musings about media, discourse theory and education
Best explanation of the financial crisis yet seen. Via John Bird and John Fortune’s satire on the South Bank Show.
The extract is actually over a year old, but more relevant than ever at the moment. Even includes a discourse analysis of the financial crisis (through the power of hedge fund names like “High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund”).
Via Stefan Niggemeier.
US-based innovative projects promoting critical, investigative journalism in the tradition of the muckrakers of old (descriptions from the organisations’ websites):
The Center for Investigative Reporting is a nonprofit organization that reveals injustice and strengthens democracy through the tools of journalism. Investigative reporting — requiring long lead times and significant investment of resources — is in short supply. Under increasing pressure to deliver higher profits for publicly traded media companies, editors and producers cut back on time and people first. The predictable outcome: a shortage of original, in-depth and risk-taking reporting, and a citizenry deprived of the information required to maintain a vibrant democracy.
ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that will produce investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work will focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We will do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.
The Center for Public Integrity is dedicated to producing original investigative journalism about significant public issues to make institutional power more transparent and accountable.
The Pulitzer Center promotes in-depth engagement with global affairs through its sponsorship of quality international journalism across all media platforms and an aggressive program of outreach and education.
A piece of the dockyard wall in Gdansk is to be exhibited in Berlin, the city most famous for its own wall, reports Katarzyna Tuszynska from Gdansk. The dockyard wall will be a memorial to the Solidarność movement, reminding visitors that the processes of radical transformation in Eastern Europe began in the Polish docks in 1980. The German President of the Bundestags Norbert Lammert met with the Speaker of the Polish Parliament (Sejm) Bronisław Komorowski recently to discuss the project.
Full story available from the n-ost news agency.
Received a letter from Dresden today. 
Sent through the private postal service
company called ‘post-modern’.
Dresden.
Always a forerunner in epistemological issues.
DeutschlandRadio’s hourly news bulletin this evening presents the “surprising” final ruling made by the International Criminal Court on the case brought by Georgia alleging Russian human rights abuses in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Judges called on both Russia and Georgia to halt human rights violations in the region. (Background text and photos).
The level of surprise will depend, perhaps, on which media the listener has been observing.
Update: 00:18. Watching BBC World news, and wondering if I misheard the German radio. Nothing on the BBC about the story. But, yes, according to a Reuters story posted on Wed 15 Oct 2008 at 2:37 EDT, a provisional court ruling was indeed made:
THE HAGUE (Reuters) – The UN’s highest court ordered Russia and Georgia on Wednesday to ensure the security of all ethnic groups in the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and adjacent areas of Georgia.
In a provisional ruling on a lawsuit filed by Georgia that alleged human rights violations by Russia in the region, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said Georgia and Russia must refrain from sponsoring any act of racial discrimination.
It also ordered both parties to do all in their power to ensure the security of persons, freedom of movement and the protection of refugees’ property.
The court ruled it had jurisdiction to order the provisional measures and ordered both parties to inform it of their compliance.
Court rulings, including provisional orders, are binding but the court has no police force to enforce its decisions. A judgment on the merits of the case proper could take at least another year.
This should prove provocative. Pravda.ru has republished Stanislav Mishin’s list of sixteen reasons why Russia should never trust the West. Full details available on his blog Mat Rodina. All the key words are included: Putin, Georgia, Islam, Taliban, Bush, Chechnya, Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky, oil, Kasparov, economy, democracy, Orthodoxy, Nazis, bombs…
More recent post on Mat Rodina, in a similar style: The Global Credit Panic Is Russia’s Chance to Reverse the Status of Colony.
NewsLab Russia, a new resource archiving extensive Russian television footage, and the first phase of NewsLab Eurasia, is now online :
The Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at UW Madison has launched an exciting new resource for students and scholars of postcommunist Russia: NewsLab Russia, an online digital archive of Russian television news. Part of NewsLab Eurasia, a broader effort to archive the news in post-Soviet states, NewsLab Russia utilizes new technology to make Russian news broadcasts available for analysis and classroom use. In its first year of operation, NewsLab Russia archived the main evening news broadcast on Russia’s three national television networks (NTV, Channel One, and Rossiya) during a period that encompassed the 2007 Duma elections, the nomination of Dmitri Medvedev to succeed Vladimir Putin as president, and the 2008 Russian presidential election. Support for this initial round of archiving was provided by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UT Austin.
NewsLab Russia draws on the resources of the University of Wisconsin NewsLab, a project initiated by Wisconsin political scientist Ken Goldstein to study local U.S. news. Content from Russia is “captured” from satellite feed and stored on servers in Madison, where Russian-speaking undergraduates “clip” the news, dividing broadcasts into segments and attaching category labels to each segment. Through an online searchable archive, anyone with an Internet connection who is willing to abide by basic terms of use has access to broadcasts from all three stations. Thus, for example, a teacher of Russian might search for a news segment on Russian-Ukrainian relations for instructional use, or a scholar might analyze all reports on Ukraine over a one-year period.
Further information about NewsLab Russia, including registration instructions and a link to the archive itself, are available at www.creeca.wisc.edu/newslabeurasia.
Ted Gerber, Director, CREECA, and Professor of Sociology, UW Madison
Jennifer Tishler, Associate Director, CREECA
Scott Gehlbach, Associate Professor of Political Science, UW Madison
Actually, I was looking for very specific information about NT&T, but — the beauty/danger of hyperlinks — I ended up discovering that these are the topics discoursology has been discussing recently:
Image courtesy of wordle.net; idea courtesy of alexocorton. Russia will return to discoursology soon.
Lance Newman’s 3by3by3.blogspot.com suggests a ‘recipe’ for making poems. Mine, based on three news stories about Russia yesterday – about the spacecraft launch, Georgia and Russia’s (other) neighbours – is now online.
Pick 3 stories from Google News. Using only words that occur in the first 3 paragraphs of each story, make a poem with 3 stanzas, 3 lines each, no more than 60 characters per line. The 3-word title should use a word from each story.
Mechanical aids encouraged. Try one of the Hobarts [on the site] if you’d like to work with a block of language that’s been randomized or run through an algorithm.
What: POETRY HEARINGS – Berlin Festival of Poetry in English
When: Fri 14 and Sat 15 November 2008
Where: Salon Rosa, above Sophiensaele in Berlin-Mitte
This year’s Poetry Hearings promise to be the strongest yet, with 10 poets from the US, UK, Ireland and Australia reading over two nights at Salon Rosa, above the Sophiensaele in Berlin-Mitte. Berlin favourite MC Jabber goes head-to-head with Jem Rolls, whose performances are currently taking Canada by storm. Critically acclaimed new Picador poet Annie Freud reads alongside Ben Borek, whose novel in verse Donjong Heights was described by Time Out as “truly fantastic”. Two nights of what might well be the most interesting and entertaining English-language poetry you’ll hear all year.
