Big Media

Glenn Beck’s Excellent Vatican Adventure

Posted by on April 23, 2010 at 3:47 pm. 4 Comments :

Glenn Beck went to the Vatican and was anointed by…someone. You have to hear this to believe it. The tone of his voice, the pregnant pauses, all bring Jim Jones to mind. Unfortunately, the audio was deleted from the source, but here is the transcript:

BECK: We are entering a…we are entering a dark, dark period of man. Um, I was, um, I was in the Vatican, and I was surprised that the individual I was speaking to knew who I was. And they said: ‘Of course we know who you are. What you’re doing is wildly important. We’re entering a period of great darkness, and if good people don’t stand up, we could enter a period unlike we have seen in a very long time.’ It was odd to stand in the Vatican and hear those words. Of all places that would understand the Dark Ages.

Beck never bothered to identify the “individual” to whom he was speaking. The implication was that it was a Vatican official of some sort. The phrase “we know who you are,” suggests that it was not a private person speaking for himself, but a representative of a group. And Beck portrays this person as someone whose opinion carries some weight. Why else would we care that he regards Beck as “wildly important?” Of course, this is Glenn Beck we’re talking about, so it may just have been some schnook in line for the tour.

The creepy thing about this is that it is further evidence of Beck’s Messianic ambitions. He clearly wants to convince his audience that he is more than just a television pundit, he is a spiritual leader with a mandate from God. He even said as much on another program:

BECK: It’s darkness, and I can just feel it coming. And I started to say…I said the problem is…and I stopped. Because I don’t want to utter something like this without really thinking it through. But I was about to say, the problem is that God is giving a plan, I think, to me that is not really a plan. And I stopped myself because I didn’t want to utter those things out loud if that’s not exactly right, and it’s not. […]

Then I said the problem is is that I think the plan that the Lord would have us follow is hard for people to understand. But I’m telling you, here’s what I feel with everything in me. If you’ve listened to this program – oy, are they gonna use this against me – If you’ve listened to this program for a long time you know who I am. And you know that many of the things that I have done and said that have put me in, you know, harm’s way, one way or another, they always start at the same place. They always start at my gut or my heart. And then I figure it out as we go along. All the stuff that I feel has been important on this show has been things that I felt and didn’t understand. [..]

I beg of you to pray for clarity on my part. The plan that He would have me articulate, I think, to you, is “Get behind me.” And I don’t mean me, I mean Him. Get behind me. Stand behind me.

So God is giving him a plan (that isn’t really a plan) and you, his faithful listeners, know who he is (the Son of…?), and you know that he is suffering (in harm’s way) for your salvation as he prays to let this cup pass from him. Yet he will endure his fate and accept the things that he feels but doesn’t understand (not as I will, but as thou wilt). Yes, Glenn Beck is hearing the voice of God and passing His Word on to his disciples. First and foremost in the message is the imposing darkness that is enveloping us all. This is an image that Beck returns to often. It is an image of a world in total collapse:

“You’re gonna see a black and white world, man, that is nothing but destruction and ugly.”

“Find the exit closest to you and prepare for a crash landing, because this plane is coming down, because the pilot is intentionally steering it into the trees. […] They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered.”

“I know what our country is headed towards. I know the struggles that are ahead in my life and I know the struggles that are ahead in your life. It’s not going to be pretty.”

“It is the eve of destruction in America.”

“The rain is coming. I think you feel it in your gut. It is time to build an Ark. It is time to prepare yourself for some tough times.”

I don’t know where Beck wants to sail in his Ark, but I suspect it’s someplace like Guyana, or perhaps the free-market paradise of Somalia, the world’s best example of the conservative ideal of small government. Someplace he can preach to his congregants of God’s plan for him and the world he fears is doomed. And I hope his Ark is big enough to hold all those who are demented enough to want to follow him. America will be a better place when they set sail for their homogeneous, free-market, theocratic, utopia.

Bill O’Reilly Needs To Fire His Research Staff

Posted by on April 15, 2010 at 4:37 pm. 3 Comments :

I just had to document this here because it so ridiculous and because Huffington Post has such a great video of it.

Bill O’Reilly confronted Sen. Tom Coburn on his show a few days ago because Coburn had the temerity to point out to his constituents that they should not believe everything they hear on Fox News. The issue specifically addressed an assertion that the health care bill had a provision that would sentence people to jail if they didn’t buy insurance. The truth is that the bill explicitly prohibits such criminal penalties.

