Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Rabble Rousing

Not that any of you or your colleagues are rabble, of course.

Here's the summary of last night's meeting, for those who couldn't attend. I like these ideas a lot, for what it's worth.

Friday, November 24, 2006

More on Al Jay-zee

From the New York Sun:

Al-Jazeera English made its debut last Wednesday, and it took only a couple of days to discern that although one reason for its absence from American TV screens is political, another may be that the global range and scope of its reportage, were it to find an audience here, could prove an embarrassment to the relative parochialism of CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, et al.


Read the whole article.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

This Could be Fun

from Personal Democracy Forum:

Please join PDF's Micah Sifry and others for a discussion panel next Tuesday, November 28th:

Blogging and Elections
Tuesday, November 28; 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
Museum of TV & Radio
25 West 52nd Street, New York City

Blogging. "The new frontier" in campaign warfare (according to the New York Times). As the lines between journalism, advocacy, and campaigning become increasingly fuzzy on the Internet, elections are becoming a whole new kind of horse race. We have assembled some of the influential names from the online political arena for a look back at the impact of blogs on the 2006 midterm elections and a look forward at what we can expect in the making of the president, 2008.

Duncan Black, Publisher, Eschaton@atrios
Ana Marie Cox, Wonkette Emerita; Washington Editor, Time.com
Peter Daou, Publisher, Salon's The Daou Report
Patrick Hynes, Founder and Proprietor, Ankle Biting Pundits
Micah Sifry, Executive Editor, Personal Democracy Forum
Matthew Yglesias, Staff Writer, The American Prospect, Blogger, TPMCafe
Additonal panelists to be announced.

To purchase tickets and receive a $10 discount, please go to http://www.mtr.org/events/ss-06fall/ss-mnv.htm#blogging and enter the promotional code "midterm."

Al Jazeera English Gives Us More of the Same?

From Slate:

The News From Qatar
Al Jazeera English debuts.
By Troy Patterson
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2006, at 5:07 PM ET

It's been a week since Al Jazeera English went live, and the most-e-mailed story on the news channel's Web site is still "Al Jazeera English goes live." Please refrain from fussing about this special deployment of the word story—the article's main source is one of the channel's executives—and appreciate what so many people are excited about: The Anglophone extension of the 10-year-old pan-Arab network is beaming news to 80 million households around the world from broadcast centers in Kuala Lumpur, London, Washington, D.C., and Doha, Qatar. In the eyes of its constituency, the most urgent thing Al Jazeera English has said so far—topping cute little human-interest stories like "Why the West Needs Ahmadinejad"—is, "Hi."

U.S. cable and satellite companies aren't exactly tripping over one another to carry the channel, which maybe has something to do with the widespread belief that Al Jazeera has an anti-American bias. The vast majority of Americans who want to size up the channel for themselves have to head to its Web site, where you can sample 15 minutes for free or, for six bucks a month, stream it 24/7. Yesterday, delivering updates on an Israeli missile strike against Hamas officials in Gaza, the channel kept returning to images of two children wounded in the attack. Others might have detected something propagandistic in the way the camera lingered on their blood-splattered faces, but it just looked liked old-fashioned tabloid style to me. The last couple days of Al Jazeera English suggest that its main bias is the universal one in favor of juicy drama.

For instance, yesterday's installment of People & Power, a magazine show, led with a story on "the fight for the future of Mexico." What a silly duck I was to expect that it might concentrate on Felipe Calderón, who takes the presidential oath of office on Dec. 1, and the man he narrowly defeated, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who claims that Calderón stole the election. Rather, it was a look at two figures who "represent the extremes"—plutocrat Carlos Slim and Zapatista spokesman Subcomandante Marcos. This approach allowed for the introduction of theatrical elements (scenes of cops in riot gear, dancers in indigenous garb, and Marcos puffing on a pipe from behind his face mask) that combined with the report's cinematic style (time-lapse footage of traffic, electronic funk on the soundtrack) to give the whole segment the flavor of a promotional video. What was being promoted? Political theater.

The next People & Power report promised "a rare glimpse of absolute power in Turkmenistan." Pretending to be a tourist, correspondent Juliana Ruhfus tiptoed around the dictatorship of Saparmurat Niyazov, the kind of dude given to renaming the month of April after his mom. While Ruhfus told us that Niyazov controls the world's fourth-largest reserve of natural gas, she left us in the dark about the implications thereof. No, the tension of hanging out in her bugged hotel room and chatting up an anonymous taxi driver was enough; analysis was less important than atmosphere. Even the sportscasters here are aching for controversy: The most recent edition of Sportsworld featured a preview of the Ashes, the England-Australia cricket series, that rejoiced in profiling the Australian player least likely to speak in pre-approved sound bites: "In this desolate media landscape, Shane Warne is an oasis."

