Media Reform Alliance Presses Obama To Keep His Word

Posted by on December 18, 2008 at 1:07 pm. NO Comments :

Free Press has assembled over 100 media reform organizations and activists to sign a letter to President-elect Barack Obama that asks, in essence, for him to implement the media agenda that he articulated in his campaign. What follows is from the press release issued by Free Press:

We congratulate you for putting crucial media and technology issues in the public spotlight. Not only did your campaign embrace new technology and innovative media, you have embraced these values in your policy agenda. Your commitment and detailed plan represent a fundamental shift toward communications policy in the public interest. We happily offer our support and service in pursuit of our common goals.

We look forward to working with the leaders you will appoint to the White House, such as the Chief Technology Officer, the positions on the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, Corporation of Public Broadcasting and in the Commerce, Education, Justice and Agriculture departments. We urge you to select strong proponents of the public interest who will embrace and enact the policy proposals you made on the campaign trail to shape the future of the media, the Internet, the economy — and our democracy.

Together, we have a unique opportunity to break with the past, lift the stranglehold industry lobbyists have had on communications policy, and put the public’s priorities first. In your own words, you pledged:

  • Protect an Open Internet: To “take a backseat to no one in my commitment to Net Neutrality” and “protect the Internet’s traditional openness to innovation and creativity and ensure that it remains a platform for free speech and innovation that will benefit consumers and our democracy.”
  • Promote Universal, Affordable Broadband: To see that “in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online” by bringing “true broadband to every community in America.”
  • Diversify Media Ownership: To create “the diverse media environment that federal law requires and the country deserves.”
  • Renew Public Media: To foster “the next generation of public media,” and “support the transition of existing public broadcasting entities and help renew their founding vision in the digital world.”
  • Spur Economic Growth: To “strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world” and leverage technology “to grow the economy, create jobs, and solve our country’s most pressing problems.”
  • Ensure Open Government: To reverse “policies that favor the few against the public interest,” close” the revolving door between government and industry,” and achieve “a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America’s citizens.”

The more than one hundred people who signed onto this letter — and the millions more we represent in our organizations, workplaces and communities — join your call to create a more vibrant and diverse media system and to deliver the benefits of the open Internet and new technology to all Americans.

That is an ambitious and commendable agenda, and one that we all must work hard to pursue. It is very easy for a new administration to get bogged down in competing priorities, particularly in challenging times such as we are enduring today. And it is easy for politicians to abandon principles in the face of opposition or in the name of compromise. That is a pattern that both Obama and the Democratic Party has displayed far too often.

However, despite the obvious severity of our nation’s present condition – economic turmoil, multiple wars, environmental calamity, legal and Constitutional decay, etc. – media reform must remain at the top of the priority list. The solutions to every problem that threatens America’s well being relies on the participation of the people in the process. The media provides the only channel to communicate and educate on a mass scale, and without it there can be no progress. It is, therefore, critical that we shape the media in a fashion that promotes independence, diversity, and respect for openness and honesty.

The Obama agenda, as articulated by him, is a good model for how to proceed. Now he (and we) need to follow through.

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Fox Greetings: May Your What Be What?

Posted by on December 17, 2008 at 4:03 pm. NO Comments :

The corporate headquarters for the War On Christmas is sending out their seasoned greetings, but the message may be getting somewhat muddled.

First of all, the wishes being conveyed are not for Christmas at all, but for some vague, unspecified “holiday.” And the graphic treatment of the message makes clear that what Fox is really wishing for is a season of conservative ideology and partisanship.

That’s the spirit!

There are more examples of the Fox holiday spirit at Jossip, where they received cards that exploit the joy of this season to make nasty comments about their competitors.

As the say at News Corp: “Tis the season to be assholes.”