However, O’Reilly went to the extreme of insisting that Coburn’s remarks were unfair because nobody on Fox ever said that the bill had such provisions:

O’Reilly: It doesn’t happen here, and we’ve researched to find out if anybody on Fox News has ever said “You’re going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance.” Nobody’s ever said it. So it seems to me what you did was, you used Fox News as a whipping boy when we didn’t qualify there.

Oh yeah? Tell that to PolitiFact who rated O’Reilly’s claim as a “Pants on Fire” lie. Or Media Matters who had no problem finding what O’Reilly’s researchers could not. Or the Young Turks who compiled the video evidence:

Once again O’Reilly makes an ass of himself. He even joked about Coburn’s “mistake” the following night with Dennis Miller. By that time both of them ought to have known that a multitude of people said that the bill could send non-payers to jail – even Glenn Beck said it on O’Reilly’s show! It just doesn’t get any stupider than that.

This is the network that had to issue a memo to its staff warning them of a zero tolerance policy for on air mishaps. And O’Reilly, in particular, frequently boasts that he has never made a retraction on his show. Of course not. He’s made hundreds of mistakes and told thousands of lies, but has never bothered to correct any of them. That doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. It just means that he’s comfortable disinforming his audience. And why mess up a perfect record by suddenly being honest? Although there was one prior incident of honesty for which O’Reilly deserves some credit:

Thanks for the entertainment, Bill. I won’t wait around for a retraction.

[Hilarity Update:] O’Reilly began his program tonight with a Talking Points Memo about how NBC and Media Matters are dishonestly smearing him because of this health care/jail time controversy. He tried to exculpate himself from his assholiness with a tortured argument that went something like this: He claimed that all of the examples of Fox folks clearly saying that jail would be the penalty for not having insurance were made at a time when such a penalty was in the bill. But his assertion that no one ever said it was referring to the final bill which had no such penalty. He even played video clips of Obama and Pelosi that he intended as support for his contention that the penalty existed at some prior point in time.

There are only three things wrong with that. One, O’Reilly, in his remarks, made no distinction between different versions of the bill or time periods of debate. He simply made a flat statement of “fact” using unambiguous words like “never” that pretty strongly imply not ever. Two, there weren’t ANY drafts of the bill that had a jail penalty in it. NONE! So O’Reilly’s excuse is pure bullshit. And three, in the clips of Obama and Pelosi, neither of them said anything about such a penalty. In fact, responding to direct questions about it, they both explicitly declined to confirm that any such thing was in the bill or that they would support it. It’s surprising that O’Reilly even bothered to play the clips when they in no way supported his argument.

The bottom line is that O’Reilly is now lying to cover up his prior idiocy. This is something that he has gotten pretty good at over the years due to the many times he’s had to do it.

The Glenn Beck Advertiser Boycott Must Be Working

Posted by on April 8, 2010 at 11:47 am. 28 Comments :

The way you can tell if a protest is effective is when the target of the action can’t stop complaining about it. For two days in a row, Glenn Beck has devoted valuable airtime to castigating the proponents of an advertiser boycott that began last year in response to Beck calling President Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred of white people.”

For Beck to divert so much time from fabricating paranoid conspiracy theories to fabricating smears on his perceived enemies is revealing. His anxiety could not be more apparent, even as he pretends that the efforts directed against him are making him happy:

“The fact is, I haven’t felt this good and positive in a long time. Why? Because the boycott attempts are the most transparent AstroTurf attacks I have ever seen or ever heard of.”

Ever? The truth is that the boycotts were initiated by a very small group that most people (including me) had never heard of. Color of Change began the effort with a small email list and a campaign to communicate with Beck’s advertisers. This shoestring effort produced surprising results, getting more than 100 advertisers to refuse to permit their commercials on Beck’s show. [Note: StopBeck later joined the effort further enhancing its effectiveness]

Beck spent the majority of his rebuttal inventing a plot that went all the way up to the White House. The first brick thrown by Beck was at his perennial nemesis, Van Jones. However, while Jones was a co-founder of Color Of Change, he left the organization two years prior to the Beck boycott. That didn’t stop Beck from building his cloud castle of hate.

He then tied Jones to Rev. Jim Wallis of the Sojourners. However, Wallis had nothing to do with the advertiser boycott, then or now. Wallis entered the picture after Beck took an astonishingly stupid stand against social justice and advised his listeners to “run” from any church that advocated it. Wallis responded by calling for Christians who believe in the venerable Christian practice of social justice to run from Glenn Beck.

And of course, Beck had to inject his distaste for working Americans by slandering unions. So he tethered Andy Stern to the boycott effort, although Stern and his SEIU had no part in the year-old boycott until about two weeks ago when they signed on with a new push by MoveOn.org.

