Tag: Media

It's no secret that traditional news media are in dire straits. Network television news has become almost completely irrelevant while 24-hour cable networks, the last innovation to revolutionize the way we consume news, are scrambling to recover the audience they're losing to the internet. If you don't believe me, try watching CNN until you hear the word "tweet" or "blog." It won't take more than five minutes. Radio has all but disappeared as a primary news source. And the newspaper industry…good lord. These are the end times for them. Circulation is down 7,000,000 per day since 1985 and in the past 12 months alone ad revenue has plummeted 19%. I've said enough over the years about the sorry state of print media, and it's nothing you don't already know if you've picked up a newspaper in the last few years. Even the New York Times is hurting, and lesser papers, the Chicago Tribune for example, are so thin they could scarcely provide enough square inches to serve as fish wrappers anymore.

Like the railroads or any other industry backed into a corner by technological changes making them obsolete, the traditional media are baring their claws and preparing for a fight – one of the vicious, desperate fight-for-your-life variety. The latest hue and cry focuses on the role of "aggregating" websites, places like Huffington Post or Digg which collect the most interesting bits from hundreds of sources and provide them free and without requiring a subscription.
online pharmacy cipro best drugstore for you

Ms. Huffington herself points out that:

So now sites that aggregate the news have become, in the words of Rupert Murdoch and his team, "parasites," "content kleptomaniacs," "vampires," "tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internets," and, of course, thieves who "steal all our copyright."

It is very convenient for the champions of the obsolete technology to vilify that which replaces them, and frankly their argument is not without merit. The internet is undercutting them precisely by providing more variety, as-it-happens delivery of breaking news, and a user-end cost of zero. Dozens of traditional media websites have attempted to set up "paywalls" – in other words, charging for access to content – and in nearly every instance the scheme failed miserably. Ironically it is the lack of rigor in the print media that undercut the attempts at paywalls; papers have gotten so lazy and so reliant on AP/Reuters/wire/syndication copy that a reader could simply steer away from pay sites and find literally the exact same story elsewhere gratis.

It's a compelling story, and a story as old as industrial society. New technology crushes old technology, the latter of which can offer little more than appeals to tradition and nostalgia. The internet killed off newspapers just as airlines and highways killed off the railroads, which killed off the steamboats, which killed off the keelboats, which killed off the Indians. But this explanation is far too convenient for the traditional media because it allows them to ignore their responsibility for their own demise. Yes, it's time for some victim-blaming.

The internet is not simply killing old media because it is newer-faster-cheaper. It is killing old media because it is providing a far better product. Wha-wha-what, you say? Yes, there certainly is a lot of shit on the internet. But consider this: on the two biggest news stories of this decade, and possibly of a generation, the traditional media absolutely and irrefutably failed us. Compare the performance of internet "news" – blogs, amateur journalists, basement and bedroom analysts – to the paper-and-ink media on the run up to the Iraq War and the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage-driven financial crisis.

Which media provided facts and which one toed the party line?
online pharmacy flexeril best drugstore for you

Which media did the digging and fact-checking that is supposed to be the foundation of journalism and which one unquestioningly parroted Official Sources? Which one offered loud voices saying "Um, these claims about Iraq are utter bullshit" or "Hey, people should pay attention to this bomb that is about to detonate under our economy"?

God help me, I am about to use a football metaphor. An American football metaphor for those of you who think soccer is football.

The old media, at least after they decided to stop questioning Official Sources and serve as stenographers, are like one person trying to tackle a runner. If they miss the runner, no one else is there to tackle him. The internet is like a gang of tiny people trying to tackle the runner. One person can't do it. She'll bounce off, but she will slow him down just a bit. And then two more little people will jump on the him. And then ten more. And then a thousand. And before you know it, the runner is buried underneath thousands of little people.

The internet is flatly better at serving the purpose our media is supposed to serve.

The traditional media run a headline – "IRAQ WAR CLAIMS MAY BE BULLSHIT" – and maybe it sticks, maybe it doesn't. If it doesn't, that's it. They move on, and their need for ratings and profit demand that they rapidly move on to something mindless but titillating. The internet, on the other hand, greatly reduces the odds of stories falling through the cracks. People swarm around stories that seem to have legs, re-posting and forwarding and generally doing a good job of getting more people to take notice. And therefore important stories might be brushed from the headlines but they don't just disappear.

