I was the eighth employee of SAP BusinessObjects. This blog only contains my personal views, thoughts and opinions. It is not endorsed by SAP nor does it constitute any official communication of SAP.
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Article source: http://timoelliott.com/blog/2012/05/game-changer.html
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Here Comes HANA: SAP In-Memory Processing in ActionLeap Forward with SAP BusinessObjects 4.0Posted by Timo Elliott on Wednesday, May 9, 2012 · Leave a Comment
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Note: the following post is republished with permission from Technology Evaluation Center’s excellent blog. It is a part of a series of interviews by Jorge Garcia on trends in the analytic industry.
It is hard to imagine that organizations like SAP or former Business Objects (BO)—now a division of SAP—were once start-up companies. Nowadays on the business intelligence (BI) scene it’s almost impossible to avoid BusinessObjects. Like many other successful companies, SAP has grown into itself by offering a product that applied a radical approach to a business problem solution, and this is particularly true of its BusinessObjects stack of BI solutions. In this installment of my Thinking Radically interview series, I had the pleasure to speak with Timo Elliott, a prominent personality in the BI space.
Mr. Elliott was one of the first employees of the original French company Business Objects, which SAP acquired in 2007. He has held various positions, including Senior Product Director for SAP BO. With vast experience in the BI arena, Mr. Elliott is now part of SAP’s elite squad of “technology evangelists.”
Below, he comments on the past, present, and future of BI and SAP’s analytics products and technologies.
Hello, Mr. Elliott. Could you give us a brief overview of your career within the BI space and with SAP BusinessObjects?
TE: I’m a statistical economist by training, but when I left school, I wanted to see the world. I ended up working on an analytics project at Shell in New Zealand, with a makeshift system including a mainframe reporting tool, exports to Lotus 1-2-3, custom macros, and a pen plotter.
A few countries later, I joined Business Objects in 1991 as the eighth employee—prompted largely by the realization that the project that had taken me a month at Shell could be done in less than a day using SkipperSQL (as the BO product was then called).
I’ve had a variety of roles over the last 20 years, but one thing has been consistent: I’ve always been lucky enough to have a market-facing role, spending time understanding customers’ real-life information challenges. My role now is “technology evangelist”—I spend a lot of time at conferences and using social media, doing my part to explain new BI technology and how to achieve its full benefits.
Back in the early days of BO, what do you think it did that was so radically differently to be a leader in the BI space?
TE: Clearly, we had the right product at the right time: organizations had valuable information locked away in their databases, and you had to have technical knowledge to get it out (although Oracle at the time positioned SQL as an “English-like language” for power users). We pioneered the notion of a “semantic layer” that let business people access information using standard business terms and which automatically generated the complex SQL required to get the data from the database.
BO also benefited from great management from its founders, Bernard Liautaud and Denis Payre. They were determined to create a “Silicon Valley start-up” on the outskirts of Paris that included rapid expansion and a global vision. There were a few stumbles along the way, but in the end, it became the second European software start-up (after SAP!) to reach a billion dollars (USD) in revenue.
What are the main differences in the way organizations do BI now compared with how they did it in the past?
TE: Clearly, the technology has changed a lot over the years, but the business requirements remain remarkably similar: cutting costs, finding new opportunities, beating the competition, getting closer to customers… The biggest change is perhaps that BI is now clearly mainstream—only a tiny fraction of organizations don’t have some sort of BI in place, even if it’s only using spreadsheets.
What are the most common complaints from companies about what a BI solution should do but doesn’t?
TE: The dream of most organizations is to have a BI solution that just works—people believe strongly in the benefits of BI, but wish that it were easier to put in place robust solutions.
A new wave of technology, including in-memory techniques, holds the promise of making some of the processes much simpler. But many of the most intractable problems stem from business processes themselves (organizations with 20 different definitions of “customer” etc.), and are consequently much harder to fix. There’s also the problem of expectations: as soon as you provide better BI systems, business people can (and should) move on to new and even more difficult questions. I don’t believe people will ever be completely happy with their information systems (and if they were, it might be a sign that they needed more imagination!).
SAP is working hard to position HANA with its customers and in the market. Regarding its relationship with SAP’s BI stack of products, how can SAP HANA be a real game changer for SAP BO customers and SAP customers in general?
