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By Daniel Domscheit-Berg
$15.64
By David Mamet
$18
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youtube.com
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America’s top military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, took to the Afghan airwaves Tuesday to apologize for the deaths of 27 civilians in an airstrike led by U.S. forces last week, according to The Christian Science Monitor.
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Based on this video, it seems Fox News viewers are so patriotic they don’t know anything about the origins of our country. During this little history lesson, Glenn Beck explains who Tom Paine was: “kind of the me. ...” In fairness, Beck made a disgusted face as he said it—the same one we were making.
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Is it unfair to bring up Mel Gibson’s troubles? After all, it’s been more than three years since the superstar allegedly blamed those “fucking Jews” for “all the wars in the world.” Gibson loses it in this interview, saying “I’ve done all the necessary mea culpas.”
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NBC’s “Tonight Show” meltdown has given plenty of fodder to the network’s late night competitors, who, for the most part, seem to side with Conan O’Brien over Jay Leno.
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By David Sirota — Thousands of miles from the San Fernando Valley’s seedy studios, the adult entertainment business is alive and panting in Haiti. Like any X-rated content, this smut is all flesh and no substantive plot.
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Flickr / Lee Carson
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The Spanish government is cracking down on television advertising that promotes weight-loss products and other related goods and services, including plastic surgery, by creating legislation that would bar the ads from being shown until after 10 p.m.
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“Lost” producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse guest star in this Onion clip, joking that the show’s fans are about to get more annoying than ever, driving their roommates and loved ones into emergency “Lost” shelters to escape amateur theories about parallel dimensions.
Posted on Jan 20, 2010
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The self-described pit bull made her punditry premiere with a guest spot on Bill O’Reilly’s show. O’Reilly wanted to know why liberals are so threatened by Palin (it’s the hair) and whether she thinks Nancy Pelosi is actually crazy. Someone get that man a falafel.
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Flickr / abardwell
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An excessively sedentary lifestyle could spell heart disease or even cause premature death, according to a new study, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, which gauged health (or issues therewith) according to the amount of time subjects spent sitting and watching television. However, TV isn’t the decisive factor in the mix—sitting for long stretches of time at work can also be hazardous to your health, the study found.
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Wikimedia Commons / Wiki edit jonny
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Simon Cowell is leaving Fox’s ratings monster to launch an American version of “X Factor,” which will allow older performers to compete with the kiddies. Cowell said “we’re hoping to find the American version of Susan Boyle,” the homely Scottish singer who exploded to international stardom with a stint on “Britain’s Got Talent,” another Cowell show.
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youtube.com
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This doesn’t bode well for next year, but it looks as if leaning ever to the right helped Fox News in 2009. The cable news channel, home to a host of conservative pundits (Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, etc.) pulled in its highest ratings ever, which was definitely not the case for CNN and MSNBC.
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The Associated Press reports on one of Congress’ urgent priorities: “Television viewers jarred by abrupt spikes in volume during commercial breaks may someday be able to give their mute buttons a rest.”
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Flickr / Alan Light
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So long, “Oprah”—in 2011, that is. Oprah Winfrey’s eponymous show went national in 1986, and, on Thursday, the talk show host and international media mogul gave notice when she’ll call it a wrap: Sept. 9, 2011, just a day over 25 years since her daytime reign began.
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On Tuesday, producers and fans of “Sesame Street” marked the 40th birthday of the super-popular children’s program—the most researched show in TV history—in New York City. Big Bird and friends were on hand for the festivities, of course.
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trt.net.tr
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A Turkish television series, “Separation,” caused a diplomatic clash between Turkey and Israel after an episode this week portrayed an Israeli soldier shooting and killing a Palestinian baby. The fictional scene was shown on Israeli television Wednesday and drew criticism from Israel’s foreign minister Thursday.
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By Chris Hedges — Read this brilliant and humorous chapter from Chris Hedges’ new book and marvel as the Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent makes sense of reality television.
