Marketwatch via IWantMedia.com: News Corp: 2010 Will Be ‘Year of Stability’

News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch says he sees “some encouraging trends” in most of his company’s businesses, adding that he expects 2010 to be “a year of stability.” Also, Murdoch says there will probably be “half a dozen” e-readers of some kind on the market shortly.

NOW WE HAVE SEEN EVERYTHING: RIGHTISTS TO PROTEST FOX

Julie reports on the Newshounds Blog (T/h) to Bradley Laing

Okay, so it’s no secret that I’ve got beef with Bill O’Reilly. He gets nutty
about stuff – like two nights ago when he told Brit Hume his reporting was
non-partisan. He has his vendettas – take the ACORN-bashing mission. He went
after abortion doctor Dr. George Tiller, and in my mind contributed to his
murder. He says stuff he shouldn’t. He allows his guests to be water-carriers
for some extreme right-wing talking points. He did do something semi-right
once, though: He pooh-poohed the “birther” movement (those nutbags who believe
President Obama was born in Kenya) as “bogus,” “nonsense,” and “dumb stuff.” As
reported by the Huffington Post, The O’Reilly Factor investigated the birther
thing in July, deemed it “bogus,” and continued to deny its validity. And now,
the damndest thing is happening: That nutty-as-a-fruitcake birther lady, Orly
Taitz, is organizing a protest against O’Reilly. In New York. On Veterans Day.
Outside Fox headquarters in Midtown. This is outside the normal realm of things
on Fox, so help me, folks, think this one through.

Pentagon pursuing new investigation into Bush propaganda program

The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General is conducting a new investigation into a covert Bush administration Defense Department program that used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage.

Last May, the Inspector General’s office rescinded and repudiated a prior internal investigation’s report on the retired military analyst program, which had been issued by the Bush administration, because it “did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.” Yet in recent interviews with Raw Story, Pentagon officials who took part in the program were still defending it by referencing this invalidated report.

PROJECT IN EXCELLENCE IN BLOG JOURNALISM REPORT

Reports that as many as 20 people may have been involved in or observed a gang rape of a 15-year-old girl outside a high school homecoming dance in Richmond, California, touched a nerve in the blogosphere last week, provoking a torrent of outrage and concern.

For the week of October 26-30, more than a quarter (26%) of the links to news-related stories from blogs were about the shocking case, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Various media outlets have reported that the incident may have lasted for as long as two hours and at least seven suspects have been arrested, most of them teenagers.

Many online commentators blamed the bystanders to the crime as much as those who actively participated. And for many the incident raised larger questions about American society and culture. The case generated much more attention online than it did in the mainstream press, where it filled only 1% of last week’s newshole.

AP: JOURNALISTS BANNED BY INDIA TO FOLLOW DALAI LAMA

NEW DELHI — The Indian government refused Thursday to allow foreign journalists to cover the Dalai Lama’s visit to a northeastern state at the heart of a long-running border dispute with China.

Permits allowing foreign correspondents to travel to Arunachal Pradesh state were not given, and the government revoked passes previously provided to four of them, including two Associated Press journalists.

Foreigners require special government permission to visit the mountainous state.
“We are incredibly surprised and disappointed to learn that reporters’ visas to Arunachal Pradesh have been canceled ahead of the Dalai Lama’s visit,” said Heather Timmons, president of the New Delhi-based Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

China has strongly opposed the Tibetan spiritual leader’s visit to a Buddhist monastery in the Arunachal Pradesh town of Tawang beginning Sunday.
Revolution in a Box

TV WILL NOT DIE

Foreign Policy: It’s not Twitter or Facebook that’s reinventing the planet. Eighty years after the first commercial broadcast crackled to life, television still rules our world. And let’s hear it for the growing legions of couch potatoes: All those soap operas might be the ticket to a better future after all.

LETTER:

Kevin Keating writes about after previewing my film Plunder: THE CRIME OF OUR TIME

I enjoyed the film thoroughly, it is THE immense subject to address, you did good….

“The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prussian-German empire.” (Geithner-Obama-Moore-Krugman)
KARL MARX

London, 1873

LES LEOPOLD ON BETWEEN THE LINES RADIO: WHAT WE HAVE TO DO

What I’m about to say now, is virtually outside the pale of the debate, but I actually think that it’s the only thing that’s going to prevent us from heading into what I call the billionaire bailout society. I don’t think we’re living under capitalism any more. We’re living in a new kind of world where money is still accumulating in the hands of the few and it’s a system that’s now set up with institutions that are “too big to fail,” such that we bail them out when they get into trouble. We transferred more money a year ago from the taxpayer to Wall Street. We transferred more wealth than at any time since slavery. It was an enormous amount of money. The estimate isn’t just TARP money. All the other guarantees we put into place come to about $13 trillion.