Al Jazeera's focus is the Middle East, of course—today's rigorous coverage of the killing of Lebanese Cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel has ceased only for a talk show dedicated to the Darfur crisis and featuring the reportage of, uh, Mia Farrow—but it's truly a global channel: "Bomb blast in Thailand ... " "Evacuees leave Tonga … " "For eastern parts of Europe, things are looking pretty miserable as well … " Well, that last one was just the weather report, but you get the idea. Al Jazeera English is covering the world more deeply and broadly than U.S. television news does and with an even greater respect for the laws of show business.

Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Evidently, You're Mad as H***

And you're not going to take it any more. Huzzah.

Please make certain to visit Maytal's blog and contribute to the discussion about your final project -- the more you all participate, the more the action the class plans will represent your interests. You might suggest some specific actions, perhaps some short-term and some longer-term too. As Maytal says, "Comment Away!"

Dissent about Dissent








Here's a few more (see below). Beyond the pale?

From another cartoonist who seeks to provoke, David Rees: some examples of Get Your War On. Be warned if you go to his website -- most of the cartoons are replete with shall we say colorful language.






Friday, November 17, 2006

Oh dear, here we go





Since the discussion this Monday is about whether there should be limits to political speech, especially during wartime, over the next few days I'll post some material to provoke discussion. If you have any good candidates to add, send me a link or e-mail. These from Ted Rall should get us started.

"Amplifying Officials, Squelching Dissent"

For Wednesday, from FAIR.

Patriotism and Dissent

For Monday, along with the DuBois essay, let's discuss this, from the late Sen. J. William Fulbright, in The Arrogance of Power:

To criticize one's country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment. It is a service because it may spur the country to do better than it is doing; it is a compliment because it evidences a belief that a country can do better than it is doing. In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste but its effect, not how it makes people feel in the moment but how it makes them feel in the long run. Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism, a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals of national adulation.


Thursday, November 16, 2006

Judge for yourself

What do you make of this?

From the New York Sun (who HATED my first book, btw):


The long-delayed sister channel to Al-Jazeera is set to make its debut this morning, but the new network's ability to build an audience in America is in doubt because major cable and satellite providers here have declined to carry the new television offering.

. . . . . . . .

A former ABC News correspondent who will be one of the main Washington anchors for the new network, David Marash, expressed some regret yesterday about the limited platform in America. "It's disappointing. Of course, you want to play to your home crowd if you can," he said.

Mr. Marash told The New York Sun that the distribution problems may give the network a slow start here but should become less important over time. "The cable-satellite deficit is a very temporary problem. I think in 10 years broadband through the Internet will be the distribution route of choice," he said.

The fledgling network continues to take flak from critics who fear it will mimic the original Al-Jazeera service, which has been accused repeatedly of being a mouthpiece for terrorist groups and for insurgents in Iraq.

"They've helped create violence, helped kill Americans, and helped create the civil war going on in Iraq," one critic, Clifford Kincaid, said. "Now, in addition to all the damage committed by Al-Jazeera Arabic, it is expanding. The only difference they have is some Western faces as window dressing."

Mr. Kincaid, who is an editor for a conservative press watchdog group, Accuracy in Media, said the new news outlet should receive close scrutiny from the American government."If Congress can review a foreign-owned company taking over American ports, they ought to take a look at the operation of a foreign-government sponsored television channel," he said.

Both the Arabic network, which went on the air in 1996, and the new English channel are funded by the family of the leader of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani.

Mr. Marash said he expects the concerns about the new channel to diminish once people actually get to see it. "I think there's been a lot of negative anticipation that is not in any way going to be rewarded," the journalist said. He said the new channel will offer "real network quality news but with a focus on the southern regions, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, somewhat at the expense of North America and Western Europe."

Nero fiddles?

From Agence France Presse:

Their caption:

Oil painting by the Iraqi artist Moayyed Mohsen, which shows outgoing US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld leaning back reading papers, with combat-boot-clad feet beside a weathered image of the Lion of Babylon atop a ruined plinth. The massive mural dominates the wall of a Baghdad art gallery in the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiyah.

Monday, November 13, 2006

Serendipidy, they call it

News as fresh as next week's assignments, from the Times:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Nov. 12 Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel that began a decade ago as an upstart, has became a thorn in the side of every dictator in the region as well as of the Bush administration.

Critics call it radical; its admirers lionize it. And the network continues to battle accusations that it is sympathetic to Al Qaeda and other extremists.

