Hustler Publisher Asks Authorities to Pardon His Shooter

Hustler Publisher Asks Authorities to Pardon His Shooter

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Posted on Oct 19, 2013

Larry Flynt, paralyzed by a shot 35 years ago, doesn’t want his attacker to be executed; Eminem’s latest hit number is homophobic; meanwhile, London plutocrats have been banned from bending building regulations to construct luxurious basement homes. These discoveries and more below.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that have found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

Paralyzed Porn Mogul Wants Attacker’s Life Spared
Porn mogul Larry Flynt urged US authorities Thursday to spare the life of a man sentenced to death for shooting him 35 years ago, leaving him paralyzed and wheelchair-bound.

Surprise! Eminem’s New Hit Song Is Homophobic
Seems like the real Slim Shady is at it again.

The Extraordinary Promise of the New Greenwald-Omidyar Venture
Make no mistake, news that Glenn Greenwald is leaving The Guardian to start a new publication funded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar is giant news—a bigger deal, than Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post.

The Best Free Data Mapping Tools
As the trend for data visualisation and mapping increases, so does the demand for tools that allow you to put this trend into action and produce content that portrays statistics in a more accessible and visually interesting way.

The Book: Its Past, Its Future
Roger Chartier, a professor at the Collège de France, examines the upheavals of the digital age which now confront us with an unprecedented question about the future of the written text: in its electronic form, should a text be fixed and immutable like a printed book, or can it open up to the potentialities of anonymity and unbounded multiplicity?

Helping Professors Use Technology Is Top Concern in Computing Survey
As professors step out from behind lecterns to stand beside laptops or in front of cameras—or both—the top concern for campus information-technology departments across the country is how they can help faculty members move smoothly into the digital age of learning.

This Is Your City Underwater
Sea levels are rising – what will that mean for your city?

Just How Much Neighborhood Transformation Can You Get From an Art Project?
Since 2005, Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn (“Haas and Hahn”) have organized three large-scale painting projects in Rio de Janeiro’s slums, or favelas.

A Fond Farewell to London’s Insane Luxury Mega-Basements
Pity the average London plutocrat searching for a decent home.

The Case for Cul-de-Sacs
In a weird way, Thomas R. Hochschild Jr. actually first encountered the social cohesion of cul-de-sacs in his latest research when he wandered into one in Connecticut with his clipboard and polo shirt, and someone called the cops.

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Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines

Hustler Publisher Asks Authorities to Pardon His Shooter

Newsweek sold to all-digital news publisher IBT Media

By Agence France-Presse
Sunday, August 4, 2013 3:35 EDT

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The once-influential US publication Newsweek is being sold to the all-digital news publisher IBT Media, the company said.




Terms of the deal were not disclosed as the transaction is expected to close “in the coming days,” the IBT statement read.




IBT Media is acquiring Newsweek and the publication’s online operations from IAC/InterActiveCorp. The purchase does not include The Daily Beast, also owned by IAC.




“We believe in the Newsweek brand and look forward to growing it, fully transformed to the digital age,” said Etienne Uzac, co-founder and chief executive officer of IBT Media.




Launched by a former Time magazine reporter in 1933, Newsweek reached a print circulation of three million by the early 1990s and published regional editions around the world.




However the magazine, like other print publications, struggled to cope with the flood of instant and often free news in the digital world and saw its revenue steadily decline.




In 2010 California billionaire Sidney Harman bought Newsweek from The Washington Post Group for a symbolic $ 1, and took over $ 40 million in liabilities. Newsweek then merged with The Daily Beast, owned by IAC.




The magazine ended its weekly print edition in December 2012, and IAC announced in May that it would sell Newsweek to concentrate on The Daily Beast.




IBT Media, founded in 2006, operates online news sites that include International Business Times, Medical Daily, Latin Times and iDigitalTimes. They say they have more than 30 million unique visitors to those sites each month.




“We respect the brand’s long history of delivering high-quality, impactful journalism and believe this aligns well with IBT Media’s culture and mission,” Uzac said.




IBT Media co-founder and chief content officer Johnathan Davis said that the Newsweek brand “is strong around the world and we believe there is significant potential to leverage that as well as enhance the editorial offering and continue to modernize the operations and approach.”






The Raw Story



Newsweek sold to all-digital news publisher IBT Media

Publisher Bails on Lehrer

Disgraced pop-journalist Jonah Lehrer’s publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has just announced that his second book, How We Decide, will be pulled from stores, and customers will be refunded. Michael Moynihan reports on the latest in the Lehrer fiasco. 

Two weeks after disgraced journalist Jonah Lehrer publically apologized for the “frailties” and “weaknesses” that lead to his firing from the New Yorker and withdrawal of his best-selling book Imagine, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), publisher of all three of Lehrer’s books, has decided it will no longer offer for sale his second book, How We Decide. After an internal review uncovered significant problems with the book, the publisher is “taking How We Decide off-sale” and has “no plans to reissue it in the future,” HMH senior vice president Bruce Nichols said in an email.

(left) Getty

HMH, who pulled Imagine from shelves in July and offered refunds to those who had purchased the book, will “shortly alert accounts about How We Decide and offer to refund returns” from customers, Nichols said. He also noted that the company’s review of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Lehrer’s first book, did not uncover any problems and that it “will remain in print.”

Nichols didn’t reveal the specifics of HMH’s findings, but shortly after the company withdrew Imagine I privately provided them with a handful of problematic passages, gleaned from a cursory look at How We Decide. For instance, during the question-and-answer period following his recent mea culpa, Lehrer referenced the concept of Cockpit Resource Management (CRM), a collaborative system employed on commercial flights in instances of catastrophic mechanical failure. It was an example drawn from How We Decide, in which Lehrer interviews Capt. Al Haynes, who in 1989 crash-landed a United Airlines plane in Sioux City, Iowa, about his experiences with CRM:

“For most of my career, we kind of worked on the concept that the captain was the authority on the aircraft,” says Al Haynes, the captain of Flight 232. “And we lost a few airplanes because of that. Sometimes the captain isn’t as smart as we thought he was…We had 103 years of flying experience there in the cockpit [on Flight 232], trying to get that airplane on the ground. If I hadn’t used CRM, if we had not had everybody’s input, it’s a cinch we wouldn’t have made it.”

And here is what Hayes said in a 1991 lecture to staffers at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Facility (and mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for CRM):

“Up until 1980, we kind of worked on the concept that the captain was THE authority on the aircraft.  What he said, goes.  And we lost a few airplanes because of that.  Sometimes the captain isn’t as smart as we thought he was… And we had 103 years of flying experience there in the cockpit, trying to get that airplane on the ground,…So if I hadn’t used CLR, if we had not let everybody put their input in, it’s a cinch we wouldn’t have made it.”

Even after the Dylan fiasco, after Imagine had been pulped, and after he publicly declared that the “lies were over now,” Lehrer told me via email that he had indeed interviewed Hayes—providing an email thread of their initial communication—and that the pilot had said the exact same thing, in the exact same language, to him twenty years later.

In his recent apology, Lehrer said that he “hadn’t thought about” providing a full accounting of the errors and plagiarism in his work. But now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, thankfully, has finally done this for him. And, hopefully, here ends the whole squalid saga.

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Publisher Bails on Lehrer