Google News, 'real paper' newspapers

OK, I usually start my day with Google News. Just reading the large media U.S. news sources does not cut it if you want an unbiased view of the world (Google News is unbiased in the sense that it provides a larger statistical sampling of news from around the world).

In the U.S., a few mega corporations own most of the news outlets that people are exposed to. This does have an affect on news coverage. For example, not to pick on General Electric, but: GE owns NBC so it would seem natural for NBC news to selectively de-emphasize news that was not in GE's interests. Nothing sinister, just business...

Both my wife and I are so much into getting our news on the web, that we actually cancelled our 'real paper' newspaper. Now, newspapers are funded by advertising so they are effectively available almost for free (I think that we only paid $2/week: essentially free, except for the guilt when I would haul 50 pounds of newspapers down to our local recyclers).

One U.S. news source that I think is excellent (and I periodically donate money at their web site) is The Christian Science Monitor: broad and fair coverage of the news. I especially like it when they cover a subject in real detail (very much like PBS news does). For example, their research piece on Neoconservatives and their blueprint for US power provides useful information on the people behind the "George Bush throne" - interesting reading for sure.

I am not sure about the name "Christian Science Monitor", since religion does not seem to be particularly covered in their news site.

Also, I found the Who Owns What site to be a good source of information on media ownership.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a way,
Read more

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon
Read more