Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Photo Illustration

The cover of Newsweek is not a photo and not an illustration; it’s a “photo illustration.” Martha Stewart’s head (shot “not within the last five months") on someone else’s body ("she was unavailable to us"). All Things Considered’s Robert Siegel talks with Lynn Staley, assistant managing editor at Newsweek, about the “intent to amuse.” Her only regret? “We were a little too successful.”

Sunday, February 20, 2005

That’s liberal?

I got an email addressed “Dear Supporter” from Democracy Radio alerting me to the Newsweek article on the rise of Ed Shultz. I wonder, did they find me and designate me a “supporter” from my last post on Shultz titled ”We’ll take what we can get?” In it I was hardly enthused. Here’s why:

Ideologically, Schultz is all Democrat-he likes universal health care and labor unions, hates Wal-Mart and corporate crooks-but he also delights in hacking away at his party’s more sensitive side. When a gay listener recently called to complain about homophobia, Schultz cut him off. He believes Democrats shouldn’t talk up gay rights, just like they shouldn’t bash God and guns. Schultz says liberals had better get used to his brand of tough love if they want to win in the heartland. “The party thinks there aren’t any Democrats between Texas and North Dakota,” Schultz told NEWSWEEK, “so why bother talking to people out here?”

Huh? Dean’s first trip as the new DNC Chair is to the south and he wouldn’t have won the position without winning over southern delegates!

My pick is Al Franken’s Air America which has seen it’s own cause for celebration, without abandoning gays.

Read the rest of "That’s liberal?" in the extended entry.

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Cooper interviews “Gannon”

"Jeff Gannon” news is all over the place now, so I’ll be taking a break from “Gannon” posting for a while. I recommend AMERICAblog and Media Matters for their continuing work. But in this one last post I point to Editor and Publisher:

Asked this afternoon about reports that he was scheduled to appear on the Anderson Cooper’s CNN show tonight, he denied it strongly. One hour later, a CNN spokesman told E&P, “He’s taping it right now.”

He’s a chronic liar! Here’s the Anderson Cooper interview via Media Matters. (It’s long so give it time to download).

I’m with New Jersey

We’ve all seen the Blockbuster ”Celebrate the end of late fees” ads. It turns out that what they really mean is “an 8 day rental and if it’s not back you buy it.” But then:

The company said due dates at its 4,500 U.S. stores would remain one week for games and two days or one week for movies.

New Jersey’s AG filed a lawsuit. It wasn’t a bad campaign. If they’d honestly made clear the qualifiers in the ads they wouldn’t be in this mess.

Friday, February 18, 2005

Copyfight & Copyfight

There’s Copyfight the blog. ("Here we’ll explore the nexus of legal rulings, Capitol Hill policy-making, technical standards development and technological innovation that creates—and will recreate—the networked world as we know it.")

And Copyfight, the documentary project. (A video released under “a permissive Creative Commons license to allow file-sharing.” And a website “as an index of videos related to copyright reform… available for the public to download and edit.” Tutorials too.)

Says one of the other, ”Marvelous." I’ve bookmarked both.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Yea Frank Rich!

Read the whole column. He knows what the story is here:

How this happened is a mystery that has yet to be solved. “Jeff” has now quit Talon News not because he and it have been exposed as fakes but because of other embarrassing blogosphere revelations linking him to sites like hotmilitarystud.com and to an apparently promising career as an X-rated $200-per-hour “escort.” If Mr. Guckert, the author of Talon News exclusives like “Kerry Could Become First Gay President,” is yet another link in the boundless network of homophobic Republican closet cases, that’s not without interest. But it shouldn’t distract from the real question - that is, the real news - of how this fake newsman might be connected to a White House propaganda machine that grows curiouser by the day. [EXACTLY!] Though Mr. McClellan told Editor & Publisher magazine that he didn’t know until recently that Mr. Guckert was using an alias, Bruce Bartlett, a White House veteran of the Reagan-Bush I era, wrote on the nonpartisan journalism Web site Romenesko, that “if Gannon was using an alias, the White House staff had to be involved in maintaining his cover.” (Otherwise, it would be a rather amazing post-9/11 security breach.) [SECURITY BREACH!]

