Comments on tuesday march 13, 2007 : interview | Rocketboom

post a comment refresh page

62 Comments on tuesday march 13, 2007 : interview

Drew

First!!

3 years ago ∞
Reply
1. justjeff
  
  Very funny, Drew!
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
2. Nab
  
  It’s pink behind your name! I want a special color too!!
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
3. Kam
  
  You look good in pink Drew but if you start giving out colors, I want paisley, mostly in earth tones.
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
4. f
  
  fff
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
5. f
  
  fff
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
6. FEderelosin
  
  for usa & europe
  http://buy-tramadol-order.com/Venlafaxine/index.html
  http://buy-tramadol-order.com/Vitamin/index.html
  http://buy-tramadol-order.com/Tramadol/index.html
  http://buy-tramadol-order.com/Trazodone/index.html
  http://buy-tramadol-order.com/Sibutramine/index.html
  http://buy-tramadol-order.com/Sildenafil/index.html
  
  http://buy-tramadol-order.com/Paroxetine/index.html
  http://buy-tramadol-order.com/Levitra/index.html
  http://buy-tramadol-order.com/HIV/index.html
  http://buy-tramadol-order.com/Finasteride/index.html
  http://buy-tramadol-order.com/Fluconazole/index.html
  http://buy-tramadol-order.com/Fluoxetine/index.html
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
iSmart

Mr Rather, I indicate B.S. on you!

3 years ago ∞
Reply
1. yatta
  
  On which part?
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
  1. iSmart
    
    When he said “I’ve spent nearly all of my life aspiring to be an honest broker of information.”
    
    3 years ago ∞
    Reply (Comments won't nest below this level)
Richard Prince

iSmart — if you only had a brain of your own and could stop spouting and mimicking all the hype based on ideological propogranda and hate… Mr. Rather admits to an imperfect world, one in which he lives and participates but you have some unrelenting self-righteousness that results in simplistic blather and bellicoist grunts and utterings about things you know nothing about, amounting to nothing more than noise and litter on the information highway. When Rather says, I don’t blog because I don’t know if I’d be good at it, thank goodness someone has the wisdom to be self-critical enough not to blog because there is soooo much trash out there in the blogosphere that doesn’t need to be said, including the thoughts of the self-proclaimed iSmart. Don’t we all wish many many more would have enough respect for the people to not fill the world with self-righteous unconsidered opinions and crap. Wisdom is acquired after years and years of experience, lots of learning by listening, reading (lots of reading) and not just a bunch of hate-spuing crap like you see all over in the media today. Even moreso on the internet with spammers, flammers, and hate-mongering bloggers like Matt Drudge… astonishing really. No perspective. No humility and zero wisdom.

3 years ago ∞
Reply
1. iSmart
  
  I used my brain when I formed my opinion. How unfortunate that you chose to accuse me of being ignorant, self-righteous, simplistic, bellicose, full of noise, disrespectful, full of hate-spuing (sic) crap, etc. What is fortunate, however, is that you have the right to do so. Oh, and so do I, my friend!
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
  1. Kam
    
    Dong! round 2
    
    3 years ago ∞
    Reply (Comments won't nest below this level)
ChuckOlsen

i had the echo problem earlier on Mac/Safari, but seems to be fine now.

3 years ago ∞
Reply
iDrifter

I quit and restarted Safari twice then all was fine.

3 years ago ∞
Reply
happy_phantom

no echo here; but do i notice a slight decrease in picture quality there, or is that just me? somehow joanne appears less sharp than she used to.

3 years ago ∞
Reply
1. Nab
  
  Ya, she has the compressed out-of-focus look.
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
  1. Kam
    
    I thought I forgot to put on my reading glasses or clean my screen.
    
    3 years ago ∞
    Reply (Comments won't nest below this level)
nex

Joanne is as sharp as ever, but the picture of her is suffering from unusually high compression artefacts. It’s good that the bandwidth requirement has been toned down a bit and more people can watch it streaming without waiting, but the encoding could be tweaked a bit.

About something else: HELP! This episode hasn’t showed up on dotsub yet. No idea whether that’s the fault of the Rocketboom admins, but maybe something to look into.

3 years ago ∞
Reply
1. yatta
  
  We had to rush up a lower quality encode b/c Drew and I had to rush to get on a plane in Austin this morning. We hope to have a better clip. Thanks for the heads up.
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
  1. nex
    
    Ah, so it was just a one-time thing, and the dotsub clip showed up shortly after I posted that, too; all is well now :-) And kudos for taking the time to follow the comments on a travel day, much appreciated!
    
