GOP News Control Plan C - A and B didn't work out so well.

GOP Event at Hoogland Center on Monday evidently Hush-Hush

On the evening of Monday, December 14, 2009 my mother wanted to go to a GOP event because she had a really good question for them. I wanted to go so I could take notes and compare what I heard with how the news media reported it later.

A while ago, perhaps weeks, my mother wrote the event down on her calendar. How or where she found that information was forgotten. Monday evening she wanted to confirm it so she looked it up in that day’s Illinois State Journal-Register. It was not in the “Happening Today” section.

I looked up the schedule for Hoogland Center for the Arts and they had “Geppeto and Son” on the 13th of December, followed by “Every Christmas Story Ever Told” on the 19th of December. Nothing on December 14th.

Mom was frustrated because it was on her calendar, but neither of us could find any supporting evidence that the event was still going on. The Illinois Times dated December 10-16 didn’t mention anything for the event either.

Tuesday morning’s Illinois State Journal-Register has an article titled “GOP candidates against Thomson housing detainees” [ http://www.sj-r.com/news/x1479446421/Five-GOP-gubernatorial-candidates-against-Thomson-housing-Gitmo-prisoners ]

According to the article, the event was hosted by the Springfield Citizens Club. I went to their website [ http://www.citizensclubofspringfield.org/ ] to see if they had any information about the event, and the latest event they had on their website was a public policy breakfast they had on November 20.

“Friday, November 20: Public Policy Breakfast, Tom Cavanagh, County Treasurer and Jim Langfelder, City Treasurer, Hoogland Center for the Arts, 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.”

So, we have an event discussing public policy by candidates running for public office, but the venue holding the event does not have it in their schedule, the hosting organization of the event does not have it in their schedule, two of the largest local news publications don’t have it in their schedule. What are we supposed to assume from that?

We can assume that any news reported the following day about the event was completely fabricated because the event itself was entirely controlled and held secret by collaborating organizations.

IS this GOP news control plan C? Plan A was planting a blogger with press credentials in the White House press pool who would ask softball questions. Plan B was paying Armstrong Williams to write GOP leaning news articles during the Bush Years. Plan C appears to be staging top secret press conferences for the purpose of fabricating news. As bad as A and B turned out, C is really the only way to control the situation from start to finish.

Still wondering about the future.

I still like to read the State Journal Register because they have career journalists on hand who work full time to get their stories and photos. For a while I even had the notion of applying for work there. But the tide is going out for good on the old media, thanks to the Internet.

I wonder how many generations it will take before subscriptions to actual hard-copy newspapers fall into the red zone of being cost-prohibitive? Would online advertising be sufficient to support the structure that remains after the printing presses have ceased forever?

Remember radio? Radio is still a good hands-free form of entertainment, but AM is dominated by right-wing conservatism, a philosophy which proved its worth over the last eight years in the political spotlight, and evidenced by the presidential election of 2008. Unpopular.

As for FM radio, it depends on the artist and not the genre.

Genre radio is old hat. The Internet has exposed us to the reality of music. That there are really good songs, not really good types of songs. We as an audience can no longer accept being pigeonholed into arbitrary categories of Rock, Pop, Country, Jazz, Lite-Jazz, Classical, Heavy Metal, Blues or Big Band.

I occasionally listen to Amy Winehouse, Bjork, Tom Waits, Dethklok, Muddy Waters, Pete Seeger, Ozzie, Tchaikovsky, Sly and the Family Stone, etc. No radio station will be able to keep me as an audience for very long.

Local Broadcast television is not doing too well either. The local news anchors most of the time are repeating the national news when they can't find local stories. Most of the remote news crews were once Union and are now gone.

During the time slot used by local news broadcasts I'm watching PBS. I'm already searching blogs and YouTube for local video on my computer instead of watching television. The Internet provides weather reports too. I don't know what the local broadcasters have left to hold up against the Internet. I think they are in worse shape than newspapers. Popular shows can be watched at Hulu.com

Barack Obama said change is here. This change is bigger than just politics. We are about to usher in a whole new cultural structure, the likes of which we can't yet imagine. Biggest of the changes is perhaps that there may be no such thing as mass communication anymore. Sub-cultures will re-arrange under totally different flags.

Philosophies will shatter and pieces from different ideologies will combine into never before seen colors.

People will be different in unheard of ways, because they will have their own custom-designed preferences thanks to the Internet. Everyone will be a stranger to everyone else, so we will simply have to shed fear.

Cable Tightens Its Belt

Now the National Geographic Channel, probably one of the most aesthetic and educational channels on cable, has been moved to digital cable channel 450. Basic Cable viewers are now unable to experience the high quality production work of people who have the most respect for the environment.

The channel perhaps needed to be moved to digital to take full advantage of high definition video signal, but denying a majority of the cable subscribers such good programming may be dire for the company itself, as well as the overall behavior of an audience denied the education provided by the National Geographic Channel.

Does Comcast Cable hate the environment? Maybe, if they get their kicks blocking environmental programming from the basic cable audience?

