[topical] Wednesday

[hermionesviolin]

I support the goal of livelongnmarry, but the idea of exchanging fanwork for money -- even money going to charity -- discomfits me, since one of the big (legal) arguments in favor of okaying fanwork is that we're not making any profit of it (so it's not like we're cutting into the potential profits of the people who actually own the rights to the characters).

***

Page 4 ("in the nation") of today's metro:

States abandoning abstinence program
Skeptical states are shoving aside millions of federal dollars for abstinence education, walking away from the program the Bush administration touts for slowing teen sexual activity.  Barely half the states are still in, and two more say they are leaving.

::cheers::

A lot of it is because of financial considerations, but there's also the concern that abstinence-only programs just don't work.

From the Washington Times version of the AP piece:

"The funding stream became inconsistent. We didn't know from one quarter to the next whether we'd be getting the rest of the money," said Elke Shaw-Tulloch of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. "We got to the point where we didn't have any infrastructure to put the money to use. At the same time, there was mounting evidence the abstinence programs weren't proving to be effective."

***

Later in the metro:

Professional news journalists have long been discour­aged, if not outright forbidden, from publicly displaying ­any­thing that might indicate a political affiliation.

Reporters are trained to push aside biases when working, in order to produce fair stories; this is drilled home in journalism school and often spelled out explicitly in an ethics policy at the workplace.

-opening paragraphs of "Bias creeps into coverage" (Malcolm Venable)

I rolled my eyes.  Both liberals and conservatives insist that the other side controls/dominates the mainstream media.  Does anyone really think reporters are unbiased?

And I often say that I would much rather people be straightforward about their biases.  I'm much better able

From the end of the article:

Daren Briscoe, a correspondent for Newsweek who has been following the Obama campaign for a book to be released in the fall. [...] "For young people who may not have encountered a politician like this before, it's uncharted territory. It calls for extra vigilance. The idea that a reporter is going to be completely agnostic is a little pie-in-the-sky, but the business is already under attack for biases, with people thinking they can't trust [the media]. So it's good to avoid doing anything blatant."

So we all know that reporters aren't completely unbiased but we should just continue to pretend that they are?  ::sighs::