The Wall Street Journal And Network Neutrality

Posted by on December 16, 2008 at 2:18 am. NO Comments :

An article in the Wall Street Journal is reporting that prominent advocates of Network Neutrality are reversing or softening their positions on the concept of treating all Internet traffic equally. The authors go into some depth in support of their contention that the movement is losing steam. And they name names.

“Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content…”

“Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have withdrawn quietly from a coalition formed two years ago to protect network neutrality.”

“In addition, prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject.”

“Lawrence Lessig, an Internet law professor at Stanford University and an influential proponent of network neutrality, recently shifted gears by saying at a conference that content providers should be able to pay for faster service.”

Unfortunately for the WSJ, almost everyone they cite denies the conclusions the article draws and affirms their commitment to Network Neutrality.

Google: Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday’s Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open.

Barack Obama: The Obama transition team is reaffirming his complete commitment to net neutrality and is disputing a much-discussed report today claiming that the President-elect is softening his support for it or shifting his position on it.

Lawrence Lessig: I don’t know what Google is doing, though if they are trying to negotiate exclusive deals for privileged access, that shows exactly why we need network neutrality regulation […] I’ve not seen anything during the Obama campaign or from the transition to indicate it has shifted its view about network neutrality at all.

Perhaps the only position correctly reported in the WSJ story is that Yahoo and Microsoft have strayed from the pro-Network Neutrality crowd. However, that separation occurred two years ago when they tightened their relationships with Telecom companies and was therefore, not a new development as the Journal implied.

So why would the Journal so badly mangle this story? They obviously didn’t bother to seek comments from the people or companies they quoted. Reporting the accurate positions of these parties would not have been difficult to do. Instead, the misquoted parties had to find other forums to set the record straight after the Journal had already hit the streets.

It would be easy to blame this shoddy work on the new Wall Street Journal as envisioned by its new owner, tabloid merchant Rupert Murdoch. But it goes deeper than that. The main companies that oppose Network Neutrality are the big Telecom and Cable businesses. Murdoch’s News Corp is heavily dependent on them for distribution of his television networks. He launched his Fox Business Network one year ago and it is still struggling for carriage. It presently passes less than half the homes of its primary competitor, CNBC. Do you think that Murdoch might be interested in getting AT & T, Comcast, Time Warner, etc., to put FBN on all of their systems? Do you think that he might like to get favored treatment and channel space for Fox News, FX, Fox Sports, National Geographic, and the rest of his cable properties?

And the big question: Do you think that Murdoch would use his Wall Street Journal to lobby for the interests of his other business assets? Of course he would – he’s Rupert Murdoch.


George W. Bush: Lame. Duck!

Posted by on December 14, 2008 at 2:18 pm. 7 Comments :

On what George Bush must think is his victory lap, the president surprised the country he destroyed with one last visit before he slips off into irrelevancy. However, during a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, one of the reporters slipped off his shoes and hurled them at Bush.

After the incident, Bush dismissed it saying that it was merely “one way of getting attention.” But in the Middle East, the symbolism of shoes is much deeper than that. Even crossing your legs in a manner that shows the sole of your shoe to someone is considered a supreme insult.

Take this, Bushie…



The Wall Street Journal After A Year With Murdoch

Posted by on December 13, 2008 at 2:30 pm. NO Comments :

It was one year ago today that the Dow Jones Company, parent of the Wall Street Journal, agreed to be acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. That transaction marked another step in the shrinking universe of media ownership. Specifically, it was the consumption of a revered publishing institution by a voracious international megalopoly. So what did the Bancroft family and other shareholders get for their greedy acquiescence to the power-mad mogul?

One year ago, the $60.00 per share offer from News Corp was about a 67% premium over Dow Jones’ then current price. Anyone who immediately liquidated their holdings following the transaction (which no one did) would have made a nice profit. Everyone else just watched as their fortunes shriveled up. The parent of Fox News has declined 60% in the past year. That means that the $5 billion dollars spent on Dow Jones has a current value of $2 billion. That’s not a particularly impressive performance.

