Fees Go Undisclosed in Medical Journals

Conflict of interest in the media? and in the health care industry too? Shocking!

Entre nous

Twenty-five out of 32 highly paid consultants to medical device companies in 2007, or their publishers, failed to reveal the financial connections in journal articles the following year, according to a study released on Monday. Multimedia

The study compared major payments to consultants by orthopedic device companies with financial disclosures the consultants later made in medical journal articles, and found them lacking in public transparency.

“We found a massive, dramatic system failure,” said David J. Rothman, a professor and president of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University, who wrote the study with two other Columbia researchers, Susan Chimonas and Zachary Frosch.

(click to continue reading Consultant Fees Go Undisclosed in Medical Journals, Study Finds – NYTimes.com.)

Trust us, in other words. Or not. Since there are no real repercussions, in this field, or in others1, what is going to change?

People's Friend, People's Journal, Sunday Post, Dundee Courier

Like this2

Tom Ridge, was on MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews, offering up his own recovery plan. There were “modest things” the White House might try, like cutting taxes or opening up credit for small businesses, but the real answer was for the president to “take his green agenda and blow it out of the box.” The first step, Ridge explained, was to “create nuclear power plants.” Combined with some waste coal and natural gas extraction, you would have an “innovation setter” that would “create jobs, create exports.”

As Ridge counseled the administration to “put that package together,” he sure seemed like an objective commentator. But what viewers weren’t told was that since 2005, Ridge has pocketed $530,659 in executive compensation for serving on the board of Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear power company. As of March 2009, he also held an estimated $248,299 in Exelon stock, according to SEC filings.

Moments earlier, retired general and “NBC Military Analyst” Barry McCaffrey told viewers that the war in Afghanistan would require an additional “three- to ten-year effort” and “a lot of money.” Unmentioned was the fact that DynCorp paid McCaffrey $182,309 in 2009 alone. The government had just granted DynCorp a five-year deal worth an estimated $5.9 billion to aid American forces in Afghanistan. The first year is locked in at $644 million, but the additional four options are subject to renewal, contingent on military needs and political realities.

In a single hour, two men with blatant, undisclosed conflicts of interest had appeared on MSNBC. The question is, was this an isolated oversight or business as usual? Evidence points to the latter. In 2003 The Nation exposed McCaffrey’s financial ties to military contractors he had promoted on-air on several cable networks; in 2008 David Barstow wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for the New York Times about the Pentagon’s use of former military officers–many lobbying or consulting for military contractors–to get their talking points on television in exchange for access to decision-makers; and in 2009 bloggers uncovered how ex-Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe had guest-hosted Countdown With Keith Olbermann while working at a large PR firm specializing in “strategies for managing corporate reputation.”

These incidents represent only a fraction of the covert corporate influence peddling on cable news, a four-month investigation by The Nation has found. Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials–people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests–have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens–and in some cases hundreds–of appearances.

(click to continue reading The Media-Lobbying Complex | The Nation.)

Corruption is endemic in our corporate culture.

Footnotes:
  1. like the generals who are always trotted out as experts on the television news shows, while simultaneously being paid big bucks by defense contractors []
  2. which I may have blogged about before, or not, who can remember []

I Will Miss Bill Moyers

The Bill Moyers Journal was one of the few news shows I watched with regularity1. I will miss him as he retires at the end of this month.

Yellow Line Fever

Thanks to all of you who wrote to express your disappointment and dismay at hearing me say last week that the JOURNAL will be coming to an end with the April 30th broadcast. My team and I were touched by your messages, but I want to disabuse those of you who fear that we are being pushed off the air by higher-ups at PBS pointing to the door and demanding that we go. Not so. PBS doesn’t fund the JOURNAL; our support comes from foundations and our sole corporate funder, Mutual of America. Together they’ve given me an independence rare for broadcast journalists. Our reporting and analysis trigger controversy from many quarters, as any strong journalism will, but not one – not one! – of my funders has ever mentioned to me the complaints directed their way. They would continue their support if I were to stick around.

I’m leaving for one reason alone: It’s time to go. I’ll be 76 in a few weeks, and while I don’t consider myself old (my father lived into his 80s, my mother into her 90s) there are some things left to do that the deadlines and demands of a weekly broadcast don’t permit. At 76, it’s now or never. I actually informed my friends at PBS of my decision over a year ago, and planned to leave at the end of last December. But they asked me to continue another four more months while they prepare a new series for Friday night broadcast. I agreed, but said at the time – April 30 and not a week longer.

