LEADING DEM PRAISES FOX

Jerry Policoff sends this along:

Pennsylvania governor and former DNC chairman Ed Rendell appeared this morning on Fox & Friends, and complimented the network for its “very balanced” coverage.

“Fox has done the fairest job, has remained most objective of all the cable networks — you hate both our candidates,” Rendell said. “No, I’m only kidding, but you actually have done a very balanced job of reporting the news.”

Rendell, who is a supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton, also mentioned how FNC has not gotten “caught up with Senator Obama” (maybe he didn’t mind those “two hours of Obama bashing” a couple weeks ago).

BBC Redesigns News Site With Video Push

The BBC is rolling out a new look for its news Web site as part of an ongoing redesign of bbc.co.uk. The news and sport pages will now feature an embedded video service. The site will also include more promotion of the video services around breaking news and live events.

SINGER DAVID ROVICS ON ART BELL AND HIS PEOPLE

For over a decade I’ve made a living as a touring musician. As a hardcore news junkie, when satellite radio came into existence I was one of its very first customers, and since I got one I’ve been able to saturate myself with BBC World Service and the English-language broadcasts of public radio from around the world to my heart’s content. But for the many years before satellite radio, during my many late-night drives across the plains, deserts and corn fields of the US, choices were much slimmer.

In the early morning or late afternoon there was usually an NPR (Nationalist Petroleum Radio) station to be found, or, very occasionally, a Pacifica affiliate where I might listen to my favorite radio news programs, Democracy Now! and Free Speech Radio News. (At the very beginning, these programs could be heard on satellite radio via the Hispanic Radio Network, but that channel soon vanished from the satellite airwaves — over one hundred choices offered, but no news channel to the left of Al Franken…)

But late at night, there were four choices. On the FM airwaves, commercial pop anti-music of various prefabricated genres brought to you by ClearChannel. On AM, you could choose from rightwing Christian evangelists, Rush Limbaugh and Art Bell. The evangelists don’t really do anything for me, but when I was getting sleepy, I’d listen to Rush, because he’s always good for waking me up — the powerful desire to strangle someone tends to keep you alert. But most of the time, if I wasn’t tired, I’d tune in to Art Bell.

For those unfamiliar with Art Bell’s show, it was a corporate-sponsored, nightly, several-hour-long show that has since been passed on to other hosts last I heard, and can generally be found on at least two different AM signals anywhere in the country every weeknight, starting sometime after midnight, as I recall. He apparently broadcast from somewhere in Nevada near the infamous Area 51, where he and many of his guests seemed to believe the US military was experimenting with space aliens who had landed there some time ago.

His guests tended to be authors who had written books or made documentaries about aliens from outer space, telepathy, what all the ghosts are up to these days, Hitler being alive and living in the Antarctic, crop circles, and so on. Being a science fiction fan and one who has had personal experiences that have led me to at least consider the possibility that there is validity in some of these claims, about what Art called the paranormal, I listened with interest to Art and his guests, although usually it was fairly evident they were full of shit.

Listening to Art’s guests and to the men (and very occasionally women) who called in, I remembered the excitement I felt as a child, before I developed a more three-dimensional understanding of the world around me, before I developed a fairly solid capability for critical thinking, before I began to understand how to read between the lines of the biases of the various authorities, experts and pundits out there in the textbooks, newspapers and airwaves. I remembered the excitement of having secrets with certain friends that only we “knew.” My own pet theories as a child included the notion that cows were not as stupid as they looked, standing around chewing cud, that they were actually engaged in astral travel, using their apparent stupidity as a grand cover of some kind. I fairly well convinced myself in the existence of dragons and elves and other mythical creatures, long after I had realized there was no Santa Claus.

But the fantasy life of children can become very odd when practiced by grown men. Many, if not most, of Art’s guests and callers seemed to believe that the things they “knew,” such as their prevalent idea that the US military was hiding space aliens in Area 51, were phenomenae that only people like them and Art were being honest about. The rest of the media, society, and the powers-that-be were either ignorant about these realities, or, at least as often, were engaging in a huge, X-Files kind of coverup.

SARAH MEYER ON AL JAZEERA

Sarah Meyer writes from England:

ref Al Jazeera. I learn more about Iraq from my twice-daily viewing of al Jazeera news than on any US / UK corporate media programme. Al Jazeera also has a superb discussion program Inside Iraq:

I also regularly watch 101 East,and and Rageh Omaar’s ‘Witness:’

So perhaps Al Jazeera’s policy is changing, but I have not yet noticed anything restrictive which would stop me watching this program. Jazeera still puts the western media to shame - which is why, I guess, it is banned in much of the U.S. of Terror.”

TAX WINDFALL COMING? SUPPORTING MEDIA CHANNEL SAYS READER

Dan Beach writes from Florida

Hi Danny -

I’ve been thinking about what the best use would be for the $600 check which our government is dispensing to me in May.

I sure as hell am not spending it at WalMart (though an extra supply of duct tape and plastic might prove useful).

Your dissection of the financial crisis in this country has been groundbreaking and brilliant.
So in May, to help our economy, I can think of no better way than to pass my government check on to you.

I can think of no better use. And I would like to urge others to do the same.

Keep up the great work!

Thank you for thinking of us. Happy to hear what the rest of you think. Emails to Dissector @medachannel.org