As for Murdoch’s financial fate, rather than adding a $5 billion asset to his empire, his company’s market cap declined $32 billion – that’s more than six times what he spent on Dow Jones.

Now it would be easy to blame this all on the economic collapse, and certainly that plays a significant part. The only problem is that News Corp fell further than any of its competitors.

Company % Decline
News Corp 60
New York Times 55
Washington Post 50
Time Warner 44
Dow Jones Index 35
Disney 29

From a financial perspective, it doesn’t appear that the folks at Dow Jones made a particularly sound decision. While it’s impossible to say where these investments would be had News Corp not come along, it seems that they would have done no worse than the rest of the field. The difference is that they would still have their independence. They would not have had their publisher replaced by a Murdoch loyalist from England. And they would not have been ordered to shorten their stories and shift their focus from business to general news so that Murdoch could taunt his enemies at the New York Times (which he is also now rumored to fancy).

Murdoch’s business prowess is widely exaggerated. His New York Post has lost money for the past decade – the whole time he has owned it. And his celebrated purchase of MySpace when it was the unchallenged leader in social networking, hasn’t really worked out so well. MySpace is now second to a surging Facebook. Fox News itself is consistently the slowest growing news network on cable TV.

The biggest advantage for a Dow Jones tie in with News Corp was the potential for a television platform. The Wall Street Journal badly missed out by allowing CNBC and Bloomberg to run away with that market. Murdoch of course has his new Fox Business Network, but due to contractual commitments with CNBC, he is not permitted to use the DJ assets. And by the time those contracts expire, the dismally low-rated FBN may be history.

So…all in all, Dow Jones probably would have been better off if they had left well enough alone. They lost some prominent and experienced talent when Murdoch took over. And although he is moving slowly, so as not to spook his staff and subscribers, we can still expect him to put his personal stamp on the enterprise by dumbing down the content to reach a broader market. That’s been his M.O. throughout his entire career and there are no signs that he is abandoning his affection for tabloid sensationalism and rightist propaganda.


Brit Hume Doesn’t Get The Internet – Or Journalism

Posted by on December 12, 2008 at 3:26 am. 5 Comments :

It’s a good thing that Brit Hume has already announced his retirement. When the primary anchor and managing editor of the Washington bureau for Fox News has such a total misconception of modern media, it is well past time for him to leave the scene. On the December 11 broadcast of the Fox News Special Report, Hume led off his Political Grapevine segment with this:

“The Obama-Biden transition team has launched a new feature on its Web site called “Open for Questions” which is designed to be an open forum for users to ask policy and issue questions. However, it is subject to what amounts to censorship by other users because the more votes an entry gets the higher it moves on the overall list. But some questions are being downplayed by Obama supporters who are trying to remove the entries entirely.”

Someone needs to explain to the old feller what “community moderation” is on social networks. They could start by telling Grandpa Hume that it is sort of like Democracy. He may remember what that is.

The whole point of the Open For Questions project is to solicit the public’s views on what issues the new administration should pursue. By allowing people to vote on the suggestions submitted, it presents a community consensus of what ought to take priority. But Hume is complaining that some comments were poorly received, or even flagged as inappropriate. He cites as an example this question:

“Is Barack Obama aware of any communications in the last six weeks between Rod Blagojevich or anyone representing Rod Blagojevich and any of Obama’s top aides?”

That may be interesting question if you’re a Republican toady trying to smear Obama, but it is not a policy suggestion for the President-elect. So it should come as no surprise that it would not rate highly, and that it might even be deemed inappropriate. It is certainly irrelevant and a distraction from the topic at hand.

