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

Found on Below the Beltway.

I will shut my blog down before they get a penny from me. I guess that's the point. As anybody can plainly see, I don't make a penny from this site, nor do I ever intend to. That being said, this is just a bunch of hot air. They don't have a monopoly on the day's events, and if we stop linking to them all it will do is reduce the traffic to their sites.

I have to admit, the computer geek in me is curious in the details of the software they're going to deploy.

From the New York Times, whom I take pleasure in quoting here for free:

Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.

...

Search engines and news aggregators contend that their brief article citations fall under the legal principle of fair use. Executives at some news organizations have said they are reluctant to test the Internet boundaries of fair use, for fear that the courts would rule against them.

Mr. Curley declined to address the fair use question, or to say what action The A.P. would take against sites that use articles without licensing.

“We’re not picking the legal remedy today,” he said. “Let’s define the scope of the problem.”

I hope for your next press conference you'll bring Larry, Moe, and Shemp along.

I peek into the MSNBC news at least once a week to see what most people are thinking and talking (repeating) about. It's been getting stranger and stranger lately. The stories seem to alternate between the uncovering of "Yet Another Real, Terrifying Bush/CIA Conspiracy" to "Group of Wacko Conspiracy Therorists Claim X," with the usual people making the usual sweeping psychological dismissals: these people are small-minded fools who can't accept the fact that history unfolds randomly and accidentally.

Lately, the conspiracy theory taking the heat is the "Birther" movement, the (admittedly pretty dodgy) claim that Obama is an illegitimate president because he does not have a birth certificate. Don't confuse Birthers and Truthers (the derogatory term for those who don't buy the official 9/11 conspiracy).

The ranks of "conspiracy theorists" have swelled over the past decade to the point where it's finally becoming mainstream. First-tier alternative media like AlterNet and Rolling Stone devote some serious copy to conspiracy-bashing now. AlterNet has run a couple of articles debunking the Georgia Guidestones ("that's not a Rosicrucian conspiracy, that's just good advice!") and Wired recently ran a story about the mysterious "new" Air Force facility known as HAARP.

I watch a lot of documentaries about atrocities, and very few are more sickening than this one. A group of young women are tricked into attending an MGM stag party thinking they are auditioning for a role. One young woman who was raped and humiliated at that party attempts to get justice, and all of Hollywood scrambles to bury the story and discredit the victim.

Today I read an interview with Debbie Gibson, where she talks about the difficulties growing up as a young woman in the showbiz scene:

“It is very disheartening that there are so many older men that prey on young performers,” Gibson told Tarts in an exclusive interview. “The younger you are, the more innocent you are, the more wholesome your image is, the weirder the fans become in terms of older men wanting to corrupt little girls. Even the way the paparazzi stalk the younger artists is very different from following around adults - I find that very disturbing.”

But what is even more disturbing than dirty male “fans” was the fact that Gibson’s own peeps were often the ones on the prey.

“There would be older male record executives trying to take me to parties by myself but my mom always be like ‘she’s a sixteen year old girl, she’s not going into an atmosphere with over 21-year-olds and alcohol!’ I hadn’t had enough life experience for those situations,” Gibson admitted. “You grow up thinking ‘everyone loves me’, but everyone who you are paying loves you. They are going to love you this year, but they are going to love the next person who makes them millions the next year. I was protected enough so that my childhood could be preserved as much as it could be in the circumstance.”

This documentary by Robert Kane Pappas is an excellent look into the media oligarchy, information, and perception control. It focuses on the 2000 Bush vs. Gore election but is wide in its historical view.

Today, Associated Press takes the veil off their aggressive new program to stop what they call "Web News Piracy," a curious new term I've never heard before. What does this mean for the blogosphere? Spreading the news is a crime now? I thought that was the point of news.

I wonder if the "misguided, unfounded legal theories" that media mogul (and owner of the local Times-Standard) Dean Singleton refers to is the Fair Use Doctrine.