It wasn’t easy deciding to close the JOURNAL. I like what I do, I cherish my colleagues, and my viewers remain loyal and engaged. I will miss the virtual community that has grown up around the broadcast – kindred spirits across the country whose unseen but felt presence reminds me of why I have kept at this work so long. But it has indeed been a long time (almost 40 years since I launched the original JOURNAL in 1971), and that’s why I can assure you that my departure is entirely voluntary. “Time brings everything,” an ancient wise man said. Including new beginnings.

[Click to continue reading Bill Moyers Journal: Bill Moyers on Retiring from the JOURNAL]

art drama et al

And I guess it’s too late for Bill Moyers to run for President. Oh well.

Footnotes:
  1. probably the only one, if you don’t count Jon Stewart’s Daily Show []

Torture supporters at The Washington Post

Marc Thiessen, remember him, has leveraged his pro-torture policy positions into quite the secondary career

By publishing a book that clearly and unapologetically defends the Bush torture regime, Marc Thiessen catapulted himself from obscure, low-level Bush speechwriter into regular Washington Post columnist, joining fellow torture defenders Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol. Today, Thiessen’s column defends the Liz-Cheney/Kristol smear campaign against DOJ lawyers and says this:

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder hired former al-Qaeda lawyers to serve in the Justice Department and resisted providing Congress this basic information. . . . Some defenders say al-Qaeda lawyers are simply following a great American tradition, in which everyone gets a lawyer and their day in court. Not so, says Andy McCarthy . . . . The habeas lawyers were not doing their constitutional duty to defend unpopular criminal defendants. They were using the federal courts as a tool to undermine our military’s ability to keep dangerous enemy combatants off the battlefield in a time of war.

So any lawyer who represents accused Terrorists and argues that the Government is violating constitutional limitations in its Terrorism policies is — all together now — an “al Qaeda lawyer” (even if those detainees were innocent, as most were). Worse, these “al Qaeda lawyers” — which includes large numbers of long-time members of the U.S. military — are “undermining our military’s” efforts to keep us safe.  That sounds like treason to me. It’s great to see the leading newspaper in the nation’s capital serving as the primary amplifying force for this McCarthyite smear campaign.  Does it get any more reckless and repugnant — or primitive and stunted — than that? Does The Post have any standards at all?

[Click to continue reading High standards at The Washington Post – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com]

Umm, rhetorical question, of course.

Harper’s Magazine in Trouble

Ru-oh. I’ve subscribed to Harper’s Magazine continuously since the 1980s; it has shaped me in all sorts of subtle ways. I can’t imagine a world without it, but apparently, I better quickly grok the idea.

Newstand on State Street circa 1996

In a rambling 40-minute monologue that left many attendees perplexed, John R. MacArthur, 53, talked about the problems facing Harper’s: readership was down 35,000, newsstand sales were plummeting, the only direct-mail piece that seemed to work was 20 years old. Worse, Harper’s seemed irrelevant — “the mainstream media is ignoring it to death,” he said — according to people who were at the meeting.

What he did not address was the chief concern on everyone’s mind: two days earlier, without warning, he had fired the magazine’s well-liked editor, Roger D. Hodge, in a five-minute conversation as Mr. Hodge was finishing his breakfast croissant.

The episode has sent ripples through the placid magazine, which has long been an outlier in the fast-paced New York publishing world.

Harper’s is a nonprofit that relies on the support of Mr. MacArthur’s foundation. As advertising revenue in publishing has declined, many organizations have considered that foundation model — combining traditional revenue with donations — to finance quality journalism. But as the Harper’s situation shows, no publishing model is immune to change — especially when one influential person runs the place.

[Click to continue reading Rick MacArthur Shakes Up Harper’s as Sales Fall – NYTimes.com]

Lewis Lapham is like my third grandfather, but he’s no longer editor, and hasn’t been for a few years. I have no solution to proffer, just hope Harper’s doesn’t vanish. Harper’s is also one of the few magazines I subscribe to that I want to keep after I’ve read: I have several years worth of back issues. I know I shouldn’t keep them – what’s the point, right? Very rarely would I think to go browse an old issue, but still, they feel substantial, so I keep them on a shelf until they fall victim to one of our periodic house cleaning purges. We subscribe to plenty of periodicals, but most are ephemeral, of the moment. Harper’s Magazine isn’t.

