Astronaut Sandra Magnus who, at least for the next couple of days is serving on the International Space Station, wrote a captivating entry describing what flying over the dark side of the Earth looks like on her space blog which I only recently found out about. I’m dying to visit space!
Blog From Space: Waiting for night to come — in another 45 minutes or so
You may have noticed by now that I get a lot of my news from the Internet, and one disturbing trend that I’ve noticed lately is that it seems like a very large proportion of news stories that are published are actually just reports that another news agency reported on something, and it seems like hardly any real investigation or fact checking is going on.
Maybe the idea is that when you start a report with, “[Some Newspaper] is reporting that [So and So] is saying [such and such],” it absolves you of having to do any fact checking. After all, if you get something wrong, you can just claim that you were reporting what someone else reported! Is there any such thing as journalistic integrity anymore?
A big problem with this is the way the media will quickly latch onto a story and repeat what someone else has said — misinformation is often being fed under the guise of authority to an unsuspecting public who rightly assumes that someone should be checking all the facts before they make it to air.
Last night’s Colbert Report made fun of TV news coverage of a supposed CDC report stating that beer pong spreads herpes. Sensationalistic coverage about this supposed CDC report was spread to multiple sources without anyone bothering to check if such a report actually even existed (it doesn’t). This is a breakdown of journalistic integrity on many levels:
This is a test of my mobile updating system. This is only a test.
-Bryan
A while ago I was asked by a friend to work as a camera assistant on a short he had written and was producing. I don’t usually do AC work, and actually, I hadn’t done any real focus pulling since film school, but I’m always up for a film making challenge and they really needed somebody and I was told they were shooting on the RED camera, so I was in.
Over the last few years I’ve heard a lot of hype surrounding the RED camera and so last week I finally got the chance to work with one of these things and what better opportunity could there be to get my hands on one and see what it could do than to work with one as a 1st AC for a few days?
While I was watching my news subscription clips on YouTube today I noticed that the AP had posted a clips of both Obama and RNC Committee Chairman Michael Steele talking about the economic stimulus package.
I don’t know anything about macroeconomics but I do know about film making and thought it would be kind of interesting to compare and contrast the qualities of the videos themselves:
Like I said, I don’t really know much about macroeconomics so I’m not really going to try to compare and contrast their competing policies. Instead, I’m going to talk about what I do know about and compare and contrast the quality of the videos themselves and what it might mean.