Saturday, September 19, 2020

No Agenda-The Saturday Memo

  

The No Agenda Promise
If you want real analysis based on research and digging deeper into a story, No Agenda is your show. To keep it alive please support No Agenda any way you can. There are excellent ideas on the support page here.

No Agenda Tribune

Show logo
Show 1279

Ruth Ginsburg
R.I.P.


PLUS: The Original Fake News
Dear Producer,
Tomorrow’s show will discuss the latest Covid situation along with the implications of the death of Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg who seemed as if she was going to live forever. Ginsberg was a stalwart of the left never failing to cast a vote favoring the thinking of Liberal Democrats and Progressives. Let’s commemorate her passing with a donation reflecting her age of 87. Click here for the farewell Ruth donation.

There is no better way to say goodbye than with a contribution to No Agenda!


And remember you can always contribute whatever you want.Click here and contribute what you think the show is worth to you. Everything helps. All credit cards accepted.
Rith Ginsburg
As Ginsburg got older she morphed into a Larry King lookalike. She often conked out in the middle of events and apparently at least once while on the Supreme Court bench.
Tomorrow, besides the Ginsberg discussion, ex-California governor Jerry Brown blames Trump for the California fires. Oh brother.

The Covid disaster continues with the situation going off the rails insofar as testing is concerned. That’s up for discussion.

And to continue the weekly series on deconstructing the news, let’s discuss the development of purely subjective top 10, top 50 and top 100 lists that appear in various magazine and broadcast outlets. This has been discussed on the show for a decade, let’s discuss it here.
Deconstructing Bogus "Best of.." Lists
 
Newspapers, magazines and some broadcast outlets will often print lists of the top influencers, the best companies to work for, the most beautiful people, the best this or that. These lists are baloney. They are worst than many awards that celebrities give to each other which are also sketchy.

These lists are the original “fake news.”

I can say this because I was an editor and a participant in the development of many of these lists myself and I’ve been a judge at many events to determine the best of this or that. In almost all instances these choices are casual and biased and most often political. “We can’t put that guy on the list, he’s a dick.”

The only lists that can be trusted tend to be the list of the wealthiest people which is derived from research and even on those lists many people are awkwardly left out.

Most of these lists are published to get publicity for the magazine. Your put major publicity hounds on the lists so they can crow about it and mention the publication over and over. “I’m a top influencer under 30 according to…” It actually ends up in their bio.

These lists appear all over the place. In an entertainment magazine there will be a list of the top movies ever made. In a sports magazine there will be the top quarterbacks who ever played. These lists are never based on actual statistically valid surveys, ever. They are just made up by the editorial staff.

These things are a plague on journalism. Let me explain the way these lists develop behind the scenes.

You are in an editorial meeting and realize that your “Top CEO’s” list is in the next issue. You hastily call a lunch meeting, bring some staffers in and put the list together over sandwiches. This begins by looking at the last year’s list and seeing what you can use from this old list. If you are pressed for time you pretty much jiggle the old list and run that making sure these people are still actually working for the company.

If you really want to shake things up, you put some totally new guy at the top, out-of-the-blue. You will literally joke about how this will upset people especially last year’s number one.

It does not take that long before you finalize the list with much of the older information and roll it out. You always get a lot of feedback such as “how could you leave out so and so...” along with “you guys are idiots for choosing this guy over that gal.” “He should have been number 5 not number 6” is another gem. And yes, there is always some obvious person you completely overlooked. Ooops. So sorry.

Nowadays I am sure the complaining is largely over racial quotas. The joke is that the list is nonsense in the first place. And this includes all lists from the top cars lists to the most beautiful people lists to the up-and-coming anything list.
 
These lists are part of a journalistic fraud and should be banned. And there are probably a few editorial staffs that might agree and want to get rid of them. When that happens the publisher complains because the sales guys need to sell ads for the issue because they know the CEO of some client is going to be on the list and they might want to advertise. So the basic corruptions step in and the bogus lists keep coming. --- jcd
Logo for top ten kids cartoons
Ridiculous.
Your No Agenda show covers and analyzes news better than any other source you will find. This is because the show is not owned by a large corporation and is solely supported by you.

THE NO AGENDA PLEDGE: There are no creepy advertisers or Chinese influencers telling us what to cover and how to slant things.

Please contribute to support the show today. Click here and be part of the team.
Sincerely,
John C. Dvorak
PS Checks should be sent directly to the No Agenda Show, Box 339, El Cerrito CA 94530. Your support means everything.
C:\support
The Show is healthier with sustaining donations known as subscriptions. Here are a few to choose from.
The favorite is the lucky $33.33 a month.
 Click here.
The 2020 donation to celebrate this crazy year. Click here for that.
And there is a weekly version of that too. Click here.
Social Distancing Pic of the Week
Do these idiots even know what "social distancing means?"
Copyright © 2020 No Agenda Show, All rights reserved.
Thanks for being part of the No Agenda family!

Our mailing address is:
No Agenda Show
box 339
El Cerrito, CA 94530

Add us to your address book


Backblaze

WITH A CLEAR VISION OF TECHNOLOGY