The media (particularly the American Media such as NBC) still does not understand that the Internet generation does not want to sit and wait a full day to know what has happened in the Beijing Olympics. And we certainly do not want them to cut to commercial in the middle of the fracking opening ceremonies (incidently, this is why soccer is a horrible sport to watch on TV in the US, they cut to commercial, a goal is scored, and we completely miss it).

So, what happens when the mainstream media tries to control online content (such as Viacomm and Youtube)? This:

NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites.

In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.

As the first Summer Games of the broadband age commenced in China, old network habits have never seemed so archaic — or so irrelevant.

To borrow from Eyes East, this is Olympics 2.0, so stop trying to limit us, we will find ways around what you do.

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If there ever was a good time to exploit an international news niche market, the time is now on the opportunity to provide foreign news to American citizens. Sadly, many of these news organizations are going in the opposite direction:

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Paris, France—After a year long undercover investigation of the infamous news personality Stephen Colbert from the Colbert Report, information and graphics have come to light that beyond dispute shows Stephen Colbert’s hidden love for bears.

Stephen Colbert, best known for his bizarro Jon Stewart impersonations, often rants about the horrible threat that bears possess to the United States. Colbert (pronounced coal-bear, the t is silent), is the son of Italian immigrants who came over from Montpellier, France to bring the acts of miming to the uncultured American people.

The following graphics may be unsuitable for children under the age of five and any fan of the Colbert Report, please do not continue if you are faint of heart.

(more…)

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I will let this passage explain perfectly my thoughts on MSM’s failures:

Fairness and balance are appropriate goals for journalists. But being fair to sources and providing balance among them should not outweigh the need to be fair to the readers, and to the facts. And balance should not be reduced to giving various points of view equal time or space in a story. It ought to mean that truth gets treated like truth and lies get treated like lies. If you’re going to lose audience anyway, why not take a stand for something on the way down? Maybe that’ll inspire some more readers to stick around, too. Or even to take a fresh look at their local paper again.

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The fun really just doesn’t stop over at the Time Magazine with Joe Klein. It is finally nice to put the corruption of the Beltway Media into one great example. And it is not just Joe Klein, but sadly the Time Magazine and its editors for him, just read the following “correction” below that will appear tomorrow (found through Glenn Greenwald):

Editor & Publisher has obtained an advance copy of Klein’s correction, which will appear in Time’s print edition tomorrow:

Correction: I was wrong to write last week that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would require a court approval of individual foreign surveillance targets. The bill does not explicitly say that. Republicans believe it can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t. To read the disputed section of the bill, go to time.com/fisa.

Read the correction twice and then out loud just so you can see how strange that sounds. Joe Klein was so factually wrong that his whole article was absolutely pointless. Joe Klein and the editors involved need to be put on leave and monitored for a long time for Time to really restore its credibility in journalism.

Here’s another way to look at it, if Joe Klein is the supposed “liberal” columnist, then I’m a radical.

And I’m very much the independent moderate.

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The ongoing drama continues over Joe Klein’s continued laziness and ignorance on doing his job as a reporter. Sadly, what passes for journalism these days consists literally of the following:

 Seriously — this is really it, in its entirety:

In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.

Leave aside the false description of what Klein wrote.

Yes, journalism now is all about reporting what one side says, reporting that as news, and then stating what the other sides says. Therefore, as “some people say” (another favorite line that really means little) if you ever want to know what bad or yellow journalism (essentially) is all about, go read Joe Klein’s articles or get a taste of the journalistic satire at Atrios:

Fresh Thread
According to sources, Rick Stengel has 32 child rape convictions. Stengel has yet to comment on these allegations, and I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out if they are true.

Makes you wonder sometimes why no one has yet sued over such false allegations that really seem go beyond protections enshrined in the First Amendment into accusations that can be disproved.

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I can vividly recall the start of my rejection of mainstream media news the move from purely watching and reading news towards the use of online blogs. I was in college at the The George Washington University waiting up in the front of the line for the political show, Crossfire. It was a fun show at the time of “the left” vs. “the right” that GWU had just gotten exclusive rights to have on the campus to host just before an election season. I wanted to talk about President Bush removing the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as I had opposed him doing so at the time, but the coordinators behind the scene wanted to limit what people wanted to ask and even told the commentators on stage in advance what the question would be. Obviously this riled me up and jaded me enough to begin to see the downsides of how the MSM was behaving. Afterwards a few college friends introduced me to a few blogs and from there I began to develop a sense of the problems developing within the MSM.

Once the MSM started to open up and only care about profits, it was only a matter of time that an acute businessman like Murdoch would see the niches in the market and launch Fox News into a network that catered solely to the Republicans, what has surprised me is how long it has taken one of the other networks to finally delve towards the Democrats. Shaun Mullen over at The Moderate Voice finds an interesting story about MSM ideological positioning by Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times:

[A] story by Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times caught my attention because of his contention that CNN’s embrace of hyperbole in this presidential campaign season is not merely bad journalism, but a coldly calculated effort to position itself ideologically the way that Fox and MSNBC have.

In fact, writes Rutten:

“We now have a situation in which the three all-news cable networks each have aligned themselves with a point on the political compass: Fox went first and consciously became the Republican network; MSNBC, which would have sold its soul to the devil for six ratings points, instead found a less-demanding buyer in the Democrats. Now, CNN has decided to reinvent itself as the independent, populist network cursing both sides of the conventional political aisle — along with immigrants and free trade, of course.

“In other words, for the first time since the advent of television news as a major force in American life, the 2008 presidential campaign will be fought out with individual networks committed to particular political perspectives. Why does that matter? As far back as 2004, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that ‘cable now trails only local TV news as a regular source for (presidential) campaign information. In several key demographic categories — young people, college graduates and wealthy Americans — cable is the leading source for election news.’ Thus, for key segments of the electorate — groups rich in what the pollsters call ‘likely voters’ — the main source of political news is now a partisan, or at least, a politicized one.”

My only point with the difference is that CNN is not going towards an independent populist route, but rather the protectionist & isolationist position to fill up one of the two remaining niches not covered by MSNBC or Fox News (the last one left to fill would be the libertarian position).

These kind of shows are already split within Europe for many of the news outlets and I personally find it to be a detriment to good politics and an informed citizenry, but with that said, not absolutely detrimental to democracy as a whole, just unfortunately one that is sub-par in my opinion.

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