Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Obviously the camera crew had been waiting all day for them because we saw camera angles they weren't daring to use on other female performers.
Don't you mean the camera angles they were contractually forbidden to use on anyone? Why don't the PCDs just webcast their next visits to the gynecologist and be done with it - the funny thing is that they started out as a modern burlesque troupe, but there's absolutely no element of tease or showmanship. More like Triumph of the Will in matching thongs.
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That'll do, there's more but others probably have others to add. Kudos to Ricky Gervais who took the stage to point out that all the stars were flying in from all over the world on private jets to get us to cut CO2 emmissions. I was waiting for a punchline but there was none.
Well, I guess the thing is it's not really much of a joke. You know, like the 'Second Annual Green' issue of Vanity Fair a few months back -- a brick of glossy heavy stock that's racked up the air-miles, so you can toss off over more softcore Annie Liebowitz photos of George, and Brad, and Leo and Sheryl (one square of one-ply) Crow, and...um, Al.
Please, I don't want to crap on anyone who likes going to rock concerts or reading glossy magazines. But really... all that heat generated by smug and meaningless moral self-congratulation can't be good for the planet.
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All I'm saying is that Ben Goldacre is invaluable and I for one am grateful to the Guardian for publishing him. No other English newspaper that I'm aware of has a columnist doing this sort of debunking.
Fair enough, I just think the Guardian Media Group would do even more of a public service if Dr. Goldacre was also hired to do some remedial staff training. As Rodgerd say, you don't need a newsroom stuffed with Ph.Ds - just people who are scientifically and statistically literate enough to recognise bullshit when it's being shoved in their faces.
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Popular science reporting is basically crap, and, as Craig notes, this is in large part because it's handled by scientific illiterates. I don't think one needs a PhD to report on science, but a few years beyond the mandatory 5th form minimum wouldn't go amiss.
Well, sure, and I've said before I wish, with 20/20 hindsight, that I'd done a lot more science and math post-School Cert. Hell, I think ti would even be worth universities making a science/math componenet a requisite of all arts/humanities degrees (and vice versa); because there was a time where it was a commonplace that the aim of a liberal education was to furnish minds where botany and astronomy occupied the same space as Virgil and Shakespeare.
But I digress... I wasn't being entirely facetious when I made the crack about sports reporting. One of the humbing things about being a baby hack is that when you're shoved into the dreaded 'general news' round, you get a violent reality check on how little you really know. But it's your job to find out, or at least start filling your contact book (and showing my age, mine really was an indexed notebook not a PDA or IPhone) with folks who do know what they're talking about. But no editor would put someone on a sports round who couldn't tell a hockey puck from a basketball, so why accept lower standards when it comes to health reporting.
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I don't want to presume to speak for Russell, but here's what really pisses me off about stories like this: It's damn hard to make good decisions when you're being fed bad information. And the decisions folks like Russ and Fiona make where their sons are concerned have real consequences for real families.
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In defense of the Guardian stable, at least Ben 'Bad Science' Goldacre' will be around to give the article a thrashing later in the week.
Sorry, Terence, that's just not good enough. I don't think the Guardian or Observer would have someone covering football who (to put it crudely) knew fuck all about the game, and cared even less, but is remarkably tolerant of folks reporting on science and health issues who are basically scientifically illiterate and innumerate.
I think Paul Litterick has a point - it takes no imagination to predict what "break[ing] another Thalidomide story" would do for the careers of everyone connected to it. And no media outlet has ever gone broke stroking the hypochondriac paranoia of its readers.
But perhaps The Observer should be reminded why it's propretor, The Scott Trust, was established in the first place. According to to the Guardian Media Group's own website these are it's values:
CP Scott, the famous Manchester Guardian editor, outlined the paper’s principles in his celebrated centenary leader on May 5, 1921.
The much-quoted article is still used to explain the values of the present-day newspaper, Trust and Group. It is also recognised around the world as the ultimate statement of values for a free press.
Among the many well known lines are the assertions that ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’, that newspapers have ‘a moral as well as a material existence’ and that ‘the voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard’.
The essential qualities that Scott believed should form the character of a newspaper have been adopted as the values of the Scott Trust and GMG.
These values are:
* honesty
* cleanness (today interpreted as integrity)
* courage
* fairness
* a sense of duty to the reader and the communityPart of the Trust’s present-day role is to ensure that these values are upheld throughout Guardian Media Group.
IMO, I find it hard to see how this story meets any of those values.
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When Sky started running six minute breaks I finally gave up in disgust, and cancelled.
Sorry, but am I the only person who hits the mute button and does something else (six minutes is long enough to make a cup of tea and go to the loo) - or, considering how often I tape stuff, just fast forward though the ads?
Oddly enough the person I know who bitches about ads on TV the loudest has a coffee table groaning under airfreighted fashion mags - and a month where the majority of pages in Vogue or Vanity Fair aren't advertising is a very bad one indeed, at least as far as Conde Nast are concerned.
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And there would be more if a) the charter actually delivered quality, and b) there was more hard-edged journalism in the political arena.
Well, I guess then we'd have a Charter that would consist of one sentence: THOU SHALT NOT MAKE SHIT. The problem is that even the BBC - which is so often held up as the model of public service broadcasting - doesn't measure if. (And if you don't believe me, Prime-watchers, please compare and contrast Extras & Hyperdrive. Never thought I'd use the words 'Nick Frost' and 'as funny as being buggered with a broken beer bottle' in the same sentence, but there you go.)
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Other points in Trelise's favour were that Tamsin Cooper was 'only' her married name and the marriage didn't last long
Hum... I know I'm setting myself up for a beating here, but I wonder what high-profile divorcees who kept using their 'married' surnames like Cath Tizard, Roseanne Meo, Pam Corkery, Christine Rankin, and Jenny Gibbs would have to say to that? I suspect the response from at least one woman in the above list would be short, sharp and physically impossible. :)
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And there are times when I'm tempted to e-mail David Farrar and volunteer to help keep house after reading this kind of outright creepy drivel...
I said to my wife ,overseas in some places the neighbours would have burnt the house down, like in Iraq a thought ,positive direct action,burn them out and move them on, ,just a thought again.
Oy and vey...
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