- Branded Twitter pages are here! But only, apparently, if you’re a progressive news outlet. Seriously, Al Jazeera? What’s next, RT/ Russia Today / Komrade Kommuniqué? Rhetorical question.

- Real headline: Barack Obama controls media more than presidential predecessors.

President Obama grants many more media interviews than his predecessors, but holds far fewer impromptu question-and-answer sessions, according to data compiled by a professor who studies presidential interactions with the press.

By doing so, Mr. Obama and his administration have more control over who asks questions and where they are answered …

… However, Mr. Obama has comparatively avoided Q.&A.s with scrums of reporters, according to Ms. Kumar, answering questions at 94 photo opportunities and other such sessions in his first three years. Mr. Bush had spoken at 307 such sessions after three years in office, and Mr. Clinton, 493.

Of course. Interviewers submit questions to the President and his team, who then choose what they want to answer. If the questions go unvetted, they don’t get asked. This is why he avoids those impromptu Q and As — and interesting how his predecessors welcomed them.

- Compare the above to this from Newsbusters: Obama’s Been Skipping the White House Press Corps for Network and Social Media Softballs.

- Interesting: NYT reporter asks for readers’s help in identifying bomb.

(more…)

- DHS is monitoring Drudge Report, social networks:

A “privacy compliance review” issued by DHS last November says that since at least June 2010, its national operations center has been operating a “Social Networking/Media Capability” which involves regular monitoring of “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites and message boards.”

The purpose of the monitoring, says the government document, is to “collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture.”

- Piers Morgan tells Andrew Breitbart that he’s “evil.” At least Breitbart’s sites have never hacked phones on his watch.

- “Someone had a good time at her double nickel birthday!”

- Gawker: “N word did not get writer fired.”

- Comedy gold: Kremlin’s smear attempt on blogger backfires.

(more…)

- Politifact defends its lie of the year:

We’ve read the critiques and see nothing that changes our findings. We stand by our story and our conclusion that the claim was the most significant falsehood of 2011. We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.

- Who owns a Twitter account: the employee or employer?

- Michael Medved deconstructs a wonky poll used by media to declare that marriage is dead.

- Only Jay Carney could make an enemy of the media.

- China jails blogger for 10 years:

A Chinese court has handed down a 10-year jail sentence to Chen Xi, the second dissident in four days to be convicted of inciting subversion through online essays …

… The intermediate people’s court in Guiyang, in south-west China’s Guizhou region, tried Chen Xi, 57, on charges linked to more than 30 political essays he published online.

“The judge said this was a major crime that had a malign impact,” his wife, Zhang Qunxuan, told Reuters by phone after the trial. The judge said Chen was a repeat offender who deserved a long sentence, she added.

Chen has insisted he was innocent, but will not appeal. “The court ignored all the points raised by the defence lawyer at the trial, so what point is there in appealing?” said Zhang.

- Google to unveil an “iPad killer” in six months. Yes! Another device upon which to run the clunky, fragmented Android OS! Any hope of an “iPad killer” died when HP screwed the pooch when it tanked its WebOS mobile devices after buying out Palm. So no, save your iPads and media-reading apps. (Steve Jobs disliked unions and was a capitalist, so I feel justified.)

- As Argentina seizes newsprint, freedom of the press suffers:

What’s the oldest trick in the dictator’s handbook? Why, to seize the newsprint. Fresh from a big electoral win, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez has pulled that hoary stunt, topping even Hugo Chavez.

By a vote of 41-26, Argentina’s Senate passed a law to nationalize all newsprint, of course in “the national interest.”

(more…)

- AP scolds reporters for Tweeting about OWS arrests.

- Did the Newspaper Guild just endorse #OWS?

Sure sounds like it.

Guild launches online forum for journalists covering protests
09 Nov 2011

Covering the Occupation Movement can be hazardous.
A growing number of reporters and photographers have been tear-gassed, threatened with arrest or otherwise bullied by police. And while overzealous authorities appear to be the worst offenders, protesters also have been known to turn on anyone who seems to represent “corporate media” — most likely a media worker, sometimes a union member, trying to do a job.
In response, the Newspaper Guild has launched a Facebook page, called “Occupied Journalists,” to serve as an online forum for media workers to share survival strategies and anecdotes from the streets. Sara Steffens, a staff organizer in Oakland for the Guild and its parent union, the Communications Workers of America, said the online forum began when “we started hearing a lot of reports from all over the country from journalists running into trouble covering the protests.”

Police can tell the difference between a journalist simply covering what’s happening and a journalist who’s forgotten their objectivity and has joined in the protests.

I don’t recall them doing anything like this with the tea party, do you? Of course, the tea party didn’t have altercations with the law and respected our men and women in uniform. [via]

(more…)

- Google chief: Internet keeps government honest.

Broader adoption of the Internet will keep governments on their toes as wired-up citizens exercise their newfound power to check rights abuses, Google chief Eric Schmidt said on Saturday.
“In nations and communities around the world, citizens are turning to online tools to keep their governments honest,” he told business leaders on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Honolulu.

“Whistleblowing has never been so easy,” he said.

- Requisite boring interview with misguided Gloria Steinem: “We need to be angrier.” Really? Angrier than this? Not one question for Ms. Steinem about the number of rapes at the OWS demonstrations and the need for some to create “safe women” zones because the movement overall is unsafe for women? Steinem doesn’t want to site that sarcastically as “progress” right along with her views of abortion? It’s 2011 and progressives can’t even have a protest without raping everything in sight.

- Forbes weighs in on the Chelsea Clinton hire:

But you can’t really buy authority. What you get instead is attention, and it’s not clear networks know the difference. (Have you watched the Today Show lately?) NBC in particular is hooked on this fame trading. Clinton joins a stable of other famous media-political offspring, including Luke Russert, Jenna Bush Hager, Meghan McCain. The message here is that fame and parentage confer journalistic authority, rather than talent or an ability to get the story right. If you’ve grown up in the media bubble that no doubt helps you understand how it works. But such experience doesn’t give you an insight into how the real world works.

(more…)

- The Fox News/Google debate was the highest-rated debate yet.

Last night’s Fox News/Google GOP debate was the highest-rated primary debate yet, averaging over six million total viewers during both the 9 and 10 PM hours. In the key adults 25-54 demo, the debate ranked second behind MSNBC’s September 7 debate.

- Pew Research’s annual poll shows exactly what we all know: people really, really don’t trust the media:

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has been tracking views of press performance since 1985, and the overall ratings remain quite negative. Fully 66% say news stories often are inaccurate, 77% think that news organizations tend to favor one side, and 80% say news organizations are often influenced by powerful people and organizations.

(more…)

If they’re not stumping for him and serving as an unofficial economic advisor during the 2008 campaign or footing the bill for his swearing-in ceremony, they’re accommodating the 2012 campaign with special deals involving their new advertising product.

This seems pretty nuts. Correct me if it’s something completely in the ordinary for a federal agency:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has bought a Google advertisement to steer people searching for “ObamaCare” to a page that is customized to detect searchers’ locations and steer them both to local health insurance information and to a list of “what’s in the law for you.”

“We are using a bunch of search term[s] to help point people to HealthCare.gov. Part of our online efforts to help get accurate information to people about the new law (i.e. also use Facebook, Twitter, blogs and webcasts),” an HHS official confirmed by e-mail.

Is this customary? Or is this the government using your tax dollars to steer Google searches to pages which feature only complimentary content about the most unpopular pieces of legislation from this administration?

I don’t regularly watch MSNBC, but curiosity got the better of me tonight. For no special reason, I found myself wondering what THE Place for Politics—I can’t bring myself to use the network’s new slogan—would say about the midterm elections the day after. So I tuned into The Rachel Maddow Show.

Let me first acknowledge that the puckish Ms. Maddow is has a certain insouciant charisma and seems quite comfortable on air–a natural.

Nevertheless, by the end of the hour, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the lass. If tonight’s menu is representative of the content and style of Maddow’s eponymous program, it was disappointing to see her obvious talent wasted on the wholesaling of bitter schadenfreude and age-old class-warfare.

Why do I say this?

In the show’s first segment, while positing that the newly House-dominant Republican party would be unwilling to compromise with President Obama on anything (a curious prejudgment), Maddow managed to work the recent BP oil spill into her monologue, ostensibly referring to inevitable upcoming House-Senate negotiations on energy legislation. (more…)

There is more than one way to manipulate the public, and the progressive movement has turned it into an art form. Less than one week after their AstroTurf rally in Washington DC, where unions and socialist organizations foot the bill to bus people to the nation’s capital city, the Daily Kos has developed a new AstroTurf program with the objective to use Google to trash Republican Candidates.

Here at Daily Kos, we are going to engage in very different, but still very important, form of election activism. It’s a type of activism no one else is working on, and it is well-suited to our medium as a blog. It’s a grassroots-based search engine optimization campaign, which I call Grassroots SEO for short.

The purpose of the SEO Astro Turf program is to influence undecided voters by having them read negative articles about Republican candidates for Congress. This exploits the fact many undecided voters conduct pre-election research via search engines like Google.

Kos is urging their members to sign up for a program to conduct research and then link damaging articles with the purpose of manipulating them to the top of the Google rankings where they will be the first thing read when an undecided voter is researching their candidates. (more…)

Progressives are up in arms after Google appears to have caved on Net Neutrality by partnering with Verizon to abandon their core aims. Writing at Huffington Post, Josh Silver of the ironically named Free Press laments:

For years, Internet advocates have warned of the doomsday scenario that will play out on Monday: Google and Verizon will announce a deal that the New York Times reports ‘could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.’

Let us, as the postmodernists say, deconstruct this.

What a shocking thing it would be if people were allowed to get higher speed service by being — gasp — “willing to pay for the privilege.” Why, that’s almost like — bigger gasp — voluntary trade nudged by price signals. Last I checked, a Ferrari costs more than a Hyundai and paying more for the first was still legal.

What is an “Internet advocate” anyway? Since the Internet is not a cause, and — Chicken Little pronouncements aside — is in no danger of disappearing, one has to wonder what Silver had in mind. Could it be along the lines of “homeless advocates,” i.e. those who wish to use the power of government to violate the property rights of some in favor of others? (more…)

Using the NAACP’s resolution against Tea Party “racism” as a model, I hereby ask YouTube to repudiate their racist users.

I take no issue with Google’s YouTube community. I believe in freedom of assembly and people raising their voices in a democracy. What I take issue with is the YouTube’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements. The time has come for them to accept the responsibility that comes with influence and make clear there is no place for racism & anti-Semitism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry on their website.

The following are real comments from YouTube users on the Black & Right channel alone. They have not been Photoshopped and distributed by Think Progress.

The following are a select group of comments from just one of my videos….

y cant i have a white History Month becuz it would be racist but its not racist when nigger get one its not that is fucking bull shit
— The219redneck

Niggers should go back to the forest where they belong! There only semi usefull as slaves after all.
— Zcabbage

black history month should be where all the niggers go back to slavery to pick the cotton for the white folks. KKK ALL THE WAY!!!!!!!!!
— 94Garay

(more…)

The President’s recent commencement address to Hampton University students in Virginia counseled the young minds about the dangers of being bombarded by too much information, but who knew that Joe Lieberman was listening when the President said:

Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations; information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment. All of this is not only putting new pressures on you; it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.

The President also schooled the kids on how difficult it is to sift through all of the information on the web.  Perhaps he thinks the government should help us by winnowing out some of the inconsequential information?

All of that mind-boggling information and the new pressures on our country and our democracy must have triggered a response in this “independent senator” from Connecticut (who caucuses with the Democrats of course, just like the other “independent senator,” Bernie Sanders of Vermont), as Joe Lieberman has offered legislation that he claims will “protect” America during an emergency by giving the President power to shut down the Internet. (more…)

Leave it to the Obama administration to come up with yet another bald power grab, in the guise of “helping” us: now the FCC, invoking an ancient  law designed to regulate the telephone industry, wants to lay its heavy hand on broadband:

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to begin the controversial process of reframing broadband service under communications law, a move aimed at clarifying the commission’s regulatory authority over the sector after a major legal setback.

By a three-to-two vote split along partisan lines, the FCC approved a notice of inquiry asking for comments from the public on how the agency should proceed with Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposal to reclassify broadband as a regulated telecommunications service, while enacting checks against the commission’s oversight authority.

Naturally, in the emerging American version of Italian fascism, major cyber-players are on board with this in order to let the government do their dirty work for them, and stamp out potential competition before it can gain a toehold in the marketplace — all, of course, in the guise of “protecting the consumer.” From My Way News: (more…)

Did we just hear Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal try to blame local journalists for his ‘misspoken’ words about his Vietnam war record? When Blumenthal was asked at Tuesday’s press conference why he didn’t correct published accounts of his Vietnam service, he said:

There were a few articles, not many. I am responsible for my own statements….I can’t be responsible for all the articles, I may not even have seen them. ….sometimes journalists do make mistakes.

Cr: Chion Wolf

Really?  Sure, journalists get quotes and background wrong from time to time but civil servants, who are in the public eye like Blumenthal, often call right away to demand a correction. In fact, that’s just what our A.G.’s press staff usually did with me – even when I wrote the quotes exactlyas he said them during phone interviews. Case in point: (more…)

One of the first things that Barack Obama did after being swept into office on the wings of “hopenchange” was to sign an executive order that would close the terrorist detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. President Obama gave a one-year deadline after which, he triumphantly promised us, the facility would be closed. Well, we are at one year plus ten days after the signing of the order and Gitmo is still open. Yet few stories expressing outrage about this lapsed promise have made the rounds in the Old Media.

On January 22, 2009, Obama signed the Executive Order that gravely asserted that Gitmo would be closed “no later than 1 year from the date of this order.” That was January 22, 2009. It is now February 3, 2010. I’d say a year and ten days after the order was signed just might constitute more than “no later than one year,” wouldn’t you?

Naturally, last year when Obama signed this order the Old Media covered it quite heavily. It was big news and was represented as an example of Obama’s fulfilling a campaign promise. All one need do is type “close Guantanamo executive order” into Google and page after page of Old Media coverage of the signing of the EO will be discovered. (more…)

Apple has announced its new iPad tablet computer, marking the dawn of a new kind of device that bridges the gap between phone and laptop. Last November I wrote about the possibilities of this device for the print world over at Big Hollywood. In short, the potential is there to revolutionize the way we read print, from newspapers, books, magazines and comics?

The cost of paper, shipping and distribution are a problem for publishers. So is making their products easily available to consumers. Stores only have limited space and money to carry books. The internet has been a great boon in that regard in terms of sales, but reading on a computer screen can be an unappealing prospect to most people. The iPad is designed to change all that: a hand-held, touch-screen device that is high resolution and extremely light (about a pound and 1/2). It’s not only lighter than a book, you can carry hundreds of books and magazines in it and read them anywhere you’d take a book.

The print business is salivating over this device, seeing it as a platform that will do for print that iTunes did for music. Except iTunes has sold a lot of songs, but it has also impacted the music business in ways few could have foreseen. Industry insiders think it destroyed the album as people started buying songs separately.  Moving their content to digital it could have similar effects on publishers and the press, but the fact is, times are changing and print has gotten very expensive. (more…)