Media Bits and Bytes – Gazing Into the Abyss Edition

UK media eats crow; Facebook gets political; Rurals get unplugged; No jack makes jack; Times ethics; Detoxing from tech

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Unelectable Corbyn Elected Again!

Jonathan Pie is a fake news guy in the UK played by Tom Walker
September 25, 2016
YouTube
 

Did Facebook intentionally block profiles of Palestinian journalists?

By Amanda Hoover
September 26, 2016
Christian Science Monitor

Journalists working for two separate Palestinian publications had their Facebook accounts suspended this past week without any explanation. They say the social media platform may have taken its recent agreement with Israel to tackle online incitement to violence too far.
With more than 1.7 billion active users worldwide, Facebook has been the focus of not just recent Israeli and Palestinian complaints, but a growing debate over inherent political bias, censorship, and its growing role as a credible news delivery platform.

When Judges Pull the Plug on Rural America

By Susan Crawford
September 20, 2016
Backchannel

Right now we have an unacceptable patchwork of high-capacity, inexpensive connectivity in this country, with islands of competitive fiber internet access. When it comes to those islands, there is often a local hero (most usefully an elected official) who has surmounted tremendous opposition to upgrade his or her community. But large parts of land are entirely left out. Most crucially, there are rural areas in which you are 10 times more likely not to be able to buy high-capacity internet access at any price than people in urban places. As cruel circumstance would have it, sometimes the ignored parts are jammed right next door to the gigabit islands.
 

Apple Deleting the iPhone’s Audio Jack Is Good News for Marketing Companies

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By Joshua Kopstein
September 23, 2016
Motherboard

Apple’s much-anticipated decision to nix the headphone jack on its newest iPhone has understandably made a lot of people very angry. But there’s at least one industry that’s jumping for joy over the death of the ubiquitous audio plug: Marketing companies that track your phone’s location and target you with ads.
The reason for the celebration is Bluetooth beacons, a “proximity marketing” technology that’s been pushed by the ad-tech industry for years. The beacons come from tiny Bluetooth Low-Energy (BTLE) transmitters that have already been planted inside many retail stores, airports, and museums, which send signals to nearby mobile devices. If your device has Bluetooth enabled and comes in range of a beacon (say, in a clothing store) any apps you’ve installed that are listening for Bluetooth beacons can determine exactly where you are, target you with ads, or record your real-world shopping habits, among other things.
 

The Crisis at The Times And That Public Editor Piece

By Josh Marshall
September 13, 2016
Talking Points Memo

The contemporary journalistic concept of objectivity is not only rooted in professional and ideological developments of the early 20th century. It is also rooted in changes in the newspaper publishing industry in the middle and late 20th century. As an increasing number of American cities became single newspaper or de facto single newspaper towns, their financial footing became increasingly based on monopoly ad pricing. This made well-known newspapers very lucrative and consistently profitable businesses since they had de facto monopolies over commercial advertising in specific geographic areas. But it also made their business model rest on being the default news source for all news consumers in their geographic domain. Obviously there were boutique publications and TV. But before the Internet, this major city and even regional newspaper dominance was a huge fact of the journalism profession and the news business - and one many assumed was the normal state of things.
 

I Used to Be a Human Being

By Andrew Sullivan
September 18, 2016
New York

If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”