man a nigger."
- "The art of destroying your 50 year comedy career in 30 seconds" - Michael 'Kramer' Richards
- 13. "The darn sky was paisley again, I'd just taken it in for repair a month ago, why...."
- The things I see after hitting my head repeatedly - Flat Head Fred
- 12.
Once upon a time(no wrong) Twice upon a time(no it happened more than that) Thrice upon a time(Grrrrrrrr) Four freaking times upon a time (finally) in a Galaxy far far away(no to far) in my inner ear cannal(darn too close) city called Cleveland (just right) there lived Umm errrr aaaaahh(crap) Some people 'n' stuff(Dhhoooh) a duck billed platypus in a zoo?
- 9. "I was only 8 years old when I discovered I was a Wizzard and the thunder shaped scare on my forehead was itching. But I couldn't be a cheap rip-off of some other book right?"
- Parry Hotter and the cheap rip-off
- 8. However Miley Cyrus's book starts
- Miles to Go
- 7. My name is (puff puff) Shaggy, I'm a hardnosed detective and (puff puff) this is my (puff puff) partner/bodygaurd Scubby Doo (puuf puuf) the dope sniffing tracker.
- Shaggy the Privete Investigator and the case of the Maltese Pot shipment.
- 6. You probably have to read this book to pass your 11th grade English class. With that said, I will try my hardest to bore you to death while you read.
- Some book that an 11th grader needs to read to pass English class
- 4. Life is getting tough, and OOH SHINY FOIL!! OH GOD I NEED IT!!
- Life with ADHD, and OH MY GOD I FARTED!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
- 3. "I think I should start by informing you Americans that I am a practicing Australian and I hate Jews worse than Hitler hated grues."
- Mel Gibson's Autobiography, "Fuck you, and Other Shit."
- 2 "it was a long night, when he got out of the bed, walked to the door, turnt and said.. goodnight nan, and winked"
- A series of frankly disturbing events.
- 1 "We're no strangers to lurve. You know the rules and so do I"
- R. Astley - N.G.G.Y.U. [that 'noise' was the book title, not bad constipation]
- 0 "The End"
- -1 "Holy shit!"
- It makes you wonder
- -2 "Frank walked outside and proceeded to massage his dog's nutsack"
- -3 "It was the minor character with the most screen-time."
- The Mystery of Edwin Drood Part Two by Charles Dickens
- -4 "Once upon a time, I murdered your girlfriend. THE END."


text:
Talk:Qt Extended Improved
From Openmoko
m (title creation)
(→It's there some GPS Application for QtEI ?)
|Line 29:
|Line 29:
--[[User:Apertum|Apertum]] 11:27, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
--[[User:Apertum|Apertum]] 11:27, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
== Battery duration Issue: any solution? ==
== Battery duration Issue: any solution? ==
Revision as of 17:59, 23 June 2009
Compile program example
When I wanted to compile the example program, I had an error.I did git clone git://git.karadog.net/qt-extended-improved.git to get the sources and then builded like in the page.
desktop# mkdir /opt/QtExtended/build/myapps desktop# cd /opt/QtExtended/build/myapps desktop# cp -R $QTOPIA_DEPOT_PATH/examples/application . desktop# mv application example desktop# cd example desktop# $QPEDIR/bin/qbuild
In file included from /opt/QtExtended/build/sdk/qtopiacore/target/include/QtCore/qglobal.h:58, from /opt/QtExtended/build/sdk/qtopiacore/target/include/QtCore/qatomic.h:41, from /opt/QtExtended/build/sdk/qtopiacore/target/include/QtCore/qvariant.h:41, from /opt/QtExtended/build/sdk/qtopiacore/target/include/QtCore/QVariant:1, from /opt/QtExtended/build/myapps/example/.uic/ui_examplebase.h:13: /opt/QtExtended/build/sdk/qtopiacore/target/include/QtCore/qconfig.h:2:66: error: /opt/QtExtended/build/sdk/sdk/qtopiacore/qconfig-qpe.h: No such file or directory
In the file qconfig.h there was at the top an inclusion of the file sdk/sdk/.... I removed 1 sdk and it compiled. Is this a bug ?
It's there some GPS Application for QtEI ?
Application "mapping demo" it's not working for me. It's a pity not having TangoGPS or Navit also ported to QtEI. It's there any plans to have a solid and good GPS application for this (very good) Distribution?
--Apertum 11:27, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
The "mapping demo" works for me. The problem on my Freerunner was, that the sys-path of gps was changed and so the gps was not turned on. I recompiled the libneogpsplugin.so with the new path after that it works for me.
--Asyring 17:59, 23 Jun 2009 (CEST)
Battery duration Issue: any solution?
I see that with QTEi, the standard duration of Battery with actual kernel (2.6.28/29) it's not more then 36/48h (sometimes also not more then 24h!).
It's there any plan to have a good battery duration that now, as everyday phone, it become an big issue?
--Apertum 11:29, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
Wireless Online Issue
I'm using the Franky Van Liedekerke's last release (release 11).
When i try to remove the Wireless module from "internet" application, QtEI simply crash (i have to remove the battery to reboot). Another problem is that if i try to stop the wifi service with the GUI, after the phone resume from a suspend, it restart automatically the Wifi online (and it consumes battery). --Apertum 11:34, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
Any roadmap and Unified Project for QtEI?
It's there any Roadmap or some active Major project (i mean with an official website, with tutorial, trac, blog, comments, like, ie, SHR-Project) for QtEI to contribute, add a wishlist, bugs, testing, translation, etc etc?
I see the Karadog+Radek+Franky efforts (very good job indeed!:-)), but i can't find a unified effort to evolve QtEI; it's a pity, because QtEI, IMHO, is the more stable and usable actual distro for our FreeRunner.
Any Suggestion?--Apertum 12:08, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Tuning Postfix Queue Settings
Tuning Postfix queue settings
Some system administrators will want to control the queue lifetime or even how frequently a message in the deferred queue is selected for redelivery. This article contains information for tuning Postfix queue settings to configure both Postfix queue lifetime and Postfix deferred queue parameters.
Note: Before changing the content of your Postfix configuration file, make a backup of the original /opt/zimbra/postfix/conf/main.cf file in case you need to restore your configuration. Be sure to also keep a backup of your changed Postfix configuration file, in order to restore your configuration after upgrading or reinstalling.
Reconfiguring the Postfix Queue Lifetime
The default queue lifetime is 5 days. After 5 days, messages in the deferred queue are returned to the sender with an "undelivered" notice. To change the queue lifetime, use the following steps.
To reconfigure the queue lifetime
1. Log in as root in the command line utility. Switch to the zimbra user account.
su - zimbra
2. Type the following command, replacing [time] with the new queue lifetime. Time can be in seconds (s), minutes (m), hours (h), days (d), and weeks (w).
postconf -e maximal_queue_lifetime=[time]
Note: Since most Postfix daemons are short-lived, your new settings are actually recognized automatically as those daemons expire and new ones are launched. However, longer running daemons such as pickup, qmgr, and possibly trivial-rewrite will not detect changes to main.cf, so changes to parameters used by these daemons require that you reload Postfix. Changes to master.cf always require a reload. Note that with changes to the inet_interfaces parameter, a reload is not sufficient. You must stop and then start Postfix in this case.
For example, to reconfigure the queue lifetime to 15 minutes, you would type:
postconf –e maximal_queue_lifetime=15m
The queue lifetime is now reconfigured.
3. To ensure that your changes are not overwritten by a future Zimbra upgrade, you can set them in the local config.
zmlocalconfig -e postfix_maximal_queue_lifetime=[time]
Reconfiguring Postfix Deferred Queue Parameters
Some administrators prefer to more tightly control the way mail in the deferred queue is handled. Three parameters determine how the mail in the deferred queue is handled by the queue manager: queue_run_delay, minimal_backoff_time, and maximal_backoff_time.
- queue_run_delay determines the time between deferred queue scans by the queue manager. The default is 1,000 seconds (1000s). This time should be less than or equal to the minimal_backoff_time setting.
- minimal_backoff_time determines the minimal time between attempts to deliver a deferred message. When a message is first placed in the deferred queue, the value of this setting is what determines when the first attempt to redeliver the message is made. The default is 1,000 seconds (1000s). This time should be equal to or greater than the queue_run_delay setting.
