 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Let's begin by synchronizing our watches. We are in the Eastern time zone.
The legislative session is over, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is about to give his wrap-up press conference. The reporters trudge into the gallery, grumbling, as reporters like to do, about traffic and editors. Someone gives the "10 seconds" signal, and Trudeau strides to the podium. He gives a nod and starts ticking off his accomplishments. The first is self-praise for cutting taxes on the middle class and raising them on the one percent. "We've given nine out of 10 families more money each month to help with the costs of raising their kids," Trudeau says.
Justin Trudeau introduced a bill that would make marijuana legal – but what will that look like, and what will it mean for the U.S.?
It's strange to witness: He speaks in a modulated, indoor voice. His dark hair is a color found in nature. At home, there is a glamorous wife and three photogenic children, still not old enough to warm his seat at next week's G-20 summit or be involved in an espionage scandal. When Trudeau moves on to his feminist bona fides (women and minorities make up more than half of his Cabinet), he pauses for a moment, but does not lose his train of thought. His words are coherent and will not need to be run through Google Translate when he is done (except if you want to translate his French into English)....
“Many of our global clients have already requested that we block this site on our activity.”
An employee for the agency described it to BuzzFeed News as a “preventative measure”, as online advertising is assigned to websites algorithmically.
Omnicom handpicks the sites their clients’ ads run on, which is known as a whitelist, whereas ad exchanges or networks such as Google’s typically work on a blacklist where brands specify which sites not to run on.
The email from management added: “If you are running activity through ad networks such as MediaIQ/Regital, Quantcast & RocketFuel it is worth reaching out to your rep and making sure Breitbart is blacklisted and request a URL level site report over the past 30 days which all should be able to provide.”...
Under more ordinary circumstances, the cover of the issue for February 13 and 20, 2017—our Anniversary Issue, marking ninety-two years—would feature some version of Rea Irvin’s classic image of the monocled dandy Eustace Tilley. This year, as a response to the opening weeks of the Trump Administration, particularly the executive order on immigration, we feature John W. Tomac’s dark, unwelcoming image, “Liberty’s Flameout.” “It used to be that the Statue of Liberty, and her shining torch, was the vision that welcomed new immigrants. And, at the same time, it was the symbol of American values,” Tomac says. “Now it seems that we are turning off the light.” Here is a slide show of past Anniversary Issue covers....
But there is a third kind of humor that could ultimately do the most to deflate Trump. Last weekend, in an attempt to explain the new Administration’s insistence on lying about the size of the crowds at Trump’s Inauguration, Kellyanne Conway went on “Meet the Press” to explain that Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, had been offering “alternative facts.” Trump’s team knows the political power of a concise, catchy, and easily repeated phrase—and they must recognize, in “alternative facts,” a potential crack in the veneer of Trumpism. The phrase is not simply plainly ridiculous, it’s pathetically so. It’s the kind of thing that an aspiring strongman like Trump himself would never say—he just blusters, pretending, or maybe even believing, that the things he says are the real facts, the only facts. Instead, it’s what the semi-reasonable people who work for him have to come up with in order to serve two masters—Trump on the one hand and reality on the other. “He believes what he believes,” Spicer later said about his boss.
Speaking in early December at a ceremony to honor Harry Reid’s retirement from the US Senate, Hillary Clinton took aim at a target that would have been totally unfamiliar to audiences as recently as the summer of 2016: fake news. She spoke of “an epidemic” of the stuff that has “flooded social media” over the past year and “can have real-world consequences.” This was reported largely as commentary on the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which had recently led to an alarming armed standoff at DC’s Comet Ping Pong restaurant. But it was also pretty clearly an allusion to her own recently failed presidential campaign, especially because she spoke favorably of the idea of bipartisan legislation to curb foreign propaganda news, arguing that “it is imperative that leaders in both the private and public sector step up to protect our democracy and innocent lives.”...
Three weeks after Donald Trump won a historic victory to become the 45th president of the United States, the media postmortems continue. In particular, the role played by the media and technology industries is coming under heavy scrutiny in the press, with Facebook’s role in the rise of fake news currently enjoying considerable coverage. This represents a shift from earlier in the campaign, when the volume of media airtime given to Trump was often held culpable for “The Apprentice” star’s political ascendancy. In truth, a Trump presidency is – in part – a reflection of the status and evolution of the media and tech industries in 2016. Here are 10 ways that they combined to help Trump capture the White House in a manner not previously possible. Without them, Trump might not have stood a chance....
