j_b

Interview with Nicholas Johnson, former FCC Commissioner: "You now have the phenomenon of the single owner paying money to the writer of the novel in the form of book advance and royalties, and then paying the screenwriter to write the feature film which is produced at the owner's Hollywood studio. The owner's magazine does features about actors, producers, directors and other celebrities and otherwise promotes their movie, while the same person or corporation owns a television network that has the late night talk show on which these folks appear as guests; they own the theaters in which the movie is shown; they own the cable networks on which the rerun is provided; they own the pay-per-view services where people watch it in hotels; and they own the video rental stores where others go to rent it. So, you have created the possibility of an incredible multi-media, multi-national hype of a product which left on its own might very well have gone nowhere. More and more, this dominates what we're going to be reading in books, seeing in feature films, reading in magazine articles and so forth." Much more here: Media Monopoly

Yes, it isn't new but communication, technology and media consumption habits have changed a little since Jefferson. Today few read books (even fewer non-fiction books), the TV is on many hours a day, news "analysts" are lobbyists and/or entertainers, there is little investigative reporting, and from 35 major media organizations 50 years ago we are down to 5 conglomerates that mostly regurgitate conservative talking points framed by Fixed News.

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand (NYT Aril 2008)

Hitler and Stalin thought so too. quasi-monosyllabic ... you have to admire the economy of the argument. "have you no decency, sir?" [video:youtube]MTFUSeLj0u8

sure, okay, of course - they're big businesses themselves so of course they're gonna be pro business, but that's been the case for more than a century, and again, the birth of the internet has substantially improved reporting by the little-man - the bottom line is that it's not the governments place to go and destroy mega-news providers - there is competition both amongst themselves and w/ the blogosphere, and theoritically they all improve one another it is the role of government to ensure the proper use of the public commons (airwaves). Proper use that includes the independence of the 4th estate for a functioning democracy, which requires an informed public. Self-censorship to retain advertisers and access to politicians is the rule rather than the exception. Coverage of all issues show that left wing perspectives aren't available through the corporate media (from the Iraq war, to single payer healthcare, to israel-palestine, and on ...). The blogosphere has a positive role to play but it doesn't have access to most of the public on a regular basis. Example: coverage of ACORN by the corporate media. Most of the info told in this segment has been available on the web for years, but only surfaces in one corporate news program once the damage to ACORN has been done: [video:youtube]zDxm--DyavI

Stating that much construction has to occur in the way of natural hazard doesn't constitute an argument for the public assuming the financial risks associated with such construction, much less for encouraging more such construction than would occur otherwise. Incentives that concentrate more people, poor or otherwise, in flood plains is dumb. Ditto for mechanisms that transfer the costs of home ownership onto people who can't afford their own home. Nobody here argued for national hazard insurance without enforcement of hazard mitigation (assessment, zoning, codes, etc ..) so comparing a public natural hazard insurance program without mitigation to no insurance for the vast majority (as is shown for regions where no national insurance programs exists) doesn't follow. Pricing hazard insurance out of the reach of most people (end result of private only hazard insurance) probably doesn't reduce development of hazardous regions but has the effect of concentrating the poor in hazardous areas, whereas national insurance programs enables hazard mitigation. Hazard to property and people isn't fixed in time but also depends on development elsewhere (paving surfaces contributes to floods, building jetties affects longshore currents in front of other properties, etc ...).

of course. I am not sure where Bill got that CB's hating on the haters was going to go any further than this page, which'd be different if the hating was directed at a participant here. The problem with hate speech isn't the fact that someone is willing to look like a hating fool but that someone will act on their hate and/or that said speech will impact in anyway the object of hatred.

Me either, however, didn't you just totally ignore Choada boys threats to exterminate Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh? I didn't ignore it but I am simply not equating some dude's over the top bluster on the internet (toward nobody present here) with hatemongers enabled by corporate media to deliver their vitriol to millions every day. Did the issue of scale and access escape you? Otherwise, I wish people didn't make these kinds of comments because it decredibilizes what they otherwise stand for and Choada seems to stand for many of the right things.

