“First, the public should be aware—warned, so to be speak—that its interests and those of the business press may not be in perfect alignment. The business press exists within the Wall Street and corporate subculture and understandably must adopt its idioms and customs, the better to translate them for the rest of us. Still, it relies on those institutions for its stories. Burning a bridge is hard. It is far easier for news bureaucracies to accept ever-narrowing frames of discourse, frames forcefully pushed by industry, even if those frames marginalize and eventually exclude the business press’s own great investigative traditions.”
“Second, there’s a difference between reporting from an investor’s perspective and from a citizen’s. The business press is better at the former than the latter, and the gap has only been growing. I would only caution that what’s good for investors in the short and medium terms may not be good for anyone over the long haul.”
via Power Problem : CJR.
Did financial journalism do its job? No. Dean Starkman lays it out.
Stephen Bernard of the Associated Press probably wouldn’t believe for one second that I could tell him, to the pound, the weight of all the rocks that fell off the Rocky Mountains during the past week. But he will — apparently without a scintilla of doubt — report that some company knows how much money was redeemed from the hedge fund industry in October.
Think about this for a second. Hedge funds are, overwhelmingly, private companies. Some of them report their performance data to various databases. Some firms even report asset data. But they don’t all report, and they mostly don’t supply monthly asset flow data…even to their own investors. Read more »
If you haven’t yet heard (though I am not sure how you could have missed it), Iran released pictures of a missile test they just conducted. The image they released was plastered all over newspapers world wide and showed 4 missiles taking flight simultaneously. The picture came from Agence France-Presse who said that they got the picture from Sepah News, they happen to be the media wing (or maybe propaganda wing) of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. There is something a bit menacing about the image of four missiles heading skyward in a successful test… That is until you study the picture a bit more.
It turns out that the missile, 3rd from the left was Photoshopped in. the dust cloud under the missile comes from the right hand side, the missile it self is identical to the one on the left hand side (the NY Times had a little fun with Photoshop themselves highlighting this). Now the question being raised is: Who is responsible for this? Read more »
Should we bring back the asylums of yesteryear?
Is the promise of modern medication exceeding its actual effectiveness?
These are questions that come to mind having read yesterday’s Freakonomics Quorum post by Stephen Dubner.
The column, How Much Progress Have Psychology and Psychiatry Really Made? is definitely worth reading in its entirety.
There is one section I would like to discuss and that has to do with a woman whose son was bipolar and who committed suicide when he stopped taking his medications. The writer says:
“Four years ago I lost a beloved son to suicide due to bipolar disorder. As devastating as this is, I do believe that the treatment he received increased his quality of life and chances for survival. His doctors and therapists were compassionate and concerned, working very hard to assess and adjust his treatments, and I came to respect the complexity of his condition and what they were trying to do on his behalf.
Is it possible he was in some ways a guinea pig in terms of the various medications he took? Perhaps, but I believe they were our only hope of giving him a chance in light of the seriousness of his condition and his previous suicide attempt. When he did complete suicide, we discovered that he had stopped taking his medications, so I don’t blame the medications, but the lack of them.”
Now as horrible as it may seem, I feel compelled to take issue with this lady. The problem which caused her son’s suicide was the fact that he stopped taking his medication. We have recently had a spate of mass murders in America committed by psychiatrically disturbed individuals who were mainstreamed in society because they were on medication. The problem that resulted in the killings has often been that the patient stopped taking the medication. Read more »
The Pulitzer Prize Award winners were just announced and you can see the full list of winners over at their website, or below the jump. Notice that there was no award given this year for Editorial Writing. Also notice Bob Dylan got a Special Citation “for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”
Reading through the Pulitzer requirements it is interesting to read up on what the award for Editorial Writing is all about:
11. For distinguished editorial writing, the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in what the writer conceives to be the right direction, in print or in print and online.
You would think in a year so ripe with topics that some one would stand out in the field. Maybe next year AM will have to toss its hat into the ring.
Here are a selection of quotes from some Pulitzer winners.
And a Reuters story by Andrees Latif about how he snapped his prize winning photo.
And The Winners are: Read more »
The staff of American Madness would like to thank the 