Major Media Outlets Supporting SOPA, Have Not Reported On It
The major news networks apparently feel that the controversial proposed Stop Online Piracy Act is an important piece of legislation — the parent companies are all working to ensure its passage. Strange, then, that there has been no on air mention of the bill. Media Matters writes:
Most major television news outlets — MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, and NBC — have ignored the bill during their evening broadcasts. One network, CNN, devoted a single evening segment to it.
The parent companies of most of these networks, as well as two of the networks themselves, are listed as official “supporters” of this legislation on the U.S. House of Representatives’ website.
New York Times media columnist David Carr, who described the legislation as “alarming in its reach,” explained in a column earlier this week that “digitally oriented companies see SOPA as dangerous and potentially destructive to the open Web and a step toward the kind…
How ‘Experts’ Are Used in News
Charlie Brooker’s take on how news ‘experts’ are doing little more than guessing, which is more or less what we could do, in the Guardian:
I went to bed in a terrible world and awoke inside a worse one. At the time of writing, details of the Norwegian atrocity are still emerging, although the identity of the perpetrator has now been confirmed and his motivation seems increasingly clear: a far-right anti-Muslim extremist who despised the ruling party.
Presumably he wanted to make a name for himself, which is why I won’t identify him. His name deserves to be forgotten. Discarded. Deleted. Labels like “madman”, “monster”, or “maniac” won’t do, either. There’s a perverse glorification in terms like that. If the media’s going to call him anything, it should call him pathetic; a nothing.
On Friday night’s news, they were calling him something else. He was a suspected terror cell with probable links to…
Which ‘Expert’ Pundits Make Accurate Predictions?
Wondering which political pundits are actually smart and which are full of hot air? Now we know (maybe).
The New York Times’s Paul Krugman is a modern-day Nostradamus — his predictions (usually concerning the economy) almost always come true. At the other end of the spectrum, if mustachioed conservative columnist and Fox News “expert” Cal Thomas says something is going to happen, it is almost certain that the opposite will occur. All this is thanks to a study concocted at Hamilton College:
Op-ed columnists and TV’s talking heads build followings by making bold, confident predictions about politics and the economy. But rarely are their predictions analyzed for accuracy.
Now, five Hamilton College seniors led by public policy professor P. Gary Wyckoff have analyzed the predictions of 26 prognosticators, sampled the predictions of 26 individuals who wrote columns in major print media and who appeared on the three major Sunday news shows – Face the…
Roger Ailes Bombproofed The Fox News Headquarters, Fearing Gay Terror Attacks
Rolling Stone’s long piece on the evil mastermind is filled with all sorts of joyous nuggets, including the above. Additionally, an underground bunker called the “brain room” — with special security clearance needed for entrance — acts as a research center in which the cable network’s most fiendishly clever plans are developed:
Murdoch installed ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. (In 1989, Ailes had broken up a protest of a Rudy Giuliani speech by gay activists, grabbing demonstrator by the throat and shoving him out the door.) Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having “bombproof glass” installed in the windows – even going so…
Fox News & Bill O’Reilly Are America’s Most Trusted News Sources
Paul Bedard reports in U.S. News & World Report:
In a stunning rejection of network news and nightly news anchors, cable news, driven by the Fox News Channel and mouthy Bill O’Reilly, is now the top most trusted source—by a mile.
In a new poll from Boston’s Suffolk University (PDF), more than a quarter of the nation says Fox is tops when it comes to who they trust the most and O’Reilly is the most believable.
“This poll shows two things: first, the network news have completely lost their brand. Second, the only network with any intensity is Fox News,” says Brent Bozell, president of the conservative Media Research Center. “Bottom line: the more they attack Fox, the stronger it is getting,” he adds.
But at the liberal Media Matters, Executive Vice President Ari Rabin-Havt says the public’s trust in Fox is disturbing. A regular Fox critic, he says the poll reveals that “Fox…
Why Facts No Longer Matter In The Media Discourse
How should we understand this latest and most troubling insight into the reality of our media ecology?
In the aftermath of the resolution of the Great Birther bash-up, even as President Obama tried to lay the issue at rest by producing the document that showed, proved, verified, documented, and validated his birth in one of the great states of our disunion, it was said that its release would only fuel more debate, and convince no one.
In other words, in the end, this long debated fact didn’t matter.