Reading Around on January 26th through January 27th

A few interesting links collected January 26th through January 27th:

  • Stop CBS From Airing Anti-Abortion Super Bowl Ad « Majority Speaks – Even as the trial continues for the murder of Dr. George Tiller, CBS is planning to air an anti-abortion ad during the Super Bowl game.

    Tell CBS that this is no time to feed the anger and hatred of anti-abortion extremists.

    CBS has a stated policy to reject all ads it deems controversial, including ads from MoveOn.org, PETA, and even the United Church of Christ, which dared to suggest that their church would model tolerance (“Jesus Didn’t Turn People Away. Neither Do We”).

    In fact, CBS execs told the United Church of Christ that CBS rejects any ad that “touches on and/or takes a position on one side of a current issue

  • Can Apple’s iPad Save the Media After All? | Epicenter | Wired.com – early reports indicate that device’s display is crisp, with rich colors. If that’s the case, it will make any well-designed, high-quality publication look good. In addition, magazine publishers can take advantage of the device’s ability to play video by embedding it into articles, and can update their publications with the latest news in real time…

    Condé Nast is preparing a number of iPad ezine subscriptions, including GQ, Wired and Vanity Fair, sources tell wired.com. In an interview before the iPad announcement one senior executive said that while the company it was still very enthusiastic about the iPhone platform — whose downloads already count towards ad-rate-setting circulation guarantees — but was poised to take full advantage of the iPad and was “eager to see what kind of additional functionality they have they baked in.”

    Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/can-apples-ipad-save-the-media-after-all#ixzz0dr25Jr9C

  • 1.2 Million Pounds Of Cured Meat Recalled For Salmonella – The Consumerist – "1.2 million pounds of Daniele International salami, sausage, and other cured meat products have been yanked out of stores and recalled due to possible salmonella contamination. The meats are linked to 184 sick individuals in 38 states. At least 35 people have been hospitalized, but none have died."

    Pippy is (internet) famous, again!

Reading Around on January 10th through January 17th

A few interesting links collected January 10th through January 17th:

  • New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers — Daily Intel – The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that, Nisenholtz and others believed, would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. (The nytimes.com homepage, for example, has sold out on numerous occasions in the past year.) As other papers failed to survive the massive migration to the web, the Times would be the last man standing and emerge with even more readers. Going paid would capture more circulation revenue, but risk losing significant traffic and with it ad dollars.
  • The Climate Killers : Rolling Stone – The Climate Killers Meet the 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming: Warren Buffett
    Rupert Murdoch
    Jack Gerard, President, American Petroleum
    Rex Tillerson, CEO, ExxonMobil
    Sen. Mary Landrieu, Democrat, Louisiana
    Marc Morano, Founder, Climate Depot
    Sen. James Inhofe, Republican, Oklahoma
    David Ratcliffe, CEO, Southern Company
    Dick Gephardt, CEO, Gephardt Group
    George Will, Commentator, ABC
    Tom Donohue, President, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
    Don Blankenship, CEO, Massey Energy
    Hack Scientist, Fred Singer, Retired physicist, University of Virginia
    Sen. John McCain, Republican, Arizona
    Rep. Joe Barton, Republican, Texas
    Charles and David Koch, CEO and Executive Vice President, Koch Industries
  • Everything That Ever Happens Is Good News For The Republicans, Corporate Media Insists – In the Senate, two Democrats will retire but six Republicans will join them. In the House, GOP retirements outpace Democrats 14 to 10.

Reading Around on January 1st through January 3rd

A few interesting links collected January 1st through January 3rd:

  • Daily Kos: State of the Nation – Remember the Naughts – Don’t forget the naughts, because this decade, no matter what anyone on the right might say, was conservatism on trial. You want less taxes? You got less taxes. You want less regulation? You got less regulation. Open markets? Wide open. An illusuion of security in place of rights? Hey, presto. Think we should privatize war by handing unlimited power given to military contractors so they can kick butt and take names? Kiddo, we passed out boots and pencils by the thousands. Everything, everything, that ever showed up on a drooled-over right wing wish list got implemented — with a side order of Freedom Fries.They will try to disown it, and God knows if I was responsible for this mess I’d be disowning it, too. But the truth is that the conservatives got everything they wanted in the decade just past, everything that they’ve claimed for forty years would make America “great again”. They didn’t fart around with any “red dog Republicans.”
  • Ptak Science Books: Mapping the Invasion of America, 1942 – The following maps appeared in a two-page spread, detailing ways in which the Axis powers could combine their efforts, focus on America, and take over the country. Maps such as these with arrows being drawn towards America were absolutely uncommon during this time.
  • d r i f t g l a s s: “…if Christ is Not Risen – Sometimes he had to pee, but did it fountain-like, leaning backwards out the bathroom door limbo-style it with one ear cocked for the brrrring…and never flushed or washed his furry little paws for fear the white noise of running water would drown out the sound of Opportunity Calling…which is also why he hadn’t done laundry for a month, and why his sink was piled with sticky, old dishes.