I don't want to wax lyrical about the glories of internet journalism because I know just how much utter crap and misinformation circulates online. Yet no matter how disappointing the signal-to-noise ratio may be, there is some signal. If a story is relevant or newsworthy, someone will catch it. Someone will ask questions, do the fact-checking (thanks, Media Matters and FactCheck.

org!) that the news media are supposed to do, and persist long after the newspapers and cable networks have decided that it is not ratings-friendly or in their financial interest to run stories about things people should know but prefer not to.

We all marvel at the ability of wingnuts to sell books to other wingnuts. You really have to hand it to people like Malkin, Beck, Coulter, and O'Reilly; they may be lacking in both sanity and brainpower but they know how to sell books.

buy bactroban online buy bactroban no prescription

Yes, the sales figures for books like Going Rogue and Slander are fudged – many of the books purchased in bulk by chain stores and internet retailers are eventually returned unsold – but that does not change the fact that a lot of actual sales are taking place.

How do they do it? They do it the same way that McDonald's gets people to spend billions on food that is grotesquely unhealthy and doesn't even taste good – by delivering a cheap, consistent, and utterly predictable product to lazy people who like nothing better than mind-numbing routine. They have identified an audience that is willing to buy books, perhaps even eager to buy books, but insistent that the books contain no facts or opinions that are not already shared by author and reader alike. It doesn't make sense to you or I, but I think it's worth emphasizing that wingnut authors are not merely selling bile and predigested thought to both flatter and inflame the prejudices of their audience. They are also selling predictability. That is an underrated commodity. People don't just watch According to Jim and eat Twinkies because they're stupid; people do it because it protects them from the unfamiliar and delivers a product that will never, ever surprise them or make them think.

Sometimes, however, the wingnut money machine runs into a snag. Case in point: Glenn Beck's "Christmas Sweater" live show. It sold 17 tickets in New York. I know NYC is a tremendously liberal place, but in a city of 17 million it sold 17 tickets. Ditto Boston. Washington proved to be a real hotbed of Christmas Sweater fandom, selling 30 tickets.

His best draw was in Seattle (70 tickets in a 450-seat venue). There are but a few potential explanations for the fact that a man who can sell a million books at the drop of a hat cannot attract enough ticket buyers to fill out a football team.

1. Mouthbreathers who buy Beck/Malkin/etc. books have a limit. They aren't bright but they're smart enough to realize that a Glenn Beck Christmas performance is going to be ass-breakingly terrible.
buy premarin online buy premarin no prescription

2. The show is guaranteed to flop in big cities but would have more success if it adopted the Palin Book Tour Strategy, i.e. appearing only in forlorn places where hopes and dreams congregate to die.

3. Beck fans simply are terrified of leaving their homes to be near other human beings and refuse to do so without a very good reason.

4. What exactly a Glenn Beck Christmas show might look like is unclear – Is it political? Is it a play? Comedy? Are there musical numbers? – and thus utterly unacceptable to a fan base that demands unwavering predictability.

I lean strongly toward #4, if only that the most logical choice, #1, would require me to give Beck fans credit for having some taste or intellect. That's not happening. No, this is about predictability. Like a McDonald's that decided to sell shepherd's pie and souvlaki, Beck's attempt to pad his wallet and stroke his ego falls flat because he neglected to understand how much of his appeal is tied up in his ability to deliver a consistent ration of shit. To many Americans the fact that it is consistent is appealing enough to outweigh the fact that it is shit.

(To any readers who have taken one of my classes, and I think there are a few out there, this is going to sound pretty familiar. Unless you slept through it or skipped class, in which case you should learn it now.)

Why are the media so ruthless in their mockery of Sarah Palin after six solid years of cheerleading the nation into the Iraq War, paving the way for two terms of Bush, and standing around thumb-in-ass as our financial system galloped toward oblivion? We could make a semantic argument about subtle differences in intelligence between Bush and Palin, for example, and concoct some ostensibly legitimate reason that the most recent President deserved to be taken seriously and Palin is a dipshit suspended over a dunk tank. That would be a waste of time. The answer is media bias.

Media bias is a very real phenomenon, but it isn't a political bias. When people hear the phrase they imagine the media having a political agenda and pushing an ideologically slanted product at unsuspecting viewers. That does not happen. Even at FOX. Media bias is commercial bias. The biggest influence on the product you read and see is the desire to make money – and that's why 'product' is the appropriate term.

