WATCHING YOUR PLANE CRASH

When that JetBlue plane made an emergency landing in Los Angeles the other day, passengers were watching the event live on television from their seats. The Telegraph in London reported:

People in offices, restaurants and gyms around America gathered around television sets to watch. The live footage, and speculative commentary, was shut off just before the pilot safely brought JetBlue Flight 292 down.

“We couldn’t believe the irony, that we were watching our own demise on TV — it was all too post-post-modern,” said Alexandra Jacobs, a journalist at the New York Observer.

A PRESIDENTIAL MEDIA ASSASSIN?

KIEV, Ukraine — A Ukrainian parliamentary commission has concluded that former President Leonid Kuchma was behind the September 2000 abduction of a prominent reporter. The headless body of Georgiy Gongadze was found in a wood near Kiev two months later.

EJC: Users to take charge of BBC website

BBC News Online is to allow unedited reader comments to be posted live for the first time in a raft of major developments to its website. The BBC says it receives more than 6,000 reader comments on a typical day but only around one in 10 is published because every offering currently has to be individually approved before publication.

The new system, which is basically a talkboard, will launch on October 10. The most contentious subjects will still be moderated, but otherwise the BBC will rely upon other users to report problems such as unacceptable comments.

Users will also vote on the most interesting comments posted and these will be given greater prominence, with some appearing on news pages. “This system will have a profound effect on our journalism and will change our relationship with our users,” [BBC producer Daniel] Mermelstein said.

When will BBC go Wiki all the way and permit readers to EDIT them?

Source: http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,7496,1576006,00.html - Media Guardian

MEDIA MARKETS SMOKING

Report Shows Schools Promote Tobacco to Millions of Students

Sixty percent of movies advertised on the in-school TV program Channel One portray smoking, according to a new report by Commercial Alert, titled “Smoking Class: How Schools and Channel One Promote Tobacco to Students.”

Such cinema portrayals of tobacco are highly effective in luring young people into the ranks of tobacco users — even more so than conventional advertising. It is estimated that each year smoking in movies recruits 390,000 new young smokers in the United States. Since January 1, 2000, Channel One has advertised at least 67 commercial motion pictures. Forty of these movies portray smoking.

Channel One is a for-profit company that distributes a daily commercial television program to more than 30 percent of all American teenagers in nearly 11,500 middle and high schools across the United States.

“Schools should never promote tobacco to students,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a nonprofit organization that protects children and communities from commercialism. “Channel One should be expelled from every school in the country.”

http://www.commercialalert.org/smokingclass.pdf

MEDIA WATCH

DXM reports on what America is reading:

There are 166 “Bush Says U.S. Must Not Retreat From Iraq” related stories, and there are 2,110 Kate-Moss stories via the Google (news). Great pics too. Of course she’s a model, or was ’til she made the cover of The Mirror UK.