After this hallucinatory construction of a widespread cabal attacking him, Beck capped it off with a wild accusation that it was a high level plot that the President was “coordinating from the Oval Office”:

“Is it possible, maybe, that pointing out every night that there are radicals, Marxists, and communists, in the White House, maybe that struck a nerve? Has someone decided that they must destroy my career and silence me because we’ve stumbled onto something? […] Has there ever been a case in American history…where an American president administration tried to destroy the livelihood of a private citizen with whom they disagree. Can’t think of any.”

Beck’s paranoia led to this declaration that nothing like this had ever happened before. He then immediately contradicted himself by comparing it to Richard Nixon’s famous “enemies list.” The only problem with that comparison is that Nixon’s list was documented and Beck’s delusions still only exist in his twisted cranium. What’s more, Nixon sought to use the power of the government against his opponents, but the Beck boycott relies entirely on the efforts of individual citizens engaging in free expression. Nevertheless, Beck elevates this to an absurd altitude wherein he literally compares himself with victims of Nazi atrocities:

“Where’s the media? Do the rest of you in this business think it’s gonna stop with me? Really? Once they get me what happens to you? Is there absolutely no chance whatsoever that you might be a target at some point in the future? What is that poem…First they came for the Jews and I stayed silent…”

Now they are coming for Glenn Beck. It is so like Beck to manifest his Messianic complex in this fashion. He is the persecuted one that suffers for his congregation. And his stylings are getting more televengelical and Apocalyptic by the day. Witness this fire and brimstone sermon:

It is a bizarre world. It is an upside down, inside out, quantum physics world. […] It is the eve of destruction in America.

I believe in God. I believe rights come from man, and this Constitution, and the founding of this nation, were divinely inspired. These are God’s rights and God’s freedoms.

If we appreciate those rights, if we do the right thing […] we are going to have to pay the consequence for our living and mistreating these rights. But in the end, have no fear, because nothing will thwart Him. Because these are His rights. This was His Constitution. This was His country for His purposes, not ours. And nothing…nothing…will thwart Him in the end.

Hallelujah. This may be the first time I have heard anyone declare that the Constitution was “divinely inspired.” To my knowledge, it has not been included in any version of the Bible. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison have not been beatified, nor is George Washington a saint. But in Beck’s mind a new holy doctrine has been proclaimed. One that permitted human slavery and denied women the right to vote. If the Constitution was divinely inspired, then what right did later generations have to amend it? Were they also the servants of God? And if so, did God screw up when he ratified Prohibition or the right to levy income taxes?

I have said this before, and it is all too apparent that it must be repeated: I genuinely hope that the people who care for Glenn Beck get him the help that he so obviously requires. It is way too tempting for his family and his producers and his hangers on, to hold back and revel in the riches he generates for them. But they will surely regret it when he self-destructs and splatters them all with the blood of their greed.

Now I’m sounding a little Biblical. And so I speaketh not further for the time is at hand for me to shuteth up. For now…..

It’s Official: Rupert Murdoch Is A Senile Old Coot

Posted by on April 7, 2010 at 9:05 am. 68 Comments :

The chairman of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, has endured many decades as a right-wing purveyor of tabloid pseudo-news enterprises around the world. His power and influence has been felt in the halls of governments and the boardrooms of corporations. His opinions have been sought after and received with great deference. But that’s all over now.

In an appearance at a forum for the public affairs TV series, The Kalb Report, Murdoch exhibited clear signs that he has lost touch with reality. Sam Stein of the Huffington Post was there and reported some examples of Murdoch’s mental decline. It begins with the ludicrous assertion that the staff at his competitors MSNBC and CNN “tend to be Democrats” but that his own Fox News presenters “are not Republicans.” He did not, however, bother to identify a single Democrat at his rivals’ networks, and when pressed, he was also unable to name one on his own.

More importantly, Murdoch seems to have completely forgotten that he employs the most recent vice-presidential candidate of the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, as well as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, Mike Huckabee. And let’s not forget other avowed Republican Fox Newsers Karl Rove, Rick Santorum, Dana Perino, Newt Gingrich, Dick Morris, Laura Ingraham, John Bolton, Dan Senor, Linda Chavez, and Oliver North. Fox is lousy with Republicans, but in his diminished capacity Murdoch is so confused about the political affiliation of his crew that he can declare aloud and in public that there aren’t any such people working for him.

In another departure from reality, Murdoch was asked if it was ethical for Fox to promote the Tea Party movement. For anyone paying attention it is clear that Fox became a virtual publicity machine for the Tea Baggers.

