Monday, 30 May 2011

How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory

The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America's Unfair and Imbalanced Network

At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as "the Chairman" – Roger Ailes.
“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”
The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”
Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp. hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816 million last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch’s global haul. The cable channel’s earnings rivaled those of News Corp.’s entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch’s beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3 billion write-down after acquiring The Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones newsgathering operation – Fox News has one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50 percent. Nearly half comes from advertising, and the rest is dues from cable companies. Fox News now reaches 100 million households, attracting more viewers than all other cable-news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to “throw off a billion in profits...”

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Tim Dickinson @'Rolling Stone'

A MUST READ!

Beyond Afghanistan
A Regional Security Strategy for South and Central Asia
By Lieutenant General David W. Barno, USA (Ret.), Andrew Exum and Matthew Irvine
(PDF)

Moroccan Activists Slam Music Festival as Corrupt

Bradley Manning's Father Says His Greatest Fear Is Son Is Guilty

"Syrians have suffered under a regime for long enough. This video is dedicated to those in Syria who have lost their lives in the name of freedom."

Thanks to @emilybarkerhalo for the link.

Babies can perform sophisticated analyses of how the physical world should behave: study

Ad (nauseum) break # 21

(Thanx to 'The Fix')

The Trouble With E-Mail

Anything But Routine: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography of William S. Burroughs v. 2.0

WSB with Husker Du

HERE

(PDF)

Download

Faust - Interview with Jean-Hervé Peron

(Excerpt)

Why the name Faust?

'It is German for "fist" which is a symbol for revolution which is what we thought we were part of ... and maybe we were too :) Also it is the name of a work by Goethe where a man sells his soul to obtain what he longs for...and this what we were doing : selling our souls to the music industry in order to do the music we wanted to.'

I will be catching both the Faust gig as part of the International Jazz Fest here in Melbourne and also the talk with J-HP the following day where I hope to at least present J-HP with an 'Exile On Moan Street' badge as I know he is reader of this blog.
The talk is free but bookings are essential.

TOTAL sleeve by Peter Saville and ParrisWakefield

Peter Saville and and Howard Wakefield of design studio ParrisWakefield have collaborated on the artwork of a new compilation of music by Joy Division and New Order called TOTAL, due for release on June 6 from Rhino...
Endeavouring to capture the essence of both Joy Division and New Order, Saville and Wakefield agreed that the Helvetica Heavy Italic used on the cover of New Order's Technique album, perfectly conveyed the band's graphic look, and also that, typographically speaking, Joy Division was predominantly uppercase. So for the cover of this new compilation, the pair decided to merge the two and set the word TOTAL in italicised upper case Helvetica Heavy.
Originally the word TOTAL, as below, was set to appear as large as possible so it fitted on the front cover. However the band decided there was too much white space.
"The 'O' was the sexiest letter," says Wakefield, "with the overlapping letter-forms alluding to the sleeve of New Order's Technique album and also to the band's 1989 single, Run 2. Funnily enough 'O' is also the only letter to appear in New Order, Joy Division and TOTAL." Wakefield decided to zoom in the 'O' and let the other letters wrap around the fold out CD insert. The letters also appear to wrap around from the back cover and the jewel case spine too.
Gavin Lucas @'CreativeReview'

Israel braces for border clashes in coming days

Police detain 7-year-old Palestinian boy and accost relatives, family members say

