Category: Media

AOL Buys Huffpo

On February 7, 2011

Arianna Huffington cashes out. This is the American dream baby, make something, then sell it to a soulless corporation which stands against everything you claim to stand for. What do you care? You’ve cashed out.

Cashing out is one of the biggest problems with American style business, actually. Capitalism operating well requires making it difficult to cash out. Cashing out almost always includes the creation of significant debt, debt which does not create new economic activity but which only weighs down the companies involved. When it does not (as is largely the case here, to AOLs credit), it still means that money is used for ownership changes rather than to create new economic activity.

As for Arianna, it’s been clear for a while that Huffpo was becoming less and less progressive or liberal and more and more a business for business sakes. The model for Huffpo was always that the entertainment and gossip news would drive the traffic, that traffic would slop over into the more progressive and political writing, and would pay for it.

In other words, the entertainment pays for the politics, just as in the old days, news on the big networks was either a loss loser or not particularly profitable compared to other types of programming. When the MBA types took over, that meant turning the news into “infotainment”, or segregating into cable, a niche market. Because there is only one value in post Reagan business in America: making money. Anything which interferes with making the most money possible (for you, not for your shareholders, don’t make me laugh) must be gotten rid of.

As for Arianna, she got her second payday. Hope the price she was paid was worth what she sold to get it.

All that said, AOL has been doing some interesting things lately, such as their emphasis on local news. We’ll see how it plays out. Having watched Huffpos changes over the years, however, I am not sanguine.

Wikileaks And The End of the Open Internet

By Ian Welsh

On December 4, 2010

62 Comments

Let’s just state the obvious here: we’re seeing the end of the open internet with what is being done to Wikileaks. It’s one thing for Amazon to toss them, it’s another thing entirely to refuse to propagate their domain information. This has been coming for quite some time, and Wikileaks is not the first domain to be shut down in the US, it is merely the highest profile. Combined with the attempt to make NetFlix pay a surcharge or lose access to customers, this spells the end of the free internet.

The absurdity, the sheer Orwellian stupidity of this is epitomized by the State Department telling students at elite colleges not to read the leaks, or they won’t get jobs at State. As if anyone who isn’t curious to read what is in the leaks, who doesn’t want to know how diplomacy actually works, is anyone State should hire. In a sane world, the reaction would be the opposite: no one who hadn’t read them would be hired.

This is reminiscent of the way the old Soviet Union worked, with everyone being forced to pretend they don’t know what they absolutely do know, and blind conformity prized over ability.

Meanwhile a worldwide alert is out for the horrible Julian Assange for rape, aka: not using a condom. I certainly won’t defend not using a condom when your partner wants you to, if that’s what happened, but those guilty of such crimes don’t usually have worldwide manhunts called against them, do they? Meanwhile the squishy left wrings its hands and wails. Let me put it to you this way: no one who was willing to put themselves out there the way Assange did is not a massive risk taker. Going into this he had to know that eventually he would be locked up, discredited, killed or some combination. Prudent men and women who would never do anything stupid (like sleep with groupies) would not have created Wikileaks in the first place and would not have leaked the inflammatory material that Assange has put out there in the second place.

In the spirit of a rambling post, let’s move back to the internet. Leaving aside censorship, which is older than writing, and is banal, boring and predictable, especially from states on auto-pilot to authoritarianism like the US, the economic model to use when thinking about the internet is the old railroads of the 19th and early 20th century. The railroads were the only way to get your products to market if you weren’t on the coast, a major river or canal. They were hated, loathed with a passion, by farmers. Why? Because they took all the surplus value, all the profit. If you weren’t willing to pay, you went out of business. Even if you were willing to pay, you wound up in hock to them. You worked for the railroad, period. All or virtually all of what would have been profit went to them.

When the only way to get your product to market is an unregulated monopoly or oligopoly they will take it all. The result isn’t just unprofitable businesses, it’s failed businesses and businesses that never get off the ground, because they can’t afford to pay the freight, or more accurately, the vig. Oligopolies in between producers and consumers always strangle the economy. Always.

And, on top of p0litical repression of free speech, that’s what’s coming to the internet near you. The essentially free and open internet is dying and it will soon be dead.

(Note: text changed from Hilary Clinton to State department telling students)

Blaming the blogosphere for Democratic Failures

By Ian Welsh

On July 15, 2010

22 Comments

So. In response to a Politico piece in which the authors and White House whine about the left wing blogosphere not being happy with all of Obama’s “wins” and not caring about potential losses in 2010, Kevin Drum writes:

Here’s the good news: this record of progressive accomplishment officially makes Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. And here’s the bad news: this shoddy collection of centrist, watered down, corporatist sellout legislation was all it took to make Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. Take your pick.