- maximal_backoff_time determines the maximal time between attempts to deliver a message. The time between each attempt to deliver a deferred message will grow exponentially until it reaches the value in this setting. The attempted deliveries are repeated at this value until the queue lifetime is reached. The default is 4,000 seconds (4000s).
To reconfigure one or more of these settings, use the following steps.
To reconfigure a deferred queue parameter
1. Log in as root in the command line utility. Switch to the zimbra user account.
su - zimbra
2. Type the following command, replacing [parameter] with the parameter you want to reconfigure and replacing [time] with the new time. Time can be in seconds (s), minutes (m), hours (h), days (d), and weeks (w).
postconf -e [parameter]=[time]
To reconfigure multiple parameters, use this command for each parameter you want to reconfigure.
For example, to change the queue_run_delay parameter to 2,000 seconds and the minimal_backoff_time parameter to 2,000 seconds:
postconf –e queue_run_delay=2000s postconf –e minimal_backoff_time=2000s
The deferred queue parameters are now reconfigured. The changes will take effect immediately.
3. To ensure that your changes are not overwritten by a future Zimbra upgrade, you can set them in the local config.
zmlocalconfig -e postfix_queue_run_delay=<new value> zmlocalconfig -e postfix_minimal_backoff_time=<new value>
Any Postfix settings you change can be preserved across upgrades by creating a local config entry named postfix_<postfix key> and setting its value. This will not immediately update the value in Postfix, but will ensure that it is rewritten at the time of the next upgrade.
Related Topics


text:
Yahoo has reached an agreement to acquire Flurry, a mobile analytics company, as part of a push to grow its advertising revenue within its mobile products.
Flurry provides tools that help developers and publishers learn more about who's using their apps in order to better target them with ads. The information, including gender, age and location, helps Flurry play digital matchmaker between publishers and advertisers. The technology can be used to place banner, full-screen and video ads.
The San Francisco-based company says it receives data from over 540,000 apps on 1.4 billion devices worldwide. Apps that use its technology include Skype, Pinterest and the BBC's news app, the company says.
Flurry could help Yahoo make more money from its growing lineup of mobile apps, potentially allowing it to better target ads and offer more personalized features.
"When completed, our acquisition of Flurry will be a meaningful step for the company and reinforces our commitment to building and supporting useful, inspiring and beautiful mobile applications and monetization solutions," said Scott Burke, Yahoo's senior VP of advertising technology, in a blog post.
He said Flurry's technology helps brands better reach their audiences, providing data on both the desktop and mobile use.
Yahoo didn't disclose the terms of the deal, though a report on the tech news site Re/code put the value at "hundreds of millions" of dollars.
Flurry's team will remain in San Francisco, Yahoo said, and its products will "continue to serve the application developer community."
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been focused on turning Yahoo around and growing its business since she took over as CEO in 2012. Mobile has been her main focus, with new or redesigned apps like Yahoo News Digest, Mail and Flickr released over the past year.
Mobile has not been a strong sales driver for Yahoo, but that could be beginning to change. Last week, during the company's second-quarter sales call, mobile was described as being "meaningful" to Yahoo's bottom line -- a change from "not material" in previous quarters. Yahoo's total sales were still down by 4 percent.
"We will work to make our tools, targeting and processes more efficient at showing the right ads to the right user," Mayer said last week.
Zach Miners covers social networking, search and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow Zach on Twitter at @zachminers. Zach's e-mail address is firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
Keck's Exclusives: Castle Gears Up for 2013
It looks as if we could be meeting Richard Castle's dad next year. Exec producer Andrew Marlowe is considering an "explosively personal" February-sweeps two-parter of ABC's Castle that would introduce the patriarch in a way that would profoundly impact both his son's and granddaughter Alexis' lives.
What kind of man might he be? "I'm pretty sure he's ruggedly handsome," says Marlowe with a laugh, adding that Nathan Fillion's fantasy choice to play him is Harrison Ford!
Also in February, Senator Bracken (Jack Coleman), who is behind the murder of Beckett's mother, returns. When it appears that he's tied to another killing, "Beckett believes this is her opportunity to nail him once and for all," says Marlowe.
Detective Esposito will get the backstory treatment in an episode that reveals his early delinquent years. "We learn Esposito had a bit of a record himself," says Marlowe, who is also planning a special mythology episode for Detective Ryan.
As for the romance between Castle and Beckett (Stana Katic), they'll celebrate their first Valentine's Day and contemplate what gifts to exchange - all while investigating a murder on a Real Housewives-type reality show (actual unscripted-TV stars may appear in the episode). As for "Caskett" getting married, Marlowe turns cagey. "Not right now," he says. "But we'll see as we get toward the end of the season." Sounds like another "Will-they-or-won't-they?" cliffhanger!
Subscribe to TV Guide Magazine now!
View original Keck's Exclusives: Castle Gears Up for 2013 at TVGuide.com
Other Links From TVGuide.com


text:
ALERT: On SATURDAY – (not today as first mistakenly listed) –at 3:30 p.m. in Morphy Recital Hall, the annual FREE concert by the UW's Perlman Trio — named after benefactor Kato Perlman — will perform piano trios by Franz Joseph Haydn and Robert Schumann, and a piano quartet by Johannes Brahms. A reception will follow For more information about the student performers and the full program, go to: https://www.music.wisc.edu/event/the-perlman-trio/
By Jacob Stockinger
Here is a special posting, a review written by frequent guest critic and writer for this blog, John W. Barker. Barker (below) is an emeritus professor of Medieval history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also is a well-known classical music critic who writes for Isthmus and the American Record Guide, and who hosts an early music show once a month on Sunday morning on WORT FM 89.9 FM. For years, he served on the Board of Advisors for the Madison Early Music Festival and frequently gives pre-concert lectures in Madison. Barker also took the performance photos.
By John W. Barker
The Middleton Community Orchestra (below), under conductor Kyle Knox, brought off a splendid concert on last Wednesday evening.
The opening item was the Introduction and Allegro, Op. 47, for string quartet and string orchestra by Edward Elgar. This is a broad work of great Romantic sweep, featuring the lush textures pitting a large ensemble against a miniature one.
The largely amateur Middleton orchestra fields a very large string section. It has not yet completely fused into a suave entity, but the 30-odd players did a brave job of capturing the music's rhetorical richness.
The soloist for the evening was Dafydd Bevil (below), a French horn player who is very active in a number of orchestras and ensembles in the Madison area while currently engaged in doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Mead Witter School of Music.
Bevil boldly chose as his vehicle the second of Richard Strauss' two horn concertos. Neither is heard in concert very much, though the Concerto No. 1 is a little more familiar from recordings. That is a bravura piece, composed in 1882, when Strauss (below) was 18, and was written for his father, Germany's foremost horn virtuoso.
The Concerto No. 2 dates from the other end of Strauss's career, in 1942, the first of some wind concertos undertaken during and after World War II. Intended to recapture his earlier instrumental style, it is a much more studied piece than its predecessor.
Bevil, clearly a player of exceptional skill and musicality, powerfully met Strauss' showy and florid solo writing. This is a virtuoso musician with a promising future.
The remainder of the concert was devoted to the first of what would be a number of scores Ralph Vaughan Williams (below) prepared to fit Classical Greek plays. (RVW was himself a very accomplished master of ancient Greek.)
In 1912, inspired by the translations of Gilbert Murray, he produced music to set Murray's English texts for three of the plays by Euripides: The Bacchae, Electra, and Iphigenia in Tauris.
Before that, however, in 1909, still early in his career, Vaughan Williams composed incidental music to a production (in Greek) of the comedy by Aristophanes, The Wasps.
From that Aristophanic score, the composer put together an orchestral concert suite of an overture and five incidental numbers. The overture itself has enjoyed some frequency of concert performances, but the full suite is little known to the public over here.
It was a clever stroke of programming that Kyle Knox (below) led the orchestra in the full suite. This is delightful music, full of typical Vaughan Williams whimsy, inventiveness, and cleverness. Sounding simple, it creates balances and details not easy to manage, but Knox and the orchestra performed it with dazzling flair. (You can hear the rarely performed full suite in the YouTube video at the bottom)
This is exactly the kind of enterprise that makes the Madison area's musical life so stimulating and joyous.


