Recently in Media Category

I was in the audience for the second performance of The false start, personal apology from the director and Trey Parker and Matt Stone sitting sixth row center all only added to the wild enthusiasm of the audience. We knew the show would be a hit. I wondered what number they'd do at the Tony's.

My assumption is that it will be the most benign of the show. "Hello," the opening number, is set at a mission training center in Salt Lake City where young Mormons are learning to missionize door-to-door. Scott Brown agrees:

I can dream that the the Tonycast will include The Book of Mormon's "Hasa Diga Eebowai," the category favorite's most talked-about number, which contains a helpful suggestion for the Supreme Being that might be anatomically impossible, even for Him. But considering the extreme de-crass-ification of past broadcasts, it seems unlikely that CBS will allow tuneful, good-natured blasphemy on its Tiffany air (yes, the same crystalline ether that, until recently, transmitted Charlie Sheen). Full-contact God-cursing just isn't easily bleepable. The show's medley will most likely open with Mormon’s doorbell-ringing opening number, “Hello!” Later, we're told there'll be a number anchored by Best Actor in a Musical nom Andrew Rannells. (I believe it'll be “I Believe," but don't make me swear on the Bible.)

An excellent CBS Sunday Morning report on the Book of Mormon includes discussion of that most talked-about number, "Hasa Diga Eebowai":

The Tony's will be live-blogged here. FiveThirtyEight looks at just how much a Tony is worth. Fresh Air did an interview with Parker and Stone on the show. Kevin Fallon says watch even if you've never been to a Broadway show.

And I'm Tech Editor. We're #33 (up from 46). TechPresident:

Here's January's top 50 list, with the new Technorati ranking alongside each blog. Note, for the new listings I am just drawing from Technorati's "U.S. Politics Blogs" subcategory, which wasn't available back in January. So some blogs that lack a new ranking haven't disappeared, they just have been reclassified by Technorati...

1. HuffingtonPost (1)
2. Boing Boing
3. Daily Kos (8)
4. CNN Political Ticker (3)
5. Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish (21)
6. The Caucus (New York Times)
7. Treehugger
8. Threat Level (39)
9. Think Progress (2)
10. 538 (10)
11. Talking Points Memo
12. Washington Wire (Wall Street Journal)
13. Michelle Malkin (14)
14. Ben Smith, Politico (22)
15. The Corner (National Review Online)
16. Pajamas Media
17. Hot Air
18. Political Radar (ABC News)
19. Crooks and Liars (13)
20. Newsbusters (5)
21. Glenn Greenwald (Salon) (4)
22. Marc Ambinder (The Atlantic)
23. Swampland (Time)
24. Powerline (9)
25. Redstate
26. Americablog
27. Firedoglake (20)
28. Gateway Pundit (11)
29. Matthew Yglesias (40)
30. Hit & Run (Reason)
31. Feministing
32. TruthDig
33. Buzzmachine
34. CQ Politics
35. Open Left
36. Hullabaloo (28)
37. Talk Left
38. Taegan Goddard's Political Wire (33)
39. Mother Jones
40. Pam's House Blend
41. MyDD
42. Balloon Juice
43. Stop the ACLU (41)
44. The Next Right
45. The Moderate Voice (33)
46. Feministe
47. Real Clear Politics
48. Atrios
49. Little Green Footballs
50. Wizbang

Me, writing today at TMV, after struggling to get the Hope Bus video uploaded:

Despite any of the talk about Net Neutrality, networks are right now enforcing a tiered level of offerings that disadvantages production at all service levels. Where I live I can only get a 6 MB incoming line. Outgoing I'm limited to half the speed of a 1990s era 512k connection. They will not even sell me more if I am willing to pay extra!

We have seen this happen before. Broadcasting itself started out as an open platform, built by innovators, nurtured by government and fostered by and for educators. Once it was developed industry moved in. Promising improvements they pushed every notion of citizen production aside. It required, we were told, trained industry professionals to do anything worthwhile.

Cable did the same thing. Begun in rural Pennsylvania as a means to deliver broadcast signals to rural homes, CATV (CoAxial cable TV) used the promise of localism through channels dedicated to educational and governmental services and Public Access TV, to take on the broadcast network monopoly. Once it had its toehold, it starved and marginalized those channels. That same thing is happening today with the Internet.
YouTube, we're told, is filled with marginal citizen-produced nonsense and gets most of its traffic through pirated programming. Remix culture -- citizen use of the mediasphere -- is criminalized as piracy. And every attempt to by you and me to upload quality versions of what we produce is literally slowed down (and deteriorated) through service tiers that won't permit fast uploads.