You're not believing me about Fox News, are you? OK. So why does Fox News offer the most conservative product, stocked with plenty of "family values" talk and appeals to social/religious conservatives, while the Fox networks offer the raunchiest programming? Think about the crap on the F/X network or Fox – it's cartoons fueled by foul language and sex jokes as far as the eye can see. It's Temptation Island and The Littlest Bachelor. It's mindless T&A at every opportunity. They do it because they have a very keen sense of how to make money. They give the news watching public what it wants and they give people who don't care about news what they want. That it happens to be two different products is irrelevant.

What happened to Palin is little more than a cold business decision (while Fox doesn't outright hammer her very often, their preference for Romney, Huckabee, and other potential candidates in 2012 is explicit). And it's not hard to get out the message when they decide it's time to tear someone apart. Remember who the big-network and Important Print Journalists are – as Matt Taibbi points out, they're overwhelmingly sons and daughters of the wealthy, people who went from boarding schools to the Ivy League to unpaid "internships" on mom and pop's dime. Their entire lives have been one extended exercise in either explicitly kissing the asses of or not having the balls to disagree with their social and economic betters. So our media, being entirely controlled by about five corporate entities, make decisions at the top that are rapidly disseminated to legions of journalists eager to please anyone with editorial or financial power over them.

That is why our media flap so helplessly in the wind, going from rabidly pro-war and dismissive of traitor pussy liberal protesters to fawning over Obama and matter-of-factly discussing Iraq as our greatest national mistake. It's just business. They figure out what their consumers want no differently than The Gap tries to figure out what sweaters you'll buy next fall. Is it really so simple? Yes. I believe it is. The media serve a public purpose but they are not public servants. They are out to make money, and they ride bandwagons. In early 2008, establishment mascot Hillary Clinton was the presumptive nominee and Obama was some inexperienced rookie under the thumb of a racist preacher. When it became impossible to ignore the flaming wreck that was the Clinton campaign they turned on a dime and started the Obama the Anointed One narrative. It happens quickly.

I like Taibbi's conclusion, as it is a far clearer and more succinct version of a point I've tried to make for years: Teabaggers should be taking note of what the treatment of Palin really means. It doesn't mean that a couple of talking heads decided to bash her for cheap laughs and ratings. The entire media are using her as a punching bag. And the Beltway insiders and their corporate bosses in New York don't whack people without getting the blessing of all five families, so to speak. They have received a unanimous signal – from the establishment GOP, Wall Street, campaign donors, and everyone else who matters to big media – that it is open season on the idiot from Alaska. She is poison, and the legions of Beck-Bachmann-Palin acolytes are not to be taken seriously. Like the anti-war left circa 2002, Teabaggers exist only to be mocked and occasionally manipulated for ratings.

Palin would do well to remember the Abe Vigoda's remark to Robert Duvall at the end of The Godfather as the former was about to be executed. It's just business, Sarah, nothing personal.

So Mike now contributes to The Atlantic, and thus in an indirect way he works with or possibly even for Megan McArdle.

McArdle is one of the few people who can claim to be a Professional Blogger. This is her job. This is essentially the only job she has ever had (you can read about her lavish, tax-dollar-funded upbringing on AlterNet, paying special attention to the fact that her only employment aside from Expert Economist on The Internet was working for her dad's friends). There are some days on which I think being a professional blogger would be the greatest of all worlds, but if it entailed becoming Megan McArdle I'd rather work at White Castle.
buy ventolin online buy ventolin no prescription

Being a professional Libertarian Economist has to be, if not the most depressing job on Earth, ranked only slightly behind the person at the animal shelter who euthanizes dogs for eight hours per day. The Libertarian Economist has only one task when he or she awakens: defend the ideology. Defend it against partisan attacks, reason, and facts. They are all the enemy. They are not unlike those soulless, bottom-feeding lawyers hired by food processors, oil companies, and other large industrial concerns to concoct arguments like, "But can you prove that the benzene we dumped in the reservoir made you sick?" The job is simple and repetitive.

Take fact X which is quite obviously caused by Y (i.e., smoking causes lung cancer or pollution damages the environment).
buy cipro online buy cipro no prescription

Recognize that admitting causality between Y and X contradicts the sacred dogma of the Free Market. Then set about arguing with all of one's might that Y does not in fact cause X. That's it. Wake up the next day and do it again. This is the process that produces shit like "Are Guns at Protests Really Dangerous?", the follow-up stupidity of "The Power of the Gun," rambling nonsense opposing universal health care which boils down to the Econ 101-level argument that "government will kill the market incentives for innovation!", or the unspeakably asinine and transparently dishonest charade of pretending to be an undecided voter throughout the 2004 race before endorsing Bush with a lengthy, verbatim recitation of his campaign's talking points.