Do we need Comcast to get access to National Geographic? No. we can now go to http://channel.nationalgeographic.com

The Internet Prevails again, proving that even cable television will subside along with the rest of the old broadcast television, radio and print media. Goodbye Comcast. Lots o' luck.

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

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.

The Internet Killed The Television Star

Why are television news reporters being so nice to Senator John McCain? MediaMatters.org noted recently that McCain has been getting the red carpet treatment and softball questions on the broadcast networks, as well as cable news networks. It's shocking to see the media fawn and flatter a political candidate.

Following the November 2008 election, there may be no more broadcast television as we know it. The results of the election will throw mud in the face of the mainstream commentators.



The news media needs McCain so it can create content and justify its own existence. It's fast becoming totally irrelevant. Most viewers have enourmous quantities of information from the Internet with which to hold up against what these people are saying, yet the television personalities continue to operate under the assumption that most of their audience is stupid, has yet to adopt Internet technology, or never will.

Winds of Change

The Illinois State Journal Register is now under the command of Gatehouse Media. They consolidated and compressed sections of the newspaper in order to either make it difficult for more than one person to read different sections from the same paper at the same time, or at the very least, save more trees. It would not be a far stretch to guess that somehow they think it will motivate multiple subscriptions per household.

However, they also have caved to the giant pharmaceutical industry and allowed full page advertising for a single product. This Sunday it was Lipitor, endorsed by Dr. Jarvik, inventor of the artificial heart. If Lipitor is so great for you heart, are you sure that someone who invented an artificial heart is a good endorsement?

That’s almost as bad as Chrysler boasting about its Five Star Service. Would you want a product that might need five star service? I like the idea of having the guy who invented prosthetic legs as an endorsement for landmines.

Gatehouse is as blatant about their ideology as Hardees is about the health of its customers. The customer gets what he or she wants, no matter what the long term consequences. I wrote a response to a preacher’s letter that as of almost a week later remains unpublished. Following is my response:

In his letter to the editor, Reverend Weitzel of Beardstown wrote that prescribing Plan B is an “evil act,” and “Conscience is the judgment one makes concerning the ethical rightness or wrongness of a human act he is considering performing.” The Conscience of the physician who wrote the prescription is entirely different from the pharmacist who must fill the prescription, one of them knows more about the patient than the other; can you guess which one?

The reverend wrote “no one, no matter what his reason might be, may force a person to do something that he considers ethically wrong...” A thoroughly trained pharmacist is well-aware of the potential for getting into such situations. A pharmacist, who interferes with the health of a patient, should not be fired; but jailed.

The Reverend wrote “The Morning After pill has no other purpose than to cause abortion.” According to Barr Pharmaceuticals, Plan B prevents pregnancy, it does not end it. Barr’s website www.go2planb.com states “Plan B will not affect a fertilized egg already attached to the uterus; it will not affect an existing pregnancy.”

Finally, the Rev. Dr. Eugene J. Weitzel wrote “No woman needs the pill for health reasons, she only needs it to undo what she and her accomplice did the night before in a selfish moment for fun and frolic.” Unfortunately, not every situation that results in a pregnancy is a “selfish moment for fun and frolic.” I don’t know what to think about someone who characterizes men as mere accomplices in such situations, nor do I care to ever find out what other outlandish unsubstantiated claims echo across the pews in Beardstown.

What is a “Sacred Cow?”

A Sacred Cow is a term used to describe a topic that the news media does not want to touch. Reporters don’t dare report on it, editors get angry and most importantly, the financial support of the media outlet from advertisers, subscribers, or in some rare cases, contributing writers, can be shaken to the core.

For example, a newspaper editor might write an editorial that holds a specific political position that the readers might very well appreciate, but that his advertisers absolutely despise. The editor then faces a dilemma. Does he want to risk losing his financial support by offending his advertisers and make an appeal to an audience that is slipping away, or would he rather make an appeal to his advertisers and not mention the fact that he’s losing subscribers?

If he makes an appeal to his audience he will lose his financial support. If he makes his appeal to his advertisers, regardless of how true or false that appeal might be, he will keep his advertisers, and not mention that his advertisers are perhaps the only subscribers he has left.

Recently there have been some publications that contain nothing more than advertising and articles about advertisers. These represent the future of print. The only audience are the advertisers, they only read about each other, and ultimately a subculture of elites is lulled into a false sense of security because they no longer have access to information about the wider world.

I stumbled onto one such sacred cow when I wrote a letter to the editor of the State Journal Register several days ago. It was very short and to the point, and a direct threat to their second biggest block of advertising revenue. Here’s what I wrote.

“Want to go green? Want to save energy, cut back on trash, lose weight and get healthy all at the same time? Stop cooking or eating processed foods! Eat only fresh fruits and vegetables! You will save on your cooling bills too!”

There second biggest block of advertising revenue behind car dealerships is food. Imagine what would happen if nobody cooked anything and ate only fresh fruits and vegetables!