Nevertheless, Hume’s assertion that the results of the public’s voting amounts to censorship is both ridiculous and utterly false. While some instances of the Blagojevich question were removed as inappropriate, many more remain on the site – just farther down the list. What’s more, commentary that went even further off topic, and could only be characterized as intentionally disruptive (not to mention immature), was also available for all to read. For instance…

  • Will Rev. Wright sing God (bleep) America at your inauguration?
  • Besides Rezko, the governor, and Bill Ayers, are there any other crooks you associated yourself with that we need to know about?
  • Are you a Muslim Terrorist in disguise? I do not believe you are American, prove it to us!
  • Is Michelle proud of America now that you are the president-elect?
  • Did you beat Clinton ’cause for the Dems it’s Bros befo’ Hos?
  • Are you a natural born citizen and if so will you show an authentic birth certificate?
  • Is it hard to be such a fucking phony all the time?

The fact that none of these items were removed proves that there is no censorship being practiced on the web site. It also proves that there are a lot of childish Republican smart asses clogging up the blogosphere. More to the point, it proves that Brit Hume is a lousy reporter and a flagrant promoter of disinformation. It took me all of fifteen minutes to compile this list. What kind of reporter is Hume if he cannot even use the search function provided on the web page to look for any information except that which affirms his predetermined view?

The transparency of Hume’s agenda driven ravings is testimony to the lie that Fox News is fair and balanced. It is further confirmation that Hume and his colleagues are dishonest and brazen purveyors of propaganda. And it is evidence that Hume is past his prime and unable to keep up with advances in new media. The sooner he trades in his anchor’s chair for a rocking chair the better. Buh bye, Brit.

Update: It appears that Hume’s source for his non-reporting is Ben Smith at Politico. Smith made the same inane accusation of censorship a day before Hume.

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Glenn Beck Is Even Stupider Than Joe The Plumber

Posted by on December 11, 2008 at 1:15 pm. NO Comments :

Glenn Beck was indisputably the stupidest man on CNN’s Headline News. He certainly holds a similarly high ranking in talk radio’s carnival of conservative clods. Next month Beck will debut his spanking new soap box on the Fox News Channel. Fox, of course is the home of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Steve Doocy, Dick Morris, Gretchen Carlson, etc. Beck must be starting to feel the strain of the competition he will encounter to be the network’s reigning rube.

So in anticipation of this battle of the blands, Beck had a workout with that international icon of intellect, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher. It bodes well for Beck that he emerged from the ring even stupider than Plumber Joe.

Much of the media attention for this event was focused on Wurzelbacher’s reversal of support for John McCain. Joe told Beck that being on the campaign trail with the Republican loser made him feel “even dirtier,” and that he wanted to “get off the bus” (although he thought that Sarah Palin was “the real deal”). But an even meatier exchange occurred that seems to have escaped the attention of the press (which should surprise precisely no one). In discussing the appointment of Hillary Clinton to be Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, Wurzelbacher said…

“I mean, you know, for example, you know, Hillary Clinton, the whole deal with her as far as becoming Secretary of State. You know, it’s kind of against — well, it’s not kind of. It’s against the Constitution right now where it stands. But they’re talking about getting around it.”

[Now I know why Joe is so fond of Palin. They speak the same language – also.]

Wurzelbacher reveals later in this interview that he learned this factoid from watching Sean Hannity. Now, watching Sean Hannity is risky enough. Learning something from him is downright foolhardy. The issue PJ is raising concerns the Constitutional prohibition against members of Congress being appointed to a position whose pay was increased during their congressional service. The Secretary of State received such an increase this year. However, this has occurred several times in the past, and then, like now, the lower salary was simply reinstated and the appointee took the job. While Wurzelbacher is too dumb to articulate this, Beck is so dumb that he doesn’t even know what Plumber Joe is referencing:

“Well, I think you are right on the money. I will tell you this in talking to one of my guys who’s deep in the Constitution, he’s saying that she can’t have two offices. That’s the problem. She can’t occupy the two offices and then two different branches, but it’s kind of iffy on that. It’s not really clear. And if she gets rid of her office, then it should be fine. But she couldn’t be a senator and Secretary of State. That’s the real problem there.”

