Friday, June 27, 2008

The end of old media

I turned on CNN for a few minutes last night and again I heard Barak Obama mentioned along with Jeremiah Wright. I turned it off.

I saw a blonde woman on the cover of Newsweek. I had an inkling of who she was, but I had to squint to see that it was John McCain's wife.

I'm over forty years old, but does that mean I should care about what's on television or featured in magazines like Newsweek or Time? No. I was around when the Internet first started, and there are people who can't even envision the world without it.

Yesterday I saw Jack Cafferty on CNN talk about how Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign was ruined because he rode around in a tank. What he failed to mention was that George Bush rode in a tank too, but the news media failed to cover that as much as Dukakis. It was the news media that ruined the Dukakis campaign.

They are trying the same strategy with Barak Obama, and they are failing. Why?

Because since the birth of the Internet, each wave of young people leaving their parents homes and striking out on their own are not subscribing to newspapers, magazines, or surprisingly, even cable television.

The new trend is to subscribe only to Cable Internet Service and nothing more. And coming soon, rumor has it, AT&T will up the anty by providing Internet access at speeds faster than cable television.

The next generation will not be watching television based news and the networks know it. You can see and hear the desperate attempts to create ever increasing situations of conflict where none should exist. They claw and scrape to create enemies and fools of public officials and foreign governments, and it will make no difference because everyone now has access to multiple sources of information and opinions that balance the emotional with the factual, exposing the old media's adoption of the Swift Boat Strategy from the 2000 presidential campaign.

So, it looks like I already waved goodbye to television news. It's been almost a week since I sat through a whole evening news show, and I don't miss it.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Methemphadvertising and the decline of the main-stream media.

Pew Internet research finds further evidence of main-stream media decline.

More people are now able to see media spin when they go online and watch political speeches from start to finish at YouTube, then share the video clips with their friends at MySpace and Facebook.

The “main-stream” media are paper publications, radio and television, all of which are limited by time and space. Because of these limitations, the main-stream media must only select portions of political speeches or news stories they deem “newsworthy.”

Consequently, they choose portions of information that serves their own agendas.

The main-stream media agenda is simply to survive in a competitive environment. They did that at first by trying to make friends with the largest portion of its audience.

Unfortunately, when you try to please as many people as possible, you wind up on the wrong side of all of them, because people more easily remember negative things that positive things. It’s just human behavior.

So the main-stream media chose to make friends with only audience members that could best help them survive, advertisers.

The main-stream became dependent on advertisers like Heroine ever since the late nineteenth century when newspapers could not longer just depend on their own sales revenue.

Cable television began as a non-advertising television medium. It was supposed to be the biggest threat to the broadcast networks in the late 1970’s and Ted Turner almost had ABC, CBS, and NBC completely over a barrel when he launched CNN. Cable was standing on only subscription revenues.

And cable television had no commercials, do you remember that? But low and behold, satellite television came along and cable had to become publicly traded on the stock market, and shareholders demanded growth and more money, so cable television buckled and started running television commercials. CNN, Fox News and other cable news networks are now no different than any of the broadcast networks because they too are addicted to Methemphadvertising.

The advertisers are of course, the drug dealers who make the networks do their bidding, or they hold back the “stuff” (advertising).

Now, Pew Internet Research has reported "A record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others."

The broadcast, cable, radio, and print media are suffering from the addiction of advertising dollars as their only source of survival, and people are walking away because they are all tired of little sound bites and slogans.

There is no withdrawal from Methemphadvertising, only death.


PEW RESEARCH: The Internet and the 2008 Election

Monday, June 09, 2008

Dunkin Donuts pulls ad over a keffiyeh?





This Dunkin Donuts ad pulled over criticism from conservative pundits like Michelle Malkin and others (huffingtonpost.com)What do the conservative pundits have to say about Senator John McCain's daughter? (Gawker.com)

More on the Keffiyeh at Wikipedia.

Saturday, June 07, 2008

The old news media is self-destructing.

Bloggers! Your day is arriving sooner than you may think. The old main-stream news media is self-destructing.

More and more, the alternative information sources are pointing at a the mistakes and complicity of the main-stream news pundits.

A recent Friday on PBS, Bill Moyers struck gold.


BILL MOYERS: What about the experts who predicted that the war would be quick and bloodless? They were terribly wrong but they're still on the air today pontificating. I mean, there seems to be no price to be paid for having been wrong about so serious an issue of life and death, war and peace.

GREG MITCHELL: You can't be wrong enough I think is what the-

JOHN WALCOTT: Well, again, they are celebrities. And, you know, Tom Cruise can make a bad movie and go on and get paid, you know, millions for the next movie. It's the same phenomenon. A name is what matters. --Bill Moyers Journal, June 6, 2008


Bill Moyers is not alone in ringing that bell. Week after week, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report regularly lampoon the news media.

The ripple effect began with Scott McClellan's new book "What Happened." Stephen Colbert explains:



If you still watch network television news or read the paper, you're doomed.