Initial reaction from the White House and much of the pundit-sphere was to deny that the actions of Joseph Stack in Austin were terrorism. A few, including Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) disagree.

Had we been more willing to take an honest look at the causes of the events we do call terrorism, it wouldn’t be so easy to argue this is an isolated incident and a cowardly criminal act. While it’s pretty clear this was an insane act by one man alone, he knows his frustrations are shared by many. He hopes to be a catalyst, writing in his suicide manifesto:

I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.

I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less.

I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are.

He may have physically been alone, but in his mind burned the belief that he was waking up America. He saw himself as hero and patriot in a narrative we’re hearing more and more from fringes of the tea-party movement.

This is an act of political terrorism, and would have been clearly labeled as such if we were in the days of the LA Times bombing. But in our zeal to foster an us-against-them mentality, we’re pushing this false standard.

When you have groups of people with shared perceptions, a violent attack on the common enemy of those perceptions is going to be an act of terrorism. The 9/11 attack resonated in the Arab world because it was the banks and brokers that make the money from Arab assets that took the hit. The Oklahoma City bombing resonated with those who thought Waco’s Branch Dividians had their rights violated, and the Austin IRS strike is going to resonate with a minority who believe the government is evil incarnate.

We’re fools to try and argue it away with semantics.

UPDATE: Add Glenn Greenwald to the list who dare call it terrorism.

UPDATE II: Glenn Greewald on Newsweek’s terrorism stylebook pretzel logic.

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“Broadcasting Needs to Party Like It’s 1999” writes Harry Jessell in TVNewsCheck. He ticks off the once-great broadcast conventions like the NATPE whose last year in Vegas was a shadow of its former self.

He looks forward to the 2010 NAB Convention in Las Vegas this April, and tells legacy broadcasters they need a good party, and laments how few station badges are at the shows these days. The comments are even more revealing. One wag says it should be renamed NANB, for National Association of Non-Broadcasters.

We’re now seeing the fruits of an organization that saw the handwriting on the wall long before its legacy members did, and was open and accepting of new media. I remember not long ago a broadcast industry that said non-linear editing would never work and a motion picture industry that said film would never die.

Legacy television broadcasters have nobody to blame but themselves. Like the RIAA and radio before them, they were in total denial about the changing media landscape. Instead of embracing digital technology, they cried poor and used their diminishing political influence to block its implementation.

So new delivery mediums simply built infrastructure without them, and now they’re on the outside looking in. YouTube is delivering 1080p while even legacy networks are still delivering content in SD.

We’ll be at the NAB this year, and while it might be fun to look at the big powerful transmitters, that’s not where the leading edge is, and the terrestrial folks ought to just accept it and move to the final stage of grief; acceptance.

Which I suppose is a good excuse for a party.

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It breaks down into three major categories:

1. The Former Media Monopoly — This includes the New York Times and MSNBC. You’ll find their exemption under U.S.C §431(9)(B)(i). Their howling has included some great moments in hypocrisy.

   The New York Times (whom you’ll recall as the petitioner who claimed the first amendment rights of its corporation had been violated in New York Times v Sullivan) opined: “Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights.” Since this was an unsigned editorial, this is a corporation complaining that corporations shouldn’t have first amendment rights. Of course, they’re exempted.

   Keith “You Sir” Olbermann, in a special comment assailed the decision with the personhood argument. His comment is actually a work for hire, the property of a corporation and disseminated by it; but of course, they’re exempted. If they weren’t exempted, they’d  be first in line with an amicus brief for Citizens United.

2. Those in Under The Wire — In 2005, the chilling effects to first amendment speech was clearly seen by the blogosphere. The Internet isn’t even mentioned in the media exceptions of BCRA, but the blogosphere wound up almost entirely exempted by an administrative decision of the FEC. As such, the FEC under another board, could change its mind. If it had decided otherwise in 2005, bloggers would have fought for first-in-line position to deliver amicus briefs along with legacy media.
3. The Exempted Political Idea Industry — This howling appears the loudest to those of us on a myriad of political action lists. This is another monopoly seeing itself lose power. Their exemption came through their ability to navigate the complicated work-arounds that resulted in the lawyered-up’s ability to express political opinions on behalf of the people paying them to do so. They’re the middlemen now cut out because anybody can go to a media distributor and buy time, or go to a computer store and buy DVD blanks and fill them with political commentary.

Poltitical contribution laws were out of step with the way media is changing. It resulted in Citizens United not being able to spew a load of crap, while Fox News does essentially the same thing every day.

It causes folks like Margaret McIntyre to be fined a hundred dollars for expressing her speech, while the Swiftboaters get awards.

The politically protected pundits can’t seem to agree what the effects of this will be. Perhaps we’ll hear nothing but corporate shills morn ’til night, perhaps we won’t.

But one thing it will do is change the game in a big way, because this decision gave a lot of freedom to a lot of people, and took away a lot of monopolies from a privileged few and its been those privileged few responsible for most of the noise that’s being made.