7 Good Reasons to Cry: The Healing Property of Tears

When Children’s Scribbles Hide a Prison Drug

Cape May County Sheriff's Department

Suboxone (hint: the fish) was hidden in this coloring book

Mike Barrett, a corrections officer, ripped open an envelope in the mail room at the Maine Correctional Center here and eyed something suspicious: a Father’s Day card, sent a month early. He carefully felt the card and slit it open, looking for a substance that has made mail call here a different experience of late.
Mr. Barrett and other prison officials nationwide are searching their facilities, mail and visitors for Suboxone, a drug used as a treatment for opiate addiction that has become coveted as contraband. Innovative smugglers have turned crushed Suboxone pills into a paste and spread it under stamps or over children’s artwork, including pages from a princess coloring book found in a New Jersey jail.
The drug also comes in thin strips, which dissolve under the tongue, that smugglers have tucked behind envelope seams and stamps.
“It’s become a crisis in here, to be honest with you,” said Maj. Francine Breton, administrator of the Cumberland County Jail in Portland, Me. “It’s the drug of choice right now.”
Law enforcement officials say that Suboxone, which is prescribed to treat addiction to heroin and powerful painkillers like oxycodone, has become a drug of abuse in its own right, resulting in prison smuggling efforts from New Mexico to Maine. Addicts buy it on the street when they cannot find or afford their drug of choice, to stave off the sickness that comes with withdrawal. But some people are also taking it for the high they say it provides.
After Suboxone strips were discovered in two letters, the Cumberland County Jail set a new rule in March that all inmate mail must arrive in white envelopes. That way, Major Breton said, officials can detect the orange tint of the strips when they hold an envelope up to the light.
The jail also rips the stamps off every piece of mail before delivery because senders were putting a paste made of crushed Suboxone pills on the back of stamps for inmates to lick off...

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Abby Goodnough & Katie Zezima @'NY Times'

Conversion therapy: she tried to make me 'pray away the gay'

Sex & Lies

Nest

Suspension

Balance

Part 1

Part 2

@'Mirko Ilic Corp'

Archive Gallery: In Defense of Evolutionary Theory

BrandDNA Stan Lee

Given her unhappiness about paying tax on her earnings, perhaps Adele would prefer people get her music from a download blog.

Adele's tax grievances won't resonate with fans

♪♫ DJ Cam - Swim

The music of The Tree of Life

Ex-Red Army member Osamu Maruoka dies in prison hospital

“Syria in Fragments: Divided Minds, Divided Lives,” by an American in Syria

We Have the Rest of This Year to Save Bradley Manning

Cate Blanchett sparks Australia climate debate

The Australian actress Cate Blanchett has been criticised for appearing in a television advertisement calling for the introduction of a carbon tax.
One leading opposition politician said the Oscar-winning actress did not understand the cost-of-living concerns of ordinary Australians.
She has been a strong advocate of steps to reduce Australian emissions.
Senator Barnaby Joyce said she should stick to acting, but the government and the Greens have rallied behind her.
It has been dubbed the Cate debate, and centres on the Oscar-winning actress's support for the government's controversial new carbon tax, which is bitterly opposed by the conservative opposition.
She features briefly in a new television campaign urging Australians to "Say Yes" to a tax on carbon.
Opponents of the carbon tax say it will increase the cost of living for ordinary Australians.
Mr Joyce, of the National Party, said the multi-millionaire star had no idea what it was like for working families struggling with rising costs.
One right-wing tabloid called her a morally vain Hollywood star trying to justify her great good fortune by preaching to the rest of Australia about climate change.
She has been the driving force behind what has been called the greening of the Sydney Theatre Company, where she is an artistic director. Her mansion in Sydney is fitted with solar panels.
The attacks on Cate Blanchett also reveal an instinctive suspicion of people in Australia perceived to be part of a cultural or educational elite - especially by the populist right.
The movie star, who has been backed by the government and the Australian Greens, has not responded publicly to the criticism.
Nick Bryant @'BBC'

Meanwhile Murdoch's stable continues its attacks on anything to do with climate change...oh and Bill Leak WTF?

This is about our children's world and our legacy to them and if we could just get the Gina and Twiggy's of this world to actually pay for the damage they are causing this continent and the world...

I Love Anonymous!

can relate

claytoncubitt Clayton Cubitt

I think my favorite karaoke song is John Cage's 4'33.

PBS hit by LulzSec

Hey Anonymous, we heard you were having trouble!

LulzSec The Lulz Boat
What's wrong with @PBS, how come all of its servers are rooted? How come their database is seized? Why are passwords cracked? :(

http://www.pbs.org/lulz/

and...

LulzSec The Lulz Boat
By the way, #WikiSecrets sucked. @PBS

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Jonathan Franzen: Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts

Banksy

Via
(Thanx Stan!)