text:
Apple has activated a new revenue stream that could foster communities of digital content creators around the world like those already thriving in China. Apple's newly published update to its App Store policies officially designates voluntary tipping via virtual currency as in-app purchases that Apple taxes 30 percent. By taking tipping out of the grey area, more app developers might institute digital tip jars as an alternative way to get creators paid without having to offer ad revenue sharing.
Chinese live-streaming video apps like Yinke and Yizhibo have long embraced tipping, allowing viewers to tip or give virtual gifts to the stars they watch in exchange for extra attention from the performer or just as a show of gratitude. American live-streaming apps like Facebook Live and Periscope don't offer tipping; instead, Facebook has begun letting broadcasters show ads in their streams and keep 55 percent of the revenue.
But last month, Apple cracked down on unofficial tipping, which sidestepped its 30 percent tax on in-app purchases by highlighting how the tips were donations rather than purchases. The Wall Street Journal reported Apple had told WeChat and other Chinese social apps to disable their tipping functions or be kicked out of the App Store.
Previously, there was no formal rule from Apple about how tipping was classified. Now, Apple has instituted a legitimate way to tip. As part of the App Store policy update coinciding with the developer release of iOS 11, Apple writes:
Apps may use in-app purchase currencies to enable customers to "tip" digital content providers in the app.
This means developers can add tipping features without fearing repercussions from Apple, as long as they're willing to give the giant 30 percent. The grey area had kept tipping out of some popular apps who sought to avoid any tension with Apple. Now app makers can offer and promote tipping features with confidence. Native iOS tipping functionality could make it difficult for third-party tipping platforms to take root, though it could also spark a new trend of micropayments that are smaller than the typical $1 in-app purchase.
The developers will have to determine whether they themselves take a cut of the tips or pass the full 70 percent on to the content creators. Passing on 50 percent while taking a 20 percent cut could unlock paths to monetizing video where ads can be interruptive or tough to match with unpolished footage.
On some platforms where 100 percent of the tips were passed through, creators might be a bit bitter about the change that will dock their earnings 30 percent. That's a big deal for stars who can pull in hundreds or even thousands of dollars per stream. But the institutionalization and potential explosion in popularity of in-app tipping could grow the pie of donations.
Thanks to tipping, musicians, comedians, artists, e-sports athletes and more risqué creators outside of China could be incentivized to make higher-quality digital content. And even if they don't take a cut, platforms that adopt tipping could see users flock to consume it.


text:
NEWARK, N.J., Jan. 22 (UPI) -- Martin Brodeur logged a shutout Tuesday -- the 120th of his career -- backstopping New Jersey to a 3-0 decision over Philadelphia in the Devils' home opener.
Brodeur turned aside all 24 shots he faced for the defending Eastern Conference champion Devils, who moved to 2-0 on the season following a Saturday defeat of the New York Islanders.
Ilya Kovalchuk notched two points with a goal and an assist and New Jersey also got markers from David Clarkson and Travis Zajac in the win.
The Flyers, meanwhile, dropped a third straight to begin a season for the first since the NHL's last lockout-shortened campaign in 1995.
Ilya Bryzgalov made 23 saves for Philadelphia.


text:
As he declared quasi-victory in Iowa following a third-place finish, Ron Paul puzzled cable news watchers across the country by proudly proclaiming, "We are all Austrians now." The average Republican presidential candidate would sooner officiate a gay marriage than praise Europe, yet here was Paul pledging allegiance to Vienna. What did he mean? Why would we all be Austrians?
Paul's statement was crystal clear to those familiar with the internecine controversies of the libertarian movement. He was referring to so-called "Austrian economics," an idiosyncratic passion of his and a set of beliefs that put him at odds with the vast majority of well-known economists of all ideological inclinations.
For starters, it's important to note that the term has something of a double meaning. The Austrian school originally referred to a set of classical liberal thinkers with diverse interests who came out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many of these thinkers are obscure today, but the most distinguished member of the group, Friedrich Hayek, is anything but. By the same token, an appreciation for Hayek's work by no means makes you an "Austrian." Hayek, who died in 1992, won the Nobel Prize, and mainstream economists thoroughly embraced his important work explicating the role of the price system in conveying information. His ideas undergird everything from carbon taxes to wireless spectrum auctions and thoroughly permeate policy throughout the Western world.
But "Austrians" in Paul's sense refers to something narrower, specifically the thought of Ludwig Von Mises and his student Murray Rothbard. It is a form of capitalism that is even more libertarian and anarchic than that espoused by many libertarians. Rothbard's followers, most prominently longtime Paul associate and founder of the Mises Institute Lew Rockwell, have been waging a decades-long war against the Koch brothers and the more mainstream form of libertarianism the Kochs represent.
"Austrian economics," in this sense, goes beyond standard-issue free market thinking in a number of ways. Most notably, it seeks to build a strong ethical case for strict libertarianism without admitting that this would lead to any practical problems whatsoever. Therefore, along with rejecting the legitimacy of any intervention to protect the poor or regulate anything (a position much more extreme than even the Hayek of Road to Serfdom), Austrians reject the idea that there is anything at all the government can do to stabilize macroeconomic fluctuations. This, to be clear, is different from the mainstream Republican view that the stimulus bill enacted by Congress in 2009 and signed into law by President Obama was wasteful or ineffective. Austrians also believe that cutting taxes to boost economic activity doesn't work either. And they disagree with Milton Friedman that appropriate monetary stimulus by the Federal Reserve could have prevented the Great Depression. Indeed, they disagree with even the least controversial of all stabilization measures, the ordinary tweaking of short-term interest rates that all modern central banks use to try to prevent either inflation or deflation. In the view of the Austrians, practically every economic policy pursued by the federal government and Federal Reserve is a mistake that distorts markets. Rather than curing recessions, claim Austrians, stimulative policies cause them by producing unsustainable bubbles.
The way this works, according to the Austrians, is that artificially low interest rates spur "malinvestment" in unworkable enterprises that inevitably crash when the stimulus is withdrawn. This is an emotionally appealing idea, positing that the suffering of a bust is a kind of cosmic payback for the boom. But it doesn't make much logical sense. For one thing, as George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan, who's ideologically sympathetic to the Austrians, points out, it's hard to understand why businesspeople would be so easily duped in this way. If Ron Paul and Ludwig von Mises know that cheap money can't last forever, why don't private investors? Why wouldn't firms avoid making the supposedly dumb investments? Ironically, the Austrians have replicated an error from the crudest forms of postwar Keynesianism—the failure to consider the role of expectations feedback in macroeconomic policy.
More broadly, the Austrian story of investment booms and busts doesn't actually explain recessions and unemployment. Spending patterns shift all the time without sparking a recession. People stop buying BlackBerrys and they buy iPhones instead. Or people stop buying boot-cut jeans and buy skinny jeans instead. Across sectors, maybe people go see fewer movies and with the money they save they eat out at nicer restaurants. A business that curtails its investment spending should have extra money to pay out as dividends. Or if they want to horde the cash, it sits in a bank for someone else to lend out.
It may seem "obvious" that the decline in housing activity caused the current recession, in line with the Austrian view, but in fact fixed residential investment turned negative in 2006. It stayed negative for more than a year before the recession began, and then continued negative for a couple more quarters before it turned severe. People spent less on home-building and renovation and more on other things. If investment spending in general declines, you would expect spending on consumer goods to rise to offset it. In practice, this doesn't always happen and you get a recession. It's this anomalous collapse in overall spending that needs explaining, and describing some of the past spending as "malinvestment" doesn't help you understand it.
The interesting question is what to do about it. Many of the original Austrians found their business cycle ideas discredited by the Great Depression, in which the bust was clearly not self-correcting and country after country stimulated real output by abandoning the gold standard and engaging in deficit spending. Then for a long time after World War II, policy elites more or less agreed on a combination of "automatic" fiscal stabilizers (the deficit naturally goes up during recessions as tax revenues fall and social service outlays rise) and interest rate cuts. And it worked, so nobody much cared about Austrian economics outside of crank circles. But when short-term rates hit zero and the Fed couldn't push them any lower despite high unemployment, political consensus broke down.