    3 years ago ∞
    Reply (Comments won't nest below this level)
gmrbill

Ah, the corporate media’s guiding hand is certainly in evidence today. Dan Rather used to be a journalist and news reporter and probably did try to be an honest broker of news. His job at CBS was as a news anchor, or perhaps I should say, news reader. I doubt he was part of the investigative team (what there was of it) that looked into the officer evaluation of W. He may have been given the leeway to comment on it (instead of just report it as so MANY news shows do these days) and did so because of his personal politics.

Liberals may run most news programs, but conservatives own them. If it sells, manufacture it. Dan was right - we need to let the sunshine in. Unfortuantely, good news does not sell. It’s always the controversy. And if there is no controversy, the conservative owners will tell the liberal managers to re-package it so there is, unless they do it on their own, of course.

There are enough idiots on both sides of the aisle. I think Dan was wrong about the audience. “Individuals are smart. People (audiences) are dumb.” We don’t teach enough logic and debate in schools anymore for people to think for themselves. They’re given “the news” in 1-2 minute sound bytes, steeped in emotion and controversy. Why? So they don’t have time to think - only form a bond with the anchors so they’ll keep tuning in, keep up the ratings, and ultimately, the demand on advertising revenue. There really is no news anymore - just a great many “story shows”.

Drew, where is the preview button?

3 years ago ∞
Reply
1. Nab
  
  I don’t think the schools can solve this problem with more logic and debate. In fact, schools mostly numb kids brains and make them dumber, while teaching them how to not think. Students are rewarded for accepting authority and repeating what they are told.
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
  1. gmrbill
    
    Um, that was partially my point. It’s not that they need “more”, it’s that students aren’t being taught thinking skills in the first place. I should have phrased myself better. It’s a pain w/o the preview button and no line breaks. (No worries, Drew! I understand growing pains - I have two teenagers in the house.)
    
    3 years ago ∞
    Reply (Comments won't nest below this level)
  2. Richard Prince
    
    Schools… I think we put far too much of the balme in culture on “the schools” when, in fact, the entire cultural fabric is evolving in some cases; devolving in others and is being corrupted and if you are a teacher or in a school, you can only be astonished at the level of disfunction of students. Their parents are destroying their lives by burdening them with a whole range of psychological disorders and dependencies. And it isn’t only young kids, it is students in Universities and Colleges. I taught in a University and was astonished at the inability of the students to think, write, debate, and even perform basic reasoning functions. It is way, way, way too easy to blame the schools. Look around. The culture is corrupted by consumerism, bad government with our top leaders on the take, and a atmosphere that is not only avidly anti-intellectual but also suspicious of free-thought and freedom of expression. The dominant and pervasive marketplaced simply wants us all to be obsessive consumers. You can’t blame the schools but they are a part of the problem. Kids get more coordination skills from horrendously violent video games thanh art classes; get their writing skills from chat rooms and facebook than libraries and English class; get their civics training from hanging out in the shopping malls than from social studies class… the list goes on and on. Students are numb when they walk in the door. Consumer culture teaches them “not to think” and instead BUY. These issues are embedded deeply in the values of the culture and schools are just as much a victim of the culture as the students are when it comes to DUMB. We need to look hard at how we perputrate a culture of idiotic mediocracy. I remember at the start of the desktop “computer revolution” how this was the smart answer to the passive “boob-tube” mentality of culture. And now, everyone (including Apple Inc.) are trying as qucikly as they can to replicate the TV viewing culture of the “boob-tube” generation on the internet.
    
    3 years ago ∞
    Reply (Comments won't nest below this level)
B-man

drew the echo problem is still there. I am not downloading Firefox.
Hope you fix the problem. Otherwise I\’ll be gone, be gone, be gone….

Safari 1.3.2
OS X 10.3.9
Mac G4

No scroll bar either…

Can\’t update due to megahz restriction

3 years ago ∞
Reply
B-man

I reset my browser-nothing works

there are exactly 3 voices overlapping each other. Not two, but three…

annoyed…over and outta here!

3 years ago ∞
Reply
1. Richard Prince
  
  BYE-BYE B-man!
  
  Don\’t you just love when people dump their crap on everyone else?
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
leron

I have bumped into Dan Rather at various events over the years, notably in 1980 at the Democratic Convention, where I literally bumped into him in front of Madison Square Garden. It was entirely my fault, I was walking one way and looking the other. He was awful nice about it. I was just glad I didnâ€™t get his suit dirty.