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© 2001 Reese Erlich
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By Reese Erlich — In the fall of 2002, Walter Cronkite agreed to be interviewed about the pending U.S. invasion of Iraq. That interview was never published. Looking back at the transcript seven years later, Walter’s views proved quite prescient. Here’s some of what he told me.
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AP photo / Douglas C. Pizac
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Despite his fame, money and extraordinary résumé—he had been a Marine, pitchman, newsboy, ditch digger, talent show host and, of course, the most famous sidekick in the history of television—Ed McMahon came off as a likable everyday guy. Before his death Tuesday at the age of 86, McMahon even experienced the wrong end of the mortgage crisis, albeit with a Beverly Hills mansion.
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rackjite.com
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It seems that immigrant bashing isn’t the ratings fertilizer it used to be. Just ask CNN blowhard Lou Dobbs, who hitched his wagon to a xenophobia boomlet only to discover that angry white men are a fickle bunch.
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.everythingcuba.com
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The Obama administration is relaxing some of the restrictions on travel to and business with Cuba, launching a new initiative that will allow American telecom companies to set up cell phone and other services on the island nation.
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AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Chris Hedges — The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. Our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
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Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn
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By Chris Hedges — The Ten Commandments were for the ancients, and are for us, the core rules that, when honored, hold us together, and when dishonored lead to alienation, discord and violence. The worship of the free market has turned out to be an idol, and like all idols it has now demanded its human sacrifice.
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Flickr / AtomicPope
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By Chris Hedges — I visited the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles a few days ago. It is advertised as “the final resting place to more of Hollywood’s founders and stars than anywhere else on Earth.” We all have gods, Martin Luther said, it is just a question of which ones. And in American society, our gods are often celebrities.
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gov.state.ak.us
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Alaska’s ever-savvy Gov. Sarah Palin has gone and lassoed top D.C. lawyer Robert Barnett to help her broadcast her important life lessons to the world, most likely in the form of a book deal (surely being hatched now that Barnett’s on the case) and maybe even a TV deal for the “telegenic” Palin, says The Hollywood Reporter.
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abc.go.com
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By G.W. Schulz, Center for Investigative Reporting —
The inaugural episode of ABC’s newest reality television series did exactly as producer Arnold Shapiro told viewers it would: unabashedly celebrated the Department of Homeland Security. It also failed in every conceivable way to critically examine the largest reorganization of the federal government since World War II.
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original: drudgereport.com
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NBC has been taking heat for scheduling a book-pushing session with Ann Coulter, but according to the author, her “Today” show appearances have been canceled. Drudge adds that “insiders” at the Peacock say the network has banned ol’ skin and bones for good, though that seems too good to be true.
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AP file photo / Reed Saxon
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By Mike Farrell — The Hollywood-centric “Membership First” faction that has controlled the Screen Actors Guild’s national board for most of the last five years chooses tactics—misinformation, tough talk and over-promising—that undermine the union’s credibility.
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AP photo / Charles Rex Arbogast
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What a time for the world to lose Studs Terkel. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, activist and radio and television star died Friday in his adopted hometown of Chicago. Terkel was 96.
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What’s that? An Obama infomercial? Network TV? Wednesday night? Oh, right—here it is, in case you missed it.
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rockthetruth.blogspot.com
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There wasn’t a whole lot of love in the room for cable news channel MSNBC during a luncheon in Beverly Hills on Monday for television executives and actors from both ends of the political spectrum.
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Composite: wikimedia, flickr/coffee monster
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The Obama campaign is running a big media blitz on Wednesday night, with CBS, Fox, NBC and Univision all airing the Democratic presidential candidate’s muy mysterioso half-hour advertisement at 8 p.m., but ABC and the CW won’t be joining in the Obamathon.
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news.aol.com
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If the hierarchy of staff salaries in the McCain/Palin campaign has anything to say about what Republicans really care about this election, then voters will likely be unsurprised that the McCain camp’s highest paid individual these past couple weeks is none other than Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist, Amy Strozzi.