Ever since, we've been fighting about fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing, and unusual economic theories have been coming to the fore. Some of them offer useful suggestions about possible fixes. Unfortunately, however, it's the Austrian school, which preaches despair and demands no action at all, that has the most effective political champion and the most dedicated followers. If I'm wrong, and the economy doesn't recover in 2012, then these faddish views may gain more steam and perhaps we really all will be Austrians someday soon. But let's hope not. The developed countries that have done best in the recession—places like Israel and Sweden—are the ones that have pursued the least "Austrian" courses of action, while the European Central Bank's insistence on pursuing a somewhat Austrian-style course in Spain and Italy is creating a deepening crisis.


text:
My brief TV career (3)
Being the innocents we were, Jim and I started setting up showings of our TV pilot on our own for the ad agencies. We rented the Gate of Horn and showed it to J. Walter Thompson, who loved it. They said, "This is too good to go on this summer. We've got the client for you and we'lI go on in January." Wonderful. Fantastic. Sensational.
Now that we were getting somewhere, all sorts of people began to surround us. A lawyer by the name of Parsons came around, and all of a sudden it was "these wonderful kids need some help, and everybody knows that television shows run at a deficit." Very quickly, I heard about a group that was going to buy a big piece of the show and help us kids out. I knew enough about capitalism to know that when anybody talks about helping kids, put one hand on your wallet and the other on your groin.
Meanwhile, J. Walter Thompson had shown our tape to Schlitz, and they loved it too. Papers were ready to be drawn up to put the show on the air in January, and heady things were happening. This was still very early in my career. All I could think about was that I was gonna be a television producer and have the casting couch and the office and the whole shtick.
Then I read a story in Advertising Age that the $18-million Schlitz account had gone from J. Walter Thompson to Leo Burnett. I guessed quicker than Friedkin and McGuinn could tell me what had happened. I may not have known much about show business, but I knew about politics, and I knew there was no way on earth that Leo Burnett was going to take J. Walter Thompson's last recommendation to Schlitz as their first television project. lf the project worked, what did Schlitz need Burnett for, and if it flopped, Burnett would take the fall.
The Schlitz people told us, "Don't worry about a thing. You're the first thing on the agenda with Leo Burnett." Six or eight weeks later we were called in again, and they said they would like to have a formal screening in their screening room. By this time we had spent $25,000 to sell a show that cost $5,000 to make, so we were grateful that at least we didn't have to rent the Gate of Horn again.


text:
The following is more evidence (and analysis) of what seems obvious to me from my having closely followed the media in recent years.
Conservatives claim the media is dominated by liberals and some conservatives go so far as to allege a liberal conspiracy, but this has never fit my own observations. Most of what is considered liberal always seemed to be centrist or moderately liberal at most. All you have to do is compare the media's treatment of Bush as compared to Obama. Bush didn't try to be bipartisan at all and pushed agendas so ideological that it made real liberals cringe, but the media allowed itself to be embedded and mostly reported the press releases straight from the White House.
I wish the media had been dominated by a real liberal agenda. In the mainstream media, Fox News almost entirely controls the narrative that all the other news sources follow. The only liberal narrative that is able to strongly counter this mostly comes from comedians such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Conservatives have been very successful in controlling the political narrative in the media.
Proof Through Repetition and the "Liberal Bias" of the U.S. Media:
A Review of Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media?
By Neil H. Buchanan
Even Conservatives Admit Liberal Media Bias Is A Myth, Yet They Perpetuate It
Alterman includes in his book quotes from both James Baker and William Kristol happily admitting that there is no meaningful liberal bias in the media. Instead, they and other archconservatives concede, they are simply "working the refs," in order to force the media to bend over backward to compensate for a bias that even they admit is, at the very least, grossly exaggerated.
One might think this kind of concession by the mythmakers would kill the myth. But it turns out that the myth is far too useful, and it continues to be purveyed to television viewers unlikely ever to open Alterman's work and read these concessions of its falsity.
For instance, consider Kristol's comments in late May of this year, when he appeared on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Stewart started by commenting on how well things are going for conservatives in the U.S., and he asked: "Is there anything else conservatives want?" Kristol, without missing a beat, replied: "Well, the liberals still dominate the media." To his credit, Stewart was incredulous; but Kristol was unfazed.
Even Liberals Themselves Play a Part In Perpetuating the Liberal Bias Myth
Meanwhile, the liberal "refs" have certainly been "worked" into submission. Take Stewart himself. His show traffics in sharp political satire, much of it highly critical of the Administration. Yet Stewart takes every opportunity to deny being liberal, consistently asserting that he is simply cynical. He regularly treats conservative guests with kid gloves, while turning into a tough interrogator of liberal guests. In the latter category, Arianna Huffington's appearance was a sorry spectacle, with Stewart constantly interrupting and saying things like, "What's the point? We can't do anything about this stuff, anyway!"
Similarly, the Times's Nicholas Kristof identifies himself as a liberal, but it often seems that he chooses to do so simply to be able to chide other liberals for being too liberal. For instance, is it truly a concern that the New York-based Times employs no evangelical Christians, as Kristof recently noted? Have any actually applied and been rejected on religious grounds?
By the way, I'm not saying there is no liberal bias anywhere in the media. There is all kinds of bias because every person is biased, but I would point out two important issues.
First, there is no equivalent to Fox News on the left. For example: Fox News management sends out memos about which issues to report and which talking points to use (I haven't heard of any other mainstream news outlet doing this). Fox News donated a lot of money to Republicans (compare that to the 'far left' MSNBC which donated equally to both Republicans and Democrats). Fox News has promoted the Tea Party even to the extent of having their employees speak at protests and rile up the crowd for the cameras (as far as I know, this level of promotion of a protest movement hasn't before been seen in the modern mainstream media).
Second, in order to ascertain bias one has to look at the entire industry. Most journalists, like most academics and scientists, identify as liberals. Yes, liberals are attracted to intellectual professions which probably relates to the fact that liberals on average have higher IQs and have higher levels of education (why this is the case is a whole other issue; for example, the research by Satoshi Kanazawa). Part of the issue here involves the definition and public opinion about labels (which I discuss more at the end). There are cultural reasons for why people choose to self-identify with particular labels. Most self-identified liberals are like most other Americans in that they are moderate in their views (relative to the far left which is rarely seen in mainstream media and politics).
Looking at the entire news industry, one must realize that journalists, reporters, and pundits represent a small percentage of the people involved. Even if the talking heads on tv self-identify as 'liberal', that doesn't automatically lead to the conclusion the media has a liberal bias. The talking heads generally don't make the decisions about what gets reported and how. The talking heads don't own the corporate media. The talking heads aren't the management of the news rooms.
Going by this, some argue that the mainstream media news outlets serve the interests of the corporations that own them rather than any particular ideological bias. However, this misses the point. Conservatism in the US has become aligned with a pro-capitalist, pro-corporation worldview. And liberalism in the US has become aligned with a worldview that is more critically suspect of capitalism and corporations. Liberals, not conservatives, are the defenders of workers unions.
Corporate Interests: How the News Media Portray the Economy
Christopher J. Kollmeyer
The data reveal that, despite growth patterns that overwhelmingly favored economic elites, thenegative news about the economy disproportionately depicted events and problems affecting corporations andinvestors instead of the general workforce. When theTimesdid discuss problems affecting workers, the articleswere relatively short, most often placed in the back sections of the newspaper, and rarely discussed policy alternativesto the status quo. Moreover, unlike the viewpoints of business leaders and government officials, the viewpointsof workers or their spokespersons were rarely used as sources of information. These findings providequalified support for existing scholarship purporting that the news media, when reporting on the economy, privilegethe interests of corporations and investors over the interests of the general workforce.
Dirty Truths
By Michael Parenti
Why do so many people have a negative view of workers a labor unions? In part, it is because of what is fed to them by the corporate-owned news media. A 1990 City University of New York study found that programs devoted to "elite" personages consumed "nearly ten times more PBS prime-time programming hours than programs devoted to workers?' Less than half of one percent of the programming dealt with workers-and it was mostly with British rather than American ones. A Los Angeles Times survey found that newspaper editors favored business over labor by 54 to 7 percent. My reading of this nation's newspapers leaves me to wonder who the 7 percent might be.