Several of its reporters have been jailed — one is in prison in Spain for ties to Al Qaeda — and its offices have been shut in almost every major Arab country at some point, and bombed by American aircraft in two wars.

Now, Al Jazeera’s journalists are working to transform the channel into a conglomerate with global reach. . . . . . .


Read the whole thing.

REALLY Fake TV News

From Democracy Now. See specially from 9:50-14:50 and 41:00 - 48:00.

For Monday:







And look here for the RATS ad

Friday, November 10, 2006

Ooooh, pictures!

Scroll down, and you'll see some images we'll discuss this coming week. Look through them and think about O'Shaughnessy's discussions about Single-Issue Evangelicalism and Party Propaganda. 'Though there are no examples here, we'll talk about Corporate Propaganda, too -- perhaps you might post examples on your own blogs?

UPDATE: I love it when you occasionally listen to me! Corporate Propaganda example here

. . . . and one example of anti-corporate propaganda here

G.W. Bush Propaganda: USA


Party Propaganda: USSR


Party Propaganda: Nazis


Propaganda: Single-Issue Groups

Example Set Four: Animal Testing



Propaganda: Single-Issue Groups

Example Set Three: HIV/AIDS

Propaganda: Single-Issue Groups




Example Set Two: Guns

Propaganda: Single-Issue Groups




Example Set One: Abortion

Net Neutrality

We'll discuss this at some length later in the semester, but for now, here's a pretty good ad against "deregulation" proposals that would allow large Internet Service Providers to privilege certain kinds of internet traffic over others. Think about McChesney's discussion about "deregulation" in the context of radio and television, and you begin to get a handle on what's at stake regarding public access to and control over electronic communication:


Politics in Spaaaace!

Yup -- some of the smartest, and most thoughtful, meditation on current politics has been on Battlestar Galactica. Seriously. Read this, from Salon:

Space balls

While politicians spent a campaign season avoiding the big issues, TV's bravest series has been facing them in thrilling fashion.

By Laura Miller

Nov. 10, 2006 | For the past month, while the national political conversation has concerned itself with racy military thrillers and antique racial slurs, the real issues -- the big, soul-scraping ones -- have been wrestled with in the wasteland of Friday night basic cable programming, on a channel otherwise devoted to no-budget thrillers about killer centipedes.

Surely you've heard by now (because we've certainly repeated it often enough) that "Battlestar Galactica," the new remake of the cheesy '70s series, is the most thrilling and trenchant dramatic series on TV at the moment (except, of course, for "The Wire"). Maybe you still haven't given it a shot because you just can't believe a show set on a spaceship could possibly engage you when you can watch the simpering narcissists of "Grey's Anatomy" instead -- in which case, you are an idiot. But if you've simply not yet gotten around to it, hurry: Rent the DVDs of Seasons 1 and 2 (they're short), and then hasten over to iTunes to catch up on the first handful of episodes for Season 3 because this one is not just about other planets; it's about our own.

The first season of "Battlestar" seemed daring merely for having the remnants of the human race persecuted by a genocidal, sanctimonious and devious enemy, the Cylons, who were not above sending suicide bombers onto the humans' ships. The series' troubled fighter pilot heroine, Starbuck, showed her darkest side when she was put in charge of interrogating a Cylon captive and tortured him without a tinge of conscience. (The Cylons, a kind of robot created by robots that were originally created by humans, are nearly indistinguishable from human beings, even under close scrutiny. The humans' position is that they're "toasters," and homicidal ones at that, but it's not always possible to maintain this position, as the story of the Cylon Sharon has demonstrated.)

At the end of Season 2, however, the show's creators executed a daredevil twist by scooping most of the characters (along with the remaining human population) off their ships and onto a dreary colony on a planet they called New Caprica. At the very end of the season finale, an overwhelming Cylon force descended, marching through the muddy streets of the tent city, and announced that they were taking over. Instead of trying to exterminate humanity, they were going to try to reform it. And the chosen method of reform would be a little thing we call occupation.

The two opening hours of Season 3 were, it must be said, unrelentingly grim. The humans, shivering in damp bulky sweaters and fingerless gloves, had mounted an insurrection. Gaius Baltar, the self-serving scientist and secret Cylon collaborator whom they had rashly elected president, was running a Vichy-like government that had become hopelessly implicated in the Cylon's brutal crackdowns on the rebels. Colonel Tigh, the former executive officer of Galactica, a leader of the resistance, lost his eye while being detained and interrogated, like many others, without charge or due process.