To prove that he isn't above walking off with somebody else's work, Singleton uses his very next sentence to crib the signature line from the classic movie Network, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Ironically, Network is a great film about how the media dominates the national conversation, silences individual voices, and manipulates our perceptions.

From Associated Press:

AP board touts new effort to fight Web news piracy
April 6, 2009
By ELLIOT SPAGAT

SAN DIEGO (AP) — The Associated Press and the newspaper industry plan an aggressive effort to track down copyright violators on the Internet and try to divert traffic from Web sites that don't properly license news content, the AP board announced Monday.

The not-for-profit news cooperative also said it will cut fees by $35 million for U.S. newspapers in 2010 — on top of a $30 million reduction that took effect this year — and loosen its long-standing requirement for two years' notice to cancel AP service.

The financial moves are part of an overhaul of the AP's policies in the face of extraordinary financial hardship for newspapers. The changes were announced at the AP's annual meeting in San Diego, along with the copyright initiative launched by the AP's board, which is made up largely of newspaper executives.

"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under some very misguided, unfounded legal theories," said Dean Singleton, the AP's chairman and the chief executive of newspaper publisher MediaNews Group Inc.

"We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more," he added, prompting applause in the meeting.

Maybe this is what Colin Powell and Joe Biden were talking about.

After a tense, last-minute accord, the United States was saved from the brink of chaos when Time-Warner and Viacom issued a ceasefire ending the humanitarian crisis of Dora the Explorer and Sponge Bob Square Pants.

Facing a backlash from TV viewers furious at the prospect of losing "SpongeBob SquarePants" and "Dora the Explorer," two media giants reached a new programming agreement that keeps those popular cartoon characters on the channels of the country's second-largest cable operator.

...

Viacom had purchased newspaper advertisements, featuring a tearful Dora the Explorer, and placed an on-screen crawl on its channels to alert viewers to the impending programming blackout. The ads encouraged viewers to complain to Time Warner Cable.

The tactic worked -- parents reported having to soothe children who were upset over the prospect of not being able to watch their favorite shows on Nickelodeon, including "SpongeBob SquarePants."

"Our family will cancel Time Warner if a suitable agreement is not reached," threatened Debra Cooper, a mother of two who lives in San Diego. "I admit SpongeBob's laugh drives me nuts, but he is part of our family, as is George Lopez, 'Home Improvement,' 'i-Carly,' and all the rest."

Here's proof that Americans really will stand up for the things that are truly important to them. Sponge Bob, George Lopez, Home Improvement, i-Carly... we're closer to them than we are to our family. We spend more time with them, we know them inside and out, their joys, their trials and tribulations. It's a real bond.

Seriously, nowadays when I read news, I can't tell if I'm reading real news or The Onion. God knows there's nothing else going on now worth standing up for.

This guy is my new hero. I can't believe I never found this 1992 documentary before now.

Instead of watching the satellite television station like a good boy, this bloke found the frequencies to the satellite feed and started watching TV news the way it should be: unfiltered. Watch handlers tell presidents and politicians how to field their questions and avoid uncomfortable issues. Learn interesting new terms like "satellite tour."

Plus, it's just always amusing to me to watch rich and influential men power-paint on the make-up.

While I have to say that the scope of this film is very narrow - it focuses on the sins and omissions of one of the major networks instead of stepping back to look at the bigger picture (though it starts to remedy this very briefly near the end), it is a very good example of the true purpose of media - to be the middle man between the power elite and the unwashed masses, to shape and control public opinion along a pre-ordained track.

The big television stations are owned by the military-industrial complex or their hangers-on (Westinghouse, General Electric, Disney), and people should realize they have NO vested interest (and no duty) to report in a truthful fashion those things which might reduce or cut-off the steady flow of money to their businesses via wartime defense contracts.

The media is more than just passive and complicit. That criticism does not go far enough. They are an essential ingredient in the formula of mass deception, just as much as Bush's lying speeches, executive orders, the new Emmanuel Goldsteins -- new wars and new enemies with new faces.