The media's pro-business bias is pronounced enough for anyone to see. The major newspapers and weeklies have no labor section to go along with their business section. They have whole staffs reporting on business news but not more than one labor reporter, if that. And usually "labor" reporters, judging from the ones I have met, show no special grasp of labor's struggles or sensitivity toward workers' issues. If they did, they would not last at that assignment and would be judged as "getting too close" to their subject.
The media's devotion to corporate America is manifested in the many TV and radio commentary shows that are glutted with conservatives. Public affairs programming is crowded with offerings like "Wall Street Week' "American Enterprise' "Adam Smith's Money World," "Nightly Business Report," and "Marketplace?'
The network evening news regularly reports the Dow Jones average but offers no weekly tabulations on lay-offs, industrial accidents, and long-term occupational illness. When the stock market has a good day, for some reason this is treated as good news for all of us. The press seldom refers to the politico-economic power of corporations. The economy itself is presented as something government and business attend to, while organized labor tags along at best as a very junior and often troublesome partner.
The media's anti-labor biases should come as no surprise. Media owners themselves are among the most exploitative, antiunion employers and strikebreakers. Over the years, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the New York Daily News, CBS, NBC and numerous other news organizations have been locked in bitter strikes that ended with unions being seriously weakened or totally crushed. As Washington Post owner Katharine Graham is reportedly fond of saying: "Unions interfere with freedom of the press."
Conservative Exclusion Is a Right-Wing Delusion
By Jim Naureckas
National Review senior editor Jay Nordlinger (Corner, 3/24/10), responding to CNN pairing disgraced Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer with a not-conservative-enough-for-National-Review Kathleen Parker, muses:
I'm reminded why conservatives had to build their own media outlets. It's sort of like Jews and country clubs. Jews built their own, not because they wanted to, necessarily, but because the other clubs wouldn't let them in. They weren't being "clannish." They wanted to play golf, on first-class courses….
Well, we conservatives built our own media outlets–because the other clubs wouldn't let us in. I guess it's working out OK.
[ . . . ] In the bad old days, when no one would let conservatives work in the media, who was the country's most prominent columnist? Walter Winchell, defender of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. Similar politics didn't stop Paul Harvey from getting a daily slot for commentary on the ABC Radio Network.
The fact is that many of the people who owned newspapers, magazines and radio stations–as you might expect of millionaire businessmen–were quite conservative: people like Robert McCormick, Harry Chandler and Frank Gannett. These are the bosses who would have been barring conservatives from working in the media industry. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it?
Black and White and Re(a)d All Over:
The Conservative Advantage in Syndicated Op-Ed Columns
Media Matters
Among the report's key findings:
- Conservative Syndicated Columnists Dominate Daily Newspapers — Sixty percent of the nation's newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists every week than progressive syndicated columnists. Only 20 percent run more progressives than conservatives, while the remaining 20 percent are evenly balanced.
- Conservative Syndicated Columnists Reach Millions More Than Progressives — In a given week, nationally syndicated conservative columnists are published in more than 153 million newspapers. Progressive columnists, on the other hand, are published in 125 million newspapers.
- Top Syndicated Columnists Are Mostly Conservative — The top-10 list of columnists, sorted by the number of papers in which they are carried or by the total circulation of the papers in which they are published, includes five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.
- In Region After Region, Conservative Syndicated Columnists Enjoy Advantage — In eight of the nine regions into which the U.S. Census divides the country, conservative syndicated columnists reach more readers than progressive syndicated columnists in any given week. Only in the Middle Atlantic region (which includes New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) do progressive columnists reach more readers each week.
"Together these results prove what many have suspected for years — that our opinion pages are consistently skewed to the right, allowing conservatives a disproportionate advantage in shaping public opinion," said David Brock, President and CEO of Media Matters. "The integrity of our nation's newspapers is at stake when the debate of today's pressing issues is dominated entirely by one side of the argument," Brock said.
Conservatives are often heard to complain about the "liberal media," a nefarious cabal of journalists and media owners supposedly endeavoring to twist the news to serve their ideological agenda. Media Matters for America has shown in a variety of ways that the "liberal media" is a myth. Our two reports on the Sunday talk shows showed how those programs are dominated by conservative guests. Our analysis of the coverage of religion showed how that coverage favors conservatives. Analyses performed by other organizations have shown how conservatives dominate talk radio. And this study demonstrates that in yet another key portion of the news media, conservatives enjoy a structural advantage that gives them a leg up in influencing public opinion.
That structural advantage enables them to transmit an overarching narrative across the country, one that serves to convey the impression that conservative ideas that in many cases enjoy tiny support are actually the "reasonable center" in key debates. To take just one example, prominent conservative columnists who wrote about the topic were nearly unanimous in support of President Bush's decision to commute Scooter Libby's sentence, while some advocated pardoning him outright, despite the fact that polls indicated the decision had the support of only around one in five Americans.
In terms of the number of people reached by their ideas and opinions, of the authority they are granted, and of their prestige, there are few in the American news media who equal the lofty position held by the top syndicated columnists. Read by millions, even tens of millions, their opinions form the basis on which our democratic debate often proceeds. Because they have a national reach, they also have the power to advance ideas and narratives that local columnists simply do not have.
As this study has demonstrated, the landscape of syndicated columnists is dominated by conservatives. They reach considerably more readers than progressives. By a 3-to-1 margin, most American newspapers run more conservative syndicated columnists than progressives. In nearly every region of the country, the conservative voice on op-ed pages is louder than the progressive voice. And for every one state that has a greater progressive voice, there are three in which conservatives have more influence.
In short, while the right wing spends a great deal of time complaining about alleged bias in the media, when it comes to the nation's op-ed pages, it is the progressives who are getting the short end of the stick.
How Public Is Public Radio?
A study of NPR's guest list
By Steve Rendall and Daniel Butterworth
Liberal bias?
That NPR harbors a liberal bias is an article of faith among many conservatives. Spanning from the early '70s, when President Richard Nixon demanded that "all funds for public broadcasting be cut" (9/23/71), through House Speaker Newt Gingrich's similar threats in the mid-'90s, the notion that NPR leans left still endures.
News of the April launch of Air America , a new liberal talk radio network, revived the old complaint, with several conservative pundits declaring that such a thing already existed. "I have three letters for you, NPR . . . . I mean, there is liberal radio," remarked conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan on NBC 's Chris Matthews Show (4/4/04.) A few days earlier (4/1/04), conservative columnist Cal Thomas told Nightline , "The liberals have many outlets," naming NPR prominently among them.
Nor is this belief confined to the right: CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer (3/31/04) seemed to repeat it as a given while questioning a liberal guest: "What about this notion that the conservatives make a fair point that there already is a liberal radio network out there, namely National Public Radio ?"
Despite the commonness of such claims, little evidence has ever been presented for a left bias at NPR , and FAIR's latest study gives it no support. Looking at partisan sources—including government officials, party officials, campaign workers and consultants—Republicans outnumbered Democrats by more than 3 to 2 (61 percent to 38 percent). A majority of Republican sources when the GOP controls the White House and Congress may not be surprising, but Republicans held a similar though slightly smaller edge (57 percent to 42 percent) in 1993, when Clinton was president and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. And a lively race for the Democratic presidential nomination was beginning to heat up at the time of the 2003 study.
Partisans from outside the two major parties were almost nowhere to be seen, with the exception of four Libertarian Party representatives who appeared in a single story (Morning Edition , 6/26/03).
Republicans not only had a substantial partisan edge, individual Republicans were NPR 's most popular sources overall, taking the top seven spots in frequency of appearance. George Bush led all sources for the month with 36 appearances, followed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (8) and Sen. Pat Roberts (6). Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Secretary of State Colin Powell, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer and Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer all tied with five appearances each.
Senators Edward Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller and Max Baucus were the most frequently heard Democrats, each appearing four times. No nongovernmental source appeared more than three times. With the exception of Secretary of State Powell, all of the top 10 most frequently appearing sources were white male government officials.