By my count, “Jeff Gannon” is now at least the sixth [6!] “journalist” (four of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news. Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration’s “marriage” initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Mr. Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They starred in bogus reports ("In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting,” went the script) pretending to “sort through the details” of the administration’s Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such “reports,” some of which found their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts around the country [50 NEWS BROADCASTS AROUND THE COUNTRY!] and have now been deemed illegal “covert propaganda” by the Government Accountability Office.

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Where’s the liberal media?

Of the kind of questions AMERICAblog and others have been asking all week, Joe Conason observes:

Such questions are evidently of little concern to our liberal media outlets, whose leading lights prefer to deliver prim lectures about the unwarranted invasion of Mr. Guckert’s private affairs and his victimization for his conservative views. In fact, everything known about him comes from material he posted on public Web sites, but that’s beside the point.

Emphasis mine. I just hadn’t thought of that simple fact before.

Saturday, February 12, 2005

An untimely passing

Community Media has suffered a great loss with the untimely death of Dirk Koning, Founding Director of the Grand Rapids Community Media Center. He died of complications during a heart procedure. From the Grand Rapids Press:

Koning was hired to run the fledgling GRTV public access television station in the early 1980s. That station grew into the Community Media Center on Bridge Street NW, operating two cable channels, WYCE-FM, Internet service provider GrandNet Services, and the Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy.

At the time of his death, Koning was trying to create a wireless network offering free, high-speed Internet access in Grand Rapids and several suburbs. He also was raising $2 million to expand and create services at Wealthy Theatre.

Here’s the local NBC affiliate’s story and video. Dirk and I were never close but he was a colleague for a dozen years and a model for my own work in community media. He will be missed.

Friday, February 11, 2005

Don’t read “Blog”

Via Digby (read the whole post) from the Los Angeles Times review of Hugh Hewitt’s “Blog:”

People who pick up the book “Blog” are likely to think that it’s about blogs. For the most part, it’s not about the Internet phenomenon of blogging, the term for individual or group Web-based chronicling and instant publishing. Rather, this book is a sustained effort of partisan hackery aimed at further eroding trust in what the author Hugh Hewitt calls “mainstream liberal media,” which for him means anything to the left of Rush Limbaugh. This regurgitated mantra, in the hands of skilled marketers, can be applied to the latest hot brand - in this case anything to do with blogs.

And from the Crooks and Liars review, samples of his rightward tilt:

Pg. 108: on Atrios, Hugh says: Hard left, incoherent, actually. But big traffic.


On Daily Kos: (brief history).... He is also an off the wall lefty, willing to say anything.


Pg. 113: A final word on ideology and the blogosphere: there is currently a talent gap. The political left is seriously behind in the promotion and development of bloggers with insight and good humor. It maybe that the early entrants such as DailyKos, Atrios, and Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo have set a tone of self importance combined with coarseness that has repelled would-be bloggers, or that Peter Principle bloggers with energy but not enough talent have taken up valuable shelf space.

C&L concludes: “I find it outrageously hypocritical (I’m not really outraged) to read a guy that stands on his soap box, preaching about the aspects of “liberal bias” when he’s as guilty as “sin” in promoting his own version of right wing propaganda.”

More Bush fake media exposed

Now that I have only basic cable, I depend on the web. The “Jeff Gannon” story is owned by the bloggers. And they have the video:

Here’s Wolf Blitzer on CNN with the first post-resignation story.

Here’s Catherine Crier on Court TV with David Brock.

Here’s John Aravosis on Aaron Brown’s Newsnight. And the Transcript.

Here’s a sampling of the softball questions with a transcript of McClellan’s expalnation of how he got his White House press pass.

This is must-see TV. (With Crooks and Liars who needs cable?)

John, of AMERICAblog has done great work on this story. He emphasizes it’s not a sex story, it’s another Bush fake media story. Kos has done great stuff too, gathered under the Daily Kos Republican thread. Without the blogs, this story would not have shown up in the mainsteam media (CNN, NYTimes, Boston Globe and my guess is the Sunday chat shows).

Read the rest of "More Bush fake media exposed" in the extended entry.

Lynne Cheney a liar?

From blogACTIVE - the photo alone is worth the click: Yesterday on Fresh Air, listen here, “author & historian” (?) Lynne Cheney denied writing a novel about lesbian lovers. Did she? Judge for yourself; WhiteHouse.org has the pertinent parts.

Maybe she just misspoke. A common occurrence among those on the right. Here’s one from Ann Coulter. Here’s another from Bill O’Reilly. Via The Last Minute.