media: October 2004 Archives

Micheal shares this wisdom from a friend:

"In the previous 17 Presidential election cycles, if the Washington Reskins won their game the weekend before the election, the incumbent party won on Tuesday. If they lost, the incumbents lost. The Skins looked pretty awful on offense today, as they have all season, but suddenly went ahead with only about 2 minutes left. Except that they didn't; the refs called the play back with an extremely questionable penalty call and the Green Bay Packers pulled it out."

This was a bad movie about really fascinating stuff! Too evangelistic for my taste, but a useful compendium of cutting edge theory in quantum mechanics, human biology and chemistry, and consciousness studies. I was fascinated by the whole neural net/nerve connection scenario in the brain - where repeated emotional experiences sortof install routine pathways that lead to a kind of "addiction" in which experiences that will stimulate those same pathways are sought....over time the biochemical pathways for other emotional experiences are impaired and eventually cut off. Its reparable - one can shift one's neural nets - but requires concentration, deliberation, time, and repetition.

This is hilarious! Thanks Becky!

Florida election ballot.

Jon Stewart's excoriation of Crossfire hosts and the whole genre of so-called political talk shows continues to generate interest. I guess I might have to start watching him! (I confess, bad comm major that I am, that the first time I saw him was when Stephen was here for the last presidential debate.)

This story from the BBC has the most currently known info about what happened when US authorities took Rackspace's harddrives for no known reason (except, as Derek McMillan points out) perhaps to shut down a vocal critic of the Bush administration).

~ from AirL listserv

Jon Stewart takes on the hosts of Crossfire....charging "news organizations look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity."

Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America

~ thanks Sreela! via Leda. :-)

The Times endorsement of Kerry includes a withering critique of Bush. Finally!

A rather haunting film about the trip that transformed Che Guevera into an activist for social justice.

Besides the guy doing finger dancing in front of Ingrid and otherwise blocking her view, I think we all enjoyed it. Sarbjeet won points for suggesting it to us (circa Jose, thanks), and Catalin commented on it being so well made, with layers of fantasy laid throughout - a voyage, coming of age, physical challenges to be overcome...

Cata and Sarbjeet are due for a playoff game of Backgammon as they respectively smoked me and Ingrid in first round matches.

Another classic Bush moment, rumors on the Internets".

~ from Alireza Doostdar on the AirL listserv.

Today's NYTimes editorial, Dangerous Territory, hasn't yet made the list of "most requested articles in the last 24 hours", which I find disturbing and counter to the editorial's optimistic conclusion:

"If the company is thinking about seriously changing course, it should do it quickly. Sinclair is in dangerous territory. If television companies force their local stations to campaign blatantly, it will not be long before the administrations that have the power to grant licenses begin expecting such favors as a quid pro quo. And the public will question whether it can afford to allow such concentrations of power in the hands of huge media corporations."

"The public" appears willing to overlook such concentration and misuse of power, and - given recent events with the FCC and FBI, the US government already feels entitled to grant and deny licenses wherever it sees fit.

David says, "This is absolutely frightening. There is a mounting global protest."

from http://indymedia.org/en/2004/10/111999.shtml

Thursday morning, US authorities issued a federal order to Rackspace
ordering them to hand over Indymedia web servers to the requesting agency.
Rackspace, which provides hosting services for more that 20 Indymedia sites at
its London facility, complied and turned over the requested servers, effectively
removing those sites from the internet.

"As a communication scholar and teacher, I find the action the Sinclair Broadcast Group proposes particularly troublesome.Ý Please be aware of this practice, and learn (below) about what some counter-groups are doing in opposition.

email from Rebecca Townsend, Ph.D.

Here's a report from the Annenberg School on 10 Major Trends Emerging in the Internet?s First Decade of Public Use.

I think the Times is now pitching for Kerry. They offer quite a critique on the Bush campaign's miscalculations in the first debate, comparing it with Nixon-Kennedy.

And then there's the long feature in the Sunday magazine, Kerry's Undeclared War:

"Kerry, a former prosecutor, was suggesting that the war, if one could call it that, was, if not winnable, then at least controllable. If mobsters could be chased into the back rooms of seedy clubs, then so, too, could terrorists be sent scurrying for their lives into remote caves where they wouldn't harm us. Bush had continually cast himself as the optimist in the race, asserting that he alone saw the liberating potential of American might, and yet his dark vision of unending war suddenly seemed far less hopeful than Kerry's notion that all of this horror -- planes flying into buildings, anxiety about suicide bombers and chemicals in the subway -- could somehow be made to recede until it was barely in our thoughts."

Split-screen effects from the first debate....

Split Decision discusses spatial and perceptual effects of attending to multiple features of interaction.

Stephen suggested that the debate rules for the vice-preseidential slugfest required seated performances because Cheney on his feet would have looked even more stolid and inanimate compared to a freely moving, uncontained Edwards. (My paraphrase.)

Dang! I could have seen Bonnie Raitt last night!

"Bruce Springsteen began stumping the swing states [in Philadelphia] tonight to support Senator John Kerry. "We're here tonight to fight for a government that is open, rational, forward-looking and humane, and we plan to rock the joint while doing so," he said at the beginning of the concert he was headlining at the Wachovia Center. The concert, which also featured R.E.M., was one of six simultaneous concerts in Pennsylvania for the Vote for Change tour, a week of benefit concerts in battleground states."

The whole story is in the NYTimes.

Kerry gains the upper hand in a debate as significant for its substance as for what it revealed about Bush.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Sidney Blumenthal for salon.com.

After months of flawless execution in a well-orchestrated campaign, President Bush had to stand alone in an unpredictable debate. He had traveled the country, appearing before adoring preselected crowds; delivered a carefully crafted acceptance speech at his convention; and approved tens of millions of dollars in TV attack commercials to belittle his opponent. His much-touted charisma was a reflection of the anxiety and wishful thinking of the people since Sept. 11. In the lead, Bush believed he had only to assert his superiority to end the contest once and for all.

But onstage the incumbent president ran out of programmed talking points. Unable to explain the logic for his policies, or think on his feet, he was thrown back on the raw elements of his personality and leadership, and he revealed even more profound issues than the policies being debated.

Every time he was confronted with ambivalence, his impulse was to sweep it aside. He claimed he must be followed because he is the leader. Fate in the form of Sept. 11 had placed authority in his hands as a man of destiny.