The Noble Lie

Those of you who tune into MSNBC for Olbermann’s rousing rants against “Bill-O,” “Manatee,” and the other dopes at “Fixed News” might need to spend more time trolling the blogosphere. Conversely, if you cheer on Bill O’Reilly as he calls out Keith Olbermann for his far left, anti-American screeds, you’ll have to tune into Rush Limbaugh or the like.

In our corporate-controlled media system, when your station’s CEOs meet behind closed doors and decide your journalistic flame war is bad for business, it will end.

• Glenn Greenwald – GE’s silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC’s sleazy use of Richard Wolffe (didn’t know Wolffe was a corporate PR hack, not surprised)
• New York Times – Fox and G.E. Reach Deal to End O’Reilly-Olbermann feud
  

Update

Check it out, turns out Olbermann isn’t so gagged after all. Olbermann claims this is just one more chess move on Rupert Murdoch’s part in the game to get “Countdown” cancelled. If Greenwald hadn’t have written his scathing blog posts when he did (which Olbermann respectfully references below), I wonder if the cards would have fallen the same way, regarding Olbermann or Richard Wolffe.

• Olbermann writes on Daily KOS that the rumors of his demise have been greatly exaggerated — oh, and Dick Wolffe ain’t comin round here no more (at least until vetted further)
• Time Blogs – The Morning After: Olbermann-O’Reilly feud back on, if it ever was off
• Huffington Post – Keith Olbermann Playing Viewers for Fools

Not to be outdone by the United States Pentagon, who recently brought their new Cyber Command online, the nation of China has been on an Internet offensive lately, taking measures to increase their online control over their citizenry. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and Paul) have been writing about, China has mandated all computers to come installed with government censorware titled Green Dam Youth Escort, which has security backdoors big enough to march the Chinese National Revolutionary Army through.

In a brand new salvo, it appears that China may have banned their citizens from Google, over concern about the amount of pornography. Google in the past has taken a lot of flack for supporting the Chinese government’s censorship demands, but it appears they haven’t done enough to win the nation’s favor.

Microsoft is eager to fill the gap. Their new search property Bing plays very nice with China’s censorship rules (see here, and here).

China is not only cracking down online. Very recently, Liu Xiaobo, leading Tiananmen Square protestor, was arrested for spreading subversive, anti-government rumors and information.

UPDATE: China’s ministry of health is announcing they are explicitly blocking sites related to sexual health. Censorware is notoriously bad for blocking health information regarding parts of the body we’re prudish about (like breast cancer), but that’s usually inadvertent due to bad filtering techniques.

“It is prohibited to spread pornographic content in the name of sex-related scientific research,” the ironically named Ministry said. “The health sections of web portals are not allowed to conduct sex-related research services.”

The word they’re looking for isn’t “ironic,” it’s “Orwellian.”