#news : npr

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Full Transcript at the link; 3-minute listen.

Quote:

By taking biopsies from long COVID patients before and after exercising, scientists in the Netherlands constructed a startling picture of widespread abnormalities in muscle tissue that may explain this severe reaction to physical activity.

Among the most striking findings were clear signs that the cellular power plants, the mitochondria, are compromised and the tissue starved for energy.

"We saw this immediately and it's very profound," says Braeden Charlton, one of the study's authors at Vrije University in Amsterdam.

The tissue samples from long COVID patients also revealed severe muscle damage, a disturbed immune response, and a buildup of microclots.

"This is a very real disease," says Charlton. "We see this at basically every parameter that we measure."

[sentientfloatingeyeball]

Possibly the greatest NPR exchange ever recorded

[barbie-necromancer]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A media literacy handbook for Israel-Gaza

Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Media explainers are a cheap way to become an instant expert on everything from billionaire submarine excursions to hellaciously complex geopolitical conflicts, but On The Media's "Breaking News Consumers' Handbooks" are explainers that help you understand other explainers:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-and-gaza-edition-on-the-media

The latest handbook is an Israel-Gaza edition. It doesn't aim to parse fine distinctions over the definition of "occupation" or identify the source of shell fragments. Rather, it offers seven bullet points' worth of advice on weighing all the other news you hear about the war:

https://media.wnyc.org/media/resources/2023/Oct/27/BNCH_ISRAEL_GAZA_EDITION_1.pdf

I. "Headlines are obscured by the fog of war"

Headline writers have a hard job under the best of circumstances – trying to snag your interest in a few words. Headlines can't encompass all the nuance of a story, and they are often written by editors, not the writers who produced the story. Between the imperatives for speed and brevity and the broken telephone between editors and writers, it's easy for headlines to go wrong, even when no one is attempting to mislead you. Even reliable outlets will screw up headlines sometimes – and that likelihood goes way up in times like these. You gotta read the story, not just the headline.

II. Know red flags for bullshit

The factually untrue information that spreads furthest tends to originate with a handful of superspreader accounts. Whether these people are Just Wrong or malicious disinfo peddlers, they share a few characteristics that should trip your BS meter and prompt extra scrutiny:

High-frequency posting

Emotionally charged framing

Posts that purport to be summaries or excerpts from news outlets, but do not include links to the original

The phrase "breaking news" (no one has that many scoops)

III. Don't trust screenshots

Screenshots of news stories, tweets, and other social media should come with links to the original. It's just too damned easy to fake a screenshot.

IV. "Know your platform"

It used to be that Twitter got a lot of first-person accounts from people in the thick of crises, while Facebook and Reddit contained commentary and reposts. Today, Twitter is just another aggregator. This time around, there's lots of first-person, real-time reporting coming off Telegram (it runs well on old phones and doesn't chew up batteries). Instagram is widely used in both Israel and the West Bank.

V. "Crisis actors" aren't a thing

People who attribute war images to "crisis actors" are either deluded or lying. There's plenty of ways to distort war news, but paying people to pretend to be grieving family members is essentially unheard of. Any explanation that involves crisis actors is a solid reason to permanently block that source.

VI. There's plenty of ways to verify stuff that smells fishy

TinEye, Yandex and Google Image Search are all good tools for checking "breaking" images and seeing if they're old copypasta ganked from earlier conflicts (or, you know, video-games). The fact that an image doesn't show up in one of these searches doesn't guarantee its authenticity, of course.

VII. Think before you post

Israel-Gaza is the most polluted media pool yet. Don't make it worse.

There's plenty more detail on this (especially on the use of verification tools) in Brooke Gladstone's radio segment:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-gaza-edition

The media environment sucks, and warrants skepticism and caution. But we also need to be skeptical of skepticism itself! As danah boyd started saying all the way back in 2018, weaponized media literacy leads to conspiratorialism:

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2018/03/09/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you.html

Remember, the biggest peddlers of "fake news" are also the most prolific users of the term. For a lot of these information warriors, the point isn't to get you to believe them – they'll settle for you believing nothing. "Flood the zone with bullshit" is Steve Bannon's go-to tactic, and it's one that his acolytes have picked up and multiplied.

It's important to be a critical thinker, but there's plenty of people who've figured out how to weaponize a critical viewpoint and turn it into nihilism. Remember, the guy who wrote How To Lie With Statistics was a tobacco industry shill who made his living obfuscating the link between smoking and cancer. It's absolutely possible to lie with statistics, but it's also possible to use statistics to know the truth, as Tim Harford explains in his 2021 must-read book The Data Detective:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

There's a world of difference between being misled and being brainwashed. A lot of today's worry about "disinformation" and "misinformation" has the whiff of a moral panic:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/10/are-we-having-a-moral-panic-over-misinformation.html

It's possible to have a nuanced view of this subject – to take steps to enure you're not being tricked without equating crude tricks like sticking a fake BBC chyron on a 10-year-old image with unstoppable mind-control:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/28/fog-o-war/#breaking-news

[weirdo-from-bonesborough]

billy and clark know that both radio and newspapers are a dying industry but they argue over which one's dying faster like the old men they are at heart

[allbornscreaming]

FONTAINES D.C. — Nabokov Live on KEXP +

[markscherz]

You hit NPR! The frogs were featured on the Short Wave podcast!

