Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Paey v Limbaugh again

I don’t believe there’s much of a chance that Rush Limbaugh’s being detained at the airport with Viagra but no prescription will lead to his deal with prosecutors falling through.

It should; exacerbated by his lawyer’s excuse that the prescription was “labeled as being issued to the physician rather than Mr. Limbaugh for privacy purposes.” His deal permits doctors to issue prescriptions in other names to an admitted drug abuser for privacy purposes??? That’s quite a deal.

It’s worth remembering here that while Limbaugh was caught pocketing pills to pump up his penis, on his way back from a country plenteous with prostitutes, the wheelchair-bound car-crash victim Richard Paey, who also was prosecuted in Florida for the use of prescription painkillers, is sitting in prison serving a mandatory 25 year sentence.

Limbaugh is back on the radio making jokes while Paey sits in prison victimized by a system that errs on the side of seeing pain killers as criminal narcotics rather than as medicinal relief from suffering. Paey’s doctor changed his story after being threatened by prosecuters and sold him down the river. What will Limbaugh’s doctor do?

Remembering 1994

I ran a cable access operation and was negotiating a new franchise on a TCI cable system in 1994. I know and have feared the name Leo Hindry. So I read with interest John Batelle’s reaction to Hendry’s claim today:

that the Yahoo and Google’s of the world are temporary phenomena - and that soon all that will matter is distributors (the cable and telco guys, natch), and content (their pals at Disney, of course). Yahoo and Google, et al, will fold because they don’t own rights to content packages like movies, and they don’t control distribution, like cable companies and telcos.

This guy is deeply, hilariously wrong. TechDirt points out the first reason - he’s missing that folks don’t go online for content alone, in fact, they go online to communicate, converse, and to declare who they are in the world. Sure, they also expect content to be there, but increasingly, it ain’t Time Warner’s or Disney’s, it’s YouTube or blogs. And if the Disney’s of the world want to succeed on the Web, they best learn from the habits of the web natives, and not shove mid 1990s media models down their throats.

I’ve been thinking lately that The Cartel is doing advocates of a cultural commons - a place where we are all producers of content rather than merely consumers - a great big favor. While they’re busy locking up tight all of their content, they’re leaving a void online that is being filled by us.

In 1994 when I was working in community media production we had only our television habit. We couldn’t understand or conceive of television as anything other than what we knew it to be. Right now we’re defining a new media platform, and we’re defining it as something homemade and remixed.

The problem in 1994 wasn’t a lack of talent or creativity. It was the time, money and complexity of production, the constant battle for (cable) distribution, and an audience that wasn’t allowed out of its cable box. Each and every one of those issues has been addressed.

What the media industry doesn’t see is that it is forcing us away from those 6 hours we used to spend in front of the TV, and giving us the opportunity to grow into producers who will use those hours making media of our own. Let’s run with it!

AJC’s “Borrower Beware” recognized

I didn’t know - but it doesn’t surprise me - that Georgia has “notoriously anti-consumer lending laws.”

Tipped off by Romenesko, I see that an Atlanta Journal-Constitution series on those laws has won a Loeb Award, (named for Gerald Loeb, a founding partner of E.F. Hutton):

The Associated Press won a Loeb award, the highest honor in business journalism, for a story examining a government loan program, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution won for its series on Georgia’s notoriously anti-consumer lending laws.

The Journal-Constitution’s Ann Hardie, Carrie Teegardin and Alan Judd wrote “Borrower Beware,” which documented links between state lawmakers, regulators and the lending and auto industry. The series also revealed that the state often blamed consumers for the unscrupulous tactics to which they fell prey.

Labeling Avery: conspiracy theorist extraordinaire

There are Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorists and JFK conspiracy theorists and now 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

I’ve pretty much ignored them all. I am surprised to find that some smart students I know don’t, they actually believe these theories. It was one of those smart students who showed me 22 year old Dylan Avery’s documentary film, ”Loose Change,” which posits that 9/11 was a government sponsored gold heist. Or something like that.

Predisposed to be unconvinced, I nonetheless found it interesting for its production values and the fact that 21st century conspiracy theorists have access to such sophisticated means to get their message heard. Today Salon takes a look at the success of “Loose Change” and shines a spotlight on the thousands of online sleuths who believe the U.S. government was behind the terror attacks.