Racist, xenophobic, conspiracy theory-spouting shit-stain on the reputation of CNN. Lou Dobbs has got to go. I used to like Lou Dobbs, but the sight of him today makes my stomach turn. If, like me, you feel like Dobbs “message” is bad for the country, there is a petition to DROP DOBBS that will go straight to his corporate masters, i.e. companies who advertise on his program. Put the pressure on them to Drop Dobbs!
The most recent Media Matters newsletter (9-26-2009) discusses how Glenn Beck has commandeered the position—formerly held by Matt Drudge—of setting the newsroom agendas for the mainstream media.
Well, maybe they should pick up on this story—by Salon’s Alexander Zaitchik—and make a big deal of it for a few days. I don’t think Glenn Beck would like that.
Not exactly buried in the article, but far down enough that Internet-reading “skimmers’ might have missed it, is this astonishing anecdote:
The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” for Halloween—a recurring motif in Beck’s life and career—Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. “A couple days after Kelly’s wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, ‘We hear you had a miscarriage,’ ” remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. “When Terry said, ‘Yes,’ Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can’t do anything right—about he can’t even have a baby.”
“It was low class,” says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. “There are certain places you just don’t go.”
I really hope this vile story gets tweeted, Facebooked, digg’d, reddited, rises to the top of the meme pile and just gets plain talked about. How will Glenn Beck’s Christian “followers” react to hearing this story? It’s so UNfunny, so UNcalled for and just… idiotic and maliciously CRUEL! What a psychotic slimeball Glenn Beck is.
WHO says things like this to someones face, let alone ON THE RADIO?? The apparent answer—and there are quite a few witnesses to this doozy—is Mr. Glenn Beck.
I can’t wait to see Beck try to explain this one away and I really hope Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Huffington Post and other progressive media outlets run with this one and decide to call him out on it. Talk to Terry Kelly. Get her on the air and ask her what it felt like to have Glenn Beck ridicule her and her husband on the radio after she’d had a miscarriage. Ask Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin what they think of this story!
I’ll bet it would make RIVETING television! Slow news day this weekend? Here’s one right over the plate for ya!
Beck will no doubt pull out his by now threadbare excuse that he was an alcoholic with a death wish back then, but did this leopard really change his spots? Really?
And the evidence would be… what?
As one Internet wag commented, “How batshit crazy do you have to be to make Bill O’Reilly seem well-adjusted?” Glenn Beck, you put shit into the world to enrich yourself, riling up low IQ people with lies that you don?
This is, uh, a little depressing! Earlier this morning I read that in 2008 over 50,000 new US college graduates held journalism degrees and 60% of them were still out of work. The ones who are working are probably being paid minimum wage or interning. The old joke about a theater degree qualifying you for a job as a waiter can now be used with just about any creative industry for the set-up now.
You read that Obama and Congress “want” to save the newspaper industry, but HOW? The magazine business model is defunct too. If newspapers are reeling from the problem of being rendered “yesterday’s news” the moment they get printed by the relentless churn of the 24 hour Internet news cycle, how difficult would it be to edit a monthly magazine these days with a 90 day lead time? It’s a fool’s errand.
Aside from a few magazines that deserve to be read in print (Vanity Fair, Vogue and The Economist come to mind) there’s not a whole lot of excuses left to print on dead trees and so the idea of paying $60,000 or $120,000 for a print ad in a glossy magazine will also go the way of that same dinosaur. And that of course sets off an entire print industry food chain spiral of death in every career path from media buying to driving a newspaper delivery truck. The main problem—and it’s an insurmountable one—is that most people choose to get their information in the freshest, easiest, most up to date manner possible and that is not via print media.
In 1995 I personally subscribed to SEVENTY magazines and got five daily newspapers delivered to my office(oh those lazy hazy daze of expense accounts!). By 2005 I was buying just a monthly issue of MOJO at the newsstand and I haven’t bought a copy of that now in over two, almost three years. So I’ve gone from being print’s best customer to not spending a cent in the arena. As in ZERO cents and NO dollars. I’m simply not interested. It’s not like I read any less, I read far more! It’s just that I tend to be reading it off a monitor, not the pages of a newspaper, magazine or—I’m almost ashamed to say—book.
When VIBE magazine got shuttered last year, a wag on Gawker made the comment that if you had any plans to make a career writing about music for a living you could effectively FORGET IT when people were more interested to read the public’s Amazon reviews than “professional” record reviews in a magazine. Ouch! But it’s true. The entire gestalt of print is passe, it’s just that simple. How do you get around something like that? You don’t. And lest you think I’m saying “Bring it on” or laughing at the death of print, I’m not, I certainly don’t see what’s coming next as an improvement or anything, but as a former journalist and publisher myself, I just can’t see any way out of it.
From Unity’s press release:
UNITY 2009 Layoff Tracker Report shows sharp quarterly spikes in job losses
MCLEAN, Va. ?