TE: SAP HANA combines a series of technologies (in-memory, column stores, in-database calculations, etc.) to create a truly innovative alternative to traditional BI infrastructures. Early customers are now starting to reap the benefits in the form of radically faster access to large quantities of data. This is allowing them to make better decisions, earlier, and more often, and fix potential problems in real time, rather than analyzing what failed in the past.
How does HANA modify the traditional BI cycle, and what is the impact on the business?
TE: I think the biggest benefit of HANA isn’t actually its speed—after all, every new generation of databases has been faster than previous versions. What’s different about HANA is the way it “collapses the layers” between data and analysis, and radically simplifies the implementation of new BI projects. When business people come up with a new analytic need, IT should no longer have to say, “Come back in six months when we’ve managed to get the data into the data warehouse.”
An analogy for how BI has changed would be the move from film to digital photography. In the old days, you’d have to buy film, load it into your camera, take pictures, send the film off to experts to get it processed, and after three days you’d get your pictures back—only to realize that they weren’t quite what you wanted. A lot of enterprise BI today works along exactly the same lines—as a business person, I have to rely on experts to get the solutions in place, it’s slow, and what I get back is often not quite what I need.
HANA is like the digital camera—it’s faster, but the real benefit is getting rid of the redundant layers in the process. Today, I can take a picture without an expert’s help, and if it’s no good, I can quickly take another while I still have the subject to hand: we’ve all become better photographers because of digital cameras, and better BI will be the result of in-memory technologies like HANA.
How about cloud computing? What is your view on SAP’s cloud service strategy, especially for BI and in light of SAP’s recent acquisition of SuccessFactors?
TE: It’s clear that cloud computing is the future, and it’s also clear that on-premise installations are going to be with us for a long, long time. SAP’s strategy of “orchestration”—helping organizations make the best use of the combination of technologies (increasingly including mobile)—sounds like the right approach to me. From an analytics point of view, BO was, and continues to be, a pioneer in on-demand business intelligence with our OnDemand platform, which now offers HANA-based BI in the cloud.
From your point of view, what is the difference between BI and business analytics, and the difference in the way they are applied by organizations?
TE: The “nomenclature wars,” as I call them, drive me nuts. People often conflate two things: the technology that is being talked about (this changes over time, requiring new terminology) and the underlying business needs that are being addressed (this doesn’t really change).
I read a lot of rubbish about how BI is “backward looking” and analytics is “forward looking.” I can assure you that BI has always been about actionable information. At the end of the day, what counts is using data to improve the way you do business. Call it whatever you like, but vendors in particular shouldn’t try to belittle what we’ve been doing for decades just because they have some new technology they want to sell.
What is your view on the general maturity level of businesses in regard to BI applications? Are there key areas for improvement organizations still have to address? Which ones?
TE: I present regularly on topics such as “why BI projects fail and what to do about it” and “how to implement BI competency centers.” Overall, there’s higher maturity in BI, but it’s widely scattered, with each new generation relearning most of the same lessons.
The key area of improvement that is required is to always remember that BI is about people and the business, not about the software architecture. The technology is, of course, often a challenge, but when BI projects fail, it’s almost inevitably a problem with organization, culture, expectation setting, and business alignment. If you run a BI project, you should be spending more time on these things than the underlying IT infrastructure.
What is your position regarding the adoption of big-data technologies (especially Hadoop) and SAP’s strategy for adopting these technologies?
TE: MapReduce, Hadoop, and related technologies have proven their worth in enterprise contexts surprisingly quickly, and every vendor in the BI space is busy providing tighter integration. The latest version of SAP’s Sybase IQ database has tight links with Hadoop, and you’ll see a lot more coming out this year, both in terms of integration and best practice (i.e., determining where it makes the most sense to use these new technologies).
What’s your vision for BI, your expectations for its future?
TE: As I sat down to gather my thoughts about BI in 2012, I quickly came up with the same long laundry list of BI topics as everybody else: in-memory, mobile, predictive, social, collaborative decision-making, data discovery, real time, etc.
All of these things are clearly important, and we’re going to continue to see great improvements this year. But I think that the real next big thing in BI is what I’m seeing when I talk to customers: they’re using these new opportunities to not only improve analytics, but also fundamentally rethink some of their key business processes.