No Glenn, that’s not the real problem, or any problem at all. Clinton has no intention of holding both offices. You must have pulled that notion right out of your … well, your brain, because your ass probably knows better. The governor of New York is already in the process of selecting Clinton’s successor in the Senate. You and your guys who are “deep in the Constitution” are deeply idiotic for managing to so thoroughly misunderstand both the Constitution and current events. You’re the real problem for being one of the foremost distributors of ignorance in America.

[FYI to GB: From the Constitution, Article I, Section 6, Paragraph 2: “…no person holding any office under the United States, shall be a member of either House during his continuance in office.” So it’s not the least bit “iffy”]

Even Joey the P disputed Beck’s mindless meanderings. You would think that Beck would be somewhat embarrassed by having been corrected by a fake plumber riding out his extended fifteen minutes of fame. That’s gotta hurt. But Beck also remains silent when Wurzelbacher declares that he doesn’t want to “stir up a hornet’s nest” by making untoward comparisons, then proceeds to say…

“…you know, when Adolf Hitler had come to power, one of the first things he did was take guns away […] some of the things that our current elected President Obama is suggesting really goes down a socialist road…”

I have to admit that I’ve been having a bit of fun at Plumber Joe’s expense for the past few weeks. It’s awfully easy to do when someone so devoid of a clue continues to humiliate himself in public. But if Glenn Beck can get his own TV program and a $50 million contract for his radio babbling, then Plumber Joe is entitled to his silly little book and the occasional guest spot the Wally Wingnut Show. And Beck can rest assured that he has nothing to worry about with regard to retaining his title. He is, and will remain, the World’s Champion Intellectual Featherweight.


Deception And Distrust: The FCC Under Kevin Martin

Posted by on December 10, 2008 at 12:13 pm. NO Comments :

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce just released a report on the activities of Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin. The report, titled “Deception and Distrust” (PDF) chronicles an agency rife with abuse, manipulation, intimidation, and incompetence. The level of corruption would be shocking if it hadn’t come from the same administration that gave us Alberto Gonzales, Michael Brown, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, etc. The introduction to the report stated that…

This investigation was prompted by allegations to the effect that Chairman Kevin J. Martin has abused FCC procedures by manipulating or suppressing reports, data, and information. Allegations of a broken process at the FCC came from current and former FCC employees, telecommunications industry representatives, and even other commissioners and were often reported in the press.

The report detailed Martin’s attempts to mislead members of Congress by withholding studies that didn’t produce the results he preferred. Then he forced commission staff to rewrite the studies to reverse the findings, even though the data did not support his conclusions. Uncooperative colleagues were dealt with harshly. The result was a collapse of morale in an environment the report calls “a climate of fear.”

Chairman Martin has forced the retirement of senior FCC staff. He has also directed the involuntary transfer of senior staff to lesser positions, often without explanation or notice – a process that was commonly called being “Martinized” or “blue-boxed” – because they disagreed with his policies or agenda…

Under Martin’s dictatorial rule, employees were instructed not to talk to colleagues within the agency without permission. This gag rule was so comprehensive that they were also ordered not to talk to employees at other Federal agencies. Martin further fortified his control by installing a hand-picked Inspector General, Kent Nilsson, who was a close associate, insuring that there would be no independent oversight of his misdeeds. Nilsson himself is alleged to have violated agency procedures repeatedly according to the report.

Kevin Martin is a charter member of the Loyal Order of Bushies. He was on the front lines of the Florida 2000 battle to prevent votes from being counted. His wife Kathie has worked the PR brigade for both Dick Cheney and Bush. For his entire tenure at the FCC, Martin has advocated on behalf of the beleaguered corporations whom he believed were hamstrung by regulations that prevented them from dominating markets and from growing into ever larger monopolies. And now we learn that his administration was modeled on the Stalinist school of management and ethics.