I love it when wingnuts abandon all pretense at making sense: it is then that their mental development really shows.

I don't believe we should ignore hate speech. I don't watch/listen to these shows, which isn't the same as pretending they aren't a threat to democracy.

? sorry, I don't get it.

and ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN all have a strong left-wing bias j_b, as usual, is full of shit you also claim that Obama is a socialist, which ought to put your comment in perspective.

all these conglomerates represent the interests of mega-corporations. Fact which was well illustrated in their drumming the beat of war on Iraq when it was obvious the intel was fixed and despite a very large portion of the public being against it (at least, until they were told being so was unamerican - "you are with us or against us"), or their over the top coverage of tea-baggers when millions in the street against invading Iraq were barely mentioned, etc ..

Sure, I agree with that, and I understand I wasn't addressing the meat of your post.

re-start applying anti-trust laws and force the sale of multiple channels, block mergers, prevent cross-media consolidations, make rules about diversity in coverage, ...? I believe most of the laws still exist but they aren't enforced, and reinstate those that have been canned. There is great diversity for those willing to do the leg work on the internet but most folks get their news from the tube (and increasingly so) where government and pro-business views are pretty much the rule.

John McPhee's Control of Nature has a great section about historical amnesia viz the chaparral fire/debris flow combo in the LA burbs. He suggests that forcing hazard disclosure on developers would go a long way toward alleviating the problem.

it'd be difficult for them to be bad at propaganda when they own 99% of the media: NewsCorp (FOX and more than 350 major media across the globe) and Clear Channel (more than 1200 radio stations just in the US) set the agenda and the rest of the corporate media dutifully follows. all fox gives a shit about is making money - if they could get more bank by sucking up to the left i'm sure they would, but those folks are more inclined to spend their cash on 10$ coffee-drinks If it were true they would cater to the ~2/3 of Americans who support a public option for healthcare, most of which doesn't spend $10 on lattes. They do care only about money but they also know that a regulated media environment isn't good for oligopolies and their capacity to make as much money as possible and dictate policy so they'll take a short term loss if necessary as long as they have a shot at coming out the winners against reforms. breaking up the media oligopolies would be part of the solution.

First, you appear to have reading comprehension issues for my post clearly says: "natural hazard insurance without appropriate regulations on where and how to build promotes building where it shouldn't happen" and then I went on about how topography and transport were the considerations of interest (and not the pleasure of the ubber rich to own mansions by the sea). But, of course, your sleight of hand allowed you to not acknowledge that much construction has to occur in the way of natural hazard. Second, the poor often owns/rent in the worst part of flood plains so describing the problem as underwriting millions of dollar pads in Martha's vineyard is specious at best.

New McCarthyism: Fear of science and the war on rationality by Peter Gleick As more and more of the world looks to knowledge, education, and science as the routes out of poverty and conflict, parts of America seems to be slipping back toward the Dark Ages, when fear of knowledge and science led to an impoverishment of civilization that had lasting effects for centuries. I've recently returned from two weeks in northern Europe and a series of scientific water meetings and discussions with people from over 130 countries. They read the news from the United States with incredulity. America is still seen as the place to come for aspiring students and scientists around the world. Our public universities, despite assaults on budgets, independence, and knowledge, still struggle to maintain their excellence. But my friends and colleagues from overseas are increasingly shocked, as are many of us in the U.S., by the expanding efforts of home-grown extremists to undermine rational discourse, eliminate the use of fact and science in policymaking, and shut down public debate over the vital issues of our times through hate, vitriol, and ad hominem attacks. Looking through the eyes of my overseas colleagues, what do we see? We see a debate over providing health care to every American that is based -- not on facts or civilized discourse -- but on screaming mobs shutting down public discussions and the use of straw man arguments to promote fear among the public and policymakers. Yet every major country of Europe provides basic health care for its population. We see President Obama appoint one of the nation's best scientists in the areas of energy, environment, and national security -- Dr. John Holdren -- to be his Science Advisor, and then have right-wing mouthpieces like Glenn Beck spread ad hominem lies about him because of their fear that facts and actual science may once again inform Presidential action. This should be a recognizable tactic to us -- lying about a person to diminish their effectiveness. In fact, these extremists want to undermine the forward-looking policies that would prevent the very draconian measures they say they deplore. We see unambiguous evidence that climate change is already affecting human health and the global economy -- evidence often collected by world-leading American scientists and scientific institutions -- while public opinion polls show that the American people continue to be misled about the risks facing us by conservative pundits who ignore, misunderstand, or intentionally misuse that science to mislead the public into fear of change. Yet we already see huge economic and environmental opportunities in adapting to the reality of climate change. Fear is an effective tool -- as hate groups and extremists know. It is no accident that repressive regimes of all kinds -- fascists, the Nazis, Stalin, religious states, madrasses -- use tools of hatred, anti-intellectualism, and fear to control knowledge, universities, and intellectuals. Fear grows best when sown in fields of ignorance, while science, rationality, and education are the greatest weapons modern societies have against irrational fear. No wonder Beck and his ilk have intellectuals in their sights; so do the leaders of Iran, and Burma, and the Taliban, and North Korea, for similar reasons. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gleick/detail??blogid=104&entry_id=47022#ixzz0S90LMfLJ