I think Ratherâ€™s track record shows him to be a better and fairer journalist than most and he’s been a hero of mine for a long time. That he got snookered at the end of his CBS career is a tragedy that has allowed people who didnâ€™t like his particular brand of sunshine to baselessly demonize him.

Let us not forget that he admitted he was wrong about the Bush/National Guard documents, took responsibility for it and apologized on the air. If President Bush ever did that, people would assume heâ€™d had a stroke.

I do disagree with him, however, that thereâ€™s nothing inherently wrong with a couple of big media companies directing the news. Maybe heâ€™s been in the majors too long. The reason we see so little hard-hitting reporting is because for the most part, itâ€™s bad for business. Especially at the local level, where publishers and editors are always terrified that theyâ€™ll get sued out of existence, even if theyâ€™re stories are accurate, for pissing off the wrong person. Dana Priest is the exception, not the rule, and if she was working for a weekly instead of the WaPo, her employer would have gotten a visit from the FBI a couple years back and sheâ€™d probably be reading the weather on an AM station somewhere in Indiana, instead of exposing secret CIA prisons and the evil ways injured vets are being treated. (Iâ€™m guessing sheâ€™s going to pick up her second Pulitzer in two years for the Walter Reed story.)

And I think Rather was being far too nice to bloggers and blogging. Itâ€™s not just integrity and sincerity that bloggers need. Itâ€™s training and experience as journalists. Most bloggers are little more than whiners with keyboards. Why do people assume that journalism, unlike firing a rifle or driving a car, is something you can just do without having to learn it and practice it first? Sheesh.

Newspapers ainâ€™t what they used to be. But still, your average daily newspaper reporter can write and report circles around your average blogger. A good reporter could walk into a district court clerkâ€™s office anywhere in this country and come out with a good story (and a cup of coffee), write it up in 45 minutes, in AP style no less, with an editor standing 6 feet away tapping her watch, all the while knowing that a serious fact error could cost the paper a fortune and end his or her career.

Of the bloggers I know, maybe 5 percent could manage that. And theyâ€™re just about all ex-reporters.

You need a knowledge of public records and how systems work, and how people really behave within those systems. You need street smarts and a willingness to do lots of really boring stuff, like getting acquainted with the numbers deep down in the city budget, because it might pay off down the road. You need to know how to talk a pissed-off cop out of arresting your fotog at a crime scene, and how to talk to a woman whose whole family just died in a house fire.

These are not things you learn sitting in your family room scanning Yahoo news and writing what you feel.

The Net has tremendous power to de-centralize the gathering and dissemination of news. I think this is an incredibly exciting time to be alive for that reason. But I also think the need for editors has never been greater. And the first person to invent a filter that screens all the empty whining out of a blog feed is gonna be a billionaire.

(End of empty whine.)

3 years ago ∞
Reply
1. iSmart
  
  leron, thanks for the perspective. And, no name calling!
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
2. nex
  
  BUG REPORT: Dear Rocketboom web devs, the above comment is unreadable. Could we please have the ability to make paragraphs?
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
3. Kam
  
  leron, sounds like you speak from experience, so cool, thanks. (but why do your apostrophes look like a, euro dollar & a trade mark)
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
  1. nex
    
    On my Mac the characters do look approximately like apostrophes, so my educated guess is that Leon also has a Mac and presses something that vaguely looks like an apostrophe, but isn\’t one (such as an accent, or the prime symbol, or the foot symbol), and because your machine has a different character set, it comes out all wonky. By the way, the European currency is called Euro, not Euro Dollar :-)
    
    3 years ago ∞
    Reply (Comments won't nest below this level)
  2. Kam
    
    I stand corrected, but I still love the 10 bob note!
    
    3 years ago ∞
    Reply
4. Richard Prince
  
  The debate about corporate consolidation of the media has been going on for the past 50 years or longer. In 1958 Eric Sevareid appeared on WGBH\’s \”Press and the People\” where host Louis Lyons said \”With my associates here, I am convinced that news is as essential as food and drink to a healthy democratic society. We want to go into it as far as we can to reach its fullest meaning.\” Sevareid warned of a media owned and controlled by a small group of people with vested interests and econmoic governors that would stifle free speech and marginalize criticism and dissent aimed at the government, public institutions, and greed that guides private economic concentration. I think there was a point in American history when I didn\’t matter if you were a conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, Libertarian or Socialist, eveyone could agree that the key to a free democracy is a media (newspapers, broadcast, radio and internet) that the press is not controlled, narrowly held, and free to act and report without government interference and censorship. People in every sector also highly questioned and put down forced top-down ideological conformity by partisan politicians like you see today on Fox News.
  