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A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and too little knowledge isn’t in short supply over at Olbermann Watch. They’ve started this video series they call “Great Moments in Broadcast Journalism.” But the November 11th edition (#426) may unintentionally undercut their point.

Their standard open includes Edward R. Murrow in what appears to be a reference to his legendary “See It Now” broadcast that rebuked Senator Joseph McCarthy. But the clip they include appears to be Murrow introducing McCarthy’s “equal opportunity” appearance which Senator McCarthy was offered and accepted under the Fairness Doctrine.

Do these right wingers really want to use an example of an exercise of the Fairness Doctrine as a great moment in broadcasting? Sure undercuts a lot of talking points.

Episode #426 goes on to present Olbermann skewering Carrie Prejean for her latest round of hypocrisy and lack of judgment.

But I’m left wondering  if the folks doing the clip selects over at Olbermann Watch know what they’re looking at, or understand what happened when the “See It Now” broadcast titled “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,” and a subsequent one the following week was originally aired. It wasn’t McCarthy’s rebuttal that caused the outrage, it was the original report that revealed the demagogue from Wisconsin for what he was.

Those broadcasts were met mostly with silence on the Hill, but there were several rabid anti-communists (perhaps red baiters is a better term) who attacked Edward R. Murrow with the same zeal the anti-Olbermann website exhibits daily toward Keith Olbermann.

McCarthy’s denouement came when the public started seeing McCarthy for what he was because they were exposed to a lot of his rhetoric, not only through the televised speech on CBS but because of the increased visibility the broadcasts brought him, which is very much like what is happening to Carrie Prejean today.

Maybe they need to edit their opening, or perhaps they really believe the great moment in journalism was the use of the Fairness Doctrine to allow Joseph McCarthy an equal opportunity to attack people for not being as good an American as he was.

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One of the most important cases regarding mass political discourse was argued before an unusual early session of the Supreme Court Wednesday last. The case is Citizens United v. The Federal Elections Commission (FEC), and the ultimate decision may rewrite campaign finance law. Common Cause is justifiably concerned, but they’re just not being honest about the fundamental issue that made SCOTUS revisit the whole question of campaign regulation.

This is first and foremost a first amendment question. You see that clearly in the amicus brief from the American Civil Liberties Union:

This case involves core political speech protected by the First Amendment, long recognized as a fundamental foundation of our democracy. Such core political speech enjoys the maximum possible protection under our Constitution. Yet a federal agency claims the legal authority to prohibit the broadcast of such core political speech. We submit that this Court should redouble its vigilance in protecting the fundamental freedom in this case so essential to our very democracy and self-governance, and our very nature as a free people.

It’s very possible, listening to Common Cause, that you wouldn’t even know the First Amendment is involved. If you joined their webchat expecting to hear the facts in the case addressed, you’d discover the words “First Amendment” never appeared in the discussion, though they did receive questions about it.

Here’s the problem:

U. S. C. §431(9)(B)(i)

The term “expenditure” does not include—

(i) any news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication, unless such facilities are owned or controlled by any political party, political committee, or candidate;

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When John Paul I sloughed off that mortal coil, it was reported on automated country station KGBS-FM, Los Angeles as a live interrupt in a program generated by a machine that played musical selections from a series of tapes intermixed in real time.

When the somber announcement of the pontiff’s death ended, the next song played was Bobby Bare’s “Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goal posts of life.” There’s subtlety in the way words and images are put together, and we have a long way to go before machines have enough rules that they’re even good at it.

Google news has had tremendous problems with determining snark from straight reportage; their answer was to limit the sources they scanned.  But Google Ads still puts their netfoot in it with regularity.

The best I’ve seen recently is the google ads insertion (at least in my browser) in a great piece on scientists being driven to laughter and/or tears when they dropped by the Creation Museum.

The ad inserted:

Biola University 100%

Biblically centered education in an all-Christian community. Apply…

Even though all the words are right, and the context is perfect, the best place for an ad for a hundred-percenter Christian university is NOT in the middle of a piece about what stupid douchebags they are.

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When cable and high power satellite suddenly gave the media and the media consumer as many pathways as they could use to stream content and the 2000-channel universe began, something very important died. The ability to create and broadcast more worthy programming than there was room for in the pipe had an upside.

Before the FCC threw open the floodgates and granted new station licenses with abandon in the 1980s, there were relatively few outlets. Radio stations could employ whole staffs to produce shows that aired once. Sometimes they weren’t aired at all, and their production costs written off.

In the golden days of radio, KFI employed an orchestra whose job was to sit in the studio and be ready to play on a moment’s notice if called upon by the local announcer who was himself standing by in case the network feed failed. News departments at the early television and major full-service radio stations, even into the 80s, were large enough they could take over and feed content 24/7 if a new story caught the public’s attention.

