From StopBigMedia.com:

Play The Game. Then Take Action.

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire just keeps on growing. This summer, Murdoch gobbled up the Wall Street Journal, one of the country’s most respected news sources. Now Murdoch has launched the Fox Business Network. The new channel, which aims to peddle Murdoch’s brand of business news to the American public, will start in about 30 million households – a considerable reach to begin with. (more…)

Culture vulture
by Tim Elliott
The Sydney Morning Herald
October 15, 2007

Real culture, Westbury says, comes from the bottom up: it’s unruly, often illegal and frequently unloved (at least by the mainstream).

Say the word art and most people think of the Mona Lisa and long-dead Europeans such as Vincent Van Gogh. Mention art to Marcus Westbury and he thinks of weeds, graffiti and video games, plus a lot of other things that most people don’t consider to be art at all.

And in his new series, Not Quite Art, he’s trying to get us to think likewise.

Affable and articulate, Westbury has made a supple and free-ranging examination of where “art” and “culture” come from, while providing a tantalising glimpse of what’s going on away from the big city galleries. “Art excites me,” he says, “but the artists who excite me most aren’t dead and on the walls of revered cultural institutions, they are alive and making things now.”

Westbury, who describes himself as “a very lucky troublemaker”, has been putting together arts events and festivals for the past 10 years; he has worked with graffiti artists, anarchist collectives, major galleries and government policy committees. And yet his resolutely unorthodox take on the art world and a lack of formal art education that makes him perfectly qualified to host a show such as Not Quite Art. (more…)

Submitted by Peter Schlager:

Christoph Schlingensief made his own contribution to the 2000 Vienna International Festival by organising the reality TV event Please Love Austria:

In 2000, German director and activist Christof Schlingensief created a fake public TV-show. After the formation of the Austrian right wing coalition, Schlingensief built a public “container” show called Please Love Austria so people could (similar to the Big Brother reality TV show) vote for which of the “contained” immigrants should stay and which should go. Schlingensief was then accused by the Austrian right wing party of racism. He was publicly offended with the words “You Artist!”

For more about this performance, visit schlingensief.com, click on Works, then Performance, then select Bitte Liebt Osterreich (2000) from the pull down menu.

Eye of the Beholder
Arts & Leisure, Movie Review
by Bruce Bennett
The New York Sun
October 5, 2007

“When you’re actually getting documentary gold, it doesn’t feel like gold,” said the filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev, the director of My Kid Could Paint That, a remarkable and controversial new nonfiction film that opens today. “It feels bad.”

As his film makes its way to a couch-side conversation that yields the unforgettably heartbreaking, humane, and dramatically priceless moment that is the source of the gold Mr. Bar-Lev referred to, My Kid Could Paint That examines the ideas and feelings behind the nature of art, identity, creativity, truth, and story. It does so with such prickly, fulminating intelligence that one leaves the film abuzz with crystallized impressions, named feelings, and known beliefs that were unspecific notions before the curtain rose. (more…)

An Armchair Analysis of Teen-Age Booby Trap: 1970 US Government Comic Book on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs
by Ethan Persoff

Part One: Introduction

There’s an old joke played with food, popular with kids. Goes like this: You hand someone a piece of something to eat and just as they are about to take a bite, you say a word completely opposite to what they’re about to taste. Example can be handing them a piece of creamy chocolate, and saying the word: ‘Glue’ or ‘Toenails’ right as they are chewing. It works every time. The brain struggles for half a second, and the experience of tasting is affected. This form of tampering is not just child’s play. It is a highly effective means of affecting somebody’s experience before they attempt consuming something.