They aired numerous interviews of Bagger spokespeople including their chief strategist and fundraiser, Dick Armey. They had reporter Griff Jenkins riding along on the Tea Party Express bus. They dispatched their top anchors, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren, and Neil Cavuto, to host Tea Party events across the nation. They even branded branded some of the events as “FNC Tea Parties.” But Murdoch’s response to the inquiry was rife with bewilderment:

“No. I don’t think we should be supporting the Tea Party or any other party. But I’d like to investigate what you are saying before condemning anyone.”

Either he never watches his own network or his memory and comprehension skills have utterly collapsed. He must also not be paying much attention to that Internet thing. For several months Murdoch has been promising to put all of his online news content behind a pay wall. He has spoken out harshly against what he deems theft by news aggregators like Google. Never mind that he can stop Google from indexing his web sites anytime he wants with just a few lines of code. At the Kalb forum he reiterated his opinion saying…

“We will be very happy if they just publish our headline or a sentence or two and that’s it. Followed by a subscription form.”

You would hope that someone on his staff (or his nurses) would advise him that that is exactly what they do now. If you search Google for news content, you will get only a headline and a couple of sentences. Then you can click the link to go to the full story on the content owner’s web site. Contrary to his misconception, this drives traffic to Murdoch’s site, it doesn’t steal anything. And what Murdoch doesn’t acknowledge (if he even remembers) is that he owns web sites that actually do steal content from other news sources. His Fox Nation, for example, is a news aggregator that does not pay for the articles it features, but reprints much more than a couple of sentences from them – sometimes the whole article.

The general tone of this interview ought to be disturbing to Murdoch’s family and doctors. He really appears to be suffering from an acute cognitive failure. These are not the sort of logical missteps made by someone who has built an international media empire. Murdoch is either profoundly distracted or is losing the mental acuity to perform his duties. It may be time for him to consider stepping aside and let his kids screw up the world for awhile.

Addendum: Additional reporting on the Kalb interview reveals that Murdoch…

  • …doesn’t consider Sarah Palin to be a journalist. (Duh!)
  • …believes that Greta Van Susteren is a Democrat. (Never mind her adoration of Sarah Palin for whom her husband is an advisor)
  • …thinks the iPad will save newspapers. (Right. A $600.00 device possessed by a fraction of American households, that will charge extra for subscriptions, is going to replace a news source that was delivered for pennies a day to any American doorstep)

Keep ’em coming, Rupert.

Fox News Caught In Massive Nielsen Ratings Fraud

Posted by on April 1, 2010 at 11:44 am. 47 Comments :

Update 4/2/2010: A major development occurred overnight.
It is now April 2, 2010! (no foolin).
Update 5/10/2010: See this new analysis and addendum.

This week saw the release of the quarterly ratings performance data for television programming. Much of the reporting on this story focused on the dominant position Fox News retains in the cable news sector. As has been the case for several years, Fox News smothered the competition and experienced rapid growth while other news programmers stagnated or declined.

While most industry insiders accept the routine pronouncements from the sole ratings provider, Nielsen Media Research, without question, some observers could not help but notice a certain incongruity in the results. How is it, they wonder, that Fox News can be so consistently in the lead despite their obvious niche programming focus on a narrow segment of the viewing audience. The decidedly right-of-center bias of Fox News corresponds to a rather small portion of the national electorate. Republican favorability has been hovering in the mid-twenties for years. So how does this negligible slice of the market translate into such a disproportionate ratings advantage?

The answer may be evident in new disclosures of business relationships that call into question the integrity of Nielsen’s data. With the rollout of its People Meter methodology in the early 2000’s, Nielsen entered the high-tech era of TV market research. It was heralded as a major advancement of data collection that would vastly improve the ability of producers, programmers and advertisers to evaluate the marketplace. But as with any upheaval in the status quo, there were skeptics and dissenters. Chief amongst them was Fox Broadcasting, who argued that the new system significantly under-counted African-Americans, a key component of their audience at the time. There was also a question as to the security of the new set-top boxes that would be recording viewer choices. With the introduction of technology comes the risk of miscalculations and tampering. But eventually the complaints receded or were resolved and the new service took its place as the signature survey product for television marketing.

It was during this time, subsequent to the implementation of People Meters, that Fox News began its rapid ascent to ratings dominance. A prudent observer might wonder how this new system came to report so much more favorably for a network that had fiercely opposed its adoption. What transpired that caused Fox News to withdraw their objections and become the biggest beneficiary of the change?

