By Sheila
Lennon
Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
Dress your candidate
for trick or treating
October 15, 2004, 7:35 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Honky
Tonkers for Truth: Takin’ My
Country Back is a
good ol' boy's toe-tapping country song with a message. You may listen
to it and download it at the link on the headline.
Here's how it starts,
Country music's got mamas and daddys
we got bar rooms and old heartbreak songs
but i 'm here today to stand up and say
how i feel about my home sweet home
what's left, what's right and what's wrong... and
i’m takin’ my country back
son, you ain't been doin’ her right
oh i been watchin’ you and i don’t like
how you've been treatin’ my stars and stripes
you took our jobs and sent ‘em overseas
now we owe billions to the red Chinese
you blew the budget and you botched Iraq
so i’m takin’ my country back...
Here
are the complete lyrics.
From WCHS-TV in Charleston,
W.Va., -- a Sinclair Broadcast Group station, by the way -- here's how
it happened (from Google's cache, since it's slipped over the horizon
now)
Honky Tonkers For Truth: Don't You Wish You'd Thought Of That Name?
NASHVILLE
When some Nashville music industry professionals decide it's time for a country
song to take issue with Presidential policy, they go and record one.
That's how the self-named "Honky Tonkers for Truth" came about. Songwriter
David Kent -- who wrote Blake Shelton's hit "Austin" -- wrote "Takin'
My Country Back," and took it to Tim Dubois and Mike Dungan -- the presidents
of Universal South Records and Capitol Records -- and producers Don Cook and
Garth Fundis. What they didn't have was a big-name artist willing to put his-or-her
career on the line by singing a song with a critical message -- until Tony
Stampley stood up. He performs the song "Takin My Country Back." The
Honky Tonkers for Truth say they support our troops overseas, and believe
in family, faith and freedom and deeply love this country. But they say the
songs
by Toby Keith, Charlie Daniels, Darryl Worley and others give people the
false impression that everyone in country music supports the current administration.
In the course of researching this item, I found more evidence of country music's
rebels: Music Row Democrats.
Bransondotcom.com notes that songwriter David Kent also
wrote Blake
Shelton's Austin (clip).
Link
to this item | Comment
E-voting:
Can we count on it? At SiliconValley.com,
In a weeklong discussion with SiliconValley.com readers, panelists from across
this spectrum of opinion will wrestle with the key questions: Is e-voting secure
and trustworthy? If not, can it be made so and how?
Here's the direct link.
The participants are a Who's Who of voting issues, including Andy Stephenson,
associate director of Bev Harris's BlackBoxVoting.org,
the site that started it all. David Dill, founder of The
Verified Voting Foundation, Scott Ritchie, a founder of the Open
Vote Foundation, Dr. Avi Rubin, co-author of the Johns Hopkins Report (and
Baltimore County election judge) and several government officials.
Journalists include We
the Media author Dan Gillmor and Elise Ackerman, both of
the San Jose Mercury News and
Kim Zetter of Wired News.
Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems declined to participate
in this discussion, according to the site.
The roundtable accepted emailed questions from nonparticipants.
I haven't made it through the whole discussion yet, but here's an excerpt.
David Dill is responding to
an email from Pittsburgh. The italics are mine, to show the emailed paragraph:
Many of the weaknesses of electronic voting systems are shared by banking
systems. But computer scientists learned years ago how to protect electronic
data in banking systems to the degree that electronic data is now held to be
more reliable than paper data. No one would trust a printed cashier's check,
for example, if the bank's electronic records did not back it up. No one today
would insist on a paper archival record of bank transactions to ensure accuracy.
Sorry, this is nonsense. Many people from the banking industry have told me
that they rely on paper record backups internally in the bank for auditing
and recovery from all-too-frequent computer system failures. (Perhaps we can
get some comments from experts in computerized banking!)
Furthermore, electronic records in banks keep track of all the participants
in the transaction, while voting systems are required to LOSE the most important
information for auditing -- the connections between the votes and the voters.