I know! I did an interview with them, and they used some of the audio in the episode! I have been listening to Short Wave since its inception :)

[gamer2002]

Journalists demonstrate that they are unbiased by suspending the editor who has said that they are biased

[cipheramnesia]

I'm curious to see if US news media will finally stop riding trumfs dick, and report on him honestly, or just switch to focusing exclusively on Kamala Harris as "inexperienced."

[allthegeopolitics]

X, the Elon Musk-owned platform formerly known as Twitter, is marking some links to news organization NPR’s website as “unsafe” when users click through to read the latest story about an altercation between a Trump campaign staffer and an Arlington National Cemetery employee. The warning being displayed is typically applied to malicious links, like those containing malware, and other types of misleading content or spam. However, in this case, the web page being blocked is an NPR news report, raising questions about whether or not Musk’s X is actively trying to stop the news story from spreading.

On Thursday X users began to notice that a link to the NPR story about the Arlington Cemetery event, when clicked, would display the following message: “Warning: this link may be unsafe” followed by the URL of the web page in question, https://npr.org/2024/08/29/nx-s1-5092087/trump-arlington-cemetery-altercation-tiktok. [...]

Continue Reading.

[remythologise]

listening to npr pop culture happy hour on good omens have the most insanely bad takes. ‘do you ship it?’ ‘I think they’re better as friends,’ ‘I agree’ ‘platonic friendship is underrepresented’ ‘what would a romance between them even look like? they don’t have genitals.’ ‘I think aziraphale has a crush but crowley is aware of that and ignoring it bc he likes the attention’. now that’s an insulting lack of media literacy. fire these people from their podcast jobs

[drsonnet]

BREAKING: The U.N. General Assembly voted by a wide margin to grant new rights to the state of Palestine and called on the Security Council to revive its membership bid.

How #UNGA members voted on #Palestine :

UN votes symbolically in favor of Palestinian membership

The United Nations general assembly approved the Arab and Palestinian-sponsored resolution by a vote of 143-9 with 25 abstentions. The United States voted against the resolution, along with Israel, Argentina, Czechia, Hungary, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Papua New Guinea.

9 against:

US, Israel, Argentina, Czechia, Hungary, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Papua New Guinea

قائمة الدول تشمل التسعة الرهط المفسدين الذين صوتوا ضد منح السلطة الفلسطينية #فلسطين عضوية كاملة في الأمم المتحدة..ربنا ينتقم منكم و معكم 25 امتنعوا أيضا.

update:

Here are some of the changes in status that Palestine will have a right to later this year:

To be seated among Member States in alphabetical order

Make statements on behalf of a group

Submit proposals and amendments and introduce them

Co-sponsor proposals and amendments, including on behalf of a group

Propose items to be included in the provisional agenda of the regular or special sessions and the right to request the inclusion of supplementary or additional items in the agenda of regular or special sessions

The right of members of the delegation of the State of Palestine to be elected as officers in the plenary and the Main Committees of the General Assembly

Full and effective participation in UN conferences and international conferences and meetings convened under the auspices of the General Assembly or, as appropriate, of other UN organs.

UN General Assembly presses Security Council to give ‘favourable consideration’ to full Palestinian membership | UN News

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Rachel O'Donoghue

he coverage from several leading news organizations of Sunday’s escalation exemplified how omitting a single crucial detail can distort the entire narrative.

The New York Times ran an early headline stating: “Israel strikes Hezbollah in Lebanon, which fires rockets at Israel.” The missing word? Preemptively. Israel preemptively struck launching sites being prepared for an imminent attack just hours later.

The headline’s implication was undoubtedly deliberate—NYT presented a skewed image of an aggressive Israel, seemingly provoking a broader regional conflict by needlessly attacking Hezbollah.

This narrative was echoed by the Los Angeles Times and CBS News, with the former downplaying Hezbollah’s drone and rocket strikes, while the latter went as far as to suggest Israel might have both ignited a wider conflict and hindered ceasefire negotiations.

In one of the more hyperbolic and misleading headlines, the Daily Mail claimed the Middle East conflict had “explod[ed]” as Israel bombed Lebanon and Hezbollah fired “150 rockets towards the Iron Dome.”

One doesn’t need to be a munitions expert to know that Hezbollah doesn’t aim at the very missile interceptors designed to neutralize its rockets.

[mysharona1987]

Gee, vengeful abusive men using the new anti abortion laws to continue to control and torment their exes. Who couldn’t have seen that coming? Oh, right. *Everyone*.

The law says he can’t go after her (which he almost certainly would have) so he’s going after her friends instead, knowing how bad it’ll make her feel.

And he totally stole her phone. How else could he have gotten the screenshots?

[archaalen]

Opinion: Obese women trying to get pregnant should have access to IVF : Shots - Health News https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/01/14/1224546666/opinion-women-with-obesity-are-often-restricted-from-ivf-thats-discriminatory

[simply-ivanka]