Nothing saves energy like shutting down 2 days/week.

In mid 20th century Los Angeles, brush fires, floods, even a little girl down a well, commanded 24/7 coverage. The stations realized that was a part of their service commitment, and the licenses were so valuable and the renewal process so onerous, that overtime got authorized and journalists went without sleep.

Somehow, we’ve lost that. As Iran explodes in anger, MSNBC cries poor and runs Lockup:Indiana and Sex Slaves-The Teen Trade. Ten years ago that might have flown, but in the face of Twitter and Facebook’s minute by minute coverage, MSNBC looks out of touch. CNN cycles old programming, even though CNN International could be switched live to US Domestic viewers, but that brings up commercial concerns.

But last night, an isolated live CNN origination of Larry King Live with Christiane Amanpour crackles across twitter, and numbers soar. Today, CNN is in high gear doing live focused coverage. Perhaps this will convince MSNBC that news is important, even if its not something you can easily cover at a time when you don’t want to spend money. Or perhaps, like radio, NBC/Universal realizes the golden days of cable are numbered and you’re best to take every last dime out before the roof falls in.

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The near 60-year history of counterintelligence has been one of having no one in charge of the enterprise. The CI community is not organized or integrated to accomplish a national mission.

Rather, the various CI elements are part of a loose confederation of independent organizations with narrower and varying responsibilities, jurisdictions and capabilities.”

—Michelle Van Cleave

The Twitter social networking site became an international political football this week when the State Department deemed it so valuable in keeping the world abreast of conditions in Iran, that it asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled update and remain online.

The Islamic Republic first tried to control public dissent over suspicious election results by the old-school method of stifling journalists, but they were choking an already dying media and making their own situation worse by helping the decentralized alternative to mushroom.

This has led to a new kind of intelligence and counterintelligence activity, where the role of the “mule” is played by the Internet-astute in their offices, studies and bedrooms; an elaborate cat and mouse game, where Iranian Twitter users tweet information, that information is then repeated by others outside the reach of Iranian control, and the original tweets are deleted by the Iranians who originally posted them.

It’s accelerated the evoution of the citizen journalist, because when you remove the real source because you fear for their safety, you take the burden of the credibility of the content on your own shoulders. A lot of people are coming of age in this sudden change: the Iranian students whose bravery is an inspiration to the world, and the responsible users of the social media networks that are trying to help them by reading the shadows half a world away.

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Like so many others twits tethered to computers and net-aware devices by business or obsession, I dabbled with Spymaster from its “beta” days through roll out. It was easy to keep it running on a browser deep in a window stack on a powerful computer. I could click away at it until my virtual energy was depleted, building up cash and virtual weaponry not quite knowing what the right or wrong answers were, figuring things out as I went along.

There wasn’t much there there, but that didn’t matter; I didn’t have much “here” to give it. But then the unfolding events in Iran made the whole thing silly. It just seemed far more productive to spend my free ponder time trying to figure out what to retweet as truth and what to publicly question as disinformation, than figuring out which safehouse to buy and which weapon to sell to buy something more powerful.

There’s a lack of clear goals and strategy in Spymaster that suddenly was supplanted by a real world situation that I could play some small part in from the safety of my real-yet-virtual viewport on it. I could leverage what knowledge I have of the tubes to some real advantage; because out there in the streets of Tehran people are dying for an idea that is only hinted at in Spymaster.

When people are putting their lives on the line for real values and a laudable goal, it just seems silly to play with virtual weaponry when sneaking the right words past Iran’s oppressors could make some small difference.

UPDATE [4:05 AM Tehran Time]: I’ve just been identified on Twitter as an “Iranian Government Account.” This is a tremendous compliment, as it comes from a twitter user (@Persian_Guy) that is almost certainly an Ahmadinejad disinformation entity.

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Back in the day, when the federal government exerted far more control over the far fewer radio and television stations, an outbreak of hate-fueled domestic terrorism would have prompted at the very least a campaign of public service announcements pointing out that killing doctors or shooting up the Holocaust Museum is not the way to change a course of government that you think is wrong.

While I won’t listen to the width and breadth of Fox and Clear Channel, I got a full dose of Rush Limbaugh today who was blaming MSNBC for the media hate mongering and calling out Shepard Smith for his honesty and concern.

Gentlemen of the legacy media both right and left: Deregulation has not removed from you the responsibility to act responsibly, and to address the hate mongering that is leading to domestic death as a problem faced by all of us. It is not an excuse to blame the other guy and suggest your viewers and listeners stop tuning in the other network.

Limbaugh and Fox may choose to believe that its the other guy making the incendiary speeches, but when one network clearly has the eyes and ears of the vast majority of conservatives then they have the bulk of the responsibility to call for restraint when its the right wingers pulling the triggers.

Fox and Clear Channel need to start calling for restraint with the same zeal they’re using terms like “baby killer,” “Socialist” and “closet Muslim.”

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