Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

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Republicans

December 9, 2011

Up until now I’ve resisted the temptation to write about the Republican presidential candidates. This is because they just didn’t seem worth it. This is the sorriest field of candidates I have ever seen. That’s a remarkable statement considering that I’ve seen some truly sorry candidates in my time. (Does anyone remember Al Haig? One of my favorite throwaway gags on The Simpsons was when Homer went rummaging through his attic and found an “Al Haig for President” t-shirt. Of course, Haig would look like Abraham Lincoln standing alongside this current bunch.) These people aren’t even competent bullshitters. (There are 14 million adult Americans who can’t find work, and Newt Gingrich is talking about bringing back child labor.) Yet what gets me is the seeming credulousness that the media show towards these bozos. CNN is an endless parade of talking heads solemnly discussing every nuance of the drivel that comes out of these people’s mouths. It’s as though Dorothy and her companions have discovered the man behind the curtain, but they still think that the giant head is real. (Yeah, I know, that’s the second Wizard of Oz metaphor that I’ve used this week. You have to admit that it’s appropriate, though.)

Consider Rick Perry. He first came to national attention when he made a stupid comment about Texas seceding from the Union. He was than accused of allowing an innocent man to be executed. Yet when he announced his candidacy last summer, the media greeted it with a fanfare worthy of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. They seemed ready to inaugurate him right then. (Alexander Cockburn compared Perry to Ronald Reagan. Before that, he compared Sarah Palin to Ronald Reagan.) Almost immediately, Perry slit his own throat by attacking Social Security. (A large chunk of the Republicans’ voter base consists of elderly people. The one thing the Republicans can not attack is Social Security. I’m amazed that Perry’s handlers didn’t tell him that.) He then embarrassed himself during the debates, a remarkable achievement considering that he was on the same stage as Michele Bachmann.

And then there was Herman Cain. Here was a man with no political experience, whose only accomplishment in life was that he laid off employees at Godfather’s Pizza. (Strangely, it didn’t seem to bother anyone that his company’s name was based on an ethnic stereotype.) Yet reporters treated him as a serious candidate, a pretense that became increasingly difficult to maintain, as Cain didn’t try very hard to conceal his lack of interest in politics. (Concerning the sexual harassment allegations, should it surprise anyone that someone who runs a sordid company like Godfather’s Pizza would behave in a sordid manner?)

The news media do not exist to inform us. They exist to maintain the charade that is U.S. politics.

Posted in Media, Republicans | Leave a Comment »

Occupy Fox News

October 5, 2011

Heh, heh.

I’m told Fox News didn’t air this. What are they afraid of?

Posted in Anti-Capitalism, Fox News, Media | Leave a Comment »

The Norway Attacks

July 24, 2011


This is how the media want us to behave all the time.

Nothing I can remember has been more disgusting than the media’s response to the terrorist attacks in Norway. Right away many in the media jumped to the conclusion that it was the work of an Islamist group, even though there was not a shred of evidence to support that idea. All along the Norwegian police were saying they believed the attacks were “domestic” in origin. Indeed, considering that the attacks targeted members of a left-wing party, it was reasonable to assume that they were the work of a right-wing group.

The Norwegian police have announced that the attacks were the work of Anders Behring Breivik. The Los Angeles Times describes him as:

    …a “right-wing Christian fundamentalist” who frequented extremist websites and left a trail of passionate, sometimes obscure rants that reflected strong anti-Islamic views, deep skepticism about the mixing of different cultures and animosity toward socialism.

In other words, this guy holds the sort of nativist views that the media assiduously try to cultivate among Americans. Funny how things turned out that way.

Posted in Media | 2 Comments »

Casey Anthony and the Price of Hysteria

July 14, 2011

In my earlier discussion of the Casey Anthony trial, I expressed my fear that the public hysteria over the trial’s verdict would lead to more unnecessary “tough-on-crime” legislation. Well, clearly my powers as a Nostradamus are vastly greater than those of Phil McGraw, for this has come to pass. In state legislatures across the country, “Caylee’s Law” legislation is being considered. These laws would make it a felony crime if a parent or guardian fails to report the death or disappearance of a child within a twenty-four period, regardless of the circumstances. So more people will be going to prison. All this just because people didn’t like one verdict in one trial.

The U.S. already incarcerates a larger percentage of its population than any other industrialized nation. California’s prison system is in crisis because it cannot adequately house and feed all its prisoners. Inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison have gone on a hunger strike to protest the inhuman conditions in which they live. This is how Wikipedia describes the place:

    Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP) is a supermax California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison near Crescent City in unincorporated Del Norte County, California. The 275-acre (111 ha) facility is explicitly designed to keep California’s alleged “worst of the worst” prisoners in long-term solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation.