Safe electronic voting is hard because no one is supposed to know how the voters
voted, and voters are even supposed to be prevented from proving how they voted
to a third party. If you add those constraints to banking, the only existing
solution is to use cash (an application where paper works pretty well).
If you have a quiet hour, take a look. You'll probably learn something.
Link
to this item | Comment
A winter of fear: Nationwide,
the images of elderly people lining up for hours -- sometimes in bad weather,
often in the cold -- outside supermarkets
for flu shots is so sad, especially when they are turned away because the supply
is so short. There's never a guarantee that a vaccine will prevent the flu, but
the anxiety of feeling left exposed can be chronic.
Marie Franklin of Orinda, Calif., pictured above, died Thursday after fainting
and hitting her head while
waiting in line for a flu
shot at a local supermarket.
There's no
good explanation and no guarantee that this couldn't happen with any
other vital drug or vaccine whose manufacture is concentrated largely in
one place. The government
is looking at solutions for next year.
Mediapost.com
reports that Rodale, publisher of Prevention magazine,
among other titles,
... has circulated this collection of tips to all of its employees
while also making one of its books, "The Immune Advantage," available
free of charge to all.
Some highlights: "Don't sneeze or cough into your hands...When you sneeze
or cough, simply turn your head and aim down," says Denise Foley, editor-at-large
at Prevention.
"Expose yourself to short-term stress that you can control. (Playing
a video game, for instance.) It spikes your levels of SIgA, a key immune system
protein," offers Dave Zinczenko, editor in chief at Men's Health.
"Drink hot cocoa," says David Willey, editor in chief, Runner's
World. "A cup made with cocoa powder has twice as many virus-fighting
antioxidant chemicals as red wine and almost five times as many as black
tea."
I can't find the full list, but garlic is another good idea.
Link
to this item | Comment
Heating
oil costs hit record averages: Newsday's Tom Incantalupo today:
Home heating oil has broken the $2-a-gallon mark, reaching record averages
of more than $2.07 on Long Island and $2.15 in the city in a new state survey.
And with crude oil also setting a new record of almost $55 a barrel Thursday,
analysts say further hikes in fuel oil prices are almost a certainty when winter
arrives.
Experts blame the high crude oil prices on tight supplies worldwide and damage
last month from Hurricane Ivan to crude oil production facilities in the Gulf
of Mexico. Heating oil prices also are being affected by high demand for diesel
fuel, which is a similar product.
Carl Larry, associate director of energy futures at Barclay's Capital in Manhattan,
says there is little reason for optimism about heating oil prices even after
the hurricane damage is repaired.
"They will go up from here," he said. "The tough part to figure
out is where the top will be. But it's not outside the realm of possiblity
if we have a cold winter that we could see $3 heating oil out there."...
Link
to this item | Comment
Pot calls kettle...: Can there be a bigger
wince than realizing that you've slammed somebody for lack of meticulousness
while
your own column misspells
a name 13 times?
Ira Simmons does this in a column about the Bill O'Reilly
sexual harassment lawsuit (I
Thought I Was Reading the Starr Report)
at Chronwatch -- a conservative site that critiques The San Francisco Chronicle:
...Lewd stuff aside, there are a number of crude and clumsy references in
the Macris/Morelli lawsuit that have to be questioned by those who are familiar
with O'Reilly's shows:
1. First, rather than calling him ''William O'Reilly,'' which is his birth
name, the suit always refers to him as ''Bill O'Reilly.'' Even first-year law
students dot their ''i's'' and cross their ''t's'' with more meticulousness.
Unfortunately for Mr. Simmons, O'Reilly's accuser, Andrea Mackris, spells
her name with a 'k.' Oops, 13 times.
Link
to this item | Comment
October 14, 2004, 6:53 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Keith Olbermann's blog debuts with O'Reilly
harassment suit: Bloggerman's
first non-debate post at MSNBC is headlined, "The
Falafel Factor," a reference to a portion of the
sexual harassment allegations by Fox associate producer Andrea Mackris in which
Fox News' Bill O'Reilly calls a loofah sponge a falafel.