So, here’s what we basically have to do is undo the experiment. I hate to say it, but I am a Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower Republican. That’s how radical we have to be. We have to go back to Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Glass-Steagall is not enough. Even if we broke institutions into two large institutions that had the Glass-Steagall wall between them, that’s not good enough. They have to be small enough to fail. They can’t be so large that when they get into trouble it forces us to bail them out; they have to be small enough to actually fail. We have to go back to the trust-busting days of Teddy Roosevelt, who was riding on the crest of the populist progressive movement at the time. And people understood that concentration of that kind of power had to be broken up.

The other thing we need to do is we have to dramatically change the tax system. Right now, and this is something that George Soros said: “The entire Wall Street has been given a gift,” he put it. I call it “they’re on welfare.” In this country, when we put low-income people on welfare, we put very tough conditions on people getting that money. They’ve got to work, they can’t get too much income, etc., etc. We’ve got nothing going on (like that on) Wall Street, except for the major “troubled” institutions. But the ones that have paid back TARP that are still taking advantage of all these other welfare subsidies we’re giving, they’re free to do what they want.

MORE ON WBCN:

FAKE AP STYLEBOOK

FIGHT OVER BLOG COMMENTS HITS HIGH COURT

AARON KROWNE OF Mi-IMPLODER WRITES

Use ml-implode.com as the URL of record to our site.

http://nhpr.org/node/27722

“The trial courts order violates basic principles the 1st amendment, of the US constitution and essentially tramples on the rights both of implode explode both to speak, and to publish and to speak, as well as on the rights of the public to receive information and speak anonymously.”

Note that the article does not draw the logical conclusion of what will happen if we lose this lawsuit — anyone publishing online from anywhere can be “taken down” by a frivolous media lawsuit in any state. We have no business in New Hampshire (other than the fact that people posted and supplied us with info to report on a New Hampshire company) and I have never set foot there.

[BTW, the Mortgage Specialists' settlement with the state over fraud is just that -- a settlement. So our reporting that cannot possibly be false, unless the state itself is lying. So their lawyer is lying. This is surprisingly common in lawsuits I've been subject to, where the plaintiffs are simply bringing fraud on the court. Yet it is surprising since one would think their lawyers at least care about being disbarred. I guess they consider that possibility vanishingly remote. Shame that they are right.]’

IN MEMORIUM: Claude-Levi Straus at 100
Lionel Tiger penned a beautiful tribute in Forbes.com
Here’s part of it:

Anthropologists not only study cultures but represent them too. Claude Levi-Straus, the legendary anthropologist of France, died this week at the puckish age of 100. His looming presence was like a bath of sun’s rays in late afternoon in early autumn. He represented his country’s broad philosophical concerns with exquisite, detailed, and capacious attention to regularities of behavior. He combined this with sharp appetite to know the variety and surprise of what exotic – not primitive- people did. He produced a body of work and influence which suffused his discipline since the Second World War. Serious scholars learned French to read his work before it was translated. He radiated analytical power which was warming, not chilling. He was broadly responsible for inventing Structuralism which in his pure form of it meant nothing more or less than that ideas like societies were systematic and never isolated.

He thought big and thought intricate and in the spirit of Parisian fashion became the Master Couturier of sophisticated social theory. He described with brilliant confidence and lucidity the basic patterns of human kinship – even if he did not quite realize it was a modern version of Darwin’s alloy of sexual and natural selection – the basic engine of how species change and the genetics which keeps them the same. Because he so skillfully unfolded the structures which were the spinal chord of social life itself, structuralism became a dominating brand name in serious social science. It reflected the unavoidable emergent complexity of a world united by electricity and Boeing and smart analysts like Levi-Straus. It was the academic heart of the post-war efforts at new solutions such as the World Bank, Unesco, WHO, et al. These global collectives necessarily embraced extensive complexity even if they too often muted it with sub-dingy bureaucrats and political ward bosses from 140 countries…..

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

I am off again tonight. Invited to the European Journalism Center’s conference on financial journalism in Brussels and then on to Paris where I will be screening my film PLUNDER: THE CRIME OF OUR TIME at the American University next Friday, thanks to my buddy Frank Meagher who is in the film.

PLEASE READ AND RESPOND: HELP, ETC

Hope to keep blogging. You will be getting a new financial appeal from Mediachannel Friday as well. We are really up against it. Our costs are low—one part timer but there are other costs and right now no money to pay them. We don’t want to pull the plug, but folks you know these are hard times specially for work like ours which we believe is essential. We only have you our readers to rely on. We are up for a grant next month but have to live another 6 weeks to get there. Can you reach down and come up with some help to keep us going. Our tenth anniversary is Feb, 1, 2010. We can make it if you will help us get there.

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