Imagine reading a food review saying a restaurant got you sick. Would you eat there? For over fifty years the US government has played this suggestive food game again and again, creating a number of pieces of dishonest art and text about the consumption of mind-altering drugs. The high-water mark for both cautionary messaging and artwork can be found in a little known (but highly sought-after) comic book produced in 1970 by the US Bureau of Narcotics & Dangerous Drugs, entitled Teenage Booby Trap. Scans of this entire document are available at http://www.ep.tc/teenageboobytrap/

(more…)

A Feast of Bullshit and Spectacle:
The Great American Media Mind Warp
by Joe Bageant
MediaChannel.org
August 8, 2007

Needless to say, the Middle Eastern doctors accused of terrorism in Scotland may be guilty as hell. Mohammed Asha may be another one of your standard terror wogs who, as we all know by now, relish the idea of prison or perhaps blowing up his wife and baby up for Allah.

But having been in the media business one way or another for almost 40 years, and having watched it increasingly take on a life of its own, I know that nothing of significance in the news is what it appears to be. This is not the result of some media conspiracy, mind you, but rather that the people working in the media have internalized the process so thoroughly they do not even know they are conditioned creatures in a larger corporate/state machine. Put simply, Katie Couric and the dumbshits grinding out your local paper actually believe they are in the news business. In today’s system, everybody is a patsy for the new corporate global order of things — the well-coiffed talking head, the brain dead audience, even the terrorists themselves. All play out their parts in our holographic image and information process. (more…)

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press
by Jay Rosen
PressThink
August 14, 2007

Conservatives think the ideology of the Washington press corps is liberal. Liberals think the press is conservative in the sense of protecting its place in the political establishment. Karl Rove once said that the press is “less liberal than it is oppositional.” (A fascinating remark coming from Rove, since it apppears to put him at odds with the conservative base.)

Whereas I believe that the real—and undeclared—ideology of American journalism is savviness, and this is what made the press so vulnerable to the likes of Karl Rove.

Savviness! Deep down, that’s what reporters want to believe in and actually do believe in— their own savviness and the savviness of certain others (including operators like Karl Rove.) In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane.

Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness—that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political—is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain. (more…)

What edits on Wikipedia have been made by people in congressional offices, the CIA and the Church of Scientology? A new online tool called WikiScanner reveals answers to such questions.

Is The CIA Editing Wikipedia?
by Brian Bergstein
Time.com/AP
August 15, 2007

As the Web encyclopedia that anyone can edit, Wikipedia encourages participants to adopt online user names, but it also lets contributors be identified simply by their computers’ numeric Internet addresses.

Often that does not provide much of a cloak, such as when PCs in congressional offices were discovered to have been involved in Wikipedia entries trashing political rivals.

Those episodes inspired Virgil Griffith, a computer scientist about to enter grad school at CalTech, to automate the process with WikiScanner. (It’s at http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr but intense attention has knocked it out of service many times this week.) Read the full story here.

Thanks Toni Dalton

Submitted by Peter Schlager:

Czech Dream (Český sen in Czech) is a documentary film directed by two young Czech directors, Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda. It records a large-scale hoax perpetuated by Klusák and Remunda on the Czech public, culminating in the “opening event” of a fake “hypermarket”. The filmmakers succeeded in attracting more than 3 thousand shoppers to an empty plain for their “grand opening” on May 31, 2003. What looked like a huge building from a distance was actually only a canvas facade backed by scaffolding.

The film hit selected theaters in the U.S. starting in June. Check here for the remaining dates in September for Seattle and Chicago.

The “bloody trailer” and a film scene can be downloaded here. Bloody trailer is in quotes because there appears to be a “blood-free” trailer which may be more aligned with reality (both are available on the DVD which is for sale).

Here’s some movie footage [9:30]: (more…)

Spoiling: Just Mean Jackassery or Brilliant Culture Jamming?
by Mark Pepper
Intertrash

If you were watching the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating contest this weekend (and really, why wouldn’t you have?), then you may have been spoiled on the pop culture event of the season.

As the contestants were running onto the stage with visions of overstuffing themselves for glory, one of them quickly flashed a sign to the camera that read: “On July 21st, _______ Dies.” I have omitted the name, of course, cause I’m not going to even get myself into that business. But the name, is the identity of a major character who is being widely reported to kick the bucket in the final Harry Potter novel. Not too many people in the world know at this point if the name on that sign is going to be right; however, it matches the information given out on many spoiler websites right now.