It's not about the sex.
OK, it is about the sex.
The late comedian Bill Hicks once observed that anybody who made a huge
public stink about their own public morals, or about somebody else's lack
of them,
was almost inevitably hiding something in their own past or present. Hicks
died in 1994, thus missing his theory, already affirmed by the falls of
the Jim Bakkers and Jimmy Swaggarts of this world, being publicly applied
to Bill
Bennett and Rush Limbaugh— although he pretty much forecast Limbaugh's
embarrassment.
Dear old Hicks completely missed Bill
O'Reilly....
I've previously mentioned that Countdown, Olbermann's MSNBC primetime news
show, is a video blog, covering many of the same hot and silly topics as the
blogosphere, so typing his thoughts makes sense for those without cable or
elsewhere at
8 p.m. weeknights.
If Olbermann makes you want to dive into O'Reilly's embarrassment,
you can read all about it (and see photos of both Mackris and O'Reilly) at The
Smoking Gun, which posts all 33 pages of Mackris's
lawsuit. They're .gif images in html pages.
Reilly has also sued, accusing
the employee and her attorneys of extortion.
A long, annotated legal look by the pseudonymous blogger "Constant" at
Constant's pations (Bill
O'Reilly allegedly says dark forces will harm Al Franken) includes,
Talks broke down, and O'Reilly sued first ref
(Mackris's lawyer Benjamin) Morelli's partner, David Ratner, later
said his client told Fox she was prepared to sue two weeks ago, but held
off after
the two sides agreed to negotiate. Ratner said the talks broke down Tuesday
night. ref
Plaintiff counter-sued after O'Reilly went on offensive
The cable network filed its lawsuit Wednesday morning and the woman immediately countered. ref
Dates of court filings show Plaintiff had the complaint ready on 28 September, while O'Reilly filed second on 13 October; and Plaintiff filed the on the 13th, the same day as O'Reilly filed.
Questions about O'Reilly's "Negotiations"
Did
O'Reilly engage in negotiations that were "not in good faith" -- simply
to find out the range of the allegations so that he could sue first; or
did he spend the time "negotiating" so that he could gather information
and then file first to pre-empty the allegations?
Much, much more here, if you care.
Link
to this item | Comment
With
new Google tool, search your own computer, Web simultaneously: Windows
only, of course, Windows XP or Windows 2000 Service
Pack 3, to be precise. WaPo:
Google Inc. released a free tool today that lets people simultaneously search
the Web and their personal computers for information, a move analysts described
as a potential blow to rivals Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. in the race to
woo searchers and dominate the hottest area of online advertising.
Google's new "desktop search" software offers what Microsoft has
been trying to develop for more than a year -- the ability to let people
enter one search term and see files relevant to that topic from both their
computers
and the Web displayed together.
desktop.google.com:
• Find your email, files, web history and chats instantly
• View web pages you've seen, even when you're not online
• Search as easily as you do on Google
Google Desktop Search finds:
Outlook / Outlook Express
Word
AOL Instant Messenger
Excel
Internet Explorer
PowerPoint
Text
But it doesn't work for me -- my operating system is Windows 2000 Service
Pack 2. I'll try it from home, where my laptop runs XP Pro.
Link
to this item | Comment
Nobody asked about the cost of heating oil in
the presidential debates. My colleague Tim Barmann reported
in yesterday's Journal,
...Home heating oil rose another 3 cents to $1.909 a gallon, the highest price
since March 2003.
...Heating oil has jumped 26 cents over the past four weeks, and 55 cents,
or 40 percent, from a year ago.
...Households that heat with oil are also facing big increases in heating
costs this winter. A typical home that burns 800 gallons of oil in a year
would spend,
at today's average price, $1,527 annually, compared with $1,087 at last year's
average price. That is an extra expense of $440 a year, or about $37 a month.
Instead, the buzz is about the Cheneys' daughter. What are we voting for here?