Some colonists, whether out of a misguided attempt to ameliorate the situation or out of bald self-interest, had signed on with the human police force that the Cylons set up to maintain order. They had to keep their identities secret, however, because the insurrection regarded them as collaborators. The Cylons just couldn't understand why the humans wouldn't behave. The humans just wanted the Cylons to go away.

The parallels to current events are obvious, but "Battlestar Galactica" has always kept more than one historical touchstone in play. The early scenes, when Secretary of Education Laura Roslin was sworn in as president because everyone above her in the civilian line of command had been massacred, cited the swearing in of LBJ after the Kennedy assassination. The scene of the shiny, terrifying Cylon centurions (a servant class of robots that actually look like robots) marching down the main road of New Caprica while the devastated colonists looked on was the Nazis marching into Paris.

The really audacious stroke of this season was showing us a story about a suicide bomber from the point of view of the bomber and his comrades -- no, it was more than that, because the cause of this terrorist was unquestioningly our own. We sympathize with the insurgents wholeheartedly. So when Colonel Tigh, a blood 'n' guts military man if there ever was one, insists that suicide bombing is the only way to end the occupation, the show leaves the question of whether he's right up to us. Is it worth it?

The humans in "Battlestar" don't have an overarching religious fanaticism to persuade them that it is. (The Cylons are the messianic monotheists.) So when Baltar confronts former President Roslin in her jail cell about the morality of the suicide bombing, and demands that she look him in the eye and tell him it's the right thing to do, she can't. Every time you start to get all starry-eyed and latch onto Roslin as the second coming of Josiah Bartlet, the show reminds you that it's a whole lot tougher -- on its characters and its viewers -- than "The West Wing" was. "Battlestar Galactica" may be set in outer space, with robots, in the far distant past, but it reminds us every week that the other TV shows are the fantasies. "This," as Roslin tells her stricken assistant in a recent episode, "this is life."

Thursday, November 09, 2006

More on the Midterms

from The Onion:

Republicans Blame Election Losses On Democrats

November 7, 2006 | Issue 42•45

WASHINGTON, DC—Republican officials are blaming tonight's GOP losses on Democrats, who they claim have engaged in a wide variety of "aggressive, premeditated, anti-Republican campaigns" over the past six-to-18 months. "We have evidence of a well-organized, well-funded series of operations designed specifically to undermine our message, depict our past performance in a negative light, and drive Republicans out of office," said Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, who accused an organization called the Democratic National Committee of spearheading the nationwide effort. "There are reports of television spots, print ads, even volunteers going door-to-door encouraging citizens to vote against us." Acknowledging that the "damage has already been done," Mehlman is seeking a promise from Democrats to never again engage in similar practices.

Aristotle and the Earl of Spencer

Another nice, although very different, response to the assignment, from Alana's Views

Hitting it out of the park

Our very own New England Patriot, and Wednesday's assignment. Good stuff -- check it out.

As usual

The Onion, America's Finest Newspaper, captures the real election story.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

For my money,

the place to be online today is Talking Points Memo. For this sort of thing, which JMM is tracking pretty carefully:

And from Sullivan County, Tennessee, where TPM Reader SJ tried to vote:

Went to my precinct to vote and all 3 machines were not working. This precinct has a lot of lower-income families and public housing. They finally got one of the machines going, but the lines were out the door - I waited close to an hour and had to get to work. I wasn't the only one - most of those leaving were young(er) working people more likely to vote Democratic. I'll be coming back later to vote, but how many of those that left will be able to do that? You would think the machines would have at least been tested and working before the actual election day.

We're not going to be able to post every anecdote like this that we receive today. It would be beside the point. We'll be looking for trends and patterns. But regardless of whether you subscribe to deep, dark conspiracy theories of GOP election trickery, voting should be easy, accurate, and fair. It's not. The system is broken.

-- TPM Reader DK

I think that THIS is the most important story today, not whatever modest shifts might take place in partisan alignment in the House and Senate (yawn), but the inescapable conclusion that the United States of America does not conduct free and fair elections.

Monday, November 06, 2006

"Who would Jesus vote for?"

Since he'll be on campus this week, perhaps you might like to "Meet Sam Brownback." Read it all the way through. Perhaps you might prepare some questions for him?

For the Ladies

Monday 11/6. 8:30 am. Trapped uptown -- no trains running, and 5,000 other people want the same cabs and busses. No way I'll make it downtown by classtime. Apologies. See you Wednesday. Meanwhile, take a few minutes and write one paragraph in which you define propaganda. . . . UPDATE: Read the next two chapters of O'Shaughnessy: we'll keep on schedule, and will do double-time on Wednesday to get caught up. So, fasten your seatbelts.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Friday, November 03, 2006