Uh, isn’t sensory deprivation a form of torture? Wikepedia also tells us:

    Pelican Bay was built with little legislative or judicial oversight. The California legislature delegated building and design decisions to Department of Corrections administrators. These administrators toured high-security prisons across the United States. They identified Florence, Arizona’s Secure Management Unit (SMU), as a “model” prison and collaborated with prison architects to copy its floor plan and high tech design for PelicanBay’s SHU [Secure Housing Unit]. (Pelican Bay was one of 21 new prisons built in California in the 1980s and 1990s.)

    Correctional administrators purchased land in rural Del Norte County, California, on the northernmost border with Oregon. Its lengthy distance away from most prisoners’ families was considered a plus. It is in a remote forested area 13 miles from the California-Oregon state line and far from California’s major metropolitan areas, 370 miles north of San Francisco and more than 750 miles north of Los Angeles. One of the few legislative comments recorded about the institution concerns whether to call it Dungeness Dungeon or Slammer by the Sea. There was no legislative discussion of the novel punitive design of Pelican Bay nor that it would be the site of indefinite SHU commitments. The original planners did not contemplate that some prisoners would spend decades there.

    Federal district courts in California first heard about the prison after it opened in the early 1990s, when they started receiving letters and legal complaints from Pelican Bay prisoners detailing the draconian conditions at the institution, along with the egregious constitutional violations taking place there. Originally designed to house 2,550 prisoners, as of 2006, Pelican Bay houses 3,301 prisoners.

Of the Secure Housing Unit, we’re told:

    The 8 x 10 foot cells of the Pelican Bay SHU, or Secure Housing Unit, are made of smooth, poured concrete. They have no windows. Instead, there are fluorescent lights, which stay on 24 hours per day. For at least twenty-two hours every day, prisoners remain in their cells, looking out through a perforated steel door at a solid concrete wall. Food is delivered twice a day through a slot in the cell door.

We live in a society that believes that locking people up is the solution to every problem. This inevitably leads to abominations like Pelican Bay.

Posted in California, Crime, Media | Leave a Comment »

Glenn Beck and Israel

July 13, 2011

Glenn Beck has dabbled in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He has expressed admiration for the anti-Semitic writers Elizabeth Dilling and Eustace Mullins. Yet he was recently invited to speak before a committee of the Israeli Knesset, where he was well received and lauded as one of “Israel’s great friends”.

We live in a society in which anyone who criticizes Israel is labeled as an “anti-Semite”. Yet the Israelis have made it clear that they regard a genuine anti-Semite as one of “Israel’s great friends”.

What does this tell us about Israel?

Posted in Conspiracy Theories, Imperialism, Media, Middle East, Racism | Leave a Comment »

Casey Anthony

July 7, 2011

The media are all in a frenzy because of the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial. During all this blather, I fear no one will ask whether it is really a good idea to give so much attention to a single sensational murder trial. CNN, for example, had almost around the clock coverage during the days just prior to the verdict. (Anderson Cooper had the pop psychologist, Phil McGraw on his show. This Nostradamus told the credulous Cooper that Anthony’s unemotional demeanor during most of the trial would make a bad impression on the jury, likely resulting in a guilty verdict. An uncanny prediction, no?) And they have had almost around the clock coverage since the verdict. Is there nothing else for these people to talk about?

The Casey Anthony trial has given people a distorted view of our criminal justice system, just as the O.J. Simpson trial did. She had experienced trial lawyers who agreed to work pro bono. Your average criminal defendant has an overworked public defender. Over ninety percent of criminal trials end in guilty verdicts. Yet I fear that because of this one verdict, we are going to hear renewed calls for “tough on crime” legislation, such as mandatory minimum sentencing laws, sentence enhancement laws and so on, which will result in the further growth of that vast warehouse of human beings known as the U.S. prison system. Of course, all this will do nothing to prevent mentally ill people from killing their children.

I am curious to know why the media have been so concerned about the murder of Caylee Anthony, whereas they have largely ignored the murder of Brisenia Flores. Would it be cynical of me to suggest that this might have something to do with the fact that Caylee Anthony was white? Do you really think the case would have received any attention at all if Caylee had been African-American? I honestly can’t see it. In the eyes of the media, murders are only important when they happen to white people.

Posted in Crime, Media, Racism | Leave a Comment »

Arianna Huffington Reloaded

June 18, 2011

As you may have guessed from my last couple of posts, I’m in the mood for hating on Arianna Huffington. I could talk about how her website, The Huffington Post habitually refers to Hugo Chavez as a “dictator”, or how it’s filled with inane celebrity gossip, or how it tirelessly promotes Sarah Palin and her family. (When Palin’s husband won a fishing contest, the HuffPo featured an article about it.) Instead, I’m going to talk about what Huffington really cares about: money.

The Newspaper Guild and the National Writers Union have called upon bloggers not to contribute to the Huffington Post, until it agrees to pay them. This is what is known as a strike. So far, Huffington has refused to meet with the union leaders about this. It appears that Mrs. Huffington doesn’t like people telling her how to run her plantation.