How does one argue in the face of evidence and logic? One tactic is to bray like an ass using every cheap rhetorical tactic available – appeals to emotion, xenophobia, etc. – like Beck, Hannity, and their allies. This works for 80% of the population. The remaining 20% have too much education and too much class pretension to listen to moronic drivel like that. They need a Libertarian Economist to dress it up for the Ivy League set, employing mind-bending contortions of logic, acceptance of the impossible or the merely implausible as viable alternatives to reality, and using many big, academic-sounding words (usually incorrectly) to give the exercise in bullshitting the veneer of intellectualism and legitimacy.

This excellent comment highlighted by my Instaputz colleague makes the best analogy: it is like medieval scholasticism, the arcane system in which great thinkers and intellectuals were forced to use their talents to concoct justifications for the fiat rule of the elite. Can you imagine anything more soul-crushing? Maybe when the Vatican employed such people to paste together a scriptural way to argue that certain people didn't really have souls, they weren't really talking about the Aztecs and or Africans. Perhaps they had Libertarian Economists in mind, in which case they might actually have a point. The shallowness and complete lack of shame necessary to operate in this line of work can't be overstated. I cannot imagine how it must feel to know that you have whored yourself out so completely, masquerading as a journalist or commentator but really doing nothing more than churning out one identical press release after another to the demands of a paying client.

If only we could tell ourselves that this video of Sarah Palin's going away speech, of which I believe there were about 12, would be the last time we'd be subjected to her punctuation free, stream-of-consciousness, Mad Lib-meets-Esperanto oratory. Every word of her farewell makes it clear just how amazing the McCain/RNC speechwriters must be to have been to make her sound like a semiliterate human being during her primetime Convention speech. Their efforts were ripped straight from the pages of Great Expectations.

My first question is, why was this given live all-networks coverage? If anyone can point out the news value in giving an admitted self-promoting shill who is now a private citizen live coverage to sell her crap about why she quit (For Alaska! So selfless of her!) I'd love to hear it. Second, why are we still talking about Sarah Palin?

buy stromectol online buy stromectol no prescription

This goes far, far beyond beating a dead horse at this point. Then it hit me, as I drifted into altered states of consciousness during her rambling exercise in luring the English language into her windowless van and fingering it. It's our fault. Not "we" as in the American public. Left-wingers. The media are pouring gas on this trainwreck because they think we enjoy watching it burn.

We have to look at Palin on TV for the same reason that the Bravo network plays Showgirls regularly; because our kind are absolutely addicted to sarcasm. Palin exists as a media entity at this point not because anyone takes her seriously and not because her kamikaze run for the White House is going everywhere (The RNC is sitting around thinking "You know what Americans want? Someone who is dumb as a bag of doorknobs and dangerously erratic!"). She is an attempt by the news networks to rope in cynical, smart-assed 24 year olds. She is the Snakes on a Plane of political figures.

She's not going away because she is useful to Tina Fey and Letterman. She's not going away because we desperately want to see her run in 2012 so that, unless Obama starts huffing glue on camera, the election will be a non-starter. She's not going away because she's a complete rube who got a little taste of Manhattan shopping sprees and doesn't want to let go. I am blaming the victims, in essence.

It's our fault that we have to watch this shit.

Our love of snark and camp creates perverse incentives. When I rent You Got Served to make fun of it, it encourages the studio to make more. When we all rush to YouTube to view and mock "My Humps" it increases the notoriety of the "artists" who make such crap. I think a good deal of caution is required here.
buy priligy online buy priligy no prescription

Not only does the continued attention encourage her, it plays directly into the plan that her handlers and the RNC have been operating under since Day One: winning sympathy. The idea of throwing an adorable puppy into a shark tank and making none-too-bright Americans teary-eyed watching it get ripped to shreds is not a new one. History tells us that she is so badly damaged at this point that she can't be taken seriously as a candidate, but why push the envelope? A good strategy at this point, now that she holds no elected office, is to ignore her entirely until she does something newsworthy. Which is to say until she announces her candidacy for 2012.

