News in 2010

After a few months of really hard work and insomnia and not meeting deadlines, I finally got a few days off. No big plans for these days, apart from catching up with some studying and watching some news. News…

So, this morning I was watching Fox & Friends and they showed images of an apparent riot at Moscow airport because people have been stranded there for days because of weather conditions, as have folks in the US and Europe. You can see the Euronews report here. Of course people are pissed off, nobody likes to spend even one hour waiting for an airplane. The problem with Fox & Friends was that, as they were showing the images of people protesting in Moscow, the hypothetical questions started and they were something like: ‘could we see something like this in NYC? People have been at the airport for three, maybe four days here, so could this be a possibility? If the situation continues, people might start doing the same…’

I saw the same story on CNNI, they showed the same images, but instead of coming up with hypothetical things and making audiences think, ‘uh, this WAS President Obama’s fault, he should be shoveling snow off the tarmac right now!’, I actually learned what was going on there.

This is something that really pissed me off this year: the hypothetical news, the passionate-blogger news, the no news-value news. And they’re everywhere.

I’m a big fan of Twitter, for me it’s the best way to compile all the organizations or people you want to get news from, but I guess in the urge of producing more and more content you can see stuff that, well, should be left unsaid, like when our local newspaper Correio do Povo reports something like: “Beach vacationers enjoy the day walking along the shoreline”. If you knew what the shoreline really looks like in my state, you’d be running like hell from it. (Oh, so maybe THAT’s the news! People enjoying themselves on the awful beach shore!)

Photo taken in Imbé

This year was definitely Jon Stewart’s year. Having a comedy show, it’s obviously easy for him to make fun of the absurdities that politicians and pundits say, but the different thing about him is that the show researches and checks facts before putting something on the air and one of his biggest trademarks is the sound bites shown to contradict what somebody is now saying so passionately on TV (this is now being used by AC360. Couldn’t have he done this before?) Anyway, one of my favorite moments was the ‘republicans will ride in the “back of the car”/”back of the bus” thing’. In the failed attempt to get people to vote in midterm elections, Obama said he wouldn’t give the car keys back and GOP would have to sit in the back of the car. Well, guess what Fox News reported…?

They simply progressively replaced “car” by “bus” and this obviously became a racial issue. The whole Jon Stewart segment can be seen here, really worth watching!!! What makes me angry is the progressive change, you know? Slowly and subtly during the hard news, and then boooom! Obama wants to send all Americans to concentration camps. In the back of the bus.

But I think one of the most outrageous passionate-blogger pieces of news was Obama’s trip to Asia last month. It all started with this Michelle Bachmann’s interview on AC360:

And it all turned out to be complete bullshit spread by those talk radio guys that for some reason have millions of listeners. That piece on AC360 actually generated comments on the NY Times, basically saying good job for the fact-checking.

It’s unbelievable that now pieces on good reporting are not given to Watergate-like articles or war stories, but to reports that straighten out fake/not fact-checked ones.

30-hour day for some 10 days would be perfect…

Never thought would have so much to do and such little time. We’re traveling next week to Santa Cruz and haven’t finalized all the activities yet. I believe I’m switching to panic mode between tomorrow and Wednesday if we don’t at least come up with the topics. We decided to split two days and do four shorter activities instead of the whole-day thing previously proposed. And obviously folks at the company called me all day but couldn’t reach me because I was involved in classes and meetings the whole day.  Needless to say that I’m pretty beat by now — it’s only Monday! — and I’ll only be able to relax a bit after the 18th — boy, will I celebrate the end of “Special Edition”!

Last week I was “asked” to leave the teachers’ lounge and move to the directors’ room, where the Corporate Coordinator works and the directors occasionally stay when they’re at the school. Today, one of them arrived and I offered my table, she refused. The room is ok but internet connection not so much. For some reason I had no internet access throughout the whole day, having one million things to do in between classes. If that becomes a pattern, well, it’s not gonna be good for anybody…

Also, I don’t think I like being in the “east wing”, you know, while all my material, the books, the printer and everything else is in the “west wing” of the building. I gotta admit, though, that staying in the teachers’ lounge can cause a little bit of distress at times. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a teacher as well and love chatting and exchanging ideas with my peers, but sometimes it’s virtually impossible to get some work done with lots of people speaking non-stop around you. One thing that I observed being in the same room as the Corporate Coordinator is that basically she’s passing on wrong information about the programme, so I must talk to her urgently otherwise it could be bad… One thing that wasn’t bad at all was the feedback from one “immersee”  we had last week, who happens to be the VP for one big company from outside Porto Alegre. The guy wants to have 20 more hours of class before his trip to Asia, which is awesome — expand services to his employees in the near future perhaps? — but we basically covered everything in 20 hours, so I’m not sure what could be done. Speaking of which, there are people at the school that are unwilling to, you know, do their job, meaning preparing classes. Do they expect me to have everything ready for them, so that they can just get the material, get in class and do their thing? Well, I don’t think so, my dear…

I saw this piece in NYT about the future of network news. Is there really anything that could be done in times of Facebook and Twitter and quality online content and livestream news — I get BBC World, Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle English, rfi English, Euronews and many more online — to save network news, not only in the US but worldwide? Let’s not forget that after Haiti’s earthquake, for many hours the population was basically providing all the images and videos seen on CNN and other channels. It’s hard to compete with 24-hour news channels when you are allowed only 22 minutes, there’s no way you can’t be superficial. Plus, there’s been a bigger contribution from regular folks — “iReporters” — in this process (Haiti’s example and most recently, Chile). If you have a camera and happen to be at the right place at the right time, do you really need a news crew to broadcast the event? A lot of job losses forecast, the job of correspondents might become something to be remembered dearly in the near future and more and more freelance reporters will be on the news and bringing the world’s stories to our TV sets/computer screens.