I receive email updates from Free Press, a group concerned with keeping the Internet free, fair, and accessible to everyone. I’m going to save time and paste their latest to me. I strongly encourage reading this because they’ve come up with a great idea. You might be familiar with FailBlog — This is MediaFail!
Dear Sheta,
You know it; your friends know it; everyone knows it: The media are failing.
Every day, we read and watch reporting that favors sensation over substance. Sideshows dominate the news cycle, while real issues of public concern get drowned out by the noise. What passes for news is too often badly sourced and tainted by commercial interests or political bias.
That’s why we’re launching an exciting new project called MediaFAIL that lets you expose the worst moments in the media as they happen. Check it out!
Is the Discovery Channel really launching a show called “Sarah Palin’s Alaska”? Did the Boston Globe just publish what may be the worst-ever story on global warming? Did that Fox News anchor really regurgitate industry talking points on Net Neutrality?
These outrageous MediaFAILs are all featured on the new site. Now you can vote to fail them. We also need you to help us find the worst examples of a failing media.
It’s easy to participate — just follow these steps:
1. Sign up at MediaFAIL.
2. Find and submit a link to an example of terrible reporting (maybe something like that story about global warming: http://mediafail.com/fails/230).
3. Share your submitted “fail” with your friends via e-mail, Twitter or Facebook.
4. Vote on other fails that you find especially bad.
5. Post a comment or two.
6. Repeat!The goal of MediaFAIL isn’t just to give the media a failing grade — we want to make it better. That’s why we’ll be connecting featured “fails” to important media reform campaigns by Free Press and our allies.
So go ahead and submit a FAIL now; vote on your favorites; and share the site with your friends by forwarding this e-mail or using Facebook and Twitter.
Thanks — and get failing.
Josh Levy
Online Campaign Manager
Free Press
www.freepress.netWant to learn more? Join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
If you haven’t already, you can also join our E-Activist list.
About Sheta Kaey
I notice that there are often dreadful and blatant grammatical errors on supposedly professional journalistic sites. Huffington Post is infamous for them, though I sometimes think calling them a “professional” journalistic site is stretching things a little with all their posts about celebrity tits and ass. I sometimes wonder if these people have never heard of proofreaders.
I see that a lot, too. I also often see professionally printed or painted signs around my area that are misspelled or have apostrophes where none are needed. It says volumes about the professionalism of both the business and their printer.
In the neighborhood where I used to live, one restaurant put out a sign which proudly proclaimed: “Ham and Egg’s.”
Egg’s what, you may wonder. Well, I wonder too. Your guess is as good as mine!
Exactly! lol