I love watching old clips of news and talk shows from the early days of television. They lay out the evidence of just how much we've changed as a nation in high contrast. In my opinon, the most consistently entertaining of the early TV pioneers is the eponymous star of The Mike Wallace Interviews. He interviewed people like Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, Salvador Dali (amazing clip – see note below), Aldous Huxley, Erich Fromm, and Ayn Rand. Today we have 60 Minutes episodes about Tom Brady. If the fact that they don't talk to anyone interesting anymore isn't sad enough, the change in the level of discourse is flat-out depressing. Watch this clip of Wallace's Rand interview.

(Side note: Straight from the horse's mouth, Rand's philosophy sounds every bit as dumb as it sounds coming from her followers. Amazing. You'd think it would sound slightly less retarded.)

Note the depth of the discussion they're having. Neither is dumbing it down because they think that home viewers are too stupid to follow it. And Wallace's shows were popular. People watched this.

This recalls an anecdote I like to use when talking about the public capacity to follow politics. We've all heard about the great Lincoln-Douglas debates, right? During the 1858 Illinois Senate race (not, as is commonly assumed, the 1860 Presidential race) the two men staged debates around the state of Illinois. The format was three hours long – 90 minutes per candidate, plus opening remarks from other speakers. They attracted crowds in excess of 20,000. Now think about that for a minute. People travelled long distances to sit outside in August heat listening to candidates engage in a debate that lasted well over three hours. Today the debates compile 90 second sound bites, and even that is unable to capture the attention of many Americans.

Why did people turn out in droves for the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Why did Mike Wallace's slow, methodical interviews with people like Erich Fromm attract big audiences? Education can't be the answer. Many of the people at the Lincoln-Douglas debates were barely literate if at all. High school graduation rates and college attendance are higher today than ever. We're smarter, on paper, than all of our American forefathers. No, they weren't smarter than us. They paid attention because they were forced to.

When there were three TV networks, people who wanted to relax in front of the tube after work had to watch what was on. If that was the evening news or a news talk show, then that's what you watched. In 1858, people were starved for both information and entertainment, hence the allure of a big spectacle like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Let's not fool ourselves – if Mike Wallace's or Stephen Douglas's audiences had the opportunity to watch Survivor or the Food Network, many of them would have done so. But they didn't. So they watched something that was good for them, and people like Wallace didn't need to sex up their formats to compete for viewers with entertainment programming.

This is, in my opinion, the single greatest example of market failure in American history. The 'democratization' of the airwaves and the proliferation of media outlets have made it so that no one needs to watch Mike Wallace talk to Frank Lloyd Wright anymore. Even though we are much smarter we sound dumber because we are never forced to listen to two intelligent adults talk about something interesting for an hour uninterrupted. No one makes us take our castor oil. We have been given limitless choice and we use it to avoid thinking, which is hard, at all costs. Nine hundred channels of satellite TV are the ultimate enabler. We know what we should do (eat carrots, read books, and watch Jim Lehrer) but we're bombarded with the opportunity to do what we want to do (eat Doritos, read nothing, and watch VH1 I Love the 80s!). Television didn't ruin us, but the changes in its content and format may have.

(Dali note: In one of his late-career retrospectives, Wallace called the Dali interview his favorite, noting that at the end of the interview he concluded that Dali "walked among humanity but was not one of us.")

I have a headache, joint pain, and some weakness in my extremities.

I checked with the internet and I have either a cold with a mild fever and seasonal allergy symptoms or Kuru, a neurodegenerative transmissible spongiform encephalopathy caused by prions.

It doesn't matter that colds are transmitted by, you know, leaving the house while Kuru is transmitted by ritual cannibalism of the neurospinal column of an infected corpse. The symptoms are the same and, well, I have been hearing a lot about Kuru lately.

I have sympathy for the government and media. Really, dealing with the dissemenation of information on issues of public health, safety and welfare is not easy.

Official Sources and media outlets must constantly tread the boundary between prudence and hysteria while communicating in a way that accounts for the American public's antipathy toward compound sentences. Nevertheless, I have to restrain myself from punching the monitor when I see things like this:

Setting aside the fact that the swine flu just isn't that damn communicable or lethal, peruse this list of "warning signs" from CDC public statements. Those are the symptoms of the swine flu. Or the regular flu. Or a cold. Or a sinus infection. Or an attack of seasonal allergies. Or drinking until 4 AM and going to work on 90 minutes of sleep. Or eating enough cheap, grease-laden Mexican food to give oneself the thunderous shits for a few hours.