It has recently been discovered that the Wegener Corporation, the manufacturer of the set-top devices that Nielsen uses, has a long association with Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation, the parent of Fox News. Wegener was founded by the former management of Scientific-Atlanta, a producer of set-top boxes for cable access and other purposes. One of the other products in Scientific-Atlanta’s line was a device used by Gemstar to provide television program listings to cable operators and their subscribers. Gemstar was an affiliate of TV Guide, which in turn was owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. So the executives who were responsible for developing and manufacturing Murdoch’s equipment for Gemstar became the principles of the company providing Nielsen with their ratings collection devices. And around that same time Fox News dropped their objections to the new People Meter service.

It would not be difficult to encode an electronic device so that it would purposefully miscalculate survey data. A simple algorithm to multiply a target by a fixed percentage could produce a result that would artificially inflate one set of figures while keeping it in proportion to a larger set, making it virtually impossible to detect. At present, their is no confirmation that such a deception has been contrived. It would require a thorough examination of Nielsen’s hardware and the ability to reverse engineer the chips inside of it. But for those who presume that it would be an outlandish notion, they would be well advised to study recent news events that uncovered similarly scandalous conduct on the part of News Corp.

One situation involves a digital recorder and satellite receiver made by NDS Group for Murdoch’s Sky network in Europe. Unlike TiVo, the Sky+ system records “personal viewing information,” which is information about your viewing practices that is tied to your contact information (i.e., it’s not kept anonymous, like TiVo’s).

In addition to that, NDS was also charged with using spies and hackers to steal Sky competitor Dish Network’s programming and make it available to viewers for free, thus undercutting Dish’s financial viability. As reported in Wired Magazine:

“The case involves a colorful cast of characters that includes former intelligence agents, Canadian TV pirates, Bulgarian and German hackers, stolen e-mails and the mysterious suicide of a Berlin hacker who had been courted by the Murdoch company not long before his death.

On the hot spot is NDS Group, a UK-Israeli firm that makes smartcards for pay-TV systems like DirecTV. The company is a majority-owned subsidiary of Murdoch’s News Corporation. The charges stem from 1997 when NDS is accused of cracking the encryption of rival NagraStar, which makes access cards and systems for EchoStar’s Dish Network and other pay-TV services. Further, it’s alleged NDS then hired hackers to manufacture and distribute counterfeit NagraStar cards to pirates to steal Dish Network’s programming for free.”

On yet another occasion Murdoch’s news group engaged in some sleazy and illegal behavior to get stories about celebrities and politicians. The Guardian reported that Murdoch paid substantial sums of money to keep this scandal under wraps:

“Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public ­figures as well as gaining unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.”

And if that’s not enough, check into the incestuous and disturbing web of connections Murdoch has to the communists in China. Glenn Beck tried to pull the veil off of this one but was censored by his own employer.

Given the history of sleazy conduct and nefarious associations, is it really that far-fetched to conclude that something similar has taken place with regard to Murdoch’s relationship to Nielsen and the firm that manufactures their ratings collection devices? It would explain how Fox News could wind up with such a dominate lead in the ratings despite catering to a relatively small potential audience. It would explain why Fox suddenly halted their objections to a new process that they previously considered inaccurate and biased against them.

It would also explain a deep discrepancy between the allegedly broad viewing of Fox News and their nearly invisible impact on the political landscape. If Fox were as ubiquitous as they (and the ratings) claim, then why, during the years of their strongest growth, did they fail to move the country to their positions. With a sustained 24/7 propaganda effort, Fox failed to stop the 2006 Democratic takeover of Congress. They failed to stop the 2008 election of Barack Obama despite incessant and false allegations of him being a Muslim, a radical leftist, and a pal of terrorists. They failed to stop the 2010 passage of a health care bill despite charges of socialism, death panels, and national bankruptcy. Does this sound like a network that holds a commanding majority of America’s television viewers under its sway?

To be sure, I am not the first to question the legitimacy of Nielsen’s numbers. Many people in the industry quietly accept what they regard as a flawed methodology simply because there is no alternative – or because proposed alternatives are even less acceptable. When it suits their purpose, even Fox News complains about the ratings. And I’m not talking about simple complaints concerning minor numerical inconsistencies, but allegations of rampant fraud that warrant federal investigation. After basking in the glow of Nielsen’s data, Bill O’Reilly turns around and castigates them as having “major problems…that have benefited MSNBC,” and asserts that…

O’Reilly: “The bottom line on this is there may be some big-time cheating going on in the ratings system, and we hope the feds will investigate. Any fraud in the television rating system affects all Americans.”

Of course the “feds” don’t have any jurisdiction over private market research firms. And it’s rather hypocritical for O’Reilly to suddenly advocate for big government intruding on the free market. But conservatives like O’Reilly are not averse to hypocrisy when it furthers their agenda. And in this case the agenda is to work the refs at Nielsen and suppress any notion that Fox is not the king of the television hill.