Air America: Challenges of Liberal Media
The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio
By John Halpin, James Heidbreder, Mark Lloyd, Paul Woodhull, Ben Scott, Josh Silver, S. Derek Turner
Despite the dramatic expansion of viewing and listening options for consumers today, traditional radio remains one of the most widely used media formats in America. Arbitron, the national radio ratings company, reports that more than 90 percent of Americans ages 12 or older listen to radio each week, "a higher penetration than television, magazines, newspapers, or the Internet." Although listening hours have declined slightly in recent years, Americans listened on average to 19 hours of radio per week in 2006.
Among radio formats, the combined news/talk format (which includes news/talk/information and talk/personality) leads all others in terms of the total number of stations per format and trails only country music in terms of national audience share. Through more than 1,700 stations across the nation, the combined news/talk format is estimated to reach more than 50 million listeners each week.
As this report will document in detail, conservative talk radio undeniably dominates the format:
- Our analysis in the spring of 2007 of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners reveals that 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive.
- Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk—10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk.
- A separate analysis of all of the news/talk stations in the top 10 radio markets reveals that 76 percent of the programming in these markets is conservative and 24 percent is progressive, although programming is more balanced in markets such as New York and Chicago.
Those aren't small numbers. The demographics and the technological landscape is changing, but for now conservative talk radio is still kicking ass and taking numbers.
There are many potential explanations for why this gap exists. The two most frequently cited reasons are the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and simple consumer demand. As this report will detail, neither of these reasons adequately explains why conservative talk radio dominates the airwaves.
Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management.
Ownership diversity is perhaps the single most important variable contributing to the structural imbalance based on the data. Quantitative analysis conducted by Free Press of all 10,506 licensed commercial radio stations reveals that stations owned by women, minorities, or local owners are statistically less likely to air conservative hosts or shows.
In contrast, stations controlled by group owners—those with stations in multiple markets or more than three stations in a single market—were statistically more likely to air conservative talk. Furthermore, markets that aired both conservative and progressive programming were statistically less concentrated than the markets that aired only one type of programming and were more likely to be the markets that had female- and minority-owned stations.
Basically, what this means is that deregulation contributed to big business dominating the public airwaves with their conservative ideology. It's actually more of an issue of diversity, but without regulation there is nothing to ensure diversity. America is demographically diverse and would choose diverse radio talk shows if they were offered, but it isn't in the interest of big business to offer diverse programming.
I came across this issue before and wrote about it in an earlier post:
Ralph Brauer: Revolutions & Liberal America
The Strange Death of Liberal America
By Ralph Brauer
pp 32-36
A second decision that became equally important for the Counterrevolution was the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. First enacted in 1949, the FCC ruling looked into the future and decided that because they operated in the public interest, the mass media should present all sides of controversial questions. The Supreme Court upheld the Fairness Doctrine in the 1969 Red Lion case, still generally considered as one of the Court's landmark decisions.
Red Lion not only involves the Religous Right but also foretells exactly what would happen with repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. The case began when the Reverend Billy James Hargis, the Jerry Falwell of his day, accused the author of a book on Barry Goldwater of being a communist. The author sued under the Fairness Doctrine and the Court found in his favor. In its decision the Court said the Fairness Doctrine serves to "enhance rather than abridge the freedoms of speechand press protected by the First Amendment." It also noted that "when a personal attack has been made on a figure involved in a public issue" the doctrine requires that "the individual attacked himself be offered an opportunity to respond."
In 1987, an FCC packed with commissioners appointed by Ronald Reagan voted to repeal the Fairness Doctrine. When Congress tried to overrule the decision by passing a law extending the doctrine, Reagan vetoed it. Just as the Buckley decision opened the door to single-issue PACS, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine opened the door wide for ideologues like Robertson.
I don't know what this means for the future, but it does explain how conservative ideology has became so dominant in recent decades. I hope it changes as the demographics keep shifting towards the liberal. Conservatives have a tight grip, though, and they're not going to give up their position of power without a fight. The corporations that fund the conservative media have deep pockets and the Republican party has proven itself savvy in astro-turfing social movements. Conservatives have been able to challenge abortion and public option even though the majority of Americans support them. How can liberals successfully fight such media control. If conservative corporations ever find a way to control the internet, the liberal movement is a lost cause.
In context of all this data and analysis, there is a related problem. To determine if there is a liberal bias, one would have to determine what is 'liberal'.
First, the American public isn't polarized despite the fact that the political representatives of the American public are polarized and despite the fact that the mainstream media portrays the American public as polarized. Most Americans are 'moderates'.
Second, although 'moderate', most Americans (along with most media and politicians) have a very biased view of 'liberalism'. Most Americans actually hold many liberal views even while holding a negative view of 'liberalism' as a label.
Let me give a couple of examples:
- Most Americans aren't 'pro-choice' about abortion in terms of it being entirely unregulated, but this is a 'moderate' position. Most pro-choice activists aren't for complete deregulation just like most gun rights advocates aren't for complete deregulation. Still, most Americans are for the right of women to choose for themselves and they don't want Roe vs Wade to be repealed. This moderate to liberal position has remained consistent for quite a while.
- Most Americans are for the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana use. This is a flagship issue for among progressive liberals. Conservatives claim Obama is far to the left and yet Obama laughed off the idea of legalization/decriminalization as if it were a radical notion unworthy of being taken seriously. So, the average American is more liberal than Obama on this particular issue. This isn't surprising considering Democrats on average are centrist (not the same thing as moderate; the center of Washington politics isn't the center of public opinion).
For 'Liberal' NYT, Taxing the Rich Is a Fringe Idea
By Jim Naureckas
The New York Times is one of the most effective tools for limiting discussion in the U.S. political system. Falsely perceived as a left-leaning outlet, it has the power to make the most reasonable proposals seem ultra-radical by placing them beyond the pale.
[…] In other words, proposals like progressive taxation should be avoided because people might call you a liberal. This from the daily news outlet that was named by journalists most often when asked to name one that was "especially liberal."
For the record, taxing the rich is not an idea that has "a chance of winning broad public support"–it already has broad public support.
This is a very important insight.
Extremely conservative opinions get voiced in the mainstream such as with Fox News, but what is perceived as extremely liberal doesn't. The particularly significant aspect is the perception of what is liberal or conservative, what is mainstream or radical. Some pundits who act like populists may not actually espouse populist opinions. And some opinions that get denied or ignored in mainstream media might actually be popular opinion.
Because of this bias, smaller protests on the right such as the Tea Party get positive media attention and lots of it, but larger protests on the left such as the anti-war movement get negative media attention or else little attention at all.
The following criticisms of a study demonstrates the problems this can lead to. If the labels used themselves are biased, one will come to biased conclusions about bias.
Former fellows at conservative think tanks issued flawed UCLA-led study on media's "liberal bias"
Definition of bias categorized ACLU as conservative
Any quantitative study of this sort must take a complex idea — in this case, "bias" — and operationalize it into something that can be measured. But given its rather odd operationalization of "bias," it is perhaps unsurprising that the study's scheme leads to some categorizations no observer — on the right or the left — could take seriously, including the following:
- National Rifle Association of America (NRA) scored a 45.9, making it "conservative" — but just barely.
- RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization (motto: "OBJECTIVE ANALYSIS. EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS.") with strong ties to the Defense Department, scored a 60.4, making it a "liberal" group.
- Council on Foreign Relations, whose tagline is "A Nonpartisan Resource for Information and Analysis" (its current president is a former Bush administration official; its board includes prominent Democrats and Republicans from the foreign policy establishment) scored a 60.2, making it a "liberal" group.
- American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), bête noire of the right, scored a 49.8, putting it just on the "conservative" side of the ledger.
- Center for Responsive Politics, a group whose primary purpose is the maintenance of databases on political contributions, scored a 66.9, making it highly "liberal."
- Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense policy think tank whose board of directors is currently chaired by former Representative Dave McCurdy (D-OK), scored a 33.9, making it more "conservative" than AEI and than the National Taxpayers Union.
