CNN iReports = FAIL!

[TheSportsPredictor]

http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/081003/business_us_apple_jobs.html?.v=6

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An Internet report claiming that Apple Inc chief executive Steve Jobs has had a heart attack is not true, the company said on Friday.

Responding to a report in "iReport", a citizen journalist web site owned and operated by Time Warner Inc's CNN, Apple spokesman Steve Dowling told Reuters by email: "It is not true."
 
The report claimed Jobs was rushed to the emergency room after suffering "a major heart attack."

Asked for further details about the status of Jobs' health, Dowling repeated: "The story is not true."

The report has since been removed from iReport. A CNN spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Congrats, CNN. You are contributing exactly what journalism needs -- less oversight, more amateurism. Way to go!!

[slappy4428]

An example of community journalism at its finest

[jps]

but they're getting a bunch of hits on the site!

[The Granny]

but they're getting a bunch of hits on the site!

And these people work just as hard.

[slappy4428]

Is there no honour in these iReports?

[Mediator]

Who wants to pay for the iMilk when you can get it for free?

[tapintoamerica]

I'm waiting for one of these Citizen Journalists to produce something that's libelous and not merely inaccurate. I pray for the day, in fact.

[DanOregon]

Considering that automated web browsers that pull up old articles on Google and Yahoo and an iReport like this can cause a company to lose tens of millions of dollars in stock value in an hour, I don't think libel is even the biggest problem.
Won't be too long before day traders figure out a way to rig a run on a stock with some carefully placed Internet misinformation.

[markvid]

But Ricky Sanchez loves his Twitter!

[slappy4428]

But Ricky Sanchez loves his Twitter!

And he thinks he's lovely and talented

[markvid]

But Ricky Sanchez loves his Twitter!

And he thinks he's lovely and talented

I quit watching CNN during the day because of him.

[BYH]

BLOGS!!!!!!!

[FileNotFound]

You get what you pay for.

[TheSportsPredictor]

Complete idiocy:

CNN spokeswoman Jennifer Martin said the SEC contacted iReport.com Friday afternoon, and that the site's staff is "doing its best to provide them with information about the posting."

Martin said that "Johntw," the author of the Steve Jobs post, had never posted in iReport.com before. She did not know when the person joined the site.

IReport.com's "citizen journalists" are not required to give their real name when registering, though they must submit a working e-mail address.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081003/steve_jobs_rumor_sec.html?.v=2

Let's see ... Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, Larry King. Johntw, welcome to the club.

[markvid]

Yeah, they'll track them down off the email...guaranteed. I'm sure they're quaking in their boots.

[host]

I just finished posting the "news" that an original "story" I developed months ago (and could not persuade anyone in the commercial press to present as "news".....) was uploaded on Ireport, 18 hours agp, and is now the #1 result fo the principle term searched, on Google News:
http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/index.php?topic=59176.50

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&um=1&tab=wn&q=gray+davis&ie=UTF-8

I am hoping that this kind of a breakthrough development will put a dent in this:
(You're in the business, so I'll leave it to you to decide if it's survived Upton Sinclair's era....)


As far as the awareness level of most voters. How do they even "know what they know", with this as the history: (Many mistakenly believe that the US press has "liberal" bias...)

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0502rwmscott.htm
Monthly Review May 2002 Robert W. McChesney and Ben Scott

"The other book, besides The Jungle, was The Brass Check, which he published himself in 1919. In The Brass Check, Sinclair made a systematic and damning critique of the severe limitations of the “free press” in the United States. “(T)he thesis of this book,” he wrote, is “that American Journalism is a class institution serving the rich and spurning the poor.” ....Sinclair drew an analogy between journalists and prostitutes, beholden to the agenda, ideology, and policies of the monied elites that owned and controlled the press. It was an integral part of his broader critique of the corruption of U.S. politics and the appalling nature of capitalism: “Politics, Journalism, and Big Business work hand in hand for the hoodwinking of the public and the plundering of labor” (p. 153)......

... In the text of the book itself, he called it “the most important and most dangerous book I have ever written”(p. 429)."

...and in 1934, when Sinclair won the California Gubernatorial primary:     

http://backissues.cjrarchives.org/year/92/5/sinclair.asp
CJR, Sept/Oct 92   Upton Sinclair's surprise victory in the California Democratic primary of 1934 frightened the California business establishment -- and the California press lords -- as did nothing before or after.....

 ...but no mention of EPIC rallies or speaking engagements by candidate Sinclair. At dinner that night he queried the paper's political editor, Kyle Palmer. "Turner, forget it," Palmer replied. "We don't go in for that kind of crap that you have back in New York -- of being obliged to print both sides. We're going to beat this son-of-a-bitch Sinclair any way we can. We're going to kill him."