it'd be difficult for them to be bad at propaganda when they own 99% of the media: NewsCorp (FOX and more than 350 major media across the globe) and Clear Channel (more than 1200 radio stations just in the US) set the agenda and the rest of the corporate media dutifully follows.

You are throwing out the baby with the bath water. Of course, national natural hazard insurance without appropriate regulations on where and how to build promotes building where it shouldn't happen but you can't ignore that topography and transport forces a disproportionate share of construction in flood plains and by the sea. We won't even talk about tornado alleys, earthquake zones, etc ...

I think everyone here agrees that it's not right to have kids sing the praise of the president in school but the real issue is why is the rightwing noise machine constantly (and pretty much only as shown by the posts of the wingnutery on this board) beating the drum about tangential issues like this (presidential speech to kids about staying in school, a few bad apples at acorn, etc ..) instead of focusing on major problems like the economy and the lack of reform a year after collapse of the financial sector, healthcare reform while folks keep losing access to healthcare, wars that are being lost, fraud on a grand scale, etc ...?

http://foxnewsboycott.com/ "Due to the extremely biased and partisan reporting by Fox News shows including The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity, Fox & Friends, etc., there is a strong public stance against supporting sponsors of these shows. FoxNewsBoycott.com urges you to not only boycott Fox News, its sponsors, but also any stores or restaurants that air the Fox News channel in their place of business."

why do you read it?

It's so common that you only need to point a search engine in the right direction and you'll find 100's of example. Just a couple of examples that come to mind: Limbaugh systematically dehumanized Dr. Tyler, every day for years, until he was murdered by an anti-choice nut-job. Here is an academic study that didn't even consider Limbaugh and Beck, the most common offenders in that respect: "Chon Noriega, PhD, and Francisco Javier Iribarren, MSW-PsyD, just completed a pilot study on hate speech and commercial talk radio at UCLA. Their study used the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's (NTIA) definition of hate speech and sought to develop a way to quantifiably measure the occurrence of hate speech in commercial talk radio. The researchers asked themselves what role, if any, the media plays in the persistence of hate speech and hate crimes. The pilot focused on three radio programs: The Lou Dobbs Show, The Savage Nation, and The John & Ken Show. Noriega and Iribarren concluded, "The preliminary analysis reveals a systematic and extensive use of false facts, flawed argumentation, divisive language, and dehumanizing metaphors that are directed toward specific vulnerable groups. Thus far, the data show a recurring rhetorical pattern in which vulnerable groups were identified as antithetical to the core values attributed by the host to himself, his audience, and the nation. These groups were then linked to social institutions that were presented as complicit. In effect, target groups are characterized as a direct threat to the listeners' way of life." Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kety-esquivel/ucla-study-hate-speech-on_b_166131.html