We leave to the reader the judgment on whether anyone could take seriously a coding scheme in which RAND is considered substantially more "liberal" than the ACLU. But this is not the only problem with Groseclose and Milyo's study; they lump together advocacy groups and think tanks that perform dramatically different functions. For instance, according to their data, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the third most-quoted group on the list. But stories about race relations that include a quote from an NAACP representative are unlikely to be "balanced" with quotes from another group on their list. Their quotes will often be balanced by quotes from an individual, depending on the nature of the story; however, because there are no pro-racism groups of any legitimacy (or on Groseclose and Milyo's list), such stories will be coded as having a "liberal bias." On the other hand, a quote from an NRA spokesperson can and often will be balanced with one from another organization on Groseclose and Milyo's list,
The problems with the Groseclose/Milyo study of media bias
…The authors also display a remarkable ignorance of previous work on the subject of media bias. In their section titled "Some Previous Studies of Media Bias," they name only three studies that address the issue at more than a theoretical level. All three studies are, to put it kindly, questionable…
Although the authors seem completely unaware of it, in reality there have been dozens of rigorous quantitative studies on media bias and hundreds of studies that address the issue in some way. One place the authors might have looked had they chosen to conduct an actual literature review would have been a 2000 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Communication (the flagship journal of the International Communication Association, the premier association of media scholars). The abstract of the study, titled "Media bias in presidential elections: a meta-analysis," reads as follows:
A meta-analysis considered 59 quantitative studies containing data concerned with partisan media bias in presidential election campaigns since 1948. Types of bias considered were gatekeeping bias, which is the preference for selecting stories from one party or the other; coverage bias, which considers the relative amounts of coverage each party receives; and statement bias, which focuses on the favorability of coverage toward one party or the other. On the whole, no significant biases were found for the newspaper industry. Biases in newsmagazines were virtually zero as well. However, meta-analysis of studies of television network news showed small, measurable, but probably insubstantial coverage and statement biases.
Standard scholarly practice dictates the assembly of a literature review as part of any published study, and meta-analyses, as they gather together the findings of multiple studies, are particularly critical to literature reviews. That Groseclose and Milyo overlooked not only the Journal of Communication meta-analysis, but also the 59 studies it surveyed, raises questions about the seriousness with which they conducted this study.
Indeed, they seem to be unaware that an academic discipline of media studies even exists. Their bibliography includes works by right-wing media critics such as Media Research Center founder and president L. Brent Bozell III and Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine (now deceased), as well as an article from the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. But Groseclose and Milyo failed to cite a single entry from any of the dozens of respected scholarly journals of communication and media studies in which media bias is a relatively frequent topic of inquiry — nothing from Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Political Communication, or any other media studies journal.
If you're interested in a summary of the research done on media bias, I think the following is a fair and useful summary:
Media bias in the United States
A 2000 meta-analysis of research in 59 quantitative studies of media bias in American presidential campaigns from 1948 through 1996 found that media bias tends to cancel out, leaving little or no net bias. The authors conclude "It is clear that the major source of bias charges is the individual perceptions of media consumers and, in particular, media consumers of a particularly ideological bent."[78]
Self-described as "the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly,[79] a study by political scientists Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Missouri at Columbia, both of whom have written for conservative think tanks (American Enterprise Institute), advocacy groups (Federalist Society), and periodicals (The American Spectator),[80]was published in December 2005 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The study's stated purpose was to document the range of bias among news outlets.[81] The research concluded that of the major 20 news outlets studied "18 scored left of the average U.S. voter, with CBS Evening News, The New York Times andThe Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal, while only the Fox News "Special Report With Brit Hume" and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter." The study also identified the Drudge Report as "left of center". In this study, "left" and "liberal" are treated as synonyms, and are identified with think tanks cited by Congressional members of the Democratic Party, while "right" is identified with think tanks cited by Congressional members of the Republican Party. The report also states, however, that the news media show a remarkable degree of centrism, since all but one of the outlets studied are, from an ideological point of view, between the average Democrat and average Republican in Congress.
The study met with criticism from many outlets, including the Wall Street Journal,[82] and Media Matters.[83] Criticisms included:
- Different lengths of time studied per media (CBS News was studied for 12 years while the Wall Street Journal was studied for four months).
- Lack of context in quoting sources (sources quoted were automatically assumed to be supporting the article)
- Lack of balance in sources (Liberal sources such as the NAACP didn't have conservative or counter sources that could add balance)
- Flawed political positions of sources (Sources such as the NRA and RAND corporation were considered "liberal" while sources such as the American Civil Liberties Union were "conservative".)
Mark Liberman, a professor of Computer Science and the Director of Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, has pointed out a number of statistical flaws in this study.[84][85] According to Professor Liberman, the model chosen leads to "very implausible psychological claims, for which no evidence is presented." He concludes by saying that "many if not most of the complaints directed against G&M (Groseclose and Milyo) are motivated in part by ideological disagreement — just as much of the praise for their work is motivated by ideological agreement. It would be nice if there were a less politically fraught body of data on which such modeling exercises could be explored."[84]
A 1998 study from FAIR found that journalists are "mostly centrist in their political orientation";[86] 30% considered themselves to the left on social issues compared to 9% on the right, while 11% considered themselves to the left on economic issues compared to 19% on the right. The report explained that since journalists considered themselves to be centrists, "perhaps this is why an earlier survey found that they tended to vote for Bill Clinton in large numbers." FAIR uses this study to support the claim that media bias is propagated down from the management, and that individual journalists are relatively neutral in their work.
Examining the "Liberal Media" Claim
Journalists' Views on Politics, Economic Policy and Media Coverage
The findings include:
- On select issues from corporate power and trade to Social Security and Medicare to health care and taxes, journalists are actually more conservative than the general public.
- Journalists are mostly centrist in their political orientation.
- The minority of journalists who do not identify with the "center" are more likely to identify with the "right" when it comes to economic issues and to identify with the "left" when it comes to social issues.
- Journalists report that "business-oriented news outlets" and "major daily newspapers" provide the highest quality coverage of economic policy issues, while "broadcast network TV news" and "cable news services" provide the worst.
First, it is sources, not journalists, who are allowed to express their views in the conventional model of "objective" journalism. Therefore, we learn much more about the political orientation of news content by looking at sourcing patterns rather than journalists' personal views. As this survey shows, it is government officials and business representatives to whom journalists "nearly always" turn when covering economic policy. Labor representatives and consumer advocates were at the bottom of the list. This is consistent with earlier research on sources. For example, analysts from the centrist Brookings Institution and right-wing think thanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute are those most quoted in mainstream news accounts; left-wing think tanks are often invisible. When it comes to sources, "liberal bias" is nowhere to be found.
Second, we must not forget that journalists do not work in a vacuum. It is crucial to remember the important role of institutional context in setting the broad parameters for the news process. Businesses are not in the habit of producing products that contradict their fundamental economic interests. The large corporations that are the major commercial media in this country—not surprisingly—tend to favor style and substance which is consonant with their corporate interests; as do their corporate advertisers.
It is here, at the structural level, that the fundamental ground rules of news production are set. Of course, working journalists sometimes succeed in temporarily challenging some of those rules and boundaries. But ultimately, if they are to succeed and advance in the profession for any length of time, they must adapt to the ground rules set by others—regardless of their own personal views.
If you'd like to hear a detailed debate about media bias, the following video includes the views of Tucker Carlson and Eric Alterman:
I'm going to end by bringing this back to the issues from the first video at the top of this post. That video is a preview of a documentary put out by an organization that offers some other documentaries I find relevant to the issues I've been discussing. In particular, I'd point out the documentary 'Mean World Syndrome'. I posted about it a while back and here is some of my commentary:
My only criticism of this documentary was that it demonstrated the effect of violence in media, but it didn't fully explore why the media focuses so much on violence. There is more to it than just the public likes violence and those producing media are simply seeking profit. I don't think it's accidental a world of fear is created by media of violence. Those in power (media owners and politicians) want a world where people live in fear and want a public that is divided because that maintains and increases their power. The mainstream media, as Chomsky and others have pointed out, follows a propaganda model.
I would add that those in power want a political narrative of ideological divisiveness, of polarization and perceived bias. Portraying violence is one way to accomplish this, but any kind of social conflict (real or perceived) will serve the same purpose.