Proving for the umpteenth time why she is a national treasure, Boing Boing reader Rachel Maddow offers a capsule history of the Rent-A-Thug organizing that the Republicans excel at.
Clearly Republicans have nothing to add to the national debate about health care so they want to make sure that debate never happens. What a plan they have: Hire a bigtime PR firm. Rile up a bunch of couch potato Glenn Beck fans and bus ‘em to Tampa for a photo op! Health care won’t be Obama’s Waterloo, it’s going to be the Republican Party’s.
Republicans are assholes.
I read today’s report on the Financial Times website about Rupert Murdoch announcing that New Corps would start charging for the content on ALL of its news websites with some bemusement. The idea the Murdoch and his well-fed corporate cronies truly believe that the public is willing to pay money to read The News of the World or Fox News online and is willing to bet the farm (i.e. his current Internet ad sales income) on this “hunch”—for this inane plan clearly can’t be a result of focus groups—is mind-blowing in its delusional logic.
“We intend to charge for all our news websites,” Mr Murdoch said.
“If we’re successful, we’ll be followed by all media,” he added, predicting “significant revenues” from charging for differentiated news online.
He warned that “the big competition will be coming from the BBC,” which offers online news for free, but said: “Our policy is to win.”
Good luck! Charging the public for something they can easily get for free elsewhere—information is a very slippery commodity, and creating profits from it is like catching rainwater in your hands these days—is a very poorly thought out strategy, one that will result in LESS income and not more.
I’d bet my cock on it.
I could write out a long-winded essay about why this is a very, very bad idea with epic and humiliating failure written all over it, but I think I can sum it up succinctly enough here to allow Mr. Murdoch to shed several layers of the highly paid News Corps upper management who are feeding him this bullshit. Rupert, buddy, this is a gift from me to you, and you can have for free:
PEOPLE DO NOT WANT TO PAY FOR STUFF ANYMORE. THERE IS TOO MUCH FREE SHIT COMPETING FOR THEIR ATTENTION ALREADY. BESIDES THAT, NO ONE HAS ANY MONEY.
Put up a barrier to Page Six, and I’d not miss it for a millisecond. How about you? If I can’t get to the latest Amy Winehouse gossip on News of the World’s website for free, guess what? I can read that same shit for free on Perez Hilton, Gawker or TMZ.
And AS IF there is no abundance of right-wing fucktardery all over the Internet? Make Fox News.com a pay site? There’s always Free Republic, NewsMax or Michelle Malkin’s blog for that low IQ flavor of opinion.
Rupert, mate, you’ve making a big mistake. The hand you’re holding ain’t what it was a decade ago. Your overhead must be a bitch.
And if you’re thinking “Well, what’s your solution to the problem, Mister Smarty Pants?” Sorry to disappoint you, Rupie baby, but there ain’t one. Print is DEAD and no one will pay for your content online if you charge for it. I’d consider that a real dilemma as a business owner, if I was you. You know what I’m saying? Here’s some more free advice: Why not sell off your print properties—cash out now—and leave someone else holding the bag while there is still some value left to extract from them?
And if you want to know how I really feel…
I used to enjoy watching Lou Dobbs on CNN when his show was called Moneyline. At that time his brand of economic populism was more or less aimed against corporate America and there was nothing of the xenophobic anti-Mexican ranting of recent years. Now I can’t stand the sight of him.
With his new policy of pandering to the low IQ racists that even a craven son-of-a-bitch like Bill O’Reilly is ashamed of claiming—the Flat Earth “birther” crowd—it’s high time the public start calling Lou Dobbs for what he is: A FLAMING ASSHOLE and demanding his hasty departure from normally respectable cable news outlet, CNN.
CNN doesn’t need a fuckwit like Dobbs destroying the organization’s decent reputation for delivering (reasonably) unbiased information. Let Fox News have him! CNN president Jon Klein should seriously be considering firing Dobbs’ dumb ass today and to put a little pressure on Klein, Media Matters has made this commercial and wants to buy as much airtime on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC as it can. Consider donating to help rid CNN of its Lou Dobbs problem once and for all.
We can do far better than this, Mr. Klein. Make your children proud, mi’fren.
Our friend Douglas Rushkoff has written about the ESPN video virus from an interesting perspective over at Tina Brown’s Daily Beast this morning:
But the Andrews video has also fueled the spread of highly toxic computer viruses, and quite probably financial thievery and terrorism, by hackers who know the real law of the Internet: The closer an Internet user is to a set of videotaped breasts, the more likely he (and 99% of those who fall into this trap are male) will be to click on whatever he’s told to.
Porn has become our enemies’ ultimate control mechanism, turning a nation of late-night Internet horndogs into an unconscious army of cyberterrorists. Talk about sleeper cells.
Nice turn of phrase there, Douglas!
The ESPN Porn Scam by Douglas Rushkoff