While government statements and media reports about the swine flu are always couched in caveats that are rarely noticed and easily overwhelmed by the paranoia of the foolish, for the most part the treatment of this statistically insignificant illness has spawned the predictable hysteria. Doctors and hospitals must take to the airwaves to combat the rising tide of panicking twits crowding their offices and ERs. The medical community is forced to divert resources to the urgent preparation of a "swine flu vaccine." Old people, irrational parents, and the generally feeble-minded are convinced that this virus is the biggest threat to civilization since Satanic Ritual Abuse and back-masked Judas Priest lyrics.

I have previously recommended Barry Glassner's excellent Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things and I will do so again. This disease has caused two confirmed deaths in the United States.

Two. Does the CDC note that every single day the regular flu – the plain old kind that you will get twice this winter – kills six hundred Americans? Six hundred. Daily. Septic infections in hospitals, the same ones would-be swine flu victims rush to, kill 93 people every day. People who are terrified of catching the swine flu have little probelm getting in their car four or five times per day, an activity thousands of times riskier. Sixty Americans die every year from being hit by lightning.

Your odds of drowning in your bathtub (1/800,000) dwarfs your odds of even catching the swine flu let alone perishing from it.

What the fuck, America?

Oh wait. It provides a great excuse to rile up the yokels about Messican immigants.

I can't imagine a lazier blog post for someone left of center than "Fox News is a joke," a statement which immediately redlines the nearest No Shit meter. As hard as it may be to conceive, though, in the past two weeks the network has jumped a new and bigger shark. To watch their "coverage" of the teabagging non-movement is to watch a network that no longer puts up the slightest pretense of being a news organization and fully embraces its role as a free 24-hour infomercial for mobilizing the vast herd of idiots who stare at it unquestioningly throughout the evening hours.

"But Ed," you say, "where have you been? This has been the case for 13 years." No. This is different. It hasn't been like this before. Having already hit rock bottom years ago, the network now appears to be tunneling through the Earth at a frightening pace.

Teabagging organizers seem extraordinarily proud of their alleged 200,000 person turnout on April 15. Leaving aside the fact that the figure is vastly inflated, that number isn't terribly impressive given the two weeks of round-the-clock fawning coverage and pleas for turnout on the network of record among bovine Americans. Am I overstating it? Media Matters has a massive list of videos, broadcast screenshots, quotes, and details on the network's decision to aggressively promote the events. While the network feebly attempted to hide behind a "coverage isn't promotion" defense, it is undermined considerably by the persistent liberal bias of reality:

Every on-air personality sprinted out from behind the news desk to "cover" these "events." FoxNews.com contained a complete list of the dates, times, locations, and websites of the protests. They gave copious airtime to bobbleheaded promoters like Malkin and Instarube but also to "grassroots" organizers like this shaved ape who organized the Houston bagging.

They interviewed the tool who wrote the "Tea Party Anthem" in his spare time between gigs behind the local bus station. But as bad as the promotional campaign was – and Media Matters effectively documents the whole thing – it pales in comparison to the live coverage on the 15th.

Watch Neil Cavuto, who spent the day at the Sacramento teabagging, make up an attendance figure when he thought his mic was off and then triple it on the air. Watch a Fox News "reporter" (apparently on loan from local frat house) ask viewers, "(W)hen are we going to wake up and start fighting the fascism that seems to be permeating this country?"

When all was said and done, the total amount of free marketing and promotion provided to the far right think tanks who created this non-event was staggering: 23 individual segments and 73 on-air promos in just eight days. What would that have cost at the going advertising rates? Other networks responded by all but ignoring the protests except to mock them, as this CNN reporter did on the 15th. This resulted in the predictable paranoid hysterics about media bias. What no one cares to explain, of course, is what about this was worth covering, what the objective was, and what was accomplished. The answers are nothing, nothing, and nothing, respectively.

While Murdoch media have always been shameless mouthpieces for the right interrupted only by ass-kissing editorials, I'm not sure that American audiences have ever seen a news network resort to infomercial-style hard selling for weeks on end to promote a specific event – an event that Fox sponsored. We can safely imagine that were the shoe on the other foot and CNN anchors were broadcasting live from "CNN Presents: Rallies to Support President Obama," Beck et al would be gushing blood from every orifice in an effort to expel as much biblical rage as possible before their black little hearts exploded from the strain.