Wednesday, July 20, 2011

The New York Times Questions The Journal's Integrity

The Atlantic | The Players: The New York Times vs. The Wall Street Journal

The First Serve: Yesterday, David Carr of The New York Times wrote a column questioning the future of Rupert Murdoch and News Corps. "The News Corporation may be hoping that it can get back to business now that some of the responsible parties have been held to account — and that people will see the incident as an aberrant byproduct of the world of British tabloids," he wrote. "But that seems like a stretch. The damage is likely to continue to mount, perhaps because the underlying pathology is hardly restricted to those who have taken the fall."

Carr also pointed to Murdoch's strategy of burying problems: "And the money the company reportedly paid out to hacking victims is chicken feed compared with what it has spent trying to paper over the tactics of News America in a series of lawsuits filed by smaller competitors in the United States."

Fellow columnist Roger Cohen, who had previously defended Murdoch, furthered the conversation in a column that appeared on The Times's site yesterday (and appears in the International Herald Tribune, a Times company, today) which questions Murdoch's character. "Murdoch is a flawed genius whose very ruthlessness has now led him to his comeuppance," he wrote. "He knew, more viscerally than anyone, what postmodern societies wanted to satisfy their twisted appetites and he provided that material in all its gaudiness. I don’t think he created those appetites. But he sure fed them"

Meanwhile, Monday The Wall Street Journal published an editorial defending its owner and its integrity (and was met with a chorus of social media jeers--covered here). The board did not stop there and took the opportunity to lob barbs at The New York Times and The Guardian.
"We also trust that readers can see through the commercial and ideological motives of our competitor-critics. The Schadenfreude is so thick you can't cut it with a chainsaw. Especially redolent are lectures about journalistic standards from publications that give Julian Assange and WikiLeaks their moral imprimatur. They want their readers to believe, based on no evidence, that the tabloid excesses of one publication somehow tarnish thousands of other News Corp. journalists across the world."
The Return Volley: Schadenfreude? Chainsaws? Joe Nocera of the The Times responded to the WSJ's allegation of schadenfreude. "Well, yes, the schadenfreude is pretty darn thick," he writes in today's column. "Who would deny it? The whole thing reminds me a little of the ending of Ian McEwan’s wonderful novel “Solar,” in which the many awful things the central character has done in his long life suddenly come together to bury him in an avalanche of comeuppance. I’m O.K. with that."

8 comments:

umbrarchist said...

It's THE DAY!!!  That DAY!!!

42 YEARS after the Moon Landing!!!

{{{  The United States's Apollo 11 was the first manned mission to land on the Moon on 20 July 1969.[4] There have been six manned landings (between 1969 and 1972) and numerous unmanned landings.   }}}

What has the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal said about the planned obsolescence of automobiles in the last 42 years?  Mofo please!!!

The SR-71 Blackbird could do 2000 mph 5 years before the Moon landing.

Oh, It's about Murdoch.  Yeah, I'm all upset about that.  YAWN!

Everybody is supposed to give a damn because they keep making cars look different.  Is The Wall Street Journal not telling us all about the banks or the government messing up the money?  Yeah, that is so much more important than THE FACT that the Laws of Physics don't change style year to year.  Right!  That lack of change in style doesn't give newspapers anything to write about.  Useless changes in style do give newspapers something to write about.

How many TRILLIONS have Americans lost on the depreciation of automobiles since the MOON LANDING?

Who Cares?
.

CNu said...

Bro. Umbra will correct me if I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure he could give a rat's ass about depreciation as a general ledger adjustment, I think he's on about the pervasive and unforgiveable crime of planned obsolescence for which "depreciation" can serve as a form of sh.orthand

umbrarchist said...

It is about the relationship between mathematics and reality.  Properly used mathematics helps in the understanding of reality.  Improperly used the smart people confuse the dumb people about reality.

Economists hardly ever talk about Net Domestic Product.  But when you check their equation it is wrong.  I am sure I cannot explain how much that shocked me when I noticed that in 1976.  I have emailed hundreds of economists.

Running a world of 7 billion people on defective grade school algebra is being far out of touch with reality.  But when that equation was defined it was not so serious a problem.  There were fewer than 3 billion people on the planet.  Reality has changed since the early 50s.

Our economics is INSANE!  I don't know if the economists are insane or just liars.
.

Tom said...

Insanity and lying are woven into the fabric and culture of that field.  I've spent literally my entire life around economists.  You will never make them connect their math to reality. 

CNu said...

They're professional liars in the employ of the oligarchs (who else employs economists) - and probably many of them believe the fraudulent propositional calculus that they've been taught and that they profess  - much like the clerical proponents of false propositional religion. (EXACTLY LIKE CLERICAL PROPONENTS OF FALSE RELIGION)

John Kurman said...

Yeah, well remember what Richard Hamming  used to say (paraphrased): "Many a physicist and applied mathematician has gotten the right number with the wrong equation".

So, when you think about appplied use of the maths *seem* to correlate well with reality (an inference), adn that economists being too dumb to become mathematicians (like engineers being too dumb to be physicists, doctors too dumb to be biochemists, etc), what does that tell you?

umbrarchist said...

I do not doubt that has happened occasionally but I would certainly like to see trustworthy statistics on how often it happens.  I would expect something like this is more common.  Though hopefully rarely that expensive.

Metric mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter
http://articles.cnn.com/1999-09-30/tech/9909_30_mars.metric.02_1_climate-orbiter-spacecraft-team-metric-system?_s=PM:TECH

We have had economists doing bad math and emphasizing GDP instead of NDP for 60 years.  This is not just about money it is about wasted energy.  Wasted natural resources.  Think about all of the chrome plated bumpers that American cars used to have.  How many tons of chromium are scattered all over America in tiny flakes that cannot possibly be collected?  But we had cars that looked cool when they didn't look completely stupid.  So that $125 million dollars is nothing compared to the crash economists have set us up for in this century.

200,000,000 cars in the US in 1995.  At $1,500 per car per year that is $300,000,000,000 per year.  One trillion dollars every 3 years and 4 months.  That is just cars.  What about televisions, air conditioners, washing machines, refrigerators,.....  4.8 trillion for cars since 1995 but probably more since the number of cars increased.
 
I have worked on enough machines to see where a minor change could have eliminated failures.  But if the keep redesigning stuff every year they design in new flaws.  I would be very surprised if depreciation could not have been cut in half over the last 50 years.  But what would that do to GDP if people did not replace junk?  But how much pollution did making all of the junk create?

I tried getting an economist to explain to me how a piston engine worked once.  We have techno-idiots talking about production of things they don't understand.  If planned obsolescence is going on they really can't tell on the basis of their own knowledge.  Can they figure out if planned obsolescence is going on in computer software?  LOL 

Haven't you been hearing about Windows 8?  Another 8 ball to get behind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG86f3WCkmk

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