KURT WAGNER: “Your a Big Girl Now”
Welcome to the Fifth Annual Falsies Awards!
Vote Falsies 2008! It's your chance to vote for the worst candidates — and enjoy it.
Each year, the Center for Media and Democracy sponsors the "Falsies Awards" contest to shine an unflattering light on those responsible for polluting our information environment. As you look back at 2008, who stands out, for their shameless spinning?
Please rate our Falsies nominees (listed below), and tell us who you think should win our "Readers' Choice" Falsies. We're also asking you to sincerely nominate people or groups who have championed honest discourse over the past year, for our "Win Against Spin" Awards.
Please fill out the survey by 5:00 pm (U.S. central standard time) on Monday, December 1, 2008, to make sure your votes are tallied. You can vote for multiple winners in each category; our awards committee will factor that into their deliberations. Please note that you must vote on at least eight of our nominees for your ballot to be counted. (We don't need anyone stuffing our Falsies!)
Thanks for your input, and stay tuned to www.prwatch.org for a revealing look at our Falsies Awards winners, in December.
My vote went for #6 which which includes Rick Berman and his trio of disinformation agencies: The Center for Union Facts, the Employment Policies Institute and the Center for Consumer Freedom. Do you ever wonder where your relatives get those bizarre ideas? Here’s your answer.
Education’s Race to the Bottom (at the Top)
Colleges routinely boast about being “need blind” in admissions, meaning that they consider applicants without regard to their ability to pay. But even if they are need blind, and a new survey suggests they are, that may be very different from being an institution that any academically qualified student can actually attend.
That’s because only a small subset of colleges pledges to meet the full need of all students they admit. That means that for most institutions, “gapping” has become the norm. That’s when a college admits a student, tells her that she probably needs $X to afford to enroll, and then provides a package that is less than $X — sometimes considerably so.
Need Blind, but ‘Gapping’ : Scott Jaschik.
This is one of those perennial stories in which a no-doubt well-intentioned reported repeats the obvious: the less money you have, the more difficult it is to get into school. It’s like a little black spot on the bright star of American progress, and then it fades.
We just can’t see class, or rather, we can’t see ourselves as a class society, because that seems to imply that we are an unequal and so unjust society. I like this story, though, because it illustrates the roller coaster ride that goes with being a little too poor to afford college.
The real story about class and education, though, is not just that the vast majority of colleges ignore economic reality in their admissions programs, it also that president’s salaries are rising at record rates. So much so, in fact, that a few of them actually felt embarrassed.
John Doe, Kathleen Edwards: “We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes”