Bad Press

My hometown recently experienced flooding along its riverfront. Businesses and homes in a narrow stretch of downtown were affected. I started getting calls at work from business travelers asking me if the roads into town were passable, and if my workplace was underwater. I wondered why so many people had such an overblown conception of the flood's scale. Then I realized that they'd probably heard about the flood on their local news, either directly or secondhand.

An essay published in the Guardian claims that, like anything else, overconsuming news has detrimental effects.

I started suspecting as much when mainstream coverage of the 9/11 attacks turned into a morbid circus. Over a decade later, most major news outlets seem to have abandoned their original mission to keep people informed about events that affect their daily lives. Instead, stories are chosen and broadcast to elicit maximum anxiety, spread propaganda, and increase profits.

Here are a few questions I always keep in mind when consuming any news story:

How is this information relevant to me?

Is this event geographically or morally proximate to me?

What biases are evident in the reporting?

Who is sponsoring this network/newspaper/web site?

In journalism as in most other human enterprises, the old advice rings true: follow the money.

Sweatshop Censorship

Free societies have long grappled with balancing artists' right to self-expression with the need to prevent libel, slander, fraud, and treason. At long last, Apple has found the secret for deciding when censorship is acceptable.

"We view Apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate. If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical app. It can get complicated, but we have decided to not allow certain kinds of content in the App Store."

Everyone from Voltaire to Larry Flynt argued that freedom of speech hinged on the rights of the speaker and the message's content. Now we know they were all looking in the wrong place, for Apple has shown us that the medium through which a thought is expressed suffices to justify banning it.

A practical example of Apple's censorship policy is the humor game Sweatshop, which was banished from their app store. Though the game was developed and marketed as a humorous expose of child labor and sub-poverty level wages in overseas clothing factories, one of Apple's reasons for dropping it was the depiction of factory managers blocking fire escapes.

Forgive me for not using this space to explain the workings of satire. I doubt it would do any good.

A second look reveals that the app store's policy is silent on the issue of criticizing a major corporation. The question of whether such criticism may be expressed on a blog seems to occupy a gray area. What do you think?