    And so, as he sat in his stink, panic closing slowly over him as a tiny voice whispered to him that The Call wasn’t coming — that he was finally facing a long-overdue oblivion which would have engulfed him 20 years before in a Better Universe — Jokeline decided to take matters into his own hands, and do the one thing GUARANTEED according to the ancient and sacred rules of his lodge to earn him the approbation of the douchebag gatekeepers standing between him and the warm, healing light of the teevee cameras.

    Punching some imaginary hippies for nonexistent crimes.

Reading Around on December 10th through December 11th

A few interesting links collected December 10th through December 11th:

    • Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border– “Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.). Nor was I finally dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my fucking paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I was not left without my jacket in the face of Ontario’s first winter storm, after all buses and intercity shuttles had shut down for the night.”In some other universe I am warm and content and not looking at spending two years in jail for the crime of having been punched in the face.”

  • The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T – By April, twelve weeks after that album came out, the Beatles had the top five spots on the Billboard chart.Now there was a lot of demand for that record — so much that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz, the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do you think they said that? No, they did not. What they did was, they went out and found another printing plant. And another one and another one, until they could make as many records as people wanted. … Randall, baby. we’ve got a hit on our hands. We’ve got the smartphone equivalent of Meet the Beatles.
  • ‘Editor & Publisher’ to Cease Publication After 125 Years– Editor & Publisher, the bible of the newspaper industry and a journalism institution that traces its origins back to 1884, is ceasing publication.An announcement, made by parent company The Nielsen Co., was made Thursday morning as staffers were informed that E&P, in both print and online, was shutting down.

Reading Around on December 9th

Some additional reading December 9th from 16:37 to 19:54:

  • Glenn Greenwald – Why don't the powerful get grilled like this? – One can watch what Rachel did in last night's interview — what made it so effective — to see why this virtually never happens on, say, Sunday shows when politically powerful people who interviewed:

    (1) Rachel had obviously done a substantial amount of work prior to the interview, having even read the guest's books and being able to refer to various parts of them quickly; doing real work and real reading is far too burdensome for most of our coddled, vapid media stars.

    (2) Rachel, despite being unfailingly civil and polite, was obviously indifferent to whether the guest liked her. She bombarded him with questions that made him extremely uncomfortable and which conclusively proved that he was simply lying. Media stars who host political interview programs would never subject powerful people to treatment like that for fear of losing access and/or their standing in the Beltway world.

  • Healthy Food Lithuanian Closing – Chicagoist – Healthy Food's closing marks the end of an era; they've been in business in Bridgeport since 1938 serving practically the same menu of fresh-squeezed juices, homemade soups, Lithuanian sausage dumplings (koldunai), blynai (rich Lithuanian pancakes stuffed with cheese and fruit), roast duck and the amazing potato and bacon bit pudding known as kugelis. Healt
  • Healthy Food Lithuanian Restaurant retiring along with its owner | Crain's Chicago Business – Healthy Food Lithuanian Restaurant, a Bridgeport staple, is closing Tuesday after 70 years of serving up kugelis and sauerkraut soup.
    Owner Grazina “Gina” Biciunas-Santoski said she is hanging up her apron and retiring after running the restaurant at 3236 S. Halsted St. for the past 30 years. Ms. Biciunas-Santoski took over the neighborhood spot in 1978 from her parents, who bought it in 1960. Healthy Food Lithuanian opened in 1938.

Playboy Magazine Outsources Business Duties

An iconic Chicago magazine is seemingly in its death throes

Red Light Night

Playboy Enterprises Inc. has agreed to outsource most of the business operations of its namesake magazine, as it seeks to stem losses and restore the cachet that helped embed the brand in the popular culture.