Instead of analytics being something that is used to monitor and eventually improve a business process, I’m seeing analytics become a more fundamental part of the business process itself. One example is a large Telco company that has transformed the way it attracts customers. Instead of laboriously creating a range of rate plans, promoting them, and analyzing the results, it now uses analytics to automatically create hundreds of more complex, personalized rate plans. The plans are then thrown out into the market, monitored in real time, and those that aren’t successful are quickly culled. It’s a way of doing business that would have been inconceivable in the past, and will be a lot more common in the future.
What is your favorite wine?
TE: When at Business Objects we used our own technology to run things, we put a French spin on the phrase “eating our own dog food” and claimed that we were “drinking our own Champagne.” So that’s my answer!
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Filed under All, Featured · Tagged with #bigdata, Analytics, BI, Big Data, BusinessObjects, Future, Futures, Interview, Jorge Garcia, Predictive, TEC
Article source: http://timoelliott.com/blog/2012/05/bi_past_present_future.html
Falcon Insurance selects the 4Sight business intelligence product for their organization.
Austin, TX /PRNewswire/ – 4Sight Business Intelligence, Inc., a leading provider of off-the-shelf property casualty specific business intelligence products, announced that Falcon Insurance has chosen the 4Sight Business Intelligence for Property Casualty solution for all of their lines of business.
“4Sight provides us with the ability to have a powerful business intelligence solution off-the-shelf. Having the ability to create reports using the ad-hoc reporting tools as well as a long list of standard reports and dashboards, we are able to do a lot in a relatively short time,” said Michael Parrillo, CEO, Falcon Insurance. “4Sight for PC provides us with the ability to drill down in to our data while analyzing our business from many different perspectives.”
“Falcon Insurance represents a large portion of our client base in that they are looking for an affordable Business Intelligence solution with a low amount of costly services,” explained Robert Clark, Development Director at 4Sight. “Due to standard based methodologies, we are able to implement our business intelligence solution to any size carrier at an extremely affordable price. We typically have carriers looking at reports in less than 45 days.”
Parrillo said they are impressed by product as well as the out-of-the-box product offering of reports and dashboards as well as the analytics preconfigured for the PC industry.
4Sight for Property Casualty is a complete, affordable, solution with over 50 preconfigured reports, dashboards and hundreds of analytics. With “what-if” capabilities and ease-of-use, whether in underwriting, claims, Billing, management, reinsurance or other areas, you can find your answers.
About 4Sight Business Intelligence, Inc.
4Sight Business Intelligence, Inc. provides business intelligence solutions designed specifically for Property Casualty insurance industry. Our focus is providing off-the-shelf, documented, solutions with ad-hoc reporting, what-if analysis, dashboards, scorecards, standard reports, data mining and pre-built ETL processes which allow for quick configuration and implementation of typically less than 45 days. Our products are for carriers and MGAs of all sizes. Some clients include Mutual Aid Exchange, American Alliance, AXA Re PC, Dallas National Insurance, Preferred Auto, Chautauqua Patrons Insurance, Kentucky National Insurance, Gateway Insurance, American Leader and the NC Farm Bureau, among many others. Our products support most platforms and your choice of database. For more information call 888-PCBI-123, visit www.4SightBI.com or email Info@4SightBI.com.
SOURCE 4Sight Business Intelligence, Inc.
Copyright [2012] PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved.
Article source: http://www.propertyandcasualty.com/doc.mvc/falcon-insurance-selects-sight-business-intelligence-0001?atc~c=771+s=773+r=001+l=a
BOSTON, MA–(Marketwire -05/09/12)-
Elsevier Business Intelligence, the medtech industry’s leading provider of strategic partnership and investment conferences, will host the ‘IN3 Medical Device 360° Boston’ investor conference on June 27-29, 2012, at the Hyatt Regency Boston.
Investment in Innovation (IN3) Medical Device 360° Boston will feature presentations by more than 25 early-, mid- and late-stage start-up companies that are seeking funding and/or strategic partnership, developing products covering the spectrum of diagnostic and therapeutic device markets. Presenters confirmed to date include Aerolase, CoolSpine, Harbor MedTech, MGI Medical, Neuronetrix, Poiesis Medical, Soft Tissue Regeneration, StnDrd Infusion, Thermimage, ThermopeutiX and Vertiflex. The event also will feature an outstanding agenda of panels, presentations and networking sessions with industry thought leaders discussing the most pressing issues facing the global device industry in 2012 and beyond.