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Now we know where John McCain has been getting his campaign ideas: 1960s camp television. My friends, who is the Batman? And why is he always palling around with criminals?
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Composite by Truthdig
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While sister company Viacom is still suing YouTube for $1 billion, CBS is hoping to get some cash out of the Web video mecca a more polite way. The Tiffany Network has had some success online, and currently has one of the more popular YouTube channels, but the eyeball business isn’t as straightforward as it used to be.
Posted on Oct 13, 2008
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collage: Flickr / videocrab / transplanted mountaineer
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Flush with cash, Barack Obama has purchased air time on at least two networks for a half-hour special to air a week before the election. No word yet on how much a half-hour of prime-time sweeps air costs, but it’s certainly more than Ross Perot paid back in ‘92.
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By Andy Borowitz — GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said today that she was “delighted” with her performance in a much-publicized ABC News interview with Charlie Gibson and gave credit to her “trusty Magic 8-Ball” for helping her come up with answers to “some darn tricky questions,” according to this satirical report.
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Satire by Andy Borowitz —
A member of the U.S. Olympic diving team was disqualified from competition today when it was learned that he did not have a sufficiently compelling human story line to exploit on the NBC telecast of the worldwide sporting event.
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“Audition” details the life story, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes, of a pioneering journalist-entertainer who reported the news while making it in ways both admirable and troubling.
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MTV has become quite the changeling, now resembling not in the least the network that debuted in the early 1980s. Recently, the cable mainstay announced it will start airing political advertisements, and Team McCain seems to be first out the gates with this “Both Ways Barack” attack ad.
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By Joe Conason — Despite all the feigned outrage fanned by the mainstream media and the right-wing noisemakers, Wesley Clark—retired four-star general, former supreme commander of NATO, wounded and highly decorated veteran of ground combat in Vietnam and a military man to his core—assuredly did not denigrate the war record of John McCain when he talked about the Republican candidate on television last Sunday.
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Flickr / soldiersmediacenter
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Coverage of the Iraq war on American newscasts gets a fraction of the airtime it has in past years. Some network journalists complain that they have to beg to get Iraq stories on the air. Although the war in Afghanistan has recently gotten more coverage, no American network has a full-time correspondent on the ground there.
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By Eugene Robinson — He knew he was a big deal—he had a healthy ego and an accurate sense of his accomplishments. But I’m confident that he would be stunned at the magnitude of the reaction to his death, especially among people who never met him.
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washingtonpost.com
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The third time’s no charm for Fox News, which has been forced yet again to apologize to Barack Obama for making racist comments against the presumed Democratic nominee. This marks the third “oops” moment for the television channel, all in the span of only two weeks.
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criminal-justice-online.com
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If you thought reality TV was only for wannabe warblers, petulant teens and bug-eating fetishists, guess again. The Department of Homeland Security, “as well as several other government agencies,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, is working with ABC on a new “unscripted” show called “Border Security USA,” brought to you, creepily enough, by the executive producer of “Big Brother.”
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By Eugene Robinson — That might be going too far for a show that still averages 28.7 million viewers, but ratings are down. In part, the cause is the presence of an even more exciting reality show on television, and it’s not even really a show.
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By David Sirota — If television is the nation’s mirror, then no two TV characters reflect the intensifying “two Americas” gap better than Chris Matthews and “The Wire’s” Jimmy McNulty.
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The Sydney Morning Herald
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Iranian President and up-and-coming schoolyard brawler Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared in a televised address Wednesday his country’s willingness to “bloody the enemy’s nose” in order to defend its national sovereignty. At issue is Iran’s controversial nuclear program, which Ahmadinejad has declared is negotiable only with U.N. nuclear officials, not the politicized Security Council.
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A few months ago columnist Amy Goodman argued that the principal beneficiaries of our current campaign finance system are the media conglomerates that rake in all those advertising dollars. That’s especially true this week as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama bombard Pennsylvania with commercials.
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New Iranian President Wants to Heal ‘Old Wound’ With U.S.
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