Don't get me wrong, citizens reap great benefits from the Interent and we will see vast improvements over what we had before. We'll even be permitted to produce in the margins. But it's obvious to me that the days of the internet as citizens' media production haven are numbered.

I read it in The New York Observer.

I've been bugged the last few days by Norah O'Donnell's Today Show stand-ups. Today from Omaha wasn't so bad, but on the White House Lawn yesterday:

Today the president is going to try to capitalize on some of the momentum from last night, launching a five-state campaign-style blitz throughout the nation in order to sell his plan directly to the American people... Now on the Middle East, the president boldly says he believes that peace is within reach for the Israelis and the Palestinians. He warned Iran to end its support of terror and promised Iranians seeking liberty that the US will stand with them.

Ok, so it sounded worse than it reads. Then here's the day before:

The president will lay out a bold blueprint for his aggressive second term agenda. He will challenge Congress to tackle some politically divisive issues, and he will ask the world to join him in a new effort to help rebuild Iraq. Preparing for tonight's State of the Union address, the president wants to chart a new course, pledging diplomacy abroad, and championing the spread of freedom with the elections in Iraq. But advisers say he will not yield to growing demands to offer an exit strategy for US troops.

Hard-hitting, deep-digging, objective, independent reporting? It sounds more like she's regurgitating White House Communications Office agitprop to me.

Ana Marie Cox, aka Wonkette, is writing a book. I don't know if she has it in her. But then, Fox's Chris Wallace didn't have it in him either and he wrote a book. ("It was a kind of collaborative effort. My -- a fellow, an agent, Bill Adler (ph), came up -- called me up and said, Have you ever thought of writing a book? And I said, yes, but I never have had an idea." I'll say.) I digress.

I couldn't write a book. Writing a blog and writing a book are very different talents. Tom Wolfe is an accomplished writer, but that doesn't guarantee he would write an interesting blog. And Cox is great as Wonkette, a foulmouthed, hard-drinking, sex-obsessed politics junkie. But... I've seen Cox on cable and C-SPAN panels and read interviews and, well, she's not always the most articulate. And while Andrew Sullivan is gone for "say, nine months" to write his book, Cox is taking just one.

Don't get me wrong, I like Wonkette, love her politics, and am grateful that her guest blogger caught me in a dumb mistake just a week after I started blogging. That sent my traffic through the roof and earned me a Google ranking I had been trying to achieve for months. Not to mention great cocktail chatter.

I bet the book will sell; I'm not so sure I'll be buying.

Andrew Sullivan is going on hiatius for "a few months."

Why? The simple answer is that I want to take a breather, to write a long-overdue book, to read some more, travel to Europe and the Middle East, and work on some longer projects... It's not so much the time as the mindset. The ability to keep on top of almost everything on a daily and hourly basis just isn't compatible with the time and space to mull over some difficult issues in a leisurely and deliberate manner.

I don't always agree with Andrew, in fact I often don't, but I like his writing and I read his blog regularly. He's pointed to things others don't and often has a fresh and different perspective.

I subscribed to The New Republic while he was editor and tend to enjoy his magazine pieces more than his books. I agree with him most on the subject of gay marriage, though even there we part ways from time to time.

Friends in New York consider him the devil and will ignore the news. Not me. I hope he finishes his book and returns as promised "to blogging full-steam with perhaps a new direction or approach to refresh the material."

If I had found a podcast that I thought would be interesting, I might have delayed signing on to Audible.com. I looked. From today's San Jose Mercury News:

``You don't have to go hunting for news -- the news finds you,'' said Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS and creator of one of the earliest blogs, the Scripting News.

Podcasting works in the same way. Subscribe to specific Podcasts, and the software finds the latest feeds and transfers the audio files automatically to iTunes, Apple's digital media jukebox. When an iPod is plugged into your computer, it downloads the podcasts. The software also works with other music management programs and digital music players.

I've yet to figure out how to have the news find me. But then, I'm not as technologically agile as I once was. To date I've listened to one of Dave's podcasts; I would gladly listen to more. As I figure it out I'll let you know how it goes.

Here's where to start looking: iPodder, Podcaster.org and Podcast.net (the top in Google's search results but the site is down right now).

Oh, and the BBC is experimenting with podcasts.

