Clearing out the Browser Tabs - A Recap of News Over the Holiday Break

Happy New Year! While our finals turned into a brief holiday hiatus, strangely, the news did not stop! Therefore, for my first post of the new year, I bring you a hodgepodge of stuff that has accumulated over the last couple weeks in my browser tabs.

From cell phones to torture to Angry Birds! I might actually start doing this occasionally as things happen in my areas of interest, but perhaps do not merit entire posts themselves.

"Both Sides" Journalism and the Role of Media's Subservience To Government

I'm a little late on this, but I wanted to mention something about the study that came out of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government a couple weeks ago, regarding newspapers' use of the word torture. Specifically, I want to use it to put in context my assertion that unfortunately, the potentially bad results of government funding of journalism are already here, with none of the benefits.

The study documents a "significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding." Basically, in the last 100 years, the newspapers discussed waterboarding occasionally and unequivocally called it torture, right up until the government began asserting that it was not torture.Glenn Greenwald sums up the implications well:

We don't need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task: once the U.S. Government decrees that a technique is no longer torture, U.S. media outlets dutifully cease using the term. That compliant behavior makes overtly state-controlled media unnecessary.

What it also does is make the bogeyman specter of government control irrelevant to the discussion because for better or worse (obviously worse) it's already here.