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Catching up on a backlog of links… Here are several items about news, media, and journalism which caught my attention over the last month.

TOP OF THIS LIST: Media / Political Bias, an essay by Andrew Cline in Rhetorica. Thoughtful discourse by a former journalist who explores, in details, the various kinds of bias that exist in journalism. This completely bypasses the false liberal/conservative dualism and goes right to the heart of the matter.

Brief excerpt: “Is the news media biased toward liberals? Yes. Is the news media biased toward conservatives? Yes. These questions and answers are uninteresting because it is possible to find evidence – anecdotal and otherwise – to ‘prove’ media bias of one stripe or another. Far more interesting and instructive is studying the inherent, or structural, biases of journalism as a professional practice – especially as mediated through television. I use the word ‘bias’ here to challenge its current use by partisan critics. A more accepted, and perhaps more accurate, term would be ‘frame’…”

Read the rest of this list…

1. Ultimately, Newspapers Can’t Move the Earth: In this Aug. 22 commentary, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz delves further into how the oft-touted liberal or conservative bias of the media obscures a far more complex and nuanced reality.
2. One Block Radius: This is a project by Brooklyn artists Christina Ray and Dave Mandl (known collaboratively as Glowlab). As I explore it I see how this approach holds intriguing potential for both journalism and e-learning. “Engaging a variety of tools and media such as blogs, video documentation, maps, field recordings and interviews, Glowlab creates a multi-layered portrait of the block as it has never been seen before.” Very, very cool.
3. 10×10: This innovative photography project by Jonathan Harris has literally made me look at news in a new way. It’s a slick and surprisingly functional integration of a news photo database and a Flash interface. It’s made me realize how dependent my personal news diet is on words, whether text or spoken. This project has drawn me closer to the imagery of news. About the project: “Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.” (Thanks to Steve Outing for this link.)
4. Reporters Without Borders, 3rd Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index: The rankings for 167 countries/governments aren’t surprising, but still useful context. Denmark and Finland did best, North Korea and Cuba did worst. The US ranked 23, while the US occupation presence in Iraq ranked a lowly 108. I don’t think this ranking took nontraditional media (such as weblogs) into account – but if it could, I’d be curious how that would shift the picture.
5. The Whois Debate: On Nov. 4, Douglas Fisher published a thoughtful pro/con piece in Common Sense Journalism about the surprisingly complex journalistic and privacy ethics involved in opening the whois database (the master list of who owns each registered internet domain name) to greater scrutiny. See Whois – another view.