Spoiling is an interesting and somewhat complex phenomenon. (more…)

TV Reporting: Too much Paris, not enough news
by Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Miami Herald
June 20, 2007

One night 10 years ago, I found myself in a crazy place.

It was only the parking lot of a courthouse in Santa Monica, but craziness had come to that place on the wings of a jury verdict in the civil trial against O.J. Simpson. The Miami Herald had dispatched me there to gather color — i.e., anecdotes and imagery that gave a sense of what being there was like.

I found more color than a paint factory. A sky full of news helicopters. A guy with a guitar crooning Johnny B. Goode. An old lady chanting, ”O.J. is innocent!” People screaming right in each other’s faces for the benefit of TV cameras. A young woman fretting that she hoped she’d get a chance to scream, “murderer!”

”It’s weird,” Sidney Lee, an L.A. screenwriter, told me as we watched the crowd, ”because it’s not something that’s going to affect them. They’re not going to go to jail, they’re not going to get out of jail, they’re not going to have to pay.” These people, he said, would wake up the next morning and realize, “I guess it didn’t involve me, did it?”

But 10 years later, there has been no such realization. Ten years later, the Simpson trials seem less an aberration than a seminal moment in the de-evolution of TV news into something that might better be called “The News Show.”

And 10 years later, Stepha Henry is missing, and David Ovalle is livid. (more…)

From PR Watch:

“Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis,” Indiana University media researchers analyzed six months’ worth of Bill O’Reilly’s “Talking Points Memo” editorials, which are aired on his TV show on Fox, posted on his website and printed in newspaper columns. The researchers found that O’Reilly “employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials.” The seven propaganda techniques are name-calling, glittering generalities, card stacking, bandwagon, plain folks, transfer, and testimonials. O’Reilly “called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute,” according to the University’s press release. Not surprisingly, “the people and groups most frequently labeled bad were the political left,” along with illegal aliens, criminals and terrorists. “He’s not very subtle,” journalism professor Mike Conway said of O’Reilly.

Source: Indiana University press release, May 2, 2007

This video is presented by the Media Education Foundation, which produces and distributes video documentaries to encourage critical thinking and debate about the relationship between media ownership, commercial media content, and the democratic demand for free flows of information, diverse representations of ideas and people, and informed citizen participation.

Directed by Byron Hurt, former star college quarterback, longtime hip-hop fan, and gender violence prevention educator, this is a “loving critique” of a number of disturbing trends in the world of rap music. He pays tribute to hip-hop while challenging the rap music industry to take responsibility for glamorizing destructive, deeply conservative stereotypes of manhood…

Dealing with issues of race, gender violence, and the corporate exploitation of youth culture, it is a terrific follow-up to yesterday’s blog post from the Black Agenda Report.

This article from Black Agenda Report suggests rerouting the responsibility for “…the anti-social aspects of commercial hip hop…” in that “…the bulk of Black community anger at hip hop products is directed at foul-behaving artists, rather than the corporate Dr. Frankensteins that created and profit from them.”

Hip Hop Profanity, Misogyny and Violence: Blame the Manufacturer
by Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford
May 2, 2007

The often convoluted debate over hip-hop lyrics and images frequently misses the point: mass marketed rap recordings, videos and stage acts are corporate products, and the artists are virtual employees and subcontractors of huge multinationals. Corporate control of the cultural marketplace is the real villain in this story, not artists who did not pick themselves for stardom and cannot on their own alter boardroom business models. Corporations have been usurping and reshaping Black mass culture for decades - hip-hop is just the latest product line.

“What the public sees, hears and consumes is the end product of a process that is integral to the business model crafted by top corporate executives.”

Read the whole article at Black Agenda Report

Thanks to MediaChannel.org