Charlie Peters also had this item:

You may have seen on the front page of The Washington Post in late November the headline “Virginia wife slain after court denies protection.� ...A few days later, the Post ran two sentences in its correction box on page 2, saying that the original story “may have left the impression that the judge had refused� to grant the extension, and that in fact “additional documents show that the protective order was dismissed at the [wife's] request.� Are two sentences on page 2 enough to correct the erroneous main thrust of a front page story?

Obviously not. What to do with the complaint? Scott Rosenberg at Salon has an idea:

Software development teams have used bug tracking software for ages now -- why not journalists? ...The model doesn't map perfectly onto journalism, but it's not too far off: Let people file "bug reports" if they believe your publication has published something in need of correcting. The publication can respond however it seems appropriate: If the complaint is frivolous, you point that out; if it's a minor error of spelling or detail, you fix it; if it's a major error, you deal with it however you traditionally deal with major errors -- but you've left a trail that shows what happened.

He revisited the idea to answer comments and concludes:

I'm not suggesting that this idea is the single, one-fix-solves-all-problems answer to the ills of journalism today. It's a pragmatic, you-could-do-it-real-soon suggestion for beginning to deal with professional journalism's biggest problem: the public's loss of trust, which begins with the sense that media companies are big institutions that pay no attention to their own mistakes.

Agreed.

I miss C-SPAN's Booknotes. It was one of my favorite shows on television. It's replacement, Q&A, is a dud. (George Bush is the guest tomorrow). Maybe it will get better.

An author I'd have liked to see on Booknotes is Malcolm Gladwell. I enjoyed his first book, The Tipping Point (The New Yorker article it's based on is here) and look forward to reading the just released Blink.

One of my first posts, Everything's Derivative, was about another New Yorker article of his, the thought-provoking Something Borrowed: Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life? I'll have another Malcolm post later today.

If you watched last night's Nightline "Iraq, Why We Stay" Town Meeting to the end, you heard Ted Koppel's closing remarks interupted by a shouter:

I was upset that nothing was said about the health of our troops mentally, physically or otherwise. So, I satarted chanting "GULF WAR SYNDROME" over and over again, very loudly so it filled the church and drown out Ted Koppel. He replied, "I am sure I have no idea what you're talking about" and I yelled, "It's about Depleted Uranium!" Then I shut up, and he finished his closing and it was over.

The full account is well worth reading. Via Steve Gillard's News Blog.

Via Kudzu Files. A 17 year old guy's been blogging as The New Democrat since November. Along comes a former Swift Boat Veteran supporter, "Ricky Vandal," who starts a blog with the same name, except with the added tagline "Saving the Democratic party from the looney left." Centerfield was the first to try to help and has the details. Now lots of blogs are talking about it.

UPDATE: Happy ending.

The FCC rejected 36 indecency complaints by the Parents Television Council. Among the PTC objections, shows with "scenes in which male characters talk about kissing men and female characters talk about kissing women." Jeff Jarvis's Buzz Machine details all 36 of them, noting:

In the first set of rulings, the FCC seems to bravely decides that "dick" in various forms is OK. Ditto ass, penis, vaginal, nutsack, and a three-way. In the second set, they add the words hell and damn -- as if they were ever in contention as indecent and blaspamous -- as well as breast, nipples, can, pissed, crap, bastard, and bitch. It's the liberalization of America, I tell you, it's the second damned sexual revolution!

What happened to Tavis Smiley's NPR show? We liked it and my guess is it was very popular in Atlanta. The NPR site has a Press Release expressing regret. The Washington Post details a falling out:

NPR executives say Smiley simply would not negotiate after an agent delivered his demands. "We tried to meet, we tried to talk by phone," says Washington lawyer Robert Barnett, who represented NPR. "We were woefully unsuccessful. . . . "

Says Smiley: "What NPR is apparently upset about is not that I would not negotiate, but that I wouldn't acquiesce. I do not do my best work in chains and shackles. For black kids and brown kids yet unborn, I felt I had to say no. They were being disrespectful."

NPR documents the agent's "$3 million demand for promotion" that it was unable to meet. The show started three years ago on 16 stations and was reaching a multiethnic, upscale and educated audience on more than 80 when Smiley exited in December. His replacement, "News & Notes," is also a partnership between NPR and the African-American Public Radio Consortium.

Kudzu Files asks, "How did the chick get into the Fox house?" Great question! Nicely put. Let's watch.

Good riddance:

Michael K. Powell will step down today as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, officials there said, ending a four-year term that was marked by the tightening of standards on decency and attempts to loosen restrictions on media ownership.

I'll say! As I noted yesterday, eight radio stations, one conservative coporate owner, here in the tiny Macon market.

