Sheldon Rampton's News Articles

Hadji Girl

by Sheldon Rampton — June 22, 2006 - 7:30pm
  • Topics: Iraq, Race / Ethnic Issues, Religion, Rhetoric

    • Joshua Belile performs "Hadji Girl" at the Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq.

    Video News Releases: The Fantasy vs. Reality

    by Sheldon Rampton — June 20, 2006 - 4:39pm
  • Topics: Video News Releases

    • Television stations have maintained a studied silence about our report on the use of video news releases, but the print media has fewer qualms about discussing it. Saturday's Indianapolis Star carried an op-ed piece by Jeffrey McCall, a professor of communication at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. McCall described the use of VNRs as a "sneaky strategy" by "some wayward television news operations" that blurs the line "between reality and fantasy."

    At Least the Lies Have Improved

    by Sheldon Rampton — June 17, 2006 - 11:10am
  • Topics: Iraq

    • Pundit Andrew Sullivan, who supported the war in Iraq but has lately begun to notice that he may have been mistaken, is nevertheless clinging to hope that the debacle can be salvaged. Yesterday he posted the following observations, from "a source of mine whom I've learned to trust as an honest observer," about the recent killing of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi:

    I am impressed with Casey, Khalilzad and the new Iraqi PM. ... As for Zarqawi, they all recognize the essential silliness of portraying him as the embodiment of the opposition, but given the resources the US has poured into this massive psyops, their feeling is: why not get a little boost out of it themselves? Hence the claim that it's the end of al Qaeda in Iraq, and the out-of-perspective presentation of al Qaeda's role in the insurgency. ... So: misleading, but very sound politics.

    Thinking About Think Tanks

    by Sheldon Rampton — June 13, 2006 - 9:26pm
  • Topics: Think Tanks

    • Juan Cole's website has an interesting commentary by William O. Beeman, titled "The Journalism/Think Tank Merry-Go-Round and the Dilemma of the Academic Public Intellectual." Beeman laments the fact that "think tanks, where no one ever has to go through peer review before publishing the most questionable material, are in the ascendancy. Real scholars are derided as the academy is openly attacked by these quasi-intellectual bodies." So who's to blame?

    Lazy, news-cycle driven and subject to the pressure of ideology and publicity flackers, it is so much easier to just call the think tank down the street, or a PR firm like Benador Associates where someone is on call and already in suit and tie, or skirted suit to get to the studio within the next 20 minutes, than to spend the extra half-hour trying to locate an ISDN feed in . . . Minneapolis or Austin to get the best possible expertise on a subject at hand. ...

    Sadly, the academy has reacted badly to this state of affairs--not by encouraging its members to shine the light on the slime and mold generated by these propaganda machines, but by fomenting retreat into its own dark little corner where it can be safe and "uncontroversial."

    Technorati-Edelman Mashup

    by Sheldon Rampton — June 3, 2006 - 11:07pm
  • Topics: Internet, Public Relations

    • Technorati, the leading search engine devoted specifically to bloggers, has partnered with the Edelman PR firm. According to Technorati vice president Peter Hirshberg, Edelman is providing support for an "accelerated development effort" to create Technorati offerings in languages including Chinese, Korean, German, Italian and French.

    Baghdad's Best Blogger

    by Sheldon Rampton — June 2, 2006 - 11:34am
  • Topics: Iraq

    • The blogger formerly known as Salam Pax has written a new post describing the current environment of chaos and fear in Iraq:

    I have newly found out that I should avoid getting out of Baghdad through a certain road to the south because the Iraqi Army battalion situated there really hates my family name.

    Achenbach's Back

    by Sheldon Rampton — June 1, 2006 - 9:08pm
  • Topics: Global Warming

    • Every once in awhile Joel Achenbach's name crosses my viewfinder. We were both undergraduates at the same time at Princeton, although our paths never really crossed socially. The first time he really caught my attention, actually, was a few years after we graduated, when the Princeton Alumni Weekly reprinted a hilarious column he wrote for the Miami Herald, satirizing the way television dumbs people down.

    It's Clobberin' Time

    by Sheldon Rampton — May 30, 2006 - 4:14pm
  • Topics: Video News Releases

    • Our senior researcher, Diane Farsetta, is one "bad mamma jamma" according to the author of "The Quincy Dump," who interviewed her for his blog about the Fake TV News report that she co-wrote and researched with Dan Price.

    Epublish and Interwiki Updates

    by Sheldon Rampton — May 28, 2006 - 12:33pm
  • Topics: Internet

    • I haven't been blogging here much lately, and there's a reason: I've been busy with some other projects.

    Support Our Props

    by Sheldon Rampton — October 14, 2005 - 3:07pm
  • Topics: Iraq, U.S. Government

    • The biggest surprise for me about the furor following President Bush's recent staged TV event with U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq was the media's newfound willingness to expose the facade. Bush has been conducting similar staged events for years now, and he rarely gets called on them.

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