Under the deal, reached last week, Playboy will turn over all the magazine’s operations except the editorial ones to American Media Inc. AMI, of Boca Raton, Fla., publishes more than a dozen titles, including Star and Men’s Fitness. The five-year partnership will help return the magazine to profitability by the end of 2011, said Scott Flanders, chief executive officer of Playboy Enterprises.

Playboy and AMI wouldn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal. What it costs Playboy will be based in part on advertising sales, which AMI is taking over. But the partnership will significantly reduce Playboy’s costs, Mr. Flanders said. Playboy has roughly 30 full-time employees working in these areas, and while some will be offered jobs at AMI, most will be let go.

[Click to continue reading Playboy Magazine Outsources Business Duties – WSJ.com]

Doesn’t bode well for those who read Playboy “just for the articles”, editorial operations will be the next to be downsized.

Reading Around on October 1st through October 2nd

A few interesting links collected October 1st through October 2nd:

  • The Outfit: A Collective of Chicago Crime Writers: If You Wanna Win You Gotta Learn How to Play – The whole Olympics is going to be like this–a game in which Chicagoans will be made to feel like they should be emotionally invested when the real players will be behind the scenes: the guys with contracts waiting to be signed, and properties on the Olympic venue Monopoly board … Maybe the games will lose money on the whole, but some people, people on the inside, are going to make Benjamins by the bagful. These are the people who exaggerate the benefits, who make it sound like Chicago needs the Olympics more than the Olympics needs Chicago (a dubious claim if only because the IOC stands to make another half billion or so in television rights for summer games on US soil) so that you’ll support an endeavor that will line their pockets.

    One Billion Dollars

    One Billion Dollars

  • Senator Helped Mistress’s Husband, Raising Ethics Flags – NYTimes.com – A Republican Senator and an ethical scandal? What a a surprise!”The senator also put his chief of staff at the time, who had raised concerns that Mr. Hampton’s activities could violate the one-year ban on lobbying, in charge of dealing with him.”
  • whore.jpg
  • Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch | vanityfair.com – more than being about cost, [Rupert Murdoch’s] strategy is about pain. What he is always doing is demonstrating a level of strength and will and resolve against which the other guys, the weaker guys, cower. He can take more pain than anybody else. While others persist in the vanity of the Internet, he will endure the short- or medium-term pain necessary to build a profitable business.

Peace Movement Invisible

Bring them Home

Dan Froomkin asks a good question:

A healthy majority of the American public now opposes the war in Afghanistan. More and more Democrats, some leading Republicans, and even members of the military are calling for, if not outright withdrawal, at least an exit strategy.

So where’s the peace movement?

Where are, if not the massive peace marches, at least the quiet peace vigils? Where are the letters to the editor, and the sermons, and the city council resolutions?

[Click to continue reading Watchdog Blog » Blog Archive » Where’s the Peace Movement?]

I don’t know if there are peace demonstrations being held, and not being reported, or if there just isn’t enough public engagement on the issue, yet.

Tunnel Vision is Underrated

Mr. Froomkin wants journalists1 to dig a little deeper:

Nevertheless, it’s astonishing how little public expression there is of such a dominant public sentiment.

Or is it that the media just aren’t paying attention?

So here are my questions to my fellow journalists: Where is the peace movement? Where is the coverage of the peace movement? And is the absence of the latter actually contributing to the absence of the former?

Footnotes:
  1. and readers too, presumedly []

Philip Anschutz is building his own empire

Denver billionaire and conservative Christian Philip Anschutz has, uncharacteristically, been in the news recently. First for purchasing Dick Cheney’s favorite magazine, The Weekly Standard:

Right Turn Ahead

[ Right Turn Ahead]

In June, [The Weekly Standard] was handed from one conservative billionaire, [Rupert] Murdoch, to another, Philip F. Anschutz, for about $1 million, according to an executive close to Mr. Murdoch who spoke anonymously because the terms of the deal were meant to be confidential. The new ownership comes at a time when conservatism, especially the version espoused by The Standard involving American muscularity to spread freedom abroad, is not in the ascendancy.

Mr. Anschutz, who made his billions in oil, real estate, railroads and telecommunications before turning to media, is more closely aligned with Christian conservatism, a thread not associated with The Standard.

Staff members say Mr. Anschutz, who has visited the magazine’s Washington offices once since buying it, did not meet with the staff as a whole. He instructed the two top editors — William Kristol, who last year was also a columnist for The New York Times, and Fred Barnes — not to alter the publication’s ideological complexion.

