Regarding your
“5-pages-about-a-Russian-novelist-and-rubbish-to-the-biochemistry-graduate-in
mainstream-media” misery. I understand what you are saying about the poor
soul not being stimulated enough, but that is not “AS OPPOSED” to
literature, trust me.
I like reading Russian novels, and I don’t find these reviews exciting.
Either you have read the novel and then it is just somebody else who’s also
read it telling you what they think about it, or interviewing the author and
giving you some backround info about how they write with their eyes closed
in the dark and what they say about their own book. It might be kind of
“interesting” if you are in the mood, but that’s just it.
Or you haven’t read the book and then it is completely irrelevant. It might
“stimulate” you to read the book, but it is not academic or high quality
stuff: it is the literary equivalent of “beetroot causes cancer”.

A freshly picked cherry from yesterday’s Guardian:

“Perrotta isn’t an easy writer to classify. The New York Times described him
as an “American Chekhov” – “I don’t know what that means,” he grins, “but I
like it.” Others have drawn comparisons with John Cheever and John Updike.”

I mean what’s that??

transcript draft (7:20+)
>>
Blogs are potentially more reliable than mainstream media ever was. Mainly because you can check each individual blog author how credible they are because bloggers link to primary sources. So, in the newspaper you might say, [??? either it's in print or it's not, and so I think it's true or not, and it's, like, this percentage chance of being true ???]. With a blog, I can go, allright, he talks about a scientific paper, he links to it, so I can go read the paper and see if he has given an accurate precis of what they did and what they found, he’s got comments, so if there were any really massively obvious holes in his argument apart from, [???] arguments, you know, if there’s serious criticism to be made, then, you will see it written there, but also, if he responded to someone else’s ideas, a blogger will link—she—a blogger will link to that other person’s argument, and then you can see for yourself if they fairly represented it or if they’ve given you a strawman misrepresentation. You can very rapidly develop a sense of whether somebody is an idiot or not. And, I see it, in print it’s impossible to do that. Journalists even now—I find that fascinating—go out of their way to hide the mechanics of how they do their job from the general public. You know, and [???] most of the quotes that you see in a newspaper article, they’re taken from press release. But they write it as if they spoke to the person. In reality, the individual people that journalists have in their stories, you know, like “one woman’s struggle against X,” in reality, they have been sourced, from someone like the [???], it’s like a dating service, a matching system, journalists go to [???] a secret, hidden story behind the rubbishness of the news, journalists go on and say, “Oh, I’m looking for, you know, a … fat person who lost a lot of weight, and then put it all on again, or something. Can you find that for me?” And they always [???] subscribe to that one channel and run around, and go around, and try to find a person who fits the journalist’s requirement for the story. And then they get it to him and place the product in it. And, you know, journalists are desperate to sort of hide the process of what they do, whereas in blogs it’s all entirely transparent. [??? I give up.]
>>

Cheers,
J.

blog.matthewcain.co.uk/mail-readers-reject-cancer-scare-story/

www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1043673/The-anti-MMR-mothers-putting-danger.html

Then followed months later by weasel-wordy talk of the still “controversial MMR” as if they’re afraid to admit something. It would be funny if it wasn’t so totally depressing.

Anyway, sorry. Derailing over.

In the same way that Ben earlier described the process of the DM and others to divide everything into A: causes … B: cures … cancer, but A and B are not disjoint sets in that media world.

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1149322/How-middle-class-MMR-refuseniks-putting-child-risk.html

Did I just slip into a parallel universe or did the last bastion of MMR-scaremongering just join the Wakefield-lynching side.

Beyond that, who knows, although the plagiarism was pretty annoying.

Don’t we humans have cubicles ?

“Response Source Porn *shudder*”

I’ve had plenty of that… last week my inbox was like Bad Science Bingo, I was in heaven