There is a certain irony that this report was released on the same day that Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was charged with multiple counts of corruption in office. While Blagojevich’s alleged crimes are thoroughly repulsive, Martin’s crimes are far more serious with longer lasting consequences. Nonetheless, I have not seen a single report about this on any of the television news outlets.

Barack Obama will have an opportunity to replace Martin shortly after his inauguration, and it will not come a moment too soon. But that won’t stop the rantings from rightist outposts who believe that Obama has secret plans to invoke censorship on conservative talk radio. It won’t stop the pro-monopoly lobby from disparaging common sense, and popularly supported, initiatives to bring more local and independent voices into the public square.

The only way to stop these assaults on the First Amendment freedoms of speech and the press, is for the people to take seriously the threat posed by multinational media enterprises whose sole allegiance is to their bottom line. And, of course, we also need to address threats posed by the sort of political cronyism that produced Kevin Martin, who did for the FCC what Katrina did for FEMA.


Dismembering George W. Bush

Posted by on December 8, 2008 at 12:15 pm. 1 Comments :

As the administration of George W. Bush at long last comes to a close, the historical record of his presidency will begin to take shape. And like everything else that touches this president, the outlines of his legacy will be distorted by his accomplices and apologists. They will seek to recast in the public mind an accounting that bears little resemblance to reality. It will not be a remembering of the Bush era, but a dismembering, a mutilation of facts and consequences.

In pursuit of that goal, a coven of Bush minions has already convened to forge a counterfeit version of recent events. This faction of falsifiers includes the most notorious of Bush’s inner circle. Amongst the notables who have converged to sanitize and canonize the outgoing misleader are:

  • Karl Rove – Also known as the Architect or Bush’s Brain. Rove was the source of some of the most insidious propaganda emanating from the Bush White House.
  • Margaret Spellings – A Bush crony from the Texas clan. As Secretary of Education, with no experience in teaching or administration, she presided over millions of children being left behind.
  • Mark McKinnon – The Bush media advisor who received a recess appoint to the Broadcasting Board of Governors. His role as an advocate of fake news reports makes him an obvious choice to help fictionalize the Bush years.
  • Karen Hughes – A long-time PR flack for Bush whose work with the White House Iraq Group was instrumental in developing the lies used to sell war to the American people.
  • Alberto Gonzales – The Former Attorney General. A natural choice for historical recollections when, during testimony before Congress, he couldn’t seem to recall anything about his own tenure at the Justice Department.

The determination of this group to whitewash Bush’s reign of error will no doubt be intense. But so will be the level of difficulty. Bush is skipping out of Washington with the lowest approval rating of any president for as long as such ratings have been measured. Even worse, with regard to forming a legacy, is that majorities of historians rank Bush as the “worst president ever,” an awesome achievement considering competition from the likes of James Buchanon, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon. The comments of one historian in the survey summarize the situation nicely:

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush. Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

It will be interesting to see how the defenders of the Bush legacy respond to that. Karl Rove has already provided a preview of how the history manglers are going to proceed. And he is not shy about disseminating nonsense. He asserts that no one will regard the decision to take out Saddam Hussein as a mistake or that the broader war on terrorism was a miscalculation. Rove may have a point there, except for the fact that most Americans already regard the Iraq war as a mistake, and the broader war on terrorism has been miserably miscalculated, as evidenced by the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and the recent bombings in Mumbai. However, some of what Rove says is disturbingly plausible:

“No administration in the foreseeable future is going to go in and say, ‘You know what, we’re repealing the Patriot Act. You know what, we’re throwing out that terrorist surveillance program.'”

