Archive for April 4, 2011
Are You There, Matt?
by John Weckerle
This morning, our Qwest DSL service was out for a few hours. After a brief chat with technical support, we were informed that there was an outage in the area and Qwest’s engineers were working on the problem. They were unable to project the duration of the outage, but said that we’d get a call letting us know when it was over.
After a while, the service came back on, and some time later we received a phone message from Qwest. The message began with “Hi, this is Matt with Qwest…” and proceeded to tell us that the service was back up. The only thing was, it seemed pretty likely to us that this was a computer generated message. Now, we’ll apologize in advance to Matt if we’re wrong, but the little breaks and stops seemed pretty symptomatic of the standard electronic notification method – suggesting that, at best, “Matt” is just somebody whose voice is used as the basis for the e-speaker. If that’s the case, then we’d advise Qwest that most of us don’t need to pretend that the digital voice at the other end of the line is actually a person, and we’re impressed enough that the system is sophisticated enough to call us up and keep us posted on its own.
Of course, there might have been a Matt that actually called – and if there is, we’d just like to say: Matt, you sound a bit like a computer. Throw in a joke or something next time!
Enough With The Gotcha
by John Weckerle
Today we find ourselves a bit behind the news – as we try to be when we think a situation should be given time to develop before commenting on it. We refer, in the current situation, to the most recent video hoax perpetrated by James O’Keefe, this time a purported “sting” against Ron Schiller, a National Public Radio fundraiser, resulting in yet another doctored video that supposedly depicts the target doing something horrible – in this case, harshly criticizing the Tea Party. For information on the situation, we provide the following links from NPR and Glenn Beck’s The Blaze:
- Questions Raised About O’Keefe’s Editing Of NPR Sting Video
- NPR: O’Keefe ‘Inappropriately Edited’ Video; Exec’s Words Still ‘Egregious’
- Elements Of NPR Gotcha Video Taken Out Of Context
- Ends vs. Means: The Ethics of Undercover Journalism
- Does Raw Video of NPR Expose Reveal Questionable Editing & Tactics?
Not surprisingly, neoconservative “news” outlets and blogs both local and national gleefully and immediately pounced on the “story” as either confirmation of longstanding claims of liberal bias or yet another reason to cut all funding to NPR and/or public broadcasting, and perhaps only a little more surprisingly the “mainstream” news media jumped right on the bandwagon. To the latter: the fact that something sells advertising space doesn’t mean it’s news. Nice job on the verification.