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With the scandal unfolding in Britain we see just how powerful someone like Rupert Murdoch really is. However there have been many like him before as we see in this list of some of the most powerful media moguls in history. My favorite is Joseph Pulitzer (pictured). You know you have power when you have facial hair like that.
Since the dawn of mass media, newspapers, radio and television have all been used to inform and educate the public. They have also been used to whip mobs into a frenzy, control the world of politics and consolidate their owners’ power. These media moguls all straddled the line between entertainment and politics, preaching to the public and wielding an immense influence over lawmakers and politicians.
What
happens when you take away your teenagers' TV, iPods, cell phones, video
games and even - gasp - Internet?
Susan Maushart did that to her three kids for 6 months in what she called "The Experiment" and lived to tell about it.
And something with as grand as "The Experiment," you'd need to kick it off in a grand way - which is exactly what Susan did:
She turned off the electricity completely for a few weeks — candles instead of electric lights, no hot showers, food stored in a cooler of ice. When blackout boot camp ended, Maushart hoped the "electricity is awesome!" reaction would soften the kids' transition to life without Google and cell phones.
The result is surprisingly (or not surprisingly, for some people anyhow) are good:
Her son Bill, a videogame and TV addict, filled his newfound spare time playing saxophone. "He swapped Grand Theft Auto for the Charlie Parker songbook," Maushart wrote. Bill says The Experiment was merely a "trigger" and he would have found his way back to music eventually. Either way, he got so serious playing sax that when the gadget ban ended, he sold his game console and is now studying music in college.
Maushart's eldest, Anni, was less wired and more bookish than the others, so her transition in and out of The Experiment was the least dramatic. Her friends thought the ban was "cool." If she needed computers for schoolwork, she went to the library. Even now, she swears off Facebook from time to time, just for the heck of it.
Maushart's youngest daughter, Sussy, had the hardest time going off the grid. Maushart had decided to allow use of the Internet, TV and other electronics outside the home, and Sussy immediately took that option, taking her laptop and moving in with her dad — Maushart's ex-husband — for six weeks. Even after she returned to Maushart's home, she spent hours on a landline phone as a substitute for texts and Facebook.
But the electronic deprivation had an impact anyway: Sussy's grades improved substantially. Maushart wrote that her kids "awoke slowly from the state of cognitus interruptus that had characterized many of their waking hours to become more focused logical thinkers."
How has Britain changed in the past 10 years? Prospect Magazine has an interesting infographic detailing the transformation of Great Britain from 1997 to 2009:
Richer, fatter, living longer, more indebted, drunker, better connected, politically disillusioned: there’s no metric that can describe whether we are happier or living better lives after 13 years of Labour. But there are plenty to show how we have changed during a period of fulsome spending, borrowing and technological transformation;
The snipped above is from the Media and Technology section and shows that cell phone ownership has gone from 17% to 93% of household, Internet access has grown from 4% to 73% whereas music sales have declined from nearly 10 million singles to just 4 million. Similiarly, newspaper circulation has contracted by 25%.
Link | The infographic in PDF format – via metafilter
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Photographer Nikki Graziano takes pictures and then creates graphs of mathematical functions which map nicely to elements of the image. It’s a very neat and beautiful way of combining math, nature, and art together into a single image.
Most of us can’t tell our secant from our cotangent. But the forms are everywhere, and Nikki Graziano wants to help us see them. Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. “I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
Regret the Error is a blog that takes note of errors, corrections, and apologies in print and electronic media; each December the most notable incidents are compiled. Here are some selections from 2009:
In my column on August 22 I suggested that Sharon Osbourne was an unemployed, drugaddled, unfit mum with a litter of feral kids. This was not intended to be taken literally. I fully accept she is none of these things and sincerely apologise to Sharon and her family for my unacceptable comments. Sorry Sharon…
In printed copies of Monday’s Daily Universe, due to a spelling error in a photo caption, the word “apostles” was replaced with a different word [apostates]. The Daily Universe apologizes to the Quorum of the Twelve and our readers for the error.
This article was amended on Tuesday 20 January 2009. In our entry on Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days, we referred to a Prairie Ho Companion; we meant a Prairie Home Companion. This has been corrected.
The original article provided the incorrect location of New York University’s new institution. It is in Abu Dhabi, not Abu Ghraib.
Many more examples at the Link, where there are sublinks to additional compilations from the past five years.
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Now that Walter Cronkite passed, Time decided to ask Americans who their most trusted newsperson was. The results were overwhelmingly in favor of Jon Stewart.
It’s a sad statement that the most trusted name in news is actually a comedian. I’m not sure if it speaks badly about Americans in general or about the state of our news media.
Link Via Good Magazine
Well, the headline pretty much sums this one up - disgruntled university is suing an adult content site for treading on their trademarks. Unfortunately for National American University, however, the similarities mostly end at the same-sounding names starting with the same letters. One of the more hilarious claims of the former of the two NAU’s is that students, faculty and others may begin confusing one for the other. When folks affiliated with a school begin to confuse their campus for a pornography production set, however, it might just mean something is missing from the curriculum.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