This discussion of bias isn't just abstract theorizing or partisan rhetoric. There is massive influence on the public depending on what media is viewed and how the media presents the news. Here is from another post I wrote where I was asking about the correlation between the conservative worldview and violence:
So, when the rightwingers are hot and bothered about some new xenophobic fear, it's hard for the liberal minority to counter it. This is particularly problematic considering social stress/uncertainty, fearmongering, and violent imagery can even make liberals more open to conservative views and more willing to accept authoritarian policies.
Liberals who gleaned most of their news from television in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks increased their support for expanded police powers, bringing them closer in line with the opinions of conservatives, a study by a UW-Madison researcher shows.
In contrast, heavy newspaper reading by liberals was related to lower levels of support for expanded police powers and for limits on privacy and freedom of information, basically reinforcing the differences between liberals and conservatives, says Dietram Scheufele, a journalism professor who conducted the study.
"TV pushed the two groups together in their thinking about post-9/11 policies, such as the Patriot Act. It made liberals more conservative. It took them away from what they initially believed and pushed them more toward a more conservative law-and-order stance," Scheufele says.
The study, soon to be published in the journal Mass Communications & Society, is based on a survey of nearly 800 residents of Tompkins County, N.Y., in the fall of 2001, shortly after the attacks. Its results have been validated by two subsequent national surveys.
The survey showed that among liberals who watched little television, about 20 percent favored more government police powers. But about 41 percent of liberals who were heavy viewers of TV news supported such measures – much closer to the 50 to 60 percent of conservatives who supported greater police powers, regardless of how much TV news they watched.
The gap between conservatives and liberals widened, however, among heavy newspaper readers.
About 39 percent of light-reading liberals backed restricting freedom of speech in the days after the attacks, versus 31 percent who were heavy newspaper readers. Among conservatives, about 66 percent favored the limits, and nearly 70 percent of heavy readers backed the restrictions.
"Newspaper reading tended to reinforce partisan leanings, partly because it is more selective, readers have more options and seek out their own viewpoints," Scheufele says. "By contrast, TV coverage is very linear, doesn't offer any choice and was more image driven. You saw the plane hitting the building time and time again."
I can't prove an intentional agenda by those who own and manage the mainstream media, but it's obvious that it's in their interest to influence the public in certain ways. Consider this in the context of two facts. First, the mainstream media is owned by a handful of parent companies. And, second, a central engine of the US economy is the defense industry. With the military-industrial complex, there are many connections between the public and private sectors. Many parent companies that own the media also own defense industry companies. Many major investors in media companies are also major investors in defense industry companies. There is often a revolving door between Washington politics, corporate lobbyists, and the mainstream media.
Basically, my point is that whatever bias might exist in the mainstream media it certainly isn't of a progressively liberal slant.


text:
It's Halloween season, the time of the year when it is acceptable—and even expected—to scare the living tar out of the children in the neighborhood as they come to your house asking for candy. Here, we compile 14 projects from Instructables that will make your haunted home the envy of all others on the block.
The Ultimate Haunted House Control Unit
Eric Wilhelm, president and co-founder of Instructables, describes how to build an incredibly innovative and complex solid-state controller that can manipulate lights, fog, animatronics and sound in a glorious choreographed Halloween production.
More From Popular Mechanics
Creepy Fingers on Your Tombstone
Fingers reach over the top of a grave branded with your name--and winds make the fingers wiggle.
The 7-Ft-Tall Jack-in-the-Box
Whether or not the audience is afraid of clowns, a 7-ft-tall Jack-in-the-Box is sure to strike fear into the heart of any onlooker.
House Goblin Peepers
These cuddly, hand-sewn goblins are half-cute, half-grotesque--and the perfect addition to any haunted house.
The Talking Skull and Pumpkin Halloween Animatronics
Whether you want your dormant skulls to tell jokes or give a pronounced "Boo!", here's your complete guide to the art of animatronics.
Dropping Spider Silhouette
This classic Halloween project is easy to implement and does wonders for the spooky ambience.
Turn a PC into a Magic Mirror
If you have a spare PC and are willing to cut a large hole in your wall (or erect a false one!), this is the ultimate party trick.
An Easy DIY Graveyard Fence
This simple fence is a must-have for any haunted house.
Cemetery Gates
The master's graveyard fence.
Yarn Spiderwebs
Here is an easy--and less messy and wasteful--alternative to the department store cobwebs.
Hologram Illusions
What's better than a magic mirror? Star Wars-quality holograms.
Make A Cool Hologram Illusion! - Awesome video clips here
Climbing Halloween Skeletons
No, these skeletons don't actually climb, but they are the most frightening roof decorations around.
Styrofoam Mausoleum
For a backyard graveyard in an hour, turn to styrofoam.
Werewolf Head on the Wall
Combine this project with your animatronics skills (above) for a stylish and scary addition to your walls.


text:
Where did the billions spent on elections come from?
This editorial appeared recently in the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison.
Six billion dollars.
That's how much money campaigns and their supporters are expected to spend on the 2012 elections, according to the latest estimate by the Center for Responsive Politics.
It's a huge and stunning amount that's only likely to increase in future elections. So voters at least deserve to know where all the big money is coming from.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that money is essentially speech that must be allowed. But the same court has encouraged Congress to require more disclosure of the donors who are doing the speaking.
Money that goes directly to the candidates already is tracked. But money spent by outside groups that mostly attack political opponents is harder to identify. This includes groups such as Americans for Prosperity on the right and the Greater Wisconsin Committee on the left.
Congress should require these shadowy organizations to disclose all of their donors who give $10,000 or more. That won't take the money out of politics. But it will give citizens more information about who is trying to influence their votes. And it will hold accountable more of these groups for what often are terribly misleading if not flat-out wrong claims and accusations.
The race for president, of course, is the biggest-spending affair, accounting for about $2.6 billion of the projected $6 billion for federal campaigns this cycle, according to the CRP. ...
Bills requiring more transparency (60 days before elections) at the federal and state levels enjoy bipartisan support.
Let's get this done in time for the next big splurge.


text:
There's an interesting conversation going on at Historiann's blog about peer review. It's especially interesting to librarians I think as a peek behind the curtain of academic publishing – at least a glimpse of what it's like in certain disciplines.
I have always wondered how closely my experiences writing in the peer-reviewed library science literature match the reality of publishing in other disciplines – and I've assumed that they don't match that well. It's a little heartening to see some of my frustrations echoed here – especially where she says "Journals also seem to have no shared rules or system of peer review." The amount and type of peer review I've gotten for my articles has varied pretty dramatically, and the extent to which I have been able to see and incorporate the reviewers' thoughts has varied as well.
This is my favorite part – even though most of the post is about why this is an idealistic picture of a process that doesn't look like this very often:
What's not to like, with a fair and humane group of supportive senior scholars freely sharing their wisdom with their (usually junior) colleagues? Furthermore, having one's work reviewed by supportive senior scholars is a really great way of making new friends and influencing influential people. I've had that experience a few times–and I'm truly grateful to the people who lent their time and expertise to make me a better historian.
I like this because I think it's easy to forget this reason for the peer review process. At this point, with a huge structure of scholarly publishing, employment and reputation that both supports and relies upon our faith in the peer review process as a guarantor of quality – I think it's easy to forget the "peer" part of peer review. And I also think that remembering it can help us as we figure out how to talk about peer review in a time where the landscape of scholarly communication is changing.
Right after I read this, I read the Tenured Radical's lovely post remembering Charles Tilly, who died on April 29th. The whole piece is a wonderful tribute. This segment particularly struck me after reading Historiann's description of ideal peer review as "a fair and humane group of supportive senior scholars freely sharing their wisdom with their (usually junior) colleagues?"
I didn't know that at that moment in time you got Chuck and Louise as a package, and that once you fell into their orbit you never really left. You became part of this network of astonishing people with capacious intellects who came in and out of town, moving through offices that were a hive of activity, research and ideas. Looking at something I had written one day, Chuck said, "Theda Skocpol is coming through next week — let's have her take a look at it and pick her brain." Chuck ran a proseminar on the state which was my principle intellectual context during my final years in graduate school: one fall, in the first meeting, I walked in and sitting around the table were E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Bridget Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm.
What's not to like, indeed?