Ireport can "cover" the fact that the corporate press is the Mighty Wurlitzer of the entrenched, right wing, US controlling elite.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm

[Birdscribe]

Considering that automated web browsers that pull up old articles on Google and Yahoo and an iReport like this can cause a company to lose tens of millions of dollars in stock value in an hour, I don't think libel is even the biggest problem.
Won't be too long before day traders figure out a way to rig a run on a stock with some carefully placed Internet misinformation.

It won't be too long... because it's already happened -- in 1999

http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/148156/

[host]

I know the teen who pulled off this fake financial news article stock scam, and because of his age, he got a slap on the wrist:
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-53869861.html

Are any of you frustrated enough, especially after the bailout of elite debtholders on Friday, to work at exposing the right wing US establishment....the elite who pay your salaries.....as the pox on all of our houses that they truly are? They are the first to use propaganda, and then violence if they feel even the slightest hint of insecurity or domestic political threat. It has been that way since the Ludlow, CO massacre of strikers in 1914, and as recently as in the response in St. Paul, just last month.

If you are a student of history, you are aware of the potential now for an economic depression and the dislocation it portends.

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930522&slug=1702558....Sinclair seethed at what he called a "concrete wall" that kept accurate information from the American people.

It was the Associated Press, the country's dominant news service, that infuriated Sinclair most of all. "The directors and managers of the Associated Press were as directly responsible for the subsequent starvation of these thousands of Colorado mine-slaves as if they had taken them and strangled them with their naked fingers," he contended.

Sinclair presented AP with evidence that Colorado's governor had lied to President Woodrow Wilson about the state's role in the miners' strike. When the news agency refused to report on the matter, Sinclair telegraphed the information to 20 of the nation's biggest newspapers.

He later observed: "There was no capitalist magazine or newspaper in the United States that would take up the conduct of the Associated Press in the Colorado strike."....

I want to use Ireport to inform the public via well documented pieces, that there is only one party in the US:

Gore Vidal: We only have one political party in the U.S., and that is the property party, which essentially is corporate America, which has two right wings, ...
cgi1.usatoday.com/mchat/20030204001/tscript.htm

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0502rwmscott.htm

....Anticipating much of the best in more recent structural media criticism, Sinclair explained the class bias built into journalism in a four-part systemic model emphasizing the importance of owners, advertisers, public relations, and the web of economic interests tied into the media system, and invested in its control of public opinion. Integrating the critique of the press into the larger history of Progressive Era activism, Sinclair pointed to the centrality of the media in all of the problems of social injustice which attended the rise of modern capitalism.

Yet, those historians who bother to mention The Brass Check dismiss it as ephemeral, explaining that the problems it depicts have been solved....

........Critics loosely charged that Sinclair had been sloppy with his facts in The Brass Check, and the book did not stand up to close scrutiny. Sinclair, a fanatic for factual accuracy, directly challenged any of those he criticized in The Brass Check to sue him for criminal libel—often in the footnotes of later editions of the book—if they could prove a single word in the text was false. No suits were ever forthcoming. Indeed, in 1921, the Associated Press announced it was appointing a commission to review, collect evidence, and denounce the charges Sinclair made about the AP in The Brass Check. The project was quietly abandoned without any report, formal or informal, being issued (p. 376).

In our view it was this smear campaign, more than anything else, which led to the virtual disappearance of The Brass Check by the middle of the century. ....

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair

The Brass Check (1919)

* Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters.

* The methods by which the "Empire of Business" maintains its control over journalism are four: First, ownership of the papers; second, ownership of the owners; third, advertising subsidies; and fourth, direct bribery. By these methods there exists in America a control of news and of current comment more absolute than any monopoly in any other industry.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/21/202233/597/208/605918

The top five percent in the US, according to the FED 2004, SCF, own:
page 27

...Ownership shares. For some assets, the distributions of the amounts held are far more disproportionate than the differences in ownership rates. MOST STRIKING is the 62.3 percent share of business assets OWNED BY THE WEALTHIEST 1 percent of the wealth distribution in 2004 (table 11a); the NEXT-WEALTHIEST 4 percent OWNED ANOTHER 22.4 percent of the total. Other key items subject to capital gains also show strong disproportions: THE WEALTHIEST 5 PERCENT OF FAMILIES OWNED 61.9 percent of residential real estate other than principal residences, 71.7 percent of nonresidential real estate, and 65.9 PERCENT OF DIRECTLY- AND INDIRECTLY HELD STOCKS. For bonds, 93.7 PERCENT OF THE TOTAL WERE HELD BY THIS GROUP....