It’s not a new thing for companies to try to get people to do things for no pay. I remember when I was working for Universal Studios, they were always trying to get employees to “volunteer” to do things, such as construct a float for the Tournament of Roses Parade. HuffPo has, however, carried this to a new level, because it was built upon unpaid labor, a fact acknowledged by the site’s new owner, AOL:

    In a Forbes magazine article, AOL executives were quoted as saying that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong “talked a lot about the importance of recruiting hordes of free bloggers…. “It was always, ‘Arianna does it. That’s what she’s built her business on. Why don’t we do it, too?’” says a former AOL editor-in-chief.”

This is what makes the HuffPo so poisonous. People see what Huffington has done, and they get the idea that maybe they too can make money by not paying people. This idea becomes like a cancer that spreads.

The Confederacy was abolished over 140 years ago, but the struggle for unpaid labor goes on.

Posted in Arianna Huffington, Capitalism, Media | Leave a Comment »

American: The Bill Hicks Story

May 31, 2011

Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas have produced this documentary about Bill Hicks, who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 32. We learn about Hick’s childhood, growing up in a Southern Baptist family that moved around the South before settling in Texas. Hicks began doing stand-up as a teenager in Houston. His act developed with remarkable speed, and within a few years he was performing at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. At around this time, he began experimenting with drugs and drinking heavily. He became notorious for getting drunk before going on stage, an absolute no-no in stand-up comedy. When clubs started banning him, he sobered up and quit drinking.

In his act, Hicks began to deal increasingly with controversial issues such as religion, patriotism and militarism. He was an outspoken critic of the first Gulf War. Posing as a journalist, he witnessed the Waco massacre. He saw a Bradley tank open fire on the Branch Davidian compound. He criticized the media for not reporting this.

Hicks’s death was a great tragedy. He could use someone like him today.

You can find samples of Hicks’s comedy here.

Posted in Cinema, Media, Popular Culture | Leave a Comment »

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

May 28, 2011

I was working for Coca-Cola when the first Harry Potter movie came out. Coca-Cola had a tie-in agreement with the producers of the film. They had big cardboard displays up in supermarkets with pictures of the films’ characters and the words, “Taste the Magic”. The idea was, apparently, that just by drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola, you could experience the magical world of Harry Potter. Nobody seemed bothered by the obvious absurdity of this. It seems that people have become so used to the ludicrous claims of advertising, that nobody even thinks twice about them any more.

Morgan Spurlock set out to make a film that would be funded entirely by corporate sponsorship. His aim was to explore the effects that advertising have on our world. There are scenes of advertising executives sitting around with straight faces spouting bullshit terms like “brand collateral” and “brand personality”. Some film directors make candid admissions about the use of product placement in films. (An advertising executive boasts to Spurlock about how he once forced a movie studio to re-write a scene that showed Alka-Selzer in an unflattering light.) There’s a creepy segment about “neuromarketing”. People are placed in MRI machines, and their brain activity is studied as they watch various commercials. Spurlock visits a cash-strapped school in Broward County, Florida. The school administrators are desperately trying to raise funds by placing advertisements around the school grounds. (Spurlock gives them a list of his sponsors. They seem very grateful.)

There’s an interesting segment in which Spurlock visits Sao Paulo, Brazil, where the city government has banned outdoor advertisements. Interestingly, nobody seems to miss the old billboards. I couldn’t help but contrast this with the scenes in New York’s Times Square, with its clutter of distracting advertisements. Would our lives be any poorer without this visual noise? I don’t think so.

Throughout the film, Spurlock keeps his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. He hints to us that he may have sold out. (He prefers to say “bought in”.) In one scene, he even tries to get Ralph Nader to buy shoes from one of his sponsors. I found this film amusing to watch, but it lacked any sense of urgency. Spurlock failed to make me feel that I should care about this topic.

Posted in Capitalism, Cinema, Media | Leave a Comment »

The War on Immigrants

February 26, 2011


Raul and Brisenia Flores

On February 22, 2011, Shawna Forde, a founder of Minuteman American Defense Corps, an ant-immigrant group, was sentenced to death for the murders of Raul “Junior” Flores and of his ten-year-old daughter, Brisenia, two Mexican-Americans. You can read about the murders here. As shocking as these killings were, they have received remarkably little attention from the mainstream media. Perhaps it is because this story doesn’t fit in with the media’s preferred narrative of hordes of Mexicans crossing the border just so they can sell drugs and live on welfare.

I would argue that the media bear some responsibility for the deaths of the Floreses. For example, Lou Dobbs was allowed for years to spew his anti-immigrant filth on CNN. (They turned against Dobbs only after he began flirting with the Birther movement. Apparently, it’s OK to demonize a whole section of the population, but God forbid you should question whether the president was born in the US!) I can’t recall seeing any reports about the murder of Brisenia Flores on CNN, can you?

Posted in Immigration, Media | 1 Comment »

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