Weekend Reading

Got some downtime this weekend? Here are some interesting articles you may not have seen this week:

In U.S. Monetary Policy, a Boon to Banks — This piece is a joint venture between ProPublica and the NYT:

The federal government, in ways explicit and implicit, profoundly subsidizes and shelters the banking industry. True since the 1930s, it is much more so today. And that makes Mr. Dimon no capitalist colossus astride the Isle of Manhattan, but one of the great welfare queens in America.

Just that last sentence makes this one all worthwhile. There might be much here that is familiar to you if you’ve been following the collapse, but making the case that monetary policy works as a safety net for banks (often without much in return for the economy) in the mainstream media is a good step.

Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News — From Gawker, reporter John Cook looks through the Nixon papers and finds how the idea, mission and overall propaganda bent of Fox News was created during the Nixon era. Go figure, right?

The documents—drawn mostly from the papers of Nixon chief of staff and felon H.R. Haldeman and Bush chief of staff John Sununu—reveal Ailes to be a tireless television producer and joyful propagandist. He was a forceful advocate for the power of television to shape the political narrative, and he reveled in the minutiae constructing political spectacles—stage-managing, for instance, the lighting of the White House Christmas tree with painstaking care. He frequently floated ideas for creating staged events and strategies for manipulating the mainstream media into favorable coverage, and used his contacts at the networks to sniff out the emergence of threatening narratives and offer advice on how to snuff them out—warning Bush, for example, to lay off the golf as war in the Middle East approached because journalists were starting to talk. There are also occasional references to dirty political tricks, as well as some positions that seem at odds with the Tea Party politics of present-day Fox News: Ailes supported government regulation of political campaign ads on television, including strict limits on spending. He also advised Nixon to address high school students, a move that caused his network to shriek about “indoctrination” when Obama did it more than 30 years later.

Fascinating and doesn’t help the reputation or judgement of the *journalists* and politicians who continue to treat these these people as credible.

ProPublica’s newest news app uses education data to get more social — This is a fascinating discussion of how ProPublica has taken a massive dataset released by the Department of Education to develop a story based on their analysis of that data, but who has also developed an app with Facebook integration that lets *you* do your own analysis of your schools. You can compare local schools, or compare at the state level, or by district and the massive amount of data captured in this dataset lets you take a good look at local schools in a way that might be otherwise pretty difficult. And with local people looking at local data, ProPublica thinks that there are more stories to come. This is an interesting model of journalism — letting reporters do their thing but giving folks closer to parts of the story an opportunity to add what they can to it. They note that the Department of Education is planning on releasing additional data, and ProPublica will also add that to their app.

Monty Python members reunite for Graham Chapman film
Not a long read, but damn cool news:

Monty Python members have reunited to voice a 3D animated film based on the memoirs of the late Graham Chapman.

Have you read anything this weekend that you want to recommend?