Author Archive
OK, so it’s not just priests who seek to cover sin…
The most telling omission in this paper is that the word “fraud” does not appear. But the world knows that the collapse of the financial system had, at its core, the largest financial fraud of all time. That fraud was in the origination, the rating, the underwriting and the issuance of credit default swaps against […]
There’s something about a cover-up that offends us …
God told me to cover sin? Remember this guy: I always seek to “cover” another’s sin. I try and focus on the good in others and hide their faults. It is simply trying to obey several specific bible verses. … Well I had one particular situation where I knew things that were not right and […]
James Cameron calls it as he sees it …
‘Let me put it this way,’ James Cameron said in an interview last month. ‘I’m happy to piss those guys off. I don’t agree with their worldview.’ Can’t argue with that. I feel the same way about weasels who try to paint themselves as my ‘competitors’ or ‘peers in the industry’… when they’re no such […]
Point and counter point … bottled water
Great example of an exposé of ‘Manufactured Demand’ for bottled water … Followed by a ‘fake journalism’ (complete with ‘noddies’) PR/propaganda fightback by the bottled water manufacturers*…’Good Stewards of the Environment’ How do they keep a straight face? *Let me know what BWM Report could possibly stand for.
Branding writ large
This is the fifth-most-photographed building in New York, the 28th worldwide: the Apple Store 5th Avenue New York City. Well, it IS cool. Inside and out. On my first visit it was just starting to rain and Apple Store staff were fitting special rubber covers to the glass steps on the spiral staircase. The shopping […]
Karl Lagerfield – interviewed by Bruce LaBruce
When Vice [Magazine] called me last month with an out-of-the-blue offer to fly to Paris and interview the Kaiser himself, Karl Lagerfeld—creative director of the $10 billion Chanel empire, the house of Fendi, and his own eponymous line—I jumped at the chance. I have to confess that I wasn’t an expert about the fabled fashion […]
Google ‘leaves’ China over censorship
Good on Google for deciding that censorship was dodgy. It was always, always dodgy,* but perhaps the ‘commercial imperative’ had driven the free-thinkers at Google to submerge their outrage. ( — which is NOT a long term strategy, as we have discussed in relation to an example closer to home.) From the Google blog today: A […]
Fearless: Margaret Moth RIP
Margaret Moth was the trail-blazing, globe-trotting photojournalist and camera operator whose jaw was blown away by a sniper’s bullet as she and her CNN news crew were traveling through Sarajevo’s infamous Sniper’s Alley in the early 1990s. Terribly injured, she recovered and eventually went back to work, doing what she did best with tenacity and […]
What new media needs to learn from old media
COURAGE . What journalism should be: Dogged and fearless Wise words from one of my former editors, Don Rood, reviewing Nothing but the Truth by Anna Politkovskaya on Radio NZ this morning. Yeah! Damn right. Dogged and fearless. To proudly call yourself ‘new media‘ and talk about freedom of speech is good. But recognise that […]
Eloquent beyond words
The image in that last post reminded me: I stood in front of this sculpture in NYC a few years ago on my way to see Leonard Cohen in concert at the Place des Arts in Montreal. (Not my first trip to New York.) Its power exceeds and surpasses logical argument … if you’re open […]
Why ‘legal action’ can be sooo dangerous …
Look at the sort of thing comes out in the wash: For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them […]
The truth is disturbing. Who is paying attention?
Fantastic article and video of 60 Minutes on Michael Lewis Wall St meltdown here. “I’m afraid that our culture will come to the conclusion, ’cause it’s always the easy conclusion, that everybody was just a bunch of criminals. I think the story is much more interesting than that. I think it’s a story of mass […]
Murdoch: It’s not old media versus new media …
… it’s about how the content is produced and who is paying for it.” Paraphrase: “Google do not have the right to scrape our very expensively produced content if we want to stop them.” I see content scraped from news sites and reproduced in its entirety on discussion forums and blogs — with a credit […]