Andrew Sullivan,
who's gay (and pro-war, and not voting for Bush this time), finds hypocrisy
afoot in the reaction (Kerry
Lesbian Remark Angers Cheneys) to this statement
by Kerry last night, answering a question by
moderator
Bob Schieffer
of CBS, "Do
you
believe
homosexuality is a choice?":
Kerry: We're all God's children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to
Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being
who
she was,
she's being who she was born as. I think if you talk to anybody, it's not
a choice....
(Kerry today released a statement: “I love my daughters. They love their
daughter. I was trying to say something positive about the way strong families
deal with this issue.”)
Sullivan seems as surprised as I was at the vehement reaction to Kerry's
mention of an actual lesbian person rather than an abstract issue: From Something
About Mary,
... In many speeches on marriage
rights, I cite Mary Cheney. Why? Because it exposes the rank hypocrisy of people
like president Bush and Dick and Lynne Cheney who don't believe gays are anti-family
demons but want to win the votes of people who do. I'm not outing any gay person.
I'm outing the double standards of straight ones. They've had it every which
way for decades, when gay people were invisible. Now they have to choose....
(More
here.)
Andrew also had an interesting
response to the debate overall:
Taken as a whole, the debate both melted some of Bush's hard edges, while
keeping Kerry as the man with more presidential manner. Indeed, over the
three debates, Kerry has seemed the most even-keeled emotionally, the most
constant,
the least prone to turning up in a different guise each time. But, after
a disastrous start and a middling second debate, last night Bush pulled out
his
frat president persona and charmed people again. That does and will matter.
Nevertheless, we live in dire times and frat presidents may not be the best
choice in such circumstances. One reason I think Bush has slid in the polls
recently is that he has simply seemed a little out of his depth in these
debates - and that's the last thing we need in a nerve-wracking war. Kerry's
liberalism
emerged more strongly last night, and that may play against him in the next
few weeks. But he didn't lose his calm; his graciousness toward the president
was a sign of underlying strength and self-confidence in the debate; and
he seemed trustworthy in a very old-fashioned kind of way. Stylistically,
he was
the conservative. And the message that sends is that it's safe to switch
leaders. You don't have to demonize them to move on from them. You can even,
as Kerry
did, praise them. But that very dynamic suggests a certain logic to this
election: "Thanks,
Mr President, and good-bye." Bush now has to fight very hard to reverse
that logic.
His first
reaction, moments after the debate ended: "The whole debate advanced
a narrative: that you don't have to hate Bush to vote for change."
I shot the photo above as Sullivan spoke to the Online News Association conference
in Evanston last November.
Link
to this item | Comment
William Gibson (coiner of "cyberspace," author most recently
of the excellent novel
Pattern Recognition) has begun blogging again.
Link
to this item | Comment
Switching
off gene switches off cancer . At New Scientist, in mice. Still,
all it takes is a common antibiotic to turn cancerous liver cells into normal
liver cells:
Cancer cells can revert to harmless cells by switching off a single gene,
shows a study of liver cancer in mice.
The gene, which produces a protein called MYC - pronounced “mick” -
usually controls cell division. It is implicated in several human cancers,
where overexpression of the protein causes rapid cell division, forming tumours.
In the new study, researchers used transgenic mice in which the MYC gene
was constantly switched ‘on’ so that too much MYC protein was
produced, inducing liver cancer in the mice.
Giving the mice the common antibiotic doxycycline turned the gene ‘off’,
and the cells reverted to normal liver cells, but were not destroyed.
...Withdrawing the antibiotic turned the gene back on so more MYC protein
was produced and the cancer, which had been lying dormant, returned. A green
dye
was used to tag the cells so they could be monitored as they turned from
liver cells to cancer cells and back again. The researchers could therefore
be certain
that the tumours forming were from the same group of cells and not from elsewhere.
...
Link
to this item | Comment
October 13, 2004, 2:50 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Guardian (U.K.) project aims to help Brits participate in our election:
My fellow non-Americans ...
The result of the US election will affect the lives of millions around the
world but those of us outside the 50 states have had no say in it - until now.