Participating speakers confirmed to date include senior-level strategic decision makers from Ascent Biomedical Ventures, Boston Scientific, Cowen Healthcare Royalty Partners, DePuy Mitek and Codman/Johnson Johnson, Fidelity Biosciences, NGN Capital, NMT Capital, Novartis Venture Funds, Polaris Venture Partners, Siemens Venture Capital, Smith Nephew Endoscopy, SV Life Sciences Advisers, Wright Medical Technology, and many more. Interactive panel topics will include: What Big Companies Want to See in a Start-Up Before Buying; Complying with the New Physician Sunshine Law; and, Medtech Investing: Hear What It Takes to Get a VC to Say Yes. In addition, Robert Pearson, president of W20 Group, will give a special Social Media Keynote Presentation, and a networking cocktail reception will be held the evening of June 28th. Partnering software will be available to all registered attendees prior to the conference so that one-on-one onsite meetings can be pre-arranged.
Emerging medtech companies that would like to apply to present in Boston should contact Kayleen Kell at 949-797-7142, or email k.kell@elsevier.com.
The event will be held at the Hyatt Regency Boston, centrally located in downtown Boston. Co-sponsors to date include Ronald Trahan Associates Inc., AptivSolutions, Medmarc with The Hartford and Biomedic-Insure, UBM TechInsights, FreeMind, Scisive, Mass Medical Angels, Life Science Intelligence, and Marketwire. Visit www.IN3Boston.com for full conference and registration details. EBI will be hosting one additional IN3 Medical Device 360° event in 2012, its Summit-San Francisco, October 15-17; visit http://www.elsevierbi.com/conferences for more information.
About Elsevier Business Intelligence
Elsevier Business Intelligence (EBI), an Elsevier company built on the heritage of F-D-C Reports, Windhover Information and Medtech Insight, is a global information supplier providing business intelligence on regulatory, business and reimbursement issues that are vital to the healthcare industry. Through a range of products including publications, conferences, databases and reports, EBI places biopharma and medical device professionals, and those who focus on these industries, at the forefront of knowledge, by providing the perfect combination of news and information together with penetrating insight and analysis. EBI (www.elsevierbi.com) has offices in the U.S. in Bridgewater, N.J.; Norwalk, Conn.; Rockville, Md.; and Irvine, Calif.
Ronald Trahan, APR
Ronald Trahan Associates Inc.
508-359-4005, x108
Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/elsevier-business-intelligence-ebi-host-134000528.html
No Deal for Greek Coalition With Conservative HeadAP
Greek conservative leader Antonis Samaras, whose party came first in last weekend’s elections that produced a hung …
Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-delivers-oracle-business-accelerators-120000170.html
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Indications
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1.
BOSTON, MA, May 09, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) –
Elsevier Business Intelligence, the medtech industry’s leading
provider of strategic partnership and investment conferences, will
host the ‘IN3 Medical Device 360 degrees Boston’ investor conference
on June 27-29, 2012, at the Hyatt Regency Boston.
Investment in Innovation (IN3) Medical Device 360 degrees Boston will
feature presentations by more than 25 early-, mid- and late-stage
start-up companies that are seeking funding and/or strategic
partnership, developing products covering the spectrum of diagnostic
and therapeutic device markets. Presenters confirmed to date include
Aerolase, CoolSpine, Harbor MedTech, MGI Medical, Neuronetrix,
Poiesis Medical, Soft Tissue Regeneration, StnDrd Infusion,
Thermimage, ThermopeutiX and Vertiflex. The event also will feature
an outstanding agenda of panels, presentations and networking
sessions with industry thought leaders discussing the most pressing
issues facing the global device industry in 2012 and beyond.
Participating speakers confirmed to date include senior-level
strategic decision makers from Ascent Biomedical Ventures, Boston
Scientific, Cowen Healthcare Royalty Partners, DePuy Mitek and
Codman/Johnson Johnson, Fidelity Biosciences, NGN Capital, NMT
Capital, Novartis Venture Funds, Polaris Venture Partners, Siemens
Venture Capital, Smith Nephew Endoscopy, SV Life Sciences Advisers,
Wright Medical Technology, and many more. Interactive panel topics
will include: What Big Companies Want to See in a Start-Up Before
Buying; Complying with the New Physician Sunshine Law; and, Medtech
Investing: Hear What It Takes to Get a VC to Say Yes. In addition,
Robert Pearson, president of W20 Group, will give a special Social
Media Keynote Presentation, and a networking cocktail reception will
be held the evening of June 28th. Partnering software will be
available to all registered attendees prior to the conference so that
one-on-one onsite meetings can be pre-arranged.
