Link Banana

Marc Ambinder points out that the venerable Christian Science Monitor is going to stop being a daily newspaper in April — it’ll become a weekly in print — and spend more time focusing on it’s web presence.

If, like me, you’ve always wondered what technological wizardry allows for The Daily Show’s impressive ability to amass clips of political and media foibles, the answer is: very little. An explanation from a former researcher:

It’s literally 15 rack-mounted TiVos of various models, many from the pre-Series 2 era. Some Philips boxes, some Sonys. And because there’s a limited number of remote codes, when a staffer operates one, he has to hold the remote directly against that box’s IR receiver so that the beam doesn’t hit any of the other boxes (i.e., so he’s not inadvertently controlling multiple boxes at once). No joke!

(via Boing Boing)

Neatorama is offering a conveniently visual take on media ownership. Some suprised me, and there are some notable errors and omissions. The comments likely contain an answer to your concerns.

Two Philadelphia papers ran fake ads for a childishly named by-the-pound airline. Just thought it was funny.

The Economist’s Europe.view column mourns the not-quite-total passing of the organization for lack of funding. Some interesting details are discussed, as are feasible alternatives for those interested in the former Soviet Republics. A snippet:

The invaluable “Tatar-Bashkir Daily Report”, for example, covering what 90 years ago was the briefly independent state of Idel-Ural, stopped publication in November 2005. Though the vernacular-language broadcasts remain, it is hard to see how they will maintain their quality as the main brains of the organisation disperse.

A sign of how much the bad guys dislike the radios’ work came only last month, with a big cyberattack that temporarily brought down the website of the Belarusian-language service, probably to stop people reading it on the anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. That recalled the Soviet-era practice of jamming, at vast expense, foreign short-wave radio broadcasts.

Only 18% of the people live in a country whose press is rated “free” by Freedom House. You may be heartened a bit by the fact that that’s actually 36% or the countries, but it still seems a terribly sad state of affairs. A map (PDF) is available as well.

Also of note, The Economist’s Asia.view column examines how censorship has changed in recent years.

The Economist offers more depth to the strike resolution than anything else I’ve read (which I admit hasn’t been much) .

The devil, as usual, is in the detail. The residual payments for streaming start only after a 17-24 day window (which is when most people would want to catch up online with shows they missed on telly). The writers asked for a straightforward percentage of gross receipts, but settled for fixed dollar amounts, which limits their earnings compared with the studios. The writers made other concