new media Archive

Liberty Counsel, the right wing religious legal group famous for amicus briefs in “10 commandments in the courtroom” cases, says they’ll back George Rekers should he decide to sue, reports today’s Washington Times. The article quotes Matthew Staver, dean of Falwell’s Liberty University School of Law. Since Mr. Staver’s private practice took place primarily in Orlando, Florida there is a distinct possibility should there be an action, he’d be involved.

I’m not an attorney, just an old news guy fascinated by communication law, but I see two problems here.

First, there is a strong possibility that George Rekers is a public figure. Since New York Times v. Sullivan, public figures have had a tough time suing for defamation. The theory is that robust public debate trumps the rights of an individual who is an actor in that public debate.

“Sullivan” was the police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama and though he wasn’t even explicitly named, he believed he was held up to ridicule because of an advertisement in the NYT Times that attempted to raise funds to defend Dr. Martin Luther King against a trumped up Alabama perjury indictment.

Rekers was a founder and member of the board of a high profile organization that took an extreme position in an area of great controversy. Much of his income came from expert testimony in widely publicized cases that were extensively written about in the press. In two of these cases he was excoriated for testimony that was worthless and biased. This too was widely reported in the press.

When his activity, most of which he does not deny, became public knowledge, he was further elevated to prominence as the subject of the opening monologues on nearly every late night show, from Colbert to Craig Ferguson.

Should he file a case, that too will be newsworthy, and will have the additional protection that, because it’s litigation, it can be publicly discussed with impunity.

Second, we are now starting to see “he called me queer” cases being thrown out of court on the grounds that an imputation of homosexuality is not defamatory.

So once again, “poor” Mr. Rekers finds himself in the damnedest position. If he sues, the very defense in the case is going to highlight the struggle of a minority to even find a level playing field to argue its oppression against the person fueling that oppression. Rekers will find himself compared with the police commissioner of racist Montgomery, Alabama in the day of MLK.

In claiming he’s injured by being called gay, he will unwittingly call his own life’s work into question, because the very injury he’s claiming is one he has spent his professional life fostering.

He’ll serve himself up on a platter for every op-ed writer in the country that needs to fill 14 paragraphs with topical edginess, and they’ll be able to do it under the doctrine of qualified privilege.

Wouldn’t surprise me if he does sue. It’s the worst possible thing a man in his position can do, and he’s never failed to take the worst option before.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When William Randolph Hearst was the current incarnation of the devil we today call Rupert Murdoch, his premier columnist was one Westbrook Pegler. Books have been written about Pegler damning him with faint praise, and there’s no lack of material to trash him. He started as a sports reporter and columnist, then moved to politics becoming the chief attacker of FDR. He was, for his day, O’Reilly, Hannity and Limbaugh all rolled into one.

Time soured Pegler; he became a rabid anti-Semite and early proponent of the John Birch Society. But he was by all accounts a great writer. He was like Andrew Sullivan on steroids; somebody who could take a totally distasteful political theory and delight you with his description of it. His wit was lethal; he inspired the quote, “It feels good to have your throat slit by a professional.”

I wish I had him back for just a day, or even a small measure of his talent to describe what’s happened to the folks who sponsor the #tcot and #p2 Twitter hashtags. He was at his best when describing people in shouting matches with each other over meaningless fine points and irrelevant details. Even he might not be up to the task.

Hashtags are short tag descriptors that Twitter users include in their tweets so that downstream search engines and applications can perform automated categorizations. Both the left and the right have gotten into pissing contests in the last two weeks over what terms should be used, who may use them, and what they should mean.

Pegler would probably use a card game as metaphor. He liked those. Just when the players worked out what the winning hands were, and what all the chip colors meant, new players would arrive. They’d argue with the old players endlessly but then that argument would be eclipsed when even more players would show up with their own chairs, sit at the table and throw in a new deck of cards.

These twin catfights didn’t arise from conservatives being more anxious to monetize hashtags and website membership than liberals, or liberals unable to decide if good is enemy to the best or vice versa. Its because the players don’t own the card table, or the card room, or the game, nor do they make the rules. Twitter does that by allowing anybody to use #tcot and #p2 for anything they want, and unless that changes, we’re all arguing over the ownership of something we don’t own in the first place.

As a self-professed new media expert on Twitter, I’m expected to have at least one “next big thing” social media idea, but I’m so edgy that I’ve got two.

Twitter has now reached its late teens (in social media years) and has begun the process of cleaning up its childish things. It recently announced that it would start cancelling and reassigning moribund accounts.

Somebody who took a valuable username, tweeted one tweet and wandered off in a daze shouldn’t be a dog-in-the-manger for someone who would put that enviable 3-character moniker to good use.

That’s where my new social networks come in: two new sites designed to keep flakes from frittering away the valuable naming resources and web real estate of the big guys.

These are gateway networks, one each for Twitter and Facebook. New users who don’t pass a simple online Web 2.0 proficiency test at Twitter and Facebook are sent to my two networks for their trial runs.

I call them Fritter and Flakebook.

For as long as music has been recorded, the performer has been screwed. In the earliest days of the phonograph, field producers traveled the country finding new performers and (as the law describes it) “fixed” their performances as sound recordings. Most artists, as a condition of being recorded, discovered later that they’d been hit with a one-two punch. They signed away their rights to the performance to the record company, and often the rights to their songs to the field producer.

The Carter Family found this out when they tried to release songbooks of their legendary recordings, only to find out they’d signed over exclusive rights to producer Ralph Peer; over nearly a century the music industry’s exploitation of artists has been a national disgrace. Somehow this sad fact has escaped notice by the trade association of our broadcast industry, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB).

That is, until now.

The NAB has had a sudden attack of moral conscience, occasioned by the record labels trying to shake them down to start paying the performer of a work as well as the songwriter. They’re now suddenly standing up for the poor downtrodden artist. Until stations began playing records in the 50s, most music on the radio was performed live, by artists who were paid by the stations.

When commercial records took over at the rise of “disk jockey” shows, the musicians unions forced stations to hire “record turners,” but those have now disappeared as well, and they didn’t represent the recording artist, they represented the legacy musicians who were fired because they were no longer needed.

Through the rise of internet and satellite radio, the NAB stood by mute as those new media agreed to pay performance fees, often to the record companies who had usurped the performers’ rights through work for hire contracts. So the NAB’s sudden concern rings a little hollow, but not as hollow as their attempt to misrepresent performance fees as a “tax.” Paying a performer for a song’s performance on the radio is no more a “performance tax” than paying a station to run commercials is a “marketing tax.”

The NAB is too late. The downtrodden performers have already found a way out of the mess through owning their own labels and often distributing their own music. This means that the NAB is only fighting the RIAA for the older product. Performance fees for the new product will likely go right to the performer.

But the worst thing the NAB has done with this ruse, is to prove that it will say anything to make money. That’s the wrong thing for a trade association to do when it represents the companies who claim they should be trusted to hold public licenses to use the public airwaves to bring us news and “official information.”