We need something like this in the Philippines. I think this should start with trying to organize all recorded interviews we have of candidates. These interviews we tag with their positions and the context. We could do this for everything a politician/journalist/business people/celebrity etc. says. Then whenever a new video is entered into our database we can automatically query flip-flopping, bad policy advice etc! This can be done by us the citizens of the Philippines. I hope someone does this.
PS: The cynic in me keeps remembering Miriam Defensor-Santiago’s “I lied!!!”
PS1: Listen to the npr audio in the linked post.
Ps2: One of the things I’d miss from my current job is the US IP address. No more full episodes of The Daily Show. Colbert Report and
For decades, young reporters would ask themselves, “What would Walter think?” Nowadays, it’s not the memory of Walter Cronkite or even Edward R. Murrow that motivates some reporters — it’s more often the fear that the stories they put out today might get picked apart by Jon Stewart tomorrow.
Prominent among the wary: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who recently explained in a magazine essay that The Daily Show host “has gone from optional to indispensable” in just a few short years.
And Williams tells NPR’s Guy Raz that on occasion, when he feels his broadcast tap-dancing toward the precipice — tossing around a story idea for “what I call Margaret Mead journalism — where we ‘discover Twitter,’ ” for instance, or entertaining some other unfortunate editorial possibility — “I will, and have, said that, ‘You know, maybe we can just give a heads-up to Jon to set aside some time for that tonight.’
“I should quickly add, we have another set of standards we put our stories through,” Williams cautions. “But Jon’s always in the back of my mind. … When you make The Daily Show, it’s usually not for a laurel, it’s for a dart.”
None of this, the NBC anchor says, is to claim that Stewart and his crew have had some wholesale transformative effect on the news media.
But “a lot of the work that Jon and his staff do is serious,” Williams says. “They hold people to account, for errors and sloppiness. … It’s usually delivered with a smile — sometimes not. It’s not who we do it for, it’s not our only check and balance, but it’s healthy — and it helps us that he’s out there.”
via Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News : NPR.