I tuned out.

UPDATE: Primetime too.

Don't buy into the Noise Machine propaganda. There is a market for liberal opinion on radio. Crooks and Liars points to, of all places, The Wall Street Journal for the good news on Air America.

They've made inroads with ClearChannel, but are not likely to turn up anytime soon on boycott-the-Dixie-Chicks-leader Cumulus Radio, the dominant Middle Georgia broadcaster with 8 stations in the tiny Macon market.

Via Atrios, Bill O'Reilly, who never served in the military, nevertheless says he's seen combat. Al Franken had a good time with that on his Air America radio show (listen here). Now James Poling is offering a reward to anyone who can corroborate the O'Reilly claim. You can help.

We're not journalists, we're bloggers. A different animal. The idea is to be politically active. "Thus, any discussion of 'blog ethics' or 'blog accountability' cannot be done exclusively within a journalistic frame. Instead, 'blog ethics' and 'blog accountability' is equally, if not more, similar to 'organizing ethics' and 'activist accountability.'" More from Chris Bowers at MyDD:

For me, the primary difference between the Blogosphere and the media oligopoly is simply not the content and register of our discourse, but instead the function of that discourse. In particular, these days our discussions almost invariably are not ends in and of themselves. Instead, while pundits of the media oligopoly work to inform (at which they do a terrible job), we work to agitate. While they supposedly labor toward objectivity (and fail miserably), we clearly labor toward subjectivity, agency and direct political action. For me, it is not about creating an alternative avenue for edgy discursive expression. Instead, it is about organizing and effectively channeling the activism of the people who take part in and witness those discussions.

We rant and rave about the establishment on a daily basis, but it is only when we organize huge rallies for Dean, raise large sums of money for candidates, help expose a major news story, and gather huge readerships that blogs receive much press. Our actions have gained us our notoriety.

Well if not that, I most certainly aspire to this:

The Blogosphere is a counter-institutional formation that seeks to relocate the primary purpose of political and opinion journalism in agitation toward action rather than in profit-based consumption.

The Republican Noise Machine is at it again. Saying Dean paid bloggers to blog favorably of him is distortion enough, but then they treat it as if it's equivalent to the Bush Armstrong Williams payments. (Compare it to understand clearly, there's no comparing!) If history is any guide they'll get away with it. Talk radio, Fox and cable news all chatter away about it, it moves next to mainstream media and the world comes to believe it's so. Meanwhile, you're not likely to see this from Laura Gross of Dean For America, the "Dean spokeswoman" quoted in the WSJ piece that started it all, via Kos:

Here's the deal: the campaign paid these guys with private funds to do work that did not include writing content or otherwise talking/writing about the campaign -- and widely disclosed the relationship at the time anyway, just in case. The Bush administration used taxpayer dollars to pay Williams to lace his commentary with praise for a certain policy -- and both the administration and Williams covered it up. Also, it appears that what they have done is illegal.

Here's Joe Trippi's response. And here a Wall Street Journal Armstrong Williams conflict of interest.

UPDATE: Dave Winer, Scripting News, 16 minute podcast interview with Joe Trippi from Saturday, January 15. Transcript & audio.

I'd like to see it happen, but can't believe it ever will. And I think it's the conservatives who will kill it. They know there's no liberal media and don't want to let go of their Republic Noise Machine.

TiVo's CEO is stepping down but remains as Chariman. Thomas Hawk says it's about time and enumerates his failings (included here in the extended entry). I wish TiVo well but have my doubts.

UPDATE: More from the New York Times.

This week Frank Rich's topic is "All the President's Newsmen." He begins with a well-earned chiding of CNN's Crossfire for its treatment of Armstrong Williams. (I've had it with Paul Begala, who called Williams "a stand-up guy" and lauded his by now rote apology with "God bless you for that." Begala's no liberal, he's a smarmy political hack.) Then there's this example of the Republican Noise Machine in action:

At a time when no one in television news could get an interview with Dick Cheney, Mr. Williams, of all "journalists," was rewarded with an extended sit-down with the vice president for the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a nationwide owner of local stations affiliated with all the major networks. In that chat, Mr. Cheney criticized the press for its coverage of Halliburton and denounced "cheap shot journalism" in which "the press portray themselves as objective observers of the passing scene, when they obviously are not objective."