...and economist Dr. Hussman asks congress:

Why on earth would Congress put the U.S. public behind these bondholders? ...

[old_tony]

Considering that automated web browsers that pull up old articles on Google and Yahoo and an iReport like this can cause a company to lose tens of millions of dollars in stock value in an hour, I don't think libel is even the biggest problem.
Won't be too long before day traders figure out a way to rig a run on a stock with some carefully placed Internet misinformation.

Or Harry Reid can do the same thing simply by shooting off his mouth.

[WazzuGrad00]

Is Host the guy who hates Gray Davis?

[Cadet]

Are any of you frustrated enough, especially after the bailout of elite debtholders on Friday, to work at exposing the right wing US establishment....the elite who pay your salaries.....as the pox on all of our houses that they truly are?

No. Because I am a sportswriter. I attend low-level high school volleyball games and keep stats with different colored pens. I may work for the LIBRUHL MEDIA but I answer to (in order) my sports editor, managing editor, editor in chief, publisher and the occasional enraged swimming parent. As I advance in my career, my job will still involve coverage of sports. It will likely not involve taking on the "pox of the right wing establishment."

You clearly have no concept of how all this works. It's like telling a third-grade teacher in Fort Collins, Colo. they need to take down the Bush Administration because NCLB is flawed.

[host]

'srry Buckweaver, I admit to being brevity "challenged". The point is that the $700 billion bailout should be the shot heard round the world, and the opportunity offered by Ireport at least holds the potential to break through the "concrete wall" Upton Sinclair said,

......that kept accurate information from the American people.......

....because journalists face an uphill battle, even if inclined to bite the hand that feeds them, and the sheeple have become conditioned to defend the elite, instead of challenging them. The view the elite as the American Idol or lottery winner, and they identify with him, because they fantasize that they can join them, so why oppose them.

There is no opposition voice, and the sign is that the most "liberal senator", Obama, is positioned to the right of 1950's president Dwight Eisenhower on progressive taxation, commitment to defending and Israel dramatically more able to take care of itself than when Eisenhower rejected growing Israeli influence on outcomes of US elections, on pre-emptive use of force, and on military spending levels....Obama wants to increase US ground forces by 92,000 troops. Eisenhower would not have signed the surveillance/telecom amnesty bill.

The right leaning elite pick both presidential candidates, and destroy any voice emerging from right of center, and the sheeple cheer as their conditioning predicts that they will. The thread at the top of this section of the forum is titled:
"Are You Getting Out of The Business"..... Mayber some of you can be inspired, or angered....enough to take your communication and reporting skills in a new, constructive direction....if it isn't already too late.....

[host]

Are any of you frustrated enough, especially after the bailout of elite debtholders on Friday, to work at exposing the right wing US establishment....the elite who pay your salaries.....as the pox on all of our houses that they truly are?

No. Because I am a sportswriter. I attend low-level high school volleyball games and keep stats with different colored pens. I may work for the LIBRUHL MEDIA but I answer to (in order) my sports editor, managing editor, editor in chief, publisher and the occasional enraged swimming parent. As I advance in my career, my job will still involve coverage of sports. It will likely not involve taking on the "pox of the right wing establishment."

You clearly have no concept of how all this works. It's like telling a third-grade teacher in Fort Collins, Colo. they need to take down the Bush Administration because NCLB is flawed.

Cadet, grrreat Post !!!! ....and I don't "hate" Gray Davis.....I just thought it was amazing that he could change his name, even on his drivers license, and then just stay silent and hide his own family skeleton while Schwarzenegger, who was upfront and asked the Wiesenthal center to investigate the elders in his family, way back in 1990, and an incurious California politcal press permitted Davis to hide his notorious "traitor" grandfather, throught three gubernatorial campaigns..... and no one views it as unusual, a black mark on the reputation of the press, or even something to report as a curiousity.....

 The Official German Report: Nazi Penetration, 1924-1942 - Page 239
by Oetje John Rogge - National socialism - 1961 - 478 pages
 http://books.google.com/books?id=82ohAAAAMAAJ&q=rogge+%22Gentlemen,+I+have+reviewed+Mr.+Davis%27+proposition&dq=rogge+%22Gentlemen,+I+have+reviewed+Mr.+Davis%27+proposition

[Inky_Wretch]

My, my. You are quite the one-trick pony, host.

[host]

Just uploaded another one:
My latest: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-105119

Has uncovering "the secrets of the powerful", ever been a pursuit of corporate owned media, or has it always been left to the likes of Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell to accomplish?