Everyone from pollsters to pundits got the result of the US presidential election wrong.
But few can have made it in such an expensive manner.
Newsweek and a partner that prints up special commemorative issues has been forced into an embarrassing recall, after it sent out 125,000 copies of its Madam President issue designed to celebrate Hillary Clinton's win....
There’s a lot of talk right now that polling failed. But Trump’s win was hardly an unpredictable “black swan” event. All the evidence was there, if you knew how to read it.In fact, the polls did ok, 2016 was not even a particularly large miss by historical standards. Most states ended up within the polling margin of error, and the more careful forecasts only gave Clinton a 70 percent chance. By the last week before the election, a Trump victory was twice as likely as losing a game of Russian Roulette. Yet the most optimistic predictions gave Clinton a 90 percent chance, because they missed a fundamental fact: polling errors tend to affect many states at once, and in the same direction. To understand the vast gulf between 70 percent and 90 percent it helps to convert probabilities to odds, the ratio of chances to win against chances to lose. A 50% chance is a coin flip, or 1:1 odds. A 66% chance – around where FiveThirtyEight’s put Clinton the last week before the election – is 66:33 or 2:1 odds. If you roll that die, it shouldn’t be surprising when it comes up red....
Breitbart, the website at the center of the self-described alternative online media, is planning to expand in the United States and abroad. The site, whose former chairman became the chief executive of Donald J. Trump’s campaign in August, has been emboldened by the victory of its candidate.
Breitbart was always bullish on Mr. Trump’s chances, but the site seems far more certain of something else, as illustrated by a less visible story it published on election night, declaring a different sort of victory: “Breitbart Beats CNN, HuffPo for Total Facebook Engagements for Election Content.”
It was a type of story the site publishes regularly. In August: “Breitbart Jumps to #11 on Facebook for Overall Engagement.” In June: “Breitbart Ranked #1 in the World for Political Social Media; Beats HuffPo by 2 Million.” Late last year: “Breitbart News #6 for Most Comments Among English Facebook Publishers Globally.”
These stories were self-promotional. But the rankings, released on a monthly basis by a company called NewsWhip, which measures activity on social networks, represented a brutal leveling. They were unelaborated lists that ranked outlets in terms that were difficult to dispute — total shares, likes and comments....
Just as with the polling numbers for the election itself, it’s difficult to tell what’s what with Ivanka Trump’s line of clothing. Is it benefiting from all the exposure, including that afforded the #GrabYourWallet boycott campaign started a few weeks ago after the videotape of her father’s salacious brags to Billy Bush surfaced, or is it taking a hit?
“The boycott was started on October 11 by Sue Atencio, a 59-year-old grandmother, and marketing specialist Shannon Coulter, who said they were shocked by Trump’s recently unearthed interview with ‘Access Hollywood’ in which the then-reality TV host bragged about his sexual conquests of women and his ability as a celebrity to ‘grab them by the p–sy,’” Itay Hod writes for The Wrap.
The New Yorker’s Sheelah Kolhatkar wrote an insightful look at Ivanka fighting to “save the brand” the following week.
“She embraced the family philosophy of turning everything into an opportunity for personal enrichment; the morning after she introduced her father at the Republican National Convention, she broadcast on Twitter an image of herself wearing one of her fashion label’s dresses on the stage with the exhortation: ‘Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech,’” Kolhatkar wrote....
Out-of-home has been a great venue for anti-Trump advertising this year, from the Nuisance Committee's clever billboards to Wieden + Kennedy's baloney-fixated food truck. Now, we can add an unpaid guerrilla campaign to that list, as some strikingly weird Donald-bashing posters suddenly popped up Wednesday on bus shelters in New York City.
There are five executions in all. Each poster is based on a fictional story—Dr. Strangelove, Dumb & Dumber, Humpty Dumpty, Thelma & Louise and The Shining.
Check out the ads below—in situ, as well as the original artwork.
Donald Trump is more popular than Hillary Clinton on Twitter -- with both humans and machines.University researchers who track political activity on Twitter have found that traffic on pro-Trump hashtags was twice as high as pro-Clinton hashtags during the first presidential debate. But the team of academics, led by Oxford University professor Philip Howard, also found that 33% of pro-Trump traffic was driven by bots and highly automated accounts, compared to 22% for Clinton. Bots are automated social media accounts that interact with other users. Some are able to answer basic questions and serve a customer service function, but they can also be used to spam and harass people....