In conclusion, if we are to have any certainty as to who the real king of the hill is, we will need to get to the bottom of this lingering controversy surrounding Nielsen’s systems and procedures. The connection to Murdoch’s covert operations and his history of unlawful corporate espionage cannot be dismissed. Nielsen must investigate their equipment providers and perform intensive examinations of the devices they place in viewers’ homes. Anything short of this would leave them open to charges of complicity and render their survey data useless.

Captain America vs. The Tea Crusaders

Posted by on February 10, 2010 at 2:46 pm. 3 Comments :

Tea CrusadersIn an epic battle of good vs. evil, the archetypal superhero, Captain America, has come out four square against hysterical protest movements that embrace racism and disseminate disinformation in pursuit of a greedy, intolerant agenda: i.e. Tea Crusaders (It aint no party).

Actually, Captain America attempted to express his revulsion of the Tea Crusaders, but agents working for the rightist cabal succeeded in getting his publisher, Marvel Comics, to apologize and remove the offending comments from future printings.

The controversy involved a short segment of the comic wherein Captain America’s alter-ego, Steve Rogers, was observing a protest march by a group of right-wing, anti-tax, activists. The marchers, in an accurate portrayal of reality, were an all-white mob of angry tea-volutionaries carrying signs that recall the Tea Party actions last year. The part that got the Crusaders all worked up contained this image with a sign saying “Tea Bag the Libs Before They Tea Bag You.”

I’m not sure I understand what the Crusaders are grumbling about. The sign being carried by the comic protester is one that has made repeated appearances at Tea Party events. David Weigel of the Washington Independent captured it on film. It is a sentiment that they readily accept and promote. Now, all of a sudden, they are outraged by their own slogans.

As a result of their bellyaching, Marvel Comics, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, took the exceedingly cautious (i.e. cowardly) move of apologizing. And since there was nothing about the comic that was false or defamatory, the only reason for the reversal must be to mollify prospective comic book readers who may also be Tea Baggers.

The moral of the story is that, while Captain America may be able to defeat the most vile and villainous enemies ever dreamed up in the imaginary world of comics, he was vanquished by a very real enemy, an international corporate media conglomerate. I’d say we need to call the X-Men, but they are already in the employ of super-villain Rupert Murdoch.

Ashamed And Sickened By Roger Ailes

Posted by on January 10, 2010 at 9:16 am. 3 Comments :

Roger Ailes

Fox News CEO Roger Ailes has become a bit of a crimp in the Murdoch family’s harmony. The New York Times is reporting that Matthew Freud, the husband of Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, is not particularly fond of his in-laws.

Freud: I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.

Uh oh. That’s gotta make for some awkward holiday gatherings. Freud’s complaint isn’t a trivial personal incompatibility. He is aiming straight at the heart of a news enterprise’s most cherished asset: its journalistic standards. The charge of “horrendous and sustained disregard” is hardly an incidental difference of opinion. And the fact that there are others who share his shame doesn’t smooth things out for Ailes.

Freud is married to Elisabeth Murdoch, who left the family business to run her own UK-based enterprise, Shine Limited. Shine also has interests in the U.S., including Reveille, the company that produces “The Office” and “Ugly Betty.” Elisabeth was an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama and held a fundraiser for him in London. That contrasts significantly with the views of Ailes, whom the Times says threatened to quit if Murdoch permitted his New York Post to endorse Obama for president.

The Times notes that Ailes also played a part in Lachlan Murdoch’s decision to leave his father’s company in 2004 and return to Australia. Up until then Lachlan was considered Rupert’s heir apparent. The article goes on to hype Ailes’ mythic reputation as a political strategist and media guru. But what it doesn’t say is that while being successful at lining the pockets of the principles, Fox News was also killing the Republican Party.

It’s good to know that there are some reasonable members of the Murdoch clan who aren’t afraid to voice their opinions. It makes for some interesting speculation about the future of News Corp. when the Murdoch progeny assume control. While son James is still a high-ranking executive running Papa’s European satellite operations, siblings Elisabeth and Lachlan will inherit equal voting shares from their father’s estate.

Should any of this make Ailes nervous? Well, would you want to keep a division head that made you “ashamed and sickened” if you inherited a multinational media empire? Would you allow your news network to continue to have a “horrendous and sustained disregard” for journalistic standards? Would Ailes even want to remain at Fox with Obama supporters as his new bosses? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

[Update] News Corp responds: “Matthew Freud’s opinions are his own and in no way reflect the views of Rupert Murdoch, who is proud of Roger Ailes and Fox News.”