If Rove is right about this, than the American experiment was a failure. This is why it is imperative for Bush to be reprimanded by the law for his transgressions against the American people, the Constitution, and the world. If the Obama administration fails to undo these legislative and executive atrocities, then an abhorrent precedent will be set for decades to come. Americans may forever lose the freedoms for which Bush says the terrorists hate us. Maybe that’s his secret plan. If terrorists truly do hate us for our freedoms, then if you take them away the terrorists will no longer hate us – or hurt us. Safe at last. But Rove isn’t through prognasticating:

“We are better off for having woken up to the fact that we were in a war, and, mark my words, no president in the foreseeable future is going to step back from the tenets of the Bush philosophy, which are: better to fight them over there than to fight them here, and we will not wait until dangers fully materialize before we strike.”

The tenets of the Bush philosophy are nothing less than the grotesque advocacy of superiority and aggression. The phrase “fight them over there” is an overt declaration that non-American lives have less value and are expendable in the war on terror. Rove is making the argument that, while it is Americans who are fighting terrorists, it is everyone else who should suffer the consequences. And Bush’s doctrine of preventative war is not a policy of striking before “dangers fully materialize.” It is a policy of striking whether or not danger even exists. It is a policy of striking at shadows and illusions, except with real victims. Rove seems to have forgotten that no WMDs were ever found in Iraq. It’s too bad that thousands of Americans and more than a million Iraqis had to die in the interim. More likely, however, Bush’s philosophy is just a policy of manufacturing false justifications for attacking economic and ideological adversaries.

In the passage of time it is going to be important to preserve honest representations of the past. We must foil the legacy perverters in their attempts to fictionalize history. This means vigilance over the sort of odious assemblies described above, as well as over the media that has already been infiltrated by these and other revisionist historians.

If we are not vigilant, our legacy will be that we misunderestimated their strategery and we will forever dismember what actually happened in the dark days of Bush. And thus we will be condemned to repeat it.


The Real Reason Bill O’Reilly Bailed On His Radio Show

Posted by on December 5, 2008 at 4:46 pm. 4 Comments :

It was announced today that Bill O’Reilly is leaving his radio program, the Radio Factor. In the press release from Fox News, O’Reilly cites the strain of the workload for opting out of his lucrative radio deal:

“It is with great regret that I’ve come to the decision to leave the Radio Factor, but with the success of the O’Reilly Factor, I can no longer give both TV and radio the time they deserve.”

TV and radio must have done something very bad to deserve any time at all from Bill O’Reilly. More likely it is O’Reilly who has been bad. That would explain why radio audiences have rejected him. As one of the highest paid hosts in radio, he can’t even crack the top 10 in the talk format. He had lower ratings in New York than Al Franken before Franken left to run for the senate in Minnesota. His program was dropped from the influential Washington, D.C. market.

O’Reilly’s excuse for bailing on his radio audience is that he can’t carry the load. His two daily hours on the radio plus an hour on TV (15 hours a week) is just too much for him. Of course, much of the real work is carried out by his assistants and producers. So he must have the stamina of a slug. Other talkers like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Rachel Maddow seem to have no trouble handling both gigs.

Rightist broadcasters have lately been stirring up all manner of dread that Barack Obama and his liberal cadre are plotting to restore the Fairness Doctrine in order to silence conservative voices. Despite the fact that their fears stem from nothing more than their own maniacal hallucinations, they insist that conservative talk radio is threatened by these leftie conspiracies. As it turns out, conservatives are falling of their own weight as audiences become ever more repulsed by their lies, histrionics, and vitriol.

One thing O’Reilly may have been uncharacteristically honest about is the need to concentrate on his TV show. Two years ago he held an unapproachable lead that was never at risk. This year Keith Olbermann’s Countdown is a strong second place challenger that frequently beats the Factor in the key 25-54 demographic, as it did twice this week. So maybe O’Reilly is just ditching his also-ran radio show to shore up his diminishing performance on TV.

On a side note, the boilerplate language at the bottom of the press release identified the divisions of Fox News as Fox News Radio, Fox News Channel, Fox News Sunday, foxnews.com, and Fox News Mobile. Does the absence of the Fox Business Network signal something about its future?