For all the chaos and unpredictability and the sometimes appalling spectacle of this election season, the question of which candidate actually deserves to be president has never been a difficult one.
Vogue has no history of political endorsements. Editors in chief have made their opinions known from time to time, but the magazine has never spoken in an election with a single voice. Given the profound stakes of this one, and the history that stands to be made, we feel that should change.
Vogue endorses Hillary Clinton for president of the United States....
|
Political viewers of all stripes have been inundated with news about President Donald Trump, whose immigration policies and potential ties to Russia have sparked controversy while his tweets routinely set digital chatter ablaze. Socialbakers just wrapped up eight months of research, looking at Twitter consumption around Trump-related subjects in six countries and offering eye-opening insights into just how immersed consumers have become in all things Donald. "Audiences are tuning in more, but polarization means you’re seeing a lot of negative reactions to political statements,” noted Moses Velasco, chief product evangelist at the Prague, Czech Republic-based tech agency. Despite the raw, public discourse, media brands have undoubtedly benefitted: CNN, Fox News and MSNBC saw double-digit TV ratings gains in May, while subscriptions for The Washington Post and The New York Times have jumped considerably. Here, Socialbakers’ statistics spotlight the impact of Trump’s Twitter. (And if you keep scrolling past the infographic, you will see a video with SocialBakers founder Jan Rezab analyzing the data.)...
Several people have figured out that the best way to get a message to President Trump is to do so via a TV program he is likely to watch, but no one has gone to the lengths that John Oliver has to get a television-based message to the president.
On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the first new episode since Trump’s inauguration, Oliver revealed that his show has arranged to run a Trump-targeted ad locally in the Washington D.C. market on all three cable news shows Monday morning, between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m.
Oliver made the announcement during a segment on the show called “Trump vs. Truth,” about Trump’s reliance on information gleaned from dubious and often false outlets like Brietbart and Infowars, and his alarming tendency to lie about easily-debunked topics such as his inauguration crowd size, much as he did for a decade about the ratings for his NBC series, Celebrity Apprentice....
All modern American presidents have seen their disapproval rating surpass the 50 percent mark at some stage after taking office. Some reached that milestone faster than others but generally, it took all of them hundreds of days to do so. George Bush senior lasted an impressive 1,336 days before he hit 50 percent disapproval in Gallup's polls while Bill Clinton lasted 573 days before reaching majority disapproval. As a result of the federal debt crisis, Barack Obama passed the 50 percent mark 936 days into his presidency.
Donald Trump has reached majority disapproval in record time, just 8 days. When he entered office, an initial poll from Gallup showed that 45 percent of Americans approved of him, 45 disapproved and 10 percent were undecided. In his first week, he announced construction of the border wall, halted immigration from seven countries, gutted the Affordable Care Act and reversed U.S abortion policy, pushing his disapproval rating to 51 percent, according to a Gallup poll released on January 28....
Donald Trump doesn’t always speak with proper grammar. And he doesn’t always speak with facts. But he does speak with two other powerful tools: anger, and even more so, volatility.
The data visualization firm Periscopic lays it out in a new data visualization called On The Trump Emoto-Coaster. "If it felt like you were on an emotional roller coaster during this past Presidential election, just look at what was happening to Donald Trump," the team writes. "As shown in 10 of the major speeches he gave from July through December, there’s a rise and fall of intense emotion." As Trevor Noah so cuttingly put it last year, Trump has the unmodulated mentality of a toddler....
A new Pew Research Center survey finds that, for the most part, the large majority of Americans do not feel that information overload is a problem for them. Some 20% say they feel overloaded by information, a decline from the 27% figure from a decade ago, while 77% say they like having so much information at their fingertips. Two-thirds (67%) say that having more information at their disposals actually helps to simplify their lives. The survey shows that most Americans are comfortable with their abilities to cope with information flows in their day-to-day lives. Moreover, those who own more devices are also the ones who feel more on top of the data and media flows in their lives. Those who are more likely to feel information overload have less technology and are poorer, less well-educated and older....
Some MIT faculty, led by Roger Levy and Nancy Kanwisher, posted a short message regarding what they believe in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. More than 400 faculty have now signed it. As an MIT alumnus, I read this statement and wondered about the platitudes it contains: why make this statement, and why ask faculty to sign it? The answers may make you uneasy.