Here’s the thing. What matters is whether policy works. It does not matter if what Obama did was more left wing than anything that’s been done in a while (though in absolute terms I would argue it mostly wasn’t left wing, the health care plan, for example, was essentially a Republican plan from the 90s), what matters is if it was left wing enough (big enough stimulus, smart enough health care plan) to improve people’s lives enough that they noticed.

It wasn’t, and that’s all that matters. Policies such as the stimulus were not done well enough, and everyone from Nobel prize winners with good predictive records like Stiglitz and and Krugman, down to nobodies like me, predicted it at the time. The President hired the wrong people to give him advice, didn’t even do as much as many of them wanted, and now we all pay the price.

Sometimes half doesn’t work. Half-assed rarely does. All Obama’s half assed “left wing” policies have done is discredit the left for another generation. Combined with the ability of the media, Republicans and hysterical Tea Baggers unable to use a dictionary to define him as a “socialist” this means that Obama’s policies are seen as left wing, and left wing policies are seen to have failed.

I don’t want Obama doing anything I agree with, because he will screw it up and discredit it. In this respect he is like Bush. He is poison because he is incompetent at policy.

As for the original Politico post, the hysterical ranting at the peanut gallery the authors clearly don’t even read, says more about them and the White House than it does about the left wing blogosphere they try to blame for Democrats own failures.

Your Liberal Media

By Ian Welsh

On July 14, 2010

27 Comments

So, I’m at the gym, which is the only place I watch TV, and as I’m walking out, I see on CNN, a big headline

Obama, Hitler and Stalin

I have no idea what the hell they were talking about and I didn’t stick around to find out, but as anyone with any sense or media training knows, if you stick those three names together people will start to associate the three no matter what you say.

I suspect it was probably some right wing idiot saying “Obama is just like Hitler and Stalin” and CNN deciding “hey, let’s discuss that.”

Are CNNs producers stupid, or evil? No wonder Americans believe so many lies. They are fed propaganda every day.

Another journalist down for saying something “inappropriate”

By Ian Welsh

On July 7, 2010

14 Comments

Latest victim is Octavia Nasr, who tweeted:

“Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”

Hezbollah, of course, are designated terrorists by the US state department, for the 1983 bombing of marine barracks in Lebanon.

Two things about that attack:

Marine barracks are, by any definition, legitimate targets of war.
Do you know why they attacked a military target? Because the US shelled Shia villages in Lebanon.

Let me emphasize, Hezbollah attacked a military target, killing soldiers, in retaliation for US attacks on defenseless civilians.

Now that doesn’t mean I agree with everything Hezbollah does, they’ve done some real terrorist attacks. But they have a policy against terrorist attacks against Americans and have for a long time. Certainly they have killed far fewer civilians than either the US or Israel.

As for Fadlallah and Nasr, her own words say it best:

I used the words “respect” and “sad” because to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of “honor killing.” He called the practice primitive and non-productive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam…

It is no secret that Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah hated with a vengeance the United States government and Israel. He regularly praised the terror attacks that killed Israeli citizens. And as recently as 2008, he said the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust were wildly inflated.

But it was his commitment to Hezbollah’s original mission – resisting Israel’s occupation of Lebanon – that made him popular and respected among many Lebanese, not just people of his own sect.

She further notes that as he got older, he actually spoke out against Hezbollah and hardline Iranian clerics:

In later years, Hezbollah’s leadership apparently did not like Fadlallah’s vocal criticism of Hezbollah’s allegiance to Iran. Nor did they like his assertions that Hezbollah’s leaders had been distracted from resistance to Israeli occupation of portions of Lebanon and had turned weapons against their own people.

At first, he was simply pushed to the side, but later wasn’t even referred to as a Hezbollah member. Rather, he was referred to as the scholar – the expert on Islam – but nothing more. During the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, his honorary title “Sayyed” – indicating that he’s a descendant of the prophet – was dropped any time he was mentioned on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV and other Hezbollah media outlets.

None of this is to say he was a “good guy”, but he was certainly no more evil than a man who launched a pre-emptive war based on lies against a country which was no threat to his own country, killing hundreds of thousands and making millions homeless.

It’s not that journalists can’t have opinions, it’s that they can only have approved opinions, or at least they can only admit to approved opinions.

The Court Eunuch Standard of Blogging Exposed by Dave Weigel’s Resignation

By Ian Welsh

On June 26, 2010

9 Comments

As many may be aware, Dave Weigel, a reporter for the Washington Post resigned after emails to a private listserv called Journolist were publicly released. These are the things he wrote which cost him his job:

•”This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.”

•”Follow-up to one hell of a day: Apparently, the Washington Examiner thought it would be fun to write up an item about my dancing at the wedding of Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman. Said item included the name and job of my girlfriend, who was not even there — nor in DC at all.”

•”I’d politely encourage everyone to think twice about rewarding the Examiner with any traffic or links for a while. I know the temptation is high to follow up hot hot Byron York scoops, but please resist it.”

•”It’s all very amusing to me. Two hundred screaming Ron Paul fanatics couldn’t get their man into the Fox News New Hampshire GOP debate, but Fox News is pumping around the clock to get Paultard Tea Party people on TV.”

I’ve spent some time reading around the web, and the main criticism of Weigel seems to be that he wasn’t impartial: not only didn’t he like the right wing folks he was covering, he despised them.

This is exactly what is wrong with US journalism. The responsibility of reporters is not to be “impartial”, their responsibility is to tell the truth. Should reporters have been unmoved by the fact that that America was torturing people? Should that not bother them as people? S Should they be unmoved by the fact that Bush sold a war based on lies, and millions of people were displaced, killed and injured as a result?

Is that we want? Sociopaths who have no personal opinions?

Weigel isn’t being attacked because he wrote anything in his public work which wasn’t true, because he didn’t write any such thing. As Friedersdorf writes, his public work was of the highest quality and that should be the only thing which matters.

I’ll defend to death, however, the proposition that the work of a journalist should be the only standard by which he is measured. Mr. Weigel’s work is superb: he breaks news, his foremost loyalty is to the facts, and he reliably treats fairly even folks with whom he very much disagrees…

…Firing Dave Weigel incentivizes more digging into the personal opinions of journalists, and validates the idea that they should be judged on the basis of those opinions, rather than the content of their work. What’s next? E-mails sent to a few people and leaked? Opinions offered at a bar over beers and surreptitiously recorded? Can I reiterate how glad I am to have moved away from Washington DC? (You should hear what I say about De Beers in private!)

If you taped everyone’s conversations, and intercepted all their emails, the very few people who could not be hung by their own words, who have never said anything that doesn’t sound bad, are exactly the people you don’t want as reporters or bloggers.

People who are either so self-controlled they never say anything intemperate, or so passionless they have no beliefs that get them riled up are the sort of folks who have nothing useful to say: the sort of folks who don’t challenge a President who wants to attack a country which never attacked the US, has nothing to do with 9/11 and has no weapons of mass destruction.

This standard, the “court eunuch” standard, is exactly why you have a press corp that is worthless for holding those in power responsible. People with no strong beliefs, or whose ambition or fear is so great they never express those standards strongly, are the sort of people who know that bucking a President isn’t good for your career, and so who cares of hundreds of thousands of people die because you’re a gutless careerist?

There’s a phrase for modern PR techniques…

By Ian Welsh

On October 7, 2009

1 Comment

David Sirota has up an article on how public relations and media messaging is done today, and how’s it’s changed in the last ten years.

It’s good, and you should read it. But it’s also a lesson that there’s actually little that’s new under the sun, because all he’s really discussing is the Big Lie.

… the broad masses of a nation… more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

– Mein Kampf

To Be or Not To Be A Sheep

By Ian Welsh

On April 2, 2009

4 Comments

This picture of a huge crowd congregating on the Bank of England to protest the G20 meeting is worth looking at, but more interesting is this:

For a second straight day, French workers facing steep layoffs at a Caterpillar factory held four of their bosses at the U.S. manufacturer’s plant in the Alps, union officials said.

Short of the Soviet Union I wonder if there has ever been a population as saturated with propaganda and lies as the American one. Wonder how long it’ll be before such things happen in the US. Wonder if it does happen, if the SWAT teams will go in and start killing people.

Bankers lost trillions of dollars over the last 8 years due in large part to outright fraud, paying themselves billions in bonuses. Under both Bush and Obama, the response to their theft has been to give them trillions of dollars worth of money. Trillions have not been spent on helping people destroyed by the bankers greed, corruption, incompetence and theft.

If Americans continue to put up with this, they aren’t just sheep, they’re serfs.