Emerging medtech companies that would like to apply to present in
Boston should contact Kayleen Kell at 949-797-7142, or email
k.kell@elsevier.com.
The event will be held at the Hyatt Regency Boston, centrally located
in downtown Boston. Co-sponsors to date include Ronald Trahan
Associates Inc., AptivSolutions, Medmarc with The Hartford and
Biomedic-Insure, UBM TechInsights, FreeMind, Scisive, Mass Medical
Angels, Life Science Intelligence, and Marketwire. Visit
www.IN3Boston.com for full conference and registration details. EBI
will be hosting one additional IN3 Medical Device 360 degrees event
in 2012, its Summit-San Francisco, October 15-17; visit
http://www.elsevierbi.com/conferences for more information.
About Elsevier Business Intelligence
Elsevier Business Intelligence
(EBI), an Elsevier company built on the heritage of F-D-C Reports,
Windhover Information and Medtech Insight, is a global information
supplier providing business intelligence on regulatory, business and
reimbursement issues that are vital to the healthcare industry.
Through a range of products including publications, conferences,
databases and reports, EBI places biopharma and medical device
professionals, and those who focus on these industries, at the
forefront of knowledge, by providing the perfect combination of news
and information together with penetrating insight and analysis. EBI
(
www.elsevierbi.com ) has offices in the U.S. in Bridgewater, N.J.;
Norwalk, Conn.; Rockville, Md.; and Irvine, Calif.
Contact:
Ronald Trahan, APR
Ronald Trahan Associates Inc.
508-359-4005, x108
SOURCE: Elsevier Business Intelligence
Copyright 2012 Marketwire, Inc., All rights reserved.
(click image for larger view and for slideshow)
More than 50% of health delivery organizations will either purchase new business intelligence (BI) technology or replace their old systems during the next three years, according to a KLAS survey.
Of the 147 respondents, representing 137 healthcare provider organizations, 33% said they intend to purchase new BI tools, while 19% said they will replace their BI systems. Another 33% reported that they will continue with their current BI tools, and 14% said they have no plans to change these systems.
The KLAS report, Business Intelligence Perception 2012: A Wave is Coming, sought to gauge the views of health IT executives at healthcare provider organizations on their data analytics needs and vendor preferences.
Among its findings: Although McKesson, SAP, and IBM systems were considered by 43% of providers, a total of 37 vendors were mentioned, a very high number, according to Joe Van De Graaff, the report’s author. Van De Graaff also said healthcare providers are looking at BI vendors with tools that provide clinical quality reporting, but many are turning to vendors that do not have a healthcare focus.
[ Practice management software keeps the medical office running smoothly. For a closer look at KLAS' top-ranked systems, see 10 Top Medical Practice Management Software Systems. ]
“Healthcare reform is driving a lot of different initiatives and business intelligence is seen as a critical part of that,” Van De Graaff told InformationWeek Healthcare. “Whether a health system is looking to understand, for example, readmission rates and be able to predict how that will affect their revenue or whether a health system is looking at how to share information, data is at the heart of it. The whole idea and principle behind it is to be able to make more informed decisions based on the data.”
To prepare for a new healthcare system that requires more data analytics, respondents said they want to use their new business intelligence tools for clinical and financial data, as well as predictive analytics, data modeling, forecasting, and trending.
The research also suggests that a trend is developing among providers who want a complete view of their data and are seeking to bring together data sources across different departments and disciplines within a health system. The result will be a “single source of truth,” that requires an enterprise data warehouse, the report states.
Not surprisingly, the report found that 83% of providers are looking to pursue an enterprise BI strategy that will simultaneously organize, analyze, and visualize clinical, financial, and operational data across the organization.
A smaller group of providers is opting for a non-enterprise approach. They are pursuing vendors who are clinically focused, such as the Advisory Board and Cerner; financially focused, such as Lawson or Oracle; or departmentally focused, such as Omnicell, which specializes in the pharmacy market.
Still other health providers are implementing a hybrid approach. Some, for example, are engaging SAP for their enterprise strategy, but approaching vendors such as Humedica for population health analytics, the research found.
Purchasing decisions also are being dictated by the size of the hospital.
According to Van De Graaff, smaller hospitals lean toward prepackaged BI technology that requires fewer IT skills, and is ready to adapt to specific healthcare needs, models, and requirements.