[From New Owner for Weekly Standard as Political Tastes Change – NYTimes.com]

and second, for purchasing a crowd-sourced news web site, NowPublic

Examiner.com, a media company controlled by the conservative billionaire Philip F. Anschutz, said on Tuesday that it had acquired NowPublic, an innovative Web site for citizen-generated media.

With the sale, Examiner.com, a unit of Mr. Anschutz’s Clarity Digital Group, became the latest company to show interest in a lively corner of the Web: the tools that let people read and share the news around them, sometimes down to neighborhood blocks.

[From Examiner.com Buys NowPublic, a Citizen-Media Web Site – NYTimes.com]

Random Anarchists

[for instance, this photo of mine was used by a NowPublic user]

The Weekly Standard does not interest me, except in abstract terms,  ((liberals would do well to at least have a vague idea of what the latest conservative talking points are)) but NowPublic’s users have used dozens1 of my photos in various articles over the four years of their existence. Not a huge number, but at least ten that I noted. I don’t want my photography to be anywhere close to any corporation owned by Philip Anschutz.

Who is Phil Anschutz you might ask? Well, for starters, from his Wikipedia entry:

Anschutz, a Republican donor and supporter of George W. Bush’s administration, has been an active patron of a number of religious and conservative causes:
Helped fund Colorado’s 1992 Amendment 2, a ballot initiative designed to overturn local and state laws that prohibit discrimination against individuals on the basis of sexual orientation.[13]

Helped fund the Discovery Institute, a think tank based in Seattle, Washington that promotes intelligent design and criticizes evolution. [14]

Supported the Parents Television Council, a group that protests against what they believe to be television indecency.[14]

Financed and distributed Christian films, such as Amazing Grace and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for mass audiences through his two film production companies and ownership of much of the Regal, Edwards and United Artists theater chains. In addition, as a producer Anschutz reportedly required the removal of certain material related to drug use and sex in the 2004 film Ray because he found it objectionable.[14]

Financed The Foundation for a Better Life.

[From Philip Anschutz – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

There’s more, but that was enough for me to send an email to NowPublic co-founder Michael Tippett, asking

In light of super conservative Republican Philip Anschutz purchasing your company, how do I go about removing my photos from the various stories they’ve been used on?

Cheers, and hope you haven’t been fired, or forced to take a loyalty oath to the anti-evolutionary forces

If I get a response, I’ll add it to this post.

Footnotes:
  1. or more, I stopped keeping track []

Reading Around on August 31st through September 1st

A few interesting links collected August 31st through September 1st:

Reading Around on August 24th through August 25th

A few interesting links collected August 24th through August 25th:

  • Guampedia: Get Involved – Guampedia, Guam’s online encyclopedia, is striving to help preserve and promote Guam’s history and culture and help educate children, residents and visitors alike … but we need your help.
  • Placid Beneath Warm Sun -oil.jpg
  • Paragraphs! – Back in the days of old, when men were men and computers didn’t yet rule the earth, stories couldn’t be edited merely by hitting the delete key a few times. So when copy needed to be cut to fill a particular space, it was convenient for every sentence to be its own paragraph. That way, you could cut any single sentence you wanted, join up the copy, and you were done. You always knew exactly how many lines you were saving and it was simple to make the cut without resetting the entire piece.

    Electronic typesetting makes this unnecessary, of course, but there’s another advantage to this custom: it adds a bit of white space to the page. Newspapers that don’t do this end up looking gray and intimidating. So the custom stays.

  • Radley Balko Comments on CNN’s Unattributed Use of His Reporting – City Desk – Washington City Paper – CNN recently did to criminal justice reporter Radley Balko, who lives in Northern Virginia, what Gawker supposedly did to Shapira, except it failed to give any credit where much credit was due.
    Balko (who I worked with at Reason) has spent several years reporting on Steven Hayne, the Mississippi medical examiner whose shoddy work has led to the incarceration of several known innocents. Over the last three years, Balko has cultivated sources, reads hundreds–if not thousands–of pages of documentation incriminating Hayne, and, as a result, has broken every single piece of major news about the medical examiner.

    But you wouldn’t know any of that if all you had for reference was the AC360 special about Hayne, which piggy-backs almost exclusively on Balko’s reporting without every hat-tipping or acknowledging his work. (Techdirt reported that “sources quoted by CNN told Balko that CNN claims it found them via his articles.”)

    all-you-can-eat_25.jpg