In a unique experiment, G2 has assembled a democratic toolkit to enable people
from Basildon to Botswana to campaign in the presidential race. And with a
little help from the folks in Clark County, Ohio, you might help decide who
takes up residence in the White House next month. Oliver Burkeman explains
how
Operation Clark Country (Ohio):
In the spirit of the Declaration of Independence's pledge to show "a
decent respect to the opinions of mankind", we have come up with a unique
way for non-Americans to express your views on the policies and candidates
in this election to some of the people best placed to decide its outcome.
It's not quite a vote, but it's a chance to influence how a very important
vote
will be cast. Or, at the very least, make a new penpal.
It works like this. By typing your email address into the box on this page,
you will receive the name and address of a voter in Clark County, Ohio. You
may not have heard of it, but it's one of the most marginal areas in one of
the most marginal states: at the last election, just 324 votes separated Democrats
from Republicans. It's a place where a change of mind among just a few voters
could make a real difference.
Writing to a Clark County voter is a chance to explain how US policies effect
you personally, and the rest of the world more generally, and who you hope
they will send to the White House. It may even persuade someone to use their
vote at all.
Link
to this item | Comment
Draft
boards ready: A recent letter in the Dallas Morning News bears
that headline on the link there:
Until recently, the law requiring young men to register with the Selective
Service System seemed like an insurance policy – one that is wise
to have but that you hope you never have to use. With the military stretched
thin
and facing recruiting and retention challenges, the possibility of having
to use the draft seems more likely.
The same law that requires youths to register also established procedures
for drafting people. But the rules are different than they were during the
Vietnam era. This time the rules that allowed Vice President Dick Cheney to
get student deferments don't exist. College seniors would finish the current
school year; others would be deferred only until the end of the current semester.
If Congress activates the draft, then 20-year-old men would be called first.
A lottery, by birth date as during the Vietnam draft, would be used to determine
the sequence within each year. If there are not enough 20-year-olds in a year,
then 21-year-olds would be called next, followed by those aged 22, 23, 24,
25, 19 and finally 18. Individual deferment requests could be heard by local
boards.
Twenty-year-old men could start receiving orders to report for an armed forces
examination within about two weeks of a draft being instituted.
Bernard Mayoff, member, Local board 031,
Selective Service System,
Richardson
Richardson is a suburb of Dallas.
Link
to this item | Comment
October 12, 2004, 7:20 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Female
Muslim comics...: There's more to the headline, but putting those
three words together is news in itself.
Megan Cossey at Women's eNews finds and profiles a few:
Tissa Hami strode onstage at a Boston comedy club this past August in black
pants, a thigh length black coat and a head covering, stared down her audience
and deadpanned "I really should be wearing a long coat but, well," and
her voice suddenly turned valley girl, "I was feeling kind of slutty today!"
The crowd erupted in relieved laughter, and Hami, 31, still a newbie on
the Boston stand-up circuit with only two years under her belt, went on to
launch
sardonic riffs on fake passports, the racism she faced as an Iranian growing
up in the Boston suburbs and the dearth of other female Muslim comics: "Well,
I didn't want the competition so I stoned them."...
...(Negin) Farsad, a veteran of the New York underground sketch comedy scene,
is an Iranian American who plumbed her Iranian background for a one-woman
show, "Bootleg
Islam," that quickly sold out to audiences at last
August's New York International Fringe Festival. The show got a rare mention
in The Wall Street Journal and was included in a piece about political theater
in The New York Sun.
Yet in many ways Farsad's show hardly seems political. She does gently comic
impressions of her family in Iran, including a playboy, hard-drinking uncle
who she casts as a Prohibition-era gangster, and one of her cousin, a wide-eyed,
23-year-old virgin wrapped in a chador and looking forward to seeing her
husband naked on her wedding night. Farsad said she was startled by some
of the responses.
"I think one of the funniest things for me was that people said after
the show 'Hey, that was really funny and it was really educational,' and
I never set out to do anything educational," she said. "I guess
I take it for granted, but most people don't know what life is like in these
other countries."
