Media Bits and Bytes – Hot Air Edition

Media in denial; Women’s mags get political; Trump’s ready to sue; Big Pharma gags; Racist code

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As Hurricane Matthew Lashes U.S., Are TV Networks the Last Bastion of Climate Denial?

May Boeve interviewed
October 7, 2016
Democracy Now!

We so often see the words "extreme weather" and "severe weather" flashing in the lower thirds of the TV screens. Where are the words "climate change" and "global warming"?
MAY BOEVE: You’re exactly right. And Hurricane Matthew is, unfortunately, just the latest example of a trend where the impacts of climate change get more serious, politicians continue to have a break and say not nearly enough about it.
And we’re seeing a deafening climate silence from journalists and in this presidential cycle, where there have been no questions asked in the debates about this issue.
 

Don’t Underestimate Cosmo. Women’s Magazines Are Taking On Trump.

By Tara Golshan
September 30, 2016
Vox

There has been a tangible shift in the kind of content produced by women’s magazines in recent elections. In the past decade, publications have shifted from a period of fluff election coverage in the early aughts to a platform for impactful political content, from interviews with important figures in the election to sharp policy analyses.
The shift with Cosmopolitan, and with this growing spate of young feminist magazines, cuts through the fluff of the early aughts — what Aarons-Mele calls a “dead zone” for serious content in women’s publications — and allows for impactful political journalism with a pro-woman angle.

Trump’s Many, Many Threats to Sue the Press Since Launching His Campaign

By Trevor Timm
October 3, 2016
Columbia Journalism Review

In the span of a long weekend in mid-September, Trump threatened to sue The New York Times, his staff had a Vice reporter arrested outside a campaign event, and he blamed the New York terrorist bombings on “freedom of the press.”
This weekend, Trump struck again. After the Times’ huge scoop detailing how he took an almost billion-dollar loss on his 1995 taxes, Trump’s lawyer threatened “prompt initiation of appropriate legal action” against the Times once more. By my count, it is at least the 11th time Trump has threatened to sue a news organization or journalist during his campaign for president.

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How Big Pharma's Shadow Regulation Censors the Internet

By Jeremy Malcolm
October 6, 2016
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Where industry can't get government to regulate the Internet in the way they want, they frequently turn to private deals with Internet intermediaries that we've termed Shadow Regulation. Big pharma is a major proponent of this practice, having spearheaded a range of such private deals that they use in an attempt to quell the supply of prescription drugs to Americans through overseas online pharmacies.
This private censorship regime insinuates multiple links in the chain between Internet content and its audience. This includes blocking blacklisted pharmaceutical websites from access to payment services [PDF], online advertising services, and domain names.

Racist Social Media Users Have A New Code To Avoid Censorship

By Alex Kantrowitz
October 1, 2016
BuzzFeed

Racist online communities have developed a new code for racial, homophobic, and bigoted slurs in an attempt avoid censorship.
The code, which uses terms like “Google,” “Skittle,” and “Yahoo” as substitutes for offensive words describing black people, Muslims, and Mexicans, appears to be in use by various accounts on Twitter and elsewhere.
The code appears to have originated in response to Google’s Jigsaw program, a new AI-powered approach to combating harassment and abuse online. The program seems to have inspired members of the online message board 4chan to start “Operation Google,” using “Google” as a derogatory term for a black person in an attempt to get Google to filter out its own name. The code developed from there.