Rupert Murdoch’s pride in Ailes irrevocably ties him to the insults, lies, and journalistic disrepute that is the hallmark of Ailes and his stars like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly. Murdoch again chooses to align himself with the dregs of the television idiocracy. That will be his legacy.

Dick Cheney: Human Events’ Conservative Of The Year.

Posted by on December 21, 2009 at 7:20 pm. 2 Comments :

Award season is in full swing, and the latest recipient of a year-end tribute is former Vice-President Dick Cheney. Human Events magazine has named Cheney “Conservative of the Year.”

Dick Cheney - The End Is Near

To be sure, this commendation lacks stature. After all, last year’s winner was Sarah Palin. Chosen to pen Palin’s accolades was the professional conservative controversialist, Ann Coulter. In her attempt to praise Palin, Coulter wrote such back-handed compliments as…

[1] Who cares if Palin was qualified to be President? [2] Palin was a kick in the pants, she energized conservatives, and she made liberal heads explode. [3] Perhaps Palin’s year is 2012, but I would recommend that she take a little more time to become older and wiser.

Pretty much the only positive thing Coulter could find to say about Palin was that she was a “genius at annoying all the right people.” While annoying people is a subject that Coulter has some familiarity with, it still begs the question, with friends like Coulter, who needs enemas?

Cheney fared little better with regard to the selection of his advocate. The honor of fluffing Cheney fell to former United Nations Ambassador, John Bolton. Bolton begins his plaudits by enumerating a list of things Cheney is NOT doing:

He is not running for President or any other office. He has not formed a PAC or a D.C. lobbying firm. He is not dishing on former colleagues, not spreading gossip, not settling scores.

Those, however, all sound like things that last year’s honoree, Palin, IS doing, and about which Bolton apparently disapproves. It’s rather telling that Human Events had to settle for someone they admit is so completely out of the political limelight. It speaks to the absence of credible leaders warming up in the conservative bullpen. The rest of the article makes a case very similar to the one Coulter made for Palin. It is basically an argument that Cheney was an effective thorn in the new administration’s side. To conservatives, that is what constitutes qualification for a prestigious award. Not setting policy, or advancing ideas, or accumulating support, but by being a nuisance. Bolton does end on a positive note by summing up Cheney’s attributes as a loyal public servant, saying he is…

“…a very experienced, very dedicated patriot, giving his fellow citizens his best analysis on how to keep them and their country safe.”

I’m not so sure that having Cheney’s “best analysis” is particularly comforting. I mean, this is the guy under who’s watch the nation suffered its worst act of terrorism ever. It’s the guy who led America into an unnecessary war justified by lies. And it’s the guy who has consistently been the herald of doom and worse, a virtual advance man for Al Qaeda. By repeatedly proclaiming his view that our country is less safe under President Obama, and therefore more vulnerable, Cheney and his cohorts are effectively inviting another terrorist attack. How does announcing to our enemies that he believes our nation is becoming weaker make us safer? Does he even care? Or is he just pasting a big bull’s eye on America and hoping for an “I told you so” moment?

In any case, I give you Richard Bruce Cheney – Human Events’ Conservative of the Year. I suppose it’s the best they could do.

The Case For The Comcast/NBC Merger

Posted by on December 5, 2009 at 1:19 pm. 3 Comments :

There has been, and will be, much discussion about the proposed merger between entertainment giants NBC/Universal and Comcast. Now that an agreement has been formally entered into, the discussions will likely become even more heated. Media reform advocates like FreePress are already organizing opposition to the deal. Free market capitalists want it to go through without interference from the government.

However, the government has a legitimate role to play to insure fair competition and to advance the interests of the public. Hearings will be held by the FCC, the FTC, and several congressional committees over the next year before the marriage can be consummated. Opponents will make the argument that a combined Comcast/NBCU would dominate access to entertainment programming and news on both cable and the Internet. Estimates show that Comcast, already the largest US provider of cable service and Internet access, would control up to 25% of all content. Comcast, on the other hand, will promise not to abuse their market position. If you’re naive enough to take their word for that, you might not think it’s such a bad deal. Unfortunately, Comcast has not been a particularly conscientious steward of the power they already have. And approving the merger would surely propel competitors to similarly bulk up to face the new, more scopious Comcast.

Ordinarily, I am a knee jerk opponent to any kind of media consolidation. The scope and reach of the Five Families of media (GE, Disney, Viacom, News Corp, and Time Warner) already wield far too much influence over everything we see, hear and read. I have long advocated breaking up these anti-competitive conglomerates and re-introducing real competition, independence, and diversity into the media marketplace. I still believe that deconsolidation is an achievable objective, though fairly far off on the time line.