Good stuff. More comics are covered, with links at the bottom of
the story to their sites.
Link
to this item | Comment
A
(fleeting) conversation with Dylan: Bob gives his first broadcast
interview in 19 years to Steve Inskeep, on NPR this morning. Excerpt:
...I did some tours with the Tom Petty band and then I did a short tour
with The Grateful Dead, and, ya know, as you could probably expect, I
really didn't
feel like my heart
was
in it
much any more
You seem to suggest that even some of your own best songs were alien to you,
hard to play.
I couldn't quite reach the meaning in the whole pantheon of the songs
which I'd written. I thought maybe they didn't hold up conceptually or
maybe the
music scene had passed me by.
(The Dead) always had seemed to have known my stuff ...deeper than me. They
found great meaning in those songs, they could play them pretty accurately,
but I couldn't do that.
(I wouldn't be surprised if Dylan at some point says, "I was channeling
those songs." Like Rimbaud, who wrote, " 'I' is somebody else.")
Of the fans who'd followed him since the 1960s, declaring that his
every word was Shakespearean poetry, Bob Dylan writes, "In many
ways, this audience was past its prime, and its reflexes were shot."
We thought the same about Bob. Can't you channel us somethin' new, man?
On that same NPR page, "Listen to excerpts from 'Chronicles: Volume One,'
the audiobook, read by Sean Penn."
Thanks for the Dylan pointer to Tom Matrullo Don't miss Tom's riff
on roofs:
...Poets, for instance, tend to not thrive where roofs protect walls that
offer regular rectangular vistas of the outer world. This could be why Mexicans,
who are entirely musical and poetical, prefer their roofs without walls when
they're having fun (and why they often build doorways, called portiles, unconnected
to walls or roofs, that stand in the middle of nowhere, a sort of trace architecture
of pure liminality.)...
Link
to this item | Comment
Pete Turner, color photographer
via Burp
Link
to this item | Comment
Puppet
Sex Leads to Rating Rift: The filmmakers behind 'Team
America' (which opens this weekend) want to get an NC-17 cut to an
R, but
the MPAA objects to an explicit scene. L.A. Times (reg req.) Here's the
crack-up quote.
"There's nothing we're asking for that hasn't appeared in other R-rated
movies, and our characters are made of wood and have no genitalia. If the puppets
did to each other what we show them doing, all they'd get is splinters," Rudin
said.
Link
to this item | Comment
Sinclair
Stations to Air Anti-Kerry Documentary: WaPo:
Sinclair Broadcast Group of Maryland, owner of the largest chain of television
stations in the nation, plans to preempt regular programming two weeks before
the Nov. 2 election to air a documentary that accuses Sen. John F. Kerry of
betraying American prisoners during the Vietnam War.
Sinclair has ordered its 62 stations, some of which are in the critical
swing states of Ohio, Florida, Iowa and Wisconsin, to air "Stolen Honor:
Wounds That Never Heal" during prime-time hours next week. The Sinclair
station group collectively reaches 24 percent of U.S. television households....
Does equal time mean they also have to show Farenheit 9/11? Sinclair
says it's "news" so they don't have to. They don't even have to fact-check
it, apparently.
Slashdot
Politics takes it on, too:
"The Sinclair Broadcasting Group, in its
latest politically charged move, has announced that
it will air a 90-minute anti-Kerry documentary a week before the election.
The video, 'Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never
Heal,' was funded by a group of Pennsylvania POWs that has merged
with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Sinclair, which is the largest
TV broadcasting group in the nation, has 62
affiliates, many in swing states. It made news in April by refusing to
let any of its affiliates air an edition of Nightline in which Ted Koppel
read the names of US soldiers who had died in Iraq, saying the broadcast
was politically motivated. Predictably, liberal blogs are fighting back."
with the usual raft of comments. Here's one:
That's right. Sinclair is just doing this to balance all the stations that are broadcasting Fahrenheit 9/11 [michaelmoore.com] and Going Upriver [goingupriver.com].