Facts no longer seem to matter on other issues, too, as articulated in the now infamous memo issued by retiring Senator Jon Kyle whose office, when confronted with evidence that he misspoke on the matter of how much money Planned Parenthood spent on abortions—he claimed 90%, the truth was but 3%—issued an advisory that said, “The statement was not meant to be factual.”
Jon Stewart and…
CNN Sending Eight Times More Staff To Prince William’s Wedding Than To Japan
Ah, cable news. 2011 has brought a wealth of incredible, transformative, and tragic events around the globe, but the mainstream media will have to hold off on covering that until after royal wedding season. The Atlantic Wire notes the figure, mentioned in passing in a Wall Street Journal story:
This crazy statistic comes from the Wall Street Journal’s Amy Chozick and Cecile Rohwedder, who discovered, as proof of the media madness that will be Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding, “CNN alone will have a team of roughly 400 reporters, cameramen and crew assigned to the wedding.” To compare: A group of just 50 CNN employees, one-eighth the size of the anticipated wedding fleet, are currently on the ground in Japan covering the aftermath of the earthquake and the continuing nuclear containment problem.
CNN isn’t the only network with such disproportionately big plans for the royal wedding. On the day of the earthquake, Technolayer…
Fox News To Fire Glenn Beck?
Photo: Gage Skidmore (CC)
The Week dissects a David Carr piece in the New York Times and comes to the conclusion that “the cable news giant may part ways with the conservative firebrand at the end of the year”:
Glenn Beck is obsessed with the coming apocalypse, but the real end times on the horizon may be for his nightly show on Fox News, reports David Carr at The New York Times. Senior Fox News executives tell Carr that the network is “looking at the end of [Beck's] contract in December and contemplating life without [him].”
Why? The conspiracy theorist has lost a third of his audience since last year, particularly in the younger demographic; he has drawn the ire of conservatives like William Kristol, and, says Carr, his show has “turned into a serial doomsday machine that’s a bummer to watch.” Could Fox News really be preparing to part ways with Beck?
It would be no…
Al-Jazeera in Talks With The Number One U.S Cable Company, Comcast, Over U.S. Distribution
This is what the White House is watching now, along with CNN. Don’t the American people deserve the same opportunity? Sam Gustin writes in WIRED’s Epicenter:
Al-Jazeera is in discussions with Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, about bringing the network’s English-language channel to millions of U.S. homes, the Qatar-based news service said Tuesday.
Al-Jazeera hopes to capitalize on its growing reputation as a serious provider of top-quality journalism from an increasingly tumultuous Middle East.
“We’re very grateful for all the support and appreciation we’ve been receiving,” Al-Jazeera English managing director Al Anstey said in a statement. “Clearly the demand is there for Al-Jazeera, and people want to see us on their screens.”
Anstey arrived in New York City on Tuesday to lead the talks, the network said. The Comcast meeting was the first move in a new push by Al-Jazeera to get on U.S. cable systems, which have been reluctant to carry the…
Al Jazeera English Blacked Out Across Most Of U.S.
Freedom of the press? Ryan Grim writes on the Huffington Post:
WASHINGTON — Canadian television viewers looking for the most thorough and in-depth coverage of the uprising in Egypt have the option of tuning into Al Jazeera English, whose on-the-ground coverage of the turmoil is unmatched by any other outlet. American viewers, meanwhile, have little choice but to wait until one of the U.S. cable-company-approved networks broadcasts footage from AJE, which the company makes publicly available. What they can’t do is watch the network directly.
Other than in a handful of pockets across the U.S. — including Ohio, Vermont and Washington, D.C. — cable carriers do not give viewers the choice of watching Al Jazeera. That corporate censorship comes as American diplomats harshly criticize the Egyptian government for blocking Internet communication inside the country and as Egypt attempts to block Al Jazeera from broadcasting.
The result of the Al Jazeera English blackout in the United States has…
Keith Olbermann Out At MSNBC
Alex Weprin reports via TV Newser:
Tonight is Keith Olbermann‘s last night on MSNBC.
The Countdown host and the network say that the two parties “have ended their contract.”
The network’s statement is:
“MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of Countdown with Keith Olbermann will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC’s success and we wish him well in his future endeavors.”
Fox News: Elie Wiesel is ‘Holocaust Winner’
This is one hell of a typo (it occurs around the 0:50 mark). Jon Bershad writes on Mediaite:
Wow. We all make mistakes and typos. There will probably be at least one in this post alone. However, some typos are worse than others. This is one of those typos. Last week, Fox & Friends had on Elie Wiesel to talk about human rights injustices. However, eagle-eyed viewer Young Manhattanite was rewatching the clip online and noticed that they accidentally combined “Holocaust Survivor” and “Nobel Prize Winner” in the chyron so as to identify Weisel as a “Holocaust Winner.” Again, wow.
America’s 30 Hackiest Political Pundits
Salon’s War Room has unveiled the Hack Thirty, counting down America’s worst political columnists and television pundits, with representative quotes of their most dismal work. The focus isn’t on obviously-partisan loons such as Glenn Beck; rather it’s on “respectable” and “moderate” writers and cable news commentators who use their enviable positions to spout banalities, unthinkingly regurgitate accepted wisdom, and bow down to those in power. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman comes in at No. 3:
Thomas Friedman is an environmentalist, now. When he’s not jetting around the world on the literally unlimited expense account his money-bleeding newspaper provides him, pondering KFC billboards he spots outside the windows of gleaming office towers in Delhi — or when he’s not lounging beside the pool at his absurd home — the second-most-influential business thinker in the country is worrying about carbon emissions. Which is, I freely admit, a nice change of pace from…
Jon Stewart Explains His Critique of The Media to Rachel Maddow (Video)
I caught the televised version of this yesterday, here’s the entire uncut interview below. I know the folks at MSNBC weren’t too happy to be compared to Fox News at Stewart’s “Restore Sanity” rally, so he takes some time on that network to clarify his intended message.
Finally, Some Goddamn Truth Expressed on U.S. TV News
Don’t freak with the BS topic of yesterday in this clip, wait until around 2:45 minutes in where Dylan Ratigan (the only mainstream journalist as far as I’m concerned has been calling out these Wall Street crooks for some time) goes on a well-deserved rant on MSNBC’s Morning Joe regarding the unsaid truth about America’s “War on Terror” — he directly calls out the “extraordinary failure of our politicians and our media” to explain the money route behind these operations.
Thank you, Mr. Ratigan.
Charlie Brooker on How To Report The News (Video)
The BBC show Newswipe, presented by Charlie Brooker, has created a brilliant step-by-step guide on how to report the news in the trite, empty manner necessary for television:
Dan Rather: Watermelons, Washington, and What We Call News Today
Dan Rather reporting from Vietnam in 1966
Dan Rather writes on the Huffington Post:
I must confess that until recently I had no idea what Twitter was. Even now, I’m not completely sure how it’s best used. When I want to post something, the younger, more tech-savvy people in my office help me out. But I do know this: if you searched Twitter for “Dan Rather” over the past few days, you probably could guess why I feel the need to write this column.
It started this past Sunday when I appeared on Chris Matthews’ syndicated talk show. I’ve known and respected Chris for many years and I enjoy doing his show. I take the train down from my home in New York to Washington D.C. and as I approach Union Station my thoughts often turn to the years I spent covering the Johnson and Nixon White Houses. It was a turbulent time…
Jon Stewart Hits Left and Right on Media Coverage of Obama GOP Lunch
My favorite parts of this are towards the end of this clip: “More than likely MSNBC replayed it at home with the slo-mo button with their pants off” and about Fox News: “We’re going to cut away because this is against the narrative we present.” Via the Daily Show:
The Revenge of a Booted Fox News ‘Talking Head’
Via Valleywag:
It’s hard to say what made Rachel Marsden turn on her benefators in right-wing media. True, she was escorted by security guards from her former job as co-host of Red Eye, a sort of late-night lockup for the truly hard-core lunatic fringe within the crazyhouse that is Fox News. But that hardly soured her on the network; she later emailed us saying she’d “always been a big fan of” Fox News chief Ailes, “and am always honoured to be asked to contribute to anything this great man has built.” Fox’s flagship shouting head Bill O’Reilly, meanwhile, was “a real man … awesome … a straight shooter, and one of my favourite people in the biz.”
However, Marsden sure has no love for Fox News now:
I was a “talking head.” I’m not a big fan of the term. “Talking head” implies the presence of a brain, which isn’t always the case. The American cable news network from which I was sprung mostly selected their female talking heads for their tits and legs. I guess nicknaming them “talking tits” or “talking legs” would be overdoing the obvious. It would also totally bust the trailer trash viewing majority who watch the network as the closest thing their old lady will allow them to get to porn.