The platitudes in this statement are problematic
The 233-word statement is well-written and direct — it’s free of jargon, passive voice, and weasel words. If you think only about the words, it seems clear and effective. But its filled with platitudes nobody disagrees with. The fact that these faculty need to make statements of this kind says a lot about them, and the times we live in. I’ve appended my comments in italic....
The Dutch inventors say that their machine can filter 95% of ultra-fine particles and 100% of fine particles out of the air. It cleans 80,000 m³ of air per hour within a 300-meter radius and up to a height of 7km. "It's a large industrial filter about 8 metres long, made of steel ... placed basically on top of buildings and it works like a big vacuum cleaner," said Henk Boersen, a spokesman for the Envinity Group, which unveiled the system at an energy conference in Amsterdam.“ A large column of air will pass through the filter and come out clear,” Boersen told AFP at the conference. The Envinity Group is a tech start-up that aims to improve the future for people, animals and the environment in a sustainable manner. Many businesses and countries are already interested in the cleaner, according to the group....
IN CASE YOU didn’t notice, there was a presidential election this week. Just kidding—there was no way you could have failed to notice that, even if you wanted to. By the time President-elect Donald Trump’s victory became imminent Tuesday night, it was already the subject dominating everything, online and off, as the Internet (and everyone else) started reacting to the outcome. Days later, that’s still the case. Here are some of the conversations you might have missed over the past few days.
Forget Nate Silver. There’s a new king of the presidential election data mountain. His name is Sam Wang, Ph.D.
Haven’t heard of him just yet? Don’t worry. You will. Because Wang has sailed True North all along, while Silver has been cautiously trying to tack his FiveThirtyEight data sailboat (weighted down with ESPN gold bars) through treacherous, Category-Five-level-hurricane headwinds in what has easily been the craziest presidential campaign in the modern political era.
When the smoke clears on Tuesday—and it will clear—what will emerge is Wang and his Princeton Election Consortium website and calculations (which have been used, in part, to drive some of the election poll conclusions at The New York Times’ Upshot blog and The Huffington Post’s election site). What will be vindicated is precisely the sort of math approach that Silver once rode to fame and fortune....
Donald Trump’s foray into news-like production has taken its next step, with the launch of a nightly program on Facebook Live. The show, Trump Tower Live, started Monday at 6:30 p.m. ET. It’s hosted by campaign advisors Boris Epshteyn and Cliff Sims. Tomi Laren of The Blaze is also part of the coverage.
Monday’s program started rough. The anchors were put on without knowing they were live. You could see the boom microphone drop into the shot. Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway was checking her phone. We heard the director (or someone off set) count them in from 10. Just as with the program the group produced last week on debate night, the picture is poorly lit and out of focus.
And just as with that debate show, none of those flaws matter to Trump’s core audience.
As of 9 p.m. ET, just after the program ended, it had more than 1 million views. That’s not the same as one million viewers, but it’s a respectable number for sure. It had more than 30 thousand shares and 130,000 reactions. CNN reports the stream averaged 40,000 – 60,000 viewers in its first half hour. People took notice. The program this team produced on debate night has had more than nine million views. There is an audience for these shows long after their original broadcast.
This Nov. 8, even if you manage to be registered in time and have the right identification, there is something else that could stop you from exercising your right to vote.
The ballot. Specifically, the ballot’s design.
Bad ballot design gained national attention almost 16 years ago when Americans became unwilling experts in butterflies and chads. The now-infamous Palm Beach County butterfly ballot, which interlaced candidate names along a central column of punch holes, was so confusing that many voters accidentally voted for Patrick Buchanan instead of Al Gore....
In September, Hillary Clinton released a devastating attack ad on Donald Trump, in which young girls are seen looking at themselves in the mirror while Trump's offensive remarks about women—in particular, their looks—are heard in the background.
The ad, titled "Mirrors," has gotten more than 5 million views on YouTube, and has been hailed by many as one of Clinton's strongest ads of the year.
Barack Obama's 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, told Slate last month: "I do think that Clinton will look back, particularly in suburban areas where they will be able to really drive good margins with women, that the ads helped. That ad where they show Trump's words and children listening? That stuff works!"
Now, Kathy Griffin has springboarded off the famous spot with a great parody of it. It's not subtle, but it is hilarious. Check it out below. Note: It features lots of NSFW language....
|
Oh Canada...