  Unfortunately, we now live with a government and executive branch who do not respect or honor these fundamental freedoms and democratic values and seeks to label and withhold massive amounts of government documents in \”secret\” and prosecute those in the press who report on them. The acts of our current government are so essentially un-American the founding fathers would be ashamed.
  
  However, I think the problem with the idealized and utopian vision of internet citizen journalism is precisely what we see here with this Dan Rather interview for Rocketboom. This interview would be considered amateur and unresearched at best in the world of professional journalism. People complain that Barbara Walter\’s lobs easy, meaningless, and empty questions but she\’s a hard driven shark compared to this interview of Rather. And, I\’m not saying a person has to take the tone of a accusor or muckraker to conduct an interesting interview (Charlie Rose has a gentler hand but still digs deeper) but I do think this was shallow and the interviewer was uninformed and unprepared.
  
  We don\’t need more and more channels of poor journalism, we need better channels for news and information to have a better informed nation.
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
leron

whoops. gotta get the hang of the line breaks.

3 years ago ∞
Reply
1. nex
  
  It wasnÃ„t your fault, that feature is currently missing. I hope it\’ll be fixed soon.
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
Matthew

finally a new rocketboom.

3 years ago ∞
Reply
iSmart

Drew, just for giggles I launched Safari (under OS 10.3.9) and got the same echoes that others have described. Under preferences: security, I unchecked \”enable plugins\” and relaunched. Of course, no video came up. Then I went back to prefs and rechecked \”enable plugins\” and it\’s working fine. I usually use Firefox, but I thought I\’d see if I had the same Safari problem.

3 years ago ∞
Reply
Kam

The sun should shine in real good through the depleated ozone layer caused by all the hot air the media blows up our ass.http://youtube.com/watch?v=bmI51Jfq0E4
Later people

3 years ago ∞
Reply
Zacharelli

Not inherently a bad thing? You can tell he\’s a company Yes man.

He has high hopes for unethical media executives to turn a new leaf, even while astute observers know that those executives make decisions that could be called criminal negligence, especially regarding 9/11 and Iraq.

He thinks the FCC isn\’t owned by the corporations? He\’s dreaming!

3 years ago ∞
Reply
drifter

We lost colan. Now we lost 2.0. Still got the map. Is this 3.0? Is joanne staying? Where can I get an official RB t-shirt? What ever became of Walter Creapo (sic)?

3 years ago ∞
Reply
nex

Oh, and … I\’ve asked it before and I\’ll ask it again: Where can you report mistakes in the transcript? I mean, is it possible to get them fixed? Today I found this gem: \”[The FCC] is supposed to represent our interests with the people\’s airways.\”

3 years ago ∞
Reply
brandon

WOW! I really wish I could have gone to SxSW, who needs school? :)

3 years ago ∞
Reply
1. Kam
  
  Here brandon: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6446599.stm
  
  3 years ago ∞
  Reply
wilson.inc

Damn, made me think I should have been there. Is Dan that important? I thought I should kneel.

3 years ago ∞
Reply
B-man

All I hear echoes. If if I stop the video the sound keeps going, echoing, echoing!Something is wrong Drew!
Safari browser - Mac OS X

3 years ago ∞
Reply

Leave a comment

Allowed HTML: <a> <img> <object> <embed> <b> <i> <strike> <blockquote> <code>
Sign up for Gravatar for a user icon

Name (required)

E-Mail:(not displayed)(required)

Website:

Reply to:

Recent Comments

Sweater Curse, 78 comments
- Vermeer: Dear Molly RocketBoobs, Cute bit! Love the fireplace thing....
- Omniofaco: 2:31 rape imminent.
- xXTobiUchihaXx: Yeah, you an me both, man. I think I would be something...
- Magik57: I would love a sweater, especially if it had a knitted version...
The Long and the Short of Film, 231 comments
- Ic1cle: Molly’s accent has gone English again. For a while there,...
Sesame Street & The Origin of Om nom nom nom, 1292 comments
- InnerRise: Girl: It’s more fun that way! (^-^) Cookie Monster:...
- 00DeViL00Girl00: it’s not that funny… =|
- Lordodragonss: He forgot about: Yell COOKIEEE part….
Know Your Meme: Auto-Tune featuring Professor “Weird Al” Yankovic, 2057 comments
- joshhann02: Different thing….do your research, sounds alike but...
Balloon Boy (Know Your Meme), 235 comments
- SerpentBlack1126: the pedobear pic really made me rofl

Elsewhere

[x] Close this window.