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 of intrusive Internet regulation that has made China a global villain to citizens of the Web.” Google co-founder Sergey Brin has warned that the legislation “would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.”

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 al-Qaida …

Read more here and those of you who like a bit of Brooker should check out his shows, Screenwipe and Newswipe.

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 Nation, Meet the Press, and This Week – and evaluated the accuracy of 472 predictions made during the 16-month period.

Led by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the most accurate pundits were Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – all Democrats and/or liberals.

Those scoring lowest – “The Ugly” – with negative tallies were conservative columnist Cal Thomas; U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC); U.S. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI); U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, a McCain supporter and Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut; and Sam Donaldson of ABC.

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 far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet. Looking down on the street below, he expressed his fears to Cooper, the editor he had tasked with up-armoring his office. “They’ll be down there protesting,” Ailes said. “Those gays.”

Befitting his siege mentality, Ailes also housed his newsroom in a bunker. Reporters and producers at Fox News work in a vast, windowless expanse below street level, a gloomy space lined with video-editing suites along one wall and an endless cube farm along the other. In a separate facility on the same subterranean floor, Ailes created an in-house research unit – known at Fox News as the “brain room” – that requires special security clearance to gain access. “The brain room is where Willie Horton comes from,” says Cooper, who helped design its specs. “It’s where the evil resides.”

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 News viewers trust the information that Fox gives them.”

The key finding in the telephone poll of 1,070 likely voters is that network news is dying. Some 28 percent say that they trust Fox News the most, followed by CNN at 18 percent. After that, the trust in TV news nose dives. NBC was third, at 10 percent, MSNBC fourth at 7 percent, CBS and ABC tied at fifth with just 6 percent.

Read More: U.S. News & World Report

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 Stephen Colbert had a lot of fun with that but one thing that’s not funny is that even when media coverage discredits or exposes some canard, public opinion is not necessarily impacted.

It doesn’t change the minds of those whose minds are made up.

Once some people buy into a narrative or worldview they seem to be locked into a way of thinking. For some, efforts to discredit a conspiracy theory offer more evidence that the conspiracy is valid, because why else would THEY want to refute it.

If you don’t trust the President, don’t believe he is an American or do believe he is a socialist, nothing he or his supporters say will change your mind. After all, what would you expect them to say?

So even refutation can turn into reinforcement and trigger more stridency.

Dismissing critics as “silly,” as Obama has done, only annoys them and makes them more determined to cling to their ideas, attitudes and anger.

The values (and prejudices) people grew up with often shape their worldviews. Their parochialism limits what they are exposed to. Their schooling and narrow range of experience seem to have had little impact in broadening their views.

Political scientist Thomas Patterson describes this as  “The process by which individuals acquire their political opinions is called political socialization. This process begins in childhood, when, through family and school, Americans acquire many of their basic political values and beliefs. Socialization continues into adulthood, when peers, political institutions and leaders, and the news media are major influences.”

Writes Edward Song on Huffington Post,

“For example, people who believe in health care reform value helping the poor and needy. For progressives, it is moral to help the poor.

For conservatives, helping the poor is helping people who are irresponsible, and goes against their principle of individual responsibility. The conservative’s solution to poverty is called “Tough Love.” Whether you believe in helping the poor is a matter of values and not a matter of logic. Believing otherwise is the big progressive mistake over the last 40 years.”

Conservative columnists like John Hawkins seem to subscribe to this view too.  Writing on Townhall.com, he argues,

“The sad truth of the matter is that most Americans don’t pay much attention to politics and those that do often just parrot doctrine instead of investigating issues with an open mind. This allows lies, myths, and dubious assertions to live on long after they should have shriveled and died in the light of day.”

Surprisingly, he also quotes JFK: “No matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as the truth.”

Media outlets play a role in fashioning a culture of repetition, producing armies of “ditto heads” who are exposed to message-point pseudo journalism that they in turn regurgitate to advance partisan agendas. This approach is built into the design of the new polarizing and politicized media system.

This leads in the words of Vietnam War chronicler Tim O’Brian to how “you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself.” He was writing about military wars abroad but his insight applies to political wars at home as well. We are all becoming casualties of a media war in which democracy is collateral damage.

No surprisingly, the dominance of conservative media produces more people who align themselves as conservatives and will only understand the world that way. The shortage of progressive media outlets limits the mass the circulation of progressive perspectives.  No wonder the media marketplace is so devoid of competing ideas.

Beyond that, media outlets legitimize virtually all controversies as valid, however contrived they may be, just to have something to talk about. This legitimates subjects with the noise of continuing blather and contentious discussion featuring superficial analysis by unqualified pundits.

One consequence, according to GOP political consultant Mark McKinnon is that voters cast ballots on attributes not issues. “They want to see the appearance of strength in leaders, and are less persuaded by what they say.”

That means, news programs ultimately trade in fostering impressions,  not conveying information. Viewers trust their feelings over facts.

Remember, one of the most profitable formats on cable TV is not news but wrestling driven by cartoonish characters and invented confrontations. Is it any wonder that ratings hungry news programs take a similar approach to political combat. They are in the business of producing numbers for advertisers more than explanations for viewers.

John Cory commented on the media role in legitimating the birther issue and turning it into a form of entertainment, calling it ” a sorry and sad day for America.”