Here's a list of those stations:
(There aren't any, of course.)
Minneapolis Star Tribune (A McClatchy Newspaper) editorializes (Airing
an anti-Kerry screed),
If the stunt that Sinclair Broadcasting Group is pulling isn't against the
law, it ought to be. Sinclair, owner of more American television stations than
any other company, has ordered all 62 of its holdings - which collectively
reach a quarter of American households - to suspend normal programming for
one evening just before the upcoming presidential election. The stations are
instead to air a one-hour conservative diatribe against Sen. John Kerry. This
is a flagrant and cynical abuse of the public's airwaves for a partisan political
purpose, an action that should put Sinclair's federal broadcast licenses in
jeopardy....
...This is not an hourlong ad (although that will be its effect). To sidestep
requirements of fairness, Sinclair is broadcasting "Stolen Honor" as
a news program - even though it wasn't produced by any sort of credible news
organization. It was written by a former reporter for the off-the-wall Washington
Times and paid for - at least initially - by a group of Pennsylvania veterans.
Asked to justify the "news" label, a spokesman for Sinclair said
the topic is important and "hasn't been out in the marketplace, and in
the news marketplace," ignoring completely the controversy that claimed
so much air time in August over the barrage of hateful ads by the Swift Boat
Vets for Truth....
...If the FCC lets this one by after all the fuss made about Jackson's breast,
then we need a new FCC, not to mention new laws reversing the consolidation
of media ownership that gives unscrupulous companies such as Sinclair so much
power.
The Chairman of the FCC is Secretary of State Colin Powell's son Michael, who
hasn't been heard from on the issue yet. But another of the five commissioners,
Democrat Michael Copps, has spoken
out:
“This is an abuse of the public trust. And it is proof positive of media
consolidation run amok when one owner can use the public airwaves to blanket
the country with its political ideology -- whether liberal or conservative.
Some will undoubtedly question if this is appropriate stewardship of the public
airwaves. This is the same corporation that refused to air Nightline’s
reading of our war dead in Iraq. It is the same corporation that short-shrifts
local communities and local jobs by distance-casting news and weather from
hundreds of miles away. It is a sad fact that the explicit public interest
protections we once had to ensure balance continue to be weakened by the
Federal Communications Commission while it allows media conglomerates to
get even bigger.
Sinclair, and the FCC, are taking us down a dangerous road.”
Meanwhile, the left is digging up data that tries to link a quid pro quo: Subsidiary
of network airing anti-Kerry film awarded ‘war on terror’ contract and
the lefty bloggers are on
it.
A statement on Sinclair's
homepage reads,
We welcome your comments regarding the upcoming special news event featuring
the topic of Americans held as prisoners of war in Vietnam. The program has
not been videotaped and the exact format of this unscripted event has not been
finalized. Characterizations regarding the content are premature and are based
on ill-informed sources.
Massachusetts Senator John Kerry has been invited to participate. You can
urge him to appear by calling his Washington, D.C. campaign headquarters at
(202) 712-3000.
if you would like to make further comments on this matter, you may do so at:
comments@sbgi.net
Hey, what a coup! Get readers to get a candidate to come boost
your ratings by making equal
time mean "anti-Kerry" and "Kerry"!
Why not both
candidates? If
you
write them, maybe you could suggest they also show your favorite anti-Bush
film and "urge him to appear" too.
Insist that Nader come, too, and let
bitter Corvair owners have at him. More money for Sinclair!
The public --
not
Sinclair
--
owns
the
airwaves, but it seems Sinclair is using its license to operate on those airwaves
with the intention of enriching its own ratings at the expense of a fair
election. Ingratiating itself with its favorite candidate is hardly stewardship.
As a
member of the public who
owns those
airwaves,
I'd
like to see
them in
more responsible hands.
Is it over yet? Three weeks from today, it finally will be -- we hope.
(Why would anybody sane and wise enough to be the President we deserve go
through this brutal initiation?)
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