Larger hospitals, on the other hand, are opting for BI platforms capable of processing financial, operational, and clinical analytics. These platforms draw information from different data sources and require more customization, larger budgets, and additional IT skills.
Given the report’s findings, Van De Graaff said vendors’ BI systems will be required to meet many different healthcare initiatives in the years ahead. “The challenge for these BI vendors will be to meet some of the government reporting requirements related to healthcare reform such as Meaningful Use, while still retaining and offering a true business intelligence platform,” Van De Graaff said.
The 2012 InformationWeek Healthcare IT Priorities Survey finds that grabbing federal incentive dollars and meeting pay-for-performance mandates are the top issues facing IT execs. Find out more in the new, all-digital Time To Deliver issue of InformationWeek Healthcare. (Free registration required.)
Article source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/healthcare/clinical-systems/240000032
For those of you who haven’t seen Marco’s post from a few days ago, registration is now open for the SSAS Maestros course that he and I will be teaching this July in Milan. A few things to point out:
So, to sum up, this is the ultimate in SSAS training and if you want to take your SSAS knowledge to the next level you should come along.
For more details on what the SSAS Maestros program is, see:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/ssas-maestros.aspx
To find out more about this course and to register, go to:
http://www.sqlbi.com/training/ssas-maestro
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/Cpjz/~3/NRw7KnlEFfI/
Marty Kaplan: We, not long ago, did a study of the Los Angeles media market. We looked at every station airing news and every news broadcast they aired round the clock. And we put together a composite half hour of news. How much in that half hour was about transportation, education, law enforcement, ordinances, tax policy; everything involving locals, from city to county? The answer is, in a half hour, 22 seconds.
Bill Moyers: Twenty-two seconds devoted to what one would think are the serious issues of democracy, right?
Marty Kaplan: Yes. Whereas, in fact, there are three minutes about crime, and two and a half minutes about the ugliest dog contest, and two minutes about entertainment. There’s plenty of room for stuff that the stations believe will keep people from changing the dial.
Bill Moyers: So they will tell you, however, that they’re in the entertainment business. That they’re in the business to amuse the public, to entertain the public. And if they do these serious stories about the schools or about the highways or about this or that, the public tunes out.
Marty Kaplan: It’s one of the great lies about broadcasting now. There are consultants who go all around the country and they tell the general managers and the news directors, “It is only at your peril that you cover this stuff.” But one of the things that we do is, the Lear Center gives out the Walter Cronkite award for excellence in television political journalism every two years. And we get amazing entries from all over the country of stations large and small, of reporters under these horrendous odds, doing brilliant pieces and series of pieces, which prove that you can not only do these pieces on a limited budget, but you can still be the market leader.
It used to be that the news programs that aired, believe it or not, had news on them. They had investigative stories. But then somewhere in the 1980s, when 60 Minutes started making a profit, CBS put the news division inside the entertainment division. And then everyone followed suit. So ever since then, news has been a branch of entertainment and, infotainment, at best.
But there was a time in which the press, the print press, news on television and radio were speaking truth to power, people paid attention, and it made a difference. I don’t think the Watergate trials would have happened, the Senate hearings, had there not been the kind of commitment from the news to cover the news rather than cutting away to Aruba and a kidnapping.
Bill Moyers: What is the basic consequence of taking the news out of the journalism box and putting it over into the entertainment box?
Marty Kaplan: People are left on their own to fend for themselves. And the problem is that there’s not that much information out there, if you’re an ordinary citizen, that comes to you. You can ferret it out. But it oughtn’t be like that in a democracy. Education and journalism were supposed to, according to our founders, inform our public and to make democracy work.
We can’t do it unless we’re smart. And so the consequence is that we’re not smart. And you can see it in one study after another. Some Americans think that climate change is a hoax cooked up by scientists, that there’s no consensus about it. This kind of view could not survive in a news environment, which said, “This is true and that’s false.” Instead we have an environment in which you have special interest groups manipulating their way onto shows and playing the system, gaming the notion that he said she said is basically the way in which politics is now covered.
It’s all about combat. If every political issue is the combat between two polarized sides, then you get great television because people are throwing food at each other. And you have an audience that hasn’t a clue, at the end of the story, which is why you’ll hear, “Well, we’ll have to leave it there.” Well, thank you very much. Leave it there.
Article source: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1224
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