Andromeda 1 - almanah naučne fantastike, Beograd, 1976
“Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.”
“
| — | Stewart Brand, American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Discipline: an Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Viking Adult, 2009 (via amiquote) |
Reuters vs. Reuters: News agency makes an ass of itself by trying to connect George Soros to Occupy Wall Street.
But some Reuters people realize it, and call their company out. Reuters then backs down, changing the story line on its report.
It all started with this report from Reuters, suggesting a link between one of the right wing’s major freak-out figures, George Soros (who does fund some liberal causes) and Occupy Wall Street.
There has been much speculation over who is financing the disparate protest, which has spread to cities across America and lasted nearly four weeks. One name that keeps coming up is investor George Soros, who in September debuted in the top 10 list of wealthiest Americans. Conservative critics contend the movement is a Trojan horse for a secret Soros agenda.Soros and the protesters deny any connection. But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests with an inventive marketing campaign aimed at sparking an Arab Spring type uprising against Wall Street. Moreover, Soros and the protesters share some ideological ground.
So what are those “indirect links?” Thin. Very thin. In 2007-97 Soros funded the Tides Foundation, a kind of liberal clearinghouse that accepts donations from a wide range of givers and supports a wide range of progressive causes.
According to disclosure documents from 2007-2009, Soros’ Open Society gave grants of $3.5 million to the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based group that acts almost like a clearing house for other donors, directing their contributions to liberal non-profit groups. Among others the Tides Center has partnered with are the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation.Disclosure documents also show Tides, which declined comment, gave Adbusters grants of $185,000 from 2001-2010, including nearly $26,000 between 2007-2009.
How thin? We’ll let New York Magazine describe it. “Years before the Occupy Wall Street protests were even a gleam in anyone’s eye, a trickle of Soros’s money went to one of the groups involved.”
Perhaps the most amazing passage was this:
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh summed up the speculation when he told his listeners last week, “George Soros money is behind this.”
New York mag speculated that the purpose might have been to grab linkage from the Drudge Report. If so, it worked. Drudge ran with it. Screen shot.
The Awl noticed what was going on.
Here is what I said on Twitter:
Seriously, Reuters? This is pathetic: http://jr.ly/7fin And people know it’s pathetic.
To which Jim Impoco, executive editor of Thomson Reuters Digital, said:
That’s putting it kindly.
Anthony DeRosa, social media editor for Reuters, said on Twitter:
When I read “Rush Limbaugh summed up the speculation” I wanted to crawl under a rock.
Which I can well understand.
Felix Salmon, financial blogger for Reuters, took his employers to task: “The angle we went with is not a story,” he wrote. The “indirect link” is bullshit, he said.
The fact that Soros gave money to Tides and that Tides gave money to Adbusters in no way means that there’s an “indirect financial link” between the two. That’s like saying that there’s an “indirect financial link” between me and Mitt Romney, because I lend money to Citigroup (I’m a depositor at Citibank), and Citigroup has given money to Romney.
Salmon spoke plainly…
Reuters cannot — must not — get a reputation as a right-wing media outlet. We have to report the news as impartially as we can. In this case, there was no story, and nothing to report. Inventing a tenuous and intellectually-dishonest link between Soros and OWS might get us traffic from Matt Drudge — but that’s traffic which, frankly, we don’t particularly value or care for. Much more importantly, it serves to undermine the heart of what Reuters stands for. And we can never afford to do that.
By the close of business, Reuters seemed backing down. Or was it? Here is what I mean….
This is the first paragraph of the Reuters story at 7:12 am New York time, headlined, Who’s Behind the Wall Street Protests?
Anti-Wall Street protesters say the rich are getting richer while average Americans suffer, but the group that started it all may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world’s richest men.
Here was the first paragraph of the same story (with the same URL) at 5:38 pm New York time, headlined, Soros: Not a Funder of Wall Street Protests.
George Soros isn’t a financial backer of the Wall Street protests, despite speculation by critics including radio host Rush Limbaugh that the billionaire investor has helped fuel the anti-capitalist movement.
But here was the first paragraph of the story (same URL) at 8:02 pm New York time, headlined (once again) Who’s Behind the Wall Street Protests?
Anti-Wall Street protesters say the rich are getting richer while average Americans suffer, but the group that started it all may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world’s richest men.
I can’t discern what Reuters is up to here… Can you?
The New York Observer notes the confusion.
Here is a Human Being: next Sigma Xi pizza lunch
Misha Angrist is a geneticist and writer on the faculty at Duke University who in 2007 was the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church’s Personal Genome Project. Yep, his entire genome was sequenced and is now a public document. One thing that resulted is his 2010 book Here is a Human Being: At The Dawn of Personal Genomics. On noon on Tuesday, Oct. 25 come hear Angrist reflect on his experiences and on some of the implications that the rise of genomics holds for all of us.
Directions to Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, in RTP are here: http://www.sigmaxi.org/about/center/directions.shtml
Please remember: The Durham Freeway (Route 147) no longer reaches all the way into Research Triangle Park. If you used to take it here, you’ll need to try another route. The good news: It’s still an easy drive.
See Robert David Graham, Independent reporting of #OccupyWallStreet
By reporting, I mean such things as contacting the park’s owners asking for an official statement. The protesters are occupying Zuccotti Park, owned by the same company (Brookfield Office Properties NYSE:BPO) that owns the adjacent skyscraper. An obvious step would be to contact them asking for a statement, but I could find no journalists that had yet done so. Well, if “journalists” aren’t going to do this, I can do this myself. I sent an email to their VP of Communications. I got a response, which I
When Ben and Brian first started The Story Collider over a year ago, their goal – aside from putting on a kick-ass show, of course – was to make science real and relatable for everyone. To do that, they needed to get as many different voices as possible involved. They wanted the most…
A CNN Business reporter, Alison Kosik, summarizes what she thinks the purpose of Occupy Wall Street is.
Here is her Twitter post.
UPDATE: Kosik deleted her tweet. That’s the kind of confidence she had in her observation, I guess. The New York City police are fairly visible at Occupy Wall Street. They are also strict about smoking weed in public. So I wonder if Kosik’s observation has any factual basis at all.
MORE: Alison and another CNN-er yuck it up about those whining protestors at Occupy Wall Street. This one hasn’t been deleted yet.
BONUS: And to further unfold the attitude at CNN, do watch this clip of Erin Burnett reporting on Occupy Wall Street. (“What are they protesting? No one seems to know.”)
COMMENT: At Balloon Juice, a political blog, they say the CNN staffers on stage here “are acting like the Heathers of the mainstream media.” Kinda puts it well.
The advance of Open Access to the scholarly literature is pretty hard to miss at this point. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists more than 7000 titles now, and the percentage of global articles that are OA is now somewhere above 10%. Revenues on OA journals are in the tens of millions…