Sepp Blatter cleared as Fifa suspends Bin Hammam and Warner

Out of Fear, Colleges Lock Books and Images Away From Scholars

FB blocks anti-women driving Saudi campaign

A group of Saudi women who launched a counter-campaign on Facebook this week to press for maintaining a long-standing ban on female car driving in the Gulf Kingdom accused the social network of blocking their page.
A female activist in the campaign said the page had been partially blocked several times over the past few days before it completely disappeared from Facebook on Saturday, according to local newspapers.
“We all are surprised at Facebook’s decision to cancel our page for no reason…we have not committed any mistake or violated the network’s rules…we just expressed our opinion which is against allowing women to drive cars,” Anbakum newspaper quoted an unnamed activist as saying.
“Our campaign entitled ‘I don’t want to drive….I want my rights’, is intended to press for the development of a public transport system for women and to respond to that campaign which is demanding a removal of the ban on driving….we wonder who will benefit from abolishing these female voices which are only expressing their views and calling for a pioneer national project.”
Newspapers last week said nearly 1,000 Saudi women signed a letter on Facebook, to be presented later to King Abdullah, appealing for him not to lift the ban on female driving in the conservative Moslem country.
The letter branded women pressing for an end to the ban as “weird” and said their campaigns to lift the ban and defiant driving by some women are more serious than protests, the papers said.
Sharq Arabic language daily said the statement was in response to a campaign launched by women on Facebook to defy a ban on female driving.
The campaign has already drawn a backlash from men, who threatened to use their headgears to confront women driving cars.
“The 1,000 women said they intend to present the letter signed by them to the Monarch to express their objection to women driving cars..…they affirmed that the recent demands and flagrant defiant actions by some women represent only a minority of the country’s women and that millions of women are opposed to lifting the ban.”
@'Emirates 24/7'

Tributes paid to Gil Scott-Heron

Musicians and friends have been paying tribute to the poet and hip-hop pioneer Gil Scott-Heron, who has died at the age of 62.

Eminem, Talib Kweli and Snoop Dogg were among the rappers who acknowledged his influence after hearing the news.
Public Enemy member Chuck D said on Twitter: "We do what we do and how we do because of you."
Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah wrote: "Salute Gil Scott-Heron for his wisdom and poetry! May he rest in paradise."
Scott-Heron, often called the Godfather of Rap, died in a New York hospital.
His material spanned soul, jazz, blues and the spoken word. His 1970s work heavily influenced the US hip-hop and rap scenes.
His work had a strong political element, and one of his most famous pieces was The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
Eminem wrote on Twitter: "RIP Gil Scott-Heron. He influenced all of hip-hop."
Cee Lo Green paid tribute to "the god Gil Scott", while Talib Kweli said he "completely influenced me as an artist".
Politically outspoken rapper Michael Franti said Scott-Heron's talent was his ability to "make us think about the world in a different way".
He would make listeners "laugh hysterically about the ironies of American culture, anger at the hypocrisy of our political system, all to a beat that kept us on the dance floor, with a voice and flow that kept you waiting with anticipation for the next phrase".

Richard Russell, who produced and released Scott-Heron's final album I'm New Here in 2010, described him as "a master lyricist, singer, orator, and keyboard player".
"Gil was not perfect in his own life," Russell wrote. "But neither is anyone else. And he judged no-one.
"He had a fierce intelligence, and a way with words which was untouchable; an incredible sense of humour and a gentleness and humanity that was unique to him.
"Gil shunned all the trappings of fame and success. He could have had all those things. But he was greater than that."

The musician's publisher Jamie Byng remembered him as "a giant of a man, a truly inspirational figure whom I loved like a father and a brother".

Scott-Heron infected people who encountered him with his "singularity of vision, his charismatic personality, his moral beauty and his willingness to take his fellow travellers through the full range of emotions", Byng wrote.
"Throughout a magnificent musical career, he helped people again and again, with his willingness and ability to articulate deep truths, through his eloquent attacks on injustices and by his enormous compassion for people's pain.
"Hundreds of thousands of people saw Gil perform live over the decades, always with remarkable bands, and few came away untouched by his magnetism, humility, biting wit and warmth of spirit."
Lemn Sissay, a friend of Scott-Heron's who produced a documentary on his work, told the BBC he was "a polymath" who "spoke crucially of the issues of his people".
"In the late 60 and early 70s, black poets were the news-givers, because their stories were not covered in truth in the mainstream media," he said.
@'BBC'