This is a scenario out of "The Manchurian Candidate." Here we find Mr. Cheney criticizing the press for a sin his own government was at that same moment signing up Mr. Williams to commit. The interview is broadcast by the same company that would later order its ABC affiliates to ban Ted Koppel's "Nightline" recitation of American casualties in Iraq and then propose showing an anti-Kerry documentary, "Stolen Honor," under the rubric of "news" in prime time just before Election Day.

When Nightline is good it is very good. Last night it was very good. (Full transcript in extended entry.) In a portrait of a gay 17 year old Oklahoma boy, Michael Shackelford, his family, church and community come to terms with his sexuality. There was no correspondent; the people told their story. And what a story it was.

Shackelford was the subject of Anne Hull's 4 part Washington Post series, Young and Gay in Real America. That made him the target of Fred Phelp's Westboro Baptist Church (found at www.godhatesfags.com). Phelps most recently thanked God for 3,000 dead Americans in the Tsunami, but was probably seen by most Americans in news coverage of Matthew Shepard's murder, where he picketed the funeral. He's been around forever, a staple at Gay rallies and news events nationwide. When Phelps and his crew targeted the Baptist church Shackelford's family attends, Nightline was there.

Shackelford's mother, sister, preacher and classmates were interviewed, as were the Westboro protestors - whose bigotry was so extreme and explicit that it helped most of those who knew Shackelford come to support him. They didn't change their mind about the sin of homosexuality, but hated the sin not the sinner. Progress. The preacher said from his pulpit that God loves everyone. The congregants applauded. Real progress. And in a real life ending that avoided sentimentality it was revealed that Shackelford had dropped out of high school and is now working towards a GED.

These stories are true to the experience of people I know living here now in Middle Georgia. Milledgeville is 30 miles from the nearest Interstate, a town dominated by a state hospital, 6 prisons and a liberal arts college. The college tempers us somewhat, but here and in towns all around here, growing up gay, coming out and finding acceptance is tough. I have a young acquaintance right now struggling with exactly the issues raised in the Nightline piece and Washington Post series. Isolated and facing rejection from his family, he still chose to come out. I've saved the show for him and will direct him to the Post series.

Chris Bowers sees the White House trying to sweep Armstrong Williams under the rug and urges action.

My friend Alex pointed me to Business Week's cover story on the future of the New York Times. As a onetime Times subscriber, reading it on the subway on the way to work in New York, I became a fan. It's a 30 mile drive to get it here, an occasional treat. No other paper I've found matches it. Here's why:

In essence, Sulzberger is doing what his forebears have always done: sink money into the Times in the belief that quality journalism pays in the long run. "The challenge is to remember that our history is to invest during tough times," he says. "And when those times turn -- and they do, inevitably -- we will be well-positioned for recovery."

Great sentiment, but will the market allow it?

NYT Co.'s stock is trading at about 40, down 25% from its high of 53.80 in mid-2002 and has trailed the shares of many other newspaper companies for a good year and a half. "Their numbers in this recovery are bordering on the abysmal," says Douglas Arthur, Morgan Stanley's (MWD ) senior publishing analyst.

After the jump -- the constancy of their commitment and will the Website remain free? If you're not a registered web user, many of my friends here aren't, sign up now. It's one of the best sites on the web!

Gary Condit's video deposition was on the Today Show today in a report about his $11 million libel suit against Dominic Dunne. Part 2, Dominic's side, tomorrow. It reminded me that I recently read in David Brock's book that MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, then a conservative Republican congressman who would later abruptly resign, had a dead female aide found in his Florida office at the same time Condit was under intense media scrutiny. Where was the coverage of that?

Meanwhile, just the other day John Aravosis at Americablog found hope in Scarborough's reaction to the Armstrong Williams payolagate scandal and suggested Scarborough might be an unlikely ally of the left.

When I say, "we'll take what we can get," it's in the context of the Right Wing domination of our media. If you doubt that's true, read David Brock's book, "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy." Doug and I listened to the audio version on our trip north. For a primer, read Chris Bowers' Book Club entry at MyDD. It neatly summarizes the book, with extensive excerpts and links.

Kos likes radio personality Ed Shultz and points to this Washington Post article. I had never heard of him before. Of course there's a Red State hook:

The most widely carried liberal on radio is a "prairie-dwelling, red-meat-eating, gun-toting former conservative" who broadcasts from the unlikely locale of North Dakota...Insisting he's no Democratic foot soldier, Schultz criticizes John Kerry as a terrible presidential candidate and says "the righties connect with Joe Beercan better than the Democrats do." He also opposes abortion but doesn't talk about it on the air, calling it "a lousy talk radio topic."

That's liberal?