In the meantime, what does this merger present to the current marketplace? Is Comcast really a worse partner for NBCU than GE, the world’s biggest defense contractor? Conflicts of interest in program content and distribution cause considerable harm, but is it any less harmful than conflicts that involve the production of military goods and weapons? GE’s reach extends even further into consumer products, financial services, information systems and health care technology. That’s a pretty broad scope for potential conflicts.

The Comcast merger offers some opportunities if implemented responsibly. Regulatory agencies can impose restrictions to prevent market abuse that would apply to all players, not just Comcast. They could mandate open access to airwaves and cable lines. They could codify network neutrality. They could promote localism to enhance the community service obligations that networks routinely ignore.

Comcast is already making noises about how they want to be better corporate citizens. They contend that they will comply with reasonable conditions set for the merger by the FCC and others. They promise that the corporate office will not influence news reporting at NBC or MSNBC. They vow to keep their content available to competing services like DirecTV. They have even taken a position in support of health care reform, explicitly repudiating the position of the US Chamber of Commerce, of which they are a member.

Of course, These may all be tactics designed to curry favor with the administration in hopes of clearing a path for approval of the merger. If so, that could also be an opportunity. The agencies and congressional committees reviewing the matter could extract significant concessions and make them binding for all of the monopolistic media enterprises.

Another somewhat more amusing benefit is the new relationship that would be forged between Fox and the NBC News unit. Bill O’Reilly and others at Fox have taken great pleasure in demonizing NBC and its current parent GE. For the most part they go after the executives because they are afraid to utter Keith Olbermann’s name aloud. O’Reilly has called GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, “a despicable human being” and has spewed impotent threats, saying…

“That Immelt man answers to me. . . . That’s why I’m in this business right now, to get guys like that.”

Um, OK. If you say so. So who will O’Reilly bash now? If he were to go off on Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, he might find himself regretting it. Comcast may decide that Fox News would be better off on a more expensive, upper tier, cable package. That could significantly reduce the number of homes that Fox would reach. Such a move would impact their ratings as well as their revenue from both advertising and cable subscription fees. Comcast might also decide that its new asset, MSNBC, would be a better fit on their basic cable packages, which it is not currently on in many markets. That obstacle to access has been a longstanding impediment to MSNBC’s ratings performance.

Like all bullies, O’Reilly is likely to keep his fat mouth shut about Roberts and Comcast. When there is really something at stake, he will cower in the corner and stick with his War on Christmas shtick. O’Reilly would never send Stuttering Jesse Watters to ambush Roberts. He’d rather stay comfy in his studio holding hands with Dick Morris as they demonstrate how little they know about any subject they address. And Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch would probably bury O’Reilly if he were to damage their relationship with the nation’s biggest cable operator. So maybe O’Reilly might actually have to confront Olbermann man to man. Although he would certainly lose that contest too.

In conclusion, I can’t get excited about another merger of big media megaliths. But I can’t really muster a great deal of antagonism about this one. I don’t see it as worse than the status quo, and I do see an opportunity to tighten regulatory oversight for the whole industry. That is, if the regulators and the administration have the will. Stayed tuned.

Rupert Murdoch: Media Vulture

Posted by on December 1, 2009 at 5:51 pm. NO Comments :

News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch appeared today at a conference sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission. His address touched upon many of the issues he has been peddling recently regarding journalism’s future and the Internet.

Murdoch continues to make noises about locking up his content behind pay walls. That is as unlikely now as it was when he first proposed it. Few will pay for the disinformation he calls news. He still believes that Google is stealing his product and he repeats his threat to de-list it from the search giant. We’re still waiting, Rupert. And we’re still waiting for you to stop stealing the content of others on your Fox News and Fox Nation web sites, where you do exactly what you are accusing Google and other aggregators of doing.

Among the more intriguing remarks he made today were those associated with the government’s involvement, or lack thereof, with media. In Murdoch’s view the government ought to stay away from any effort to help the struggling industry. By this he means that anything resembling a bailout ought to be avoided. Let the weaker players fail. At the same time he is anxious for government to get involved with respect to reforming regulations. Particularly those that impose limits on cross-ownership.

What Murdoch wants is for the government to refrain from any initiative that might help shaky media enterprises because he is more than happy to see them fail. They are his competition. When they go under, his market share increases, at least potentially. And while many media firms are struggling financially, Murdoch has the resources to deficit finance his own operations until the economy improves. Then he can scoop up new business and failed businesses at bargain rates. Especially if he is freed from the ownership caps he hopes to be able to eliminate.

It is a cynical and cold-hearted strategy that feeds off of the misfortune of others. And it is quintessentially Rupert.