“What does it say about our ‘media’ that they have spent so much time and so much effort promoting crazy over reality? That our ‘media’ relishes circus clowns jumping out of their clown-cars and spraying clown-seltzer everywhere and then giddily covers the wet and stained audience reaction while ignoring the burning of fact?”

So, it is the media system itself, not Donald Trump or some crazy, that is the real “carnival barker” in the President’s words, Their programs program the audience by constantly and continually framing issues in a trivial matter. Manipulating emotion is their modality, doubt their currency and cynicism their methodology, except, of course, on issues like the economy, Israel or US wars.

The shame of it is that they know what they are doing, know what the impact of what passes for “coverage” will be, but do it anyway.

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

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 reported that NBC News sent four anchors and correspondents to join the staff at its Tokyo Bureau. The same day, the Associated Press wrote that NBC was planning to send “an army of people–in the hundreds” to cover William and Kate’s nuptuals. ABC’s senior vice president wouldn’t confirm to the AP how much manpower it would have in London on the wedding day, but did say “it’s a major event that takes resources and people.” ABC sent three anchors and corespondents to Japan the day of the earthquake.

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 surprise if it were true: Carr’s tale of tumbling audience figures and exasperated executives certainly rings true, says Steve Benen at Washington Monthly. But there’s more. Beck’s radio show has been dropped in “several major media markets,” his book sales have drooped, and “advertisers have abandoned him in droves.” It’s this last item that may be of particular concern to Fox — Beck “can’t get and keep any nationally recognized advertisers.” That is unsustainable.
“Fox News considers a post-Beck era”

This sounds like a negotiating tactic: Beck’s ratings are actually still pretty good, says Glynnis MacNicol at Business Insider. In fact, he beats every other prime time show on cable, “except three other Fox shows.” It’s far more likely that this story has been planted deliberately as an “opening salvo” in Fox’s contract negotiations with Beck. The idea that he’s about to be canned over ratings is “less than believable.”
“Sorry NYT, but this Fox News is trying to get rid of Glenn Beck because of ratings story doesn’t sound entirely believable”

Still, Beck’s appeal is on the wane: Beck’s audience is diminishing because his apocalyptic shtick has become depressing and demonstrably inaccurate…

[continues at The Week]

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 Qatar-based news network. A Comcast spokesperson declined to comment on the talks.

It’s quite a turn of events for Al-Jazeera, which until its widely praised coverage of the unrest in Egypt was something of a pariah in the United States. During the Iraq War, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld branded the network’s reporting of civilian casualties as “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.”

Now, the White House is watching Al-Jazeera alongside CNN.

Read More in WIRED’s Epicenter

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 been a surge in traffic to the media outlet’s website, where footage can be seen streaming live. The last 24 hours have seen a two-and-a-half thousand percent increase in web traffic, Tony Burman, head of North American strategies for Al Jazeera English, told HuffPost. Sixty percent of that traffic, he said, has come from the United States.

Read More on the Huffington Post

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.”

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.

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 back when he was telling the world that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would lead to a glorious new dawn of freedom/democracy/whiskey/iPods/Old Navy in the Middle East as a whole.

(Oh wait, what’s that? What Obama needs to deal with Iran is “a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm”? Hm. And your message to the people of Iraq? Oh, right, it was, “suck on this.”)

Matt Taibbi’s reviews of Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” and its follow-up, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded, are essential reading for anyone baffled by Friedman’s apparent inability to construct sentences without falling into three metaphor-shaped holes, whereupon he commences digging deeper with his many shovels.

But for some reason, his are the airport bookstore selections of presidents and CEOs. The man has lately decided that he is done with democracy itself, and he’d much prefer it if “reasonably enlightened” people (like the Chinese Communist Party) could just impose “politically difficult but critically important policies” from on high. This is the secret wish of nearly every “moderate” pundit on this list, but — confidential to Tom, you’re not supposed to wish for totalitarianism out loud.

He’s a silly, simple-minded man whose success leads a cynic to the conclusion that the world is run by similarly silly, simple-minded men.

Repeat offenses: Conflation of wealth with virtue, horrible jokes, repetition, warmongering, easy generalizations in lieu of research or analysis, cabdriver-on-the-street columns, mixed metaphors, generally awful prose, random capitalization of Certain Words when he’s Trying to Coin a Catchphrase.

Thank you, Mr. Ratigan.

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 for the country and a formative period for me as a reporter and a young father.

The Washington of that time was a far different place. In some ways it was better: less politically rancorous, more collegial. In many ways it, and the country it represented, was much worse. African Americans were still very much second-class citizens. Women held few positions of power. We smoked more, polluted our environment more, and accepted social mores that anyone who has seen Mad Men knows are embarrassingly outdated.

Read More of Dan Rather’s article in the Huffington Post

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.

Read More: Valleywag

Former President George H.W. Bush feels that the tone of the national discourse lacks civility. “I don’t like it,” Bush told CBS. “The cables (TV) have a lot to do with it.” Bush said he believes Obama was “entitled to civil treatment” when it comes to his critics. But it was not just those on the right, who presumably make up a majority of Obama’s critics, that Bush felt were responsible for the angry tone. The left was guilty as well.

Singling out MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann, Bush said, “the way they treat my son and anyone who’s opposed to their point of view is just horrible.” Maddow and Olbermann, he added, are “sick puppies.”

Needless to say, Maddow and Olbermann weren’t taking Bush’s criticism lying down. Here’s the video.