Wise Attention Choices

Society implies that it is your civic and moral duty to keep abreast of every tidbit of news and current events. Yet, in this era more, information is generated on earth in one second than you can take in the rest of your life.

The notion that you can watch the news, read the paper, or scan the Web to catch up on events is erroneous. You can only keep abreast of a small amount of information. So make wise choices about where you want to offer your time and attention.

Skepticism is a Virtue

Michael Gartner, journalist, lawyer, and former head of NBC News suggests asking yourself the following ten questions as you read, watch, and surf:

1. Is the guest expert being paid?

2. Who posted the information? Unless this is clear, it's useless.

3. Who stated the information? Anonymous quotes don't count.

4. What was the question? In any poll, stop reading or listening if the reporter doesn't give the wording of the question, the sample size, and the date of the poll.

5. What is the answer? If an allegation is made in a story, is the reply included in the story as well? If not, it's one-sided.

6. Why should I believe you? Any opinion piece is simply that, an opinion unless the writer has incontestable facts.

7. How can I believe you? If the reporter's on a talk show, touting partisan politics, how can he/she be writing a column next week that supposed to be straight news?

8. Does anyone believe this? Absolutely ignore person-on-the-street interviews or focus group stories that purport to speak for the state or for the nation.

9. Are the words loaded? I "say," you, "allege." My friends are "associates," yours are cronies," etc.

10. Do I really care? Because the headline is large doesn't mean the issue is important.

Source: Michael Gartner

It's official: Polls are Bogus

In his illuminating book. The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls
David W. Moore, who has been praised as a "scholarly crusader" by the New York Times, reveals that "pollsters don't report public opinion, they manufacture it."

"Drawing on over a decade's experience at the Gallup Poll and a distinguished academic career in survey research, Moore describes the questionable tactics pollsters use to create poll-driven news stories-including force-feeding respondents, slanting question wording, and ignoring public ignorance on even the most arcane issues. More than proof that the numbers do lie, The
Opinion Makers clearly and convincingly spells out how urgent it is that we make polls deliver on their promise to monitor, not manipulate, the pulse of democracy.

What's worse, says the author, today's polls "report the whims rather than the will of the people due to an intrinsic methodological problem: poll results don't differentiate between those who express deeply held views and those who have hardly, if at all, thought about an issue. Thus, respondents are compelled to provide an ill-considered, top-of-mind response because the method does not offer the option of expressing no opinion."

Moore says that forced-choice polls not only distort public opinion, they create a legitimacy spin cycle, which damages U.S. democracy...

Magazines Come and Go

Watsonville, CA - “Hundreds of new magazines are launched every year in the United States and Canada but most cover the same topics as what's already available on the newsstand,” according to a study by Wooden Horse Publishing reveals.
"Magazine publishers seem content to follow each other like lemmings," remarked Meg Weaver, owner of the Wooden Horse Magazines Database, an online magazine resource for publicists, writers and researchers with information on over 2,000 US and Canadian consumer and trade publications. "And over the proverbial cliff most of them go as 60% of all new magazines fail in the first year."

And this was Before 9-11

“Biggest U.S. spy agency choking on too much information”

By Correspondent David Ensor, 07/01

FORT MEADE, Maryland (CNN) -- The largest U.S. spy agency, the National Security Agency, is in crisis, overwhelmed by too many targets, too much information and the challenges created by increasingly sophisticated technologies.

The NSA is headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, about halfway between Washington and Baltimore. With its 38,000 employees, it is more than twice the size of the CIA, and at least twice as secretive.

"It produces, probably produces, 80 percent of the intelligence the United States uses," said James Bamford, author of "The Puzzle Palace." The agency's mission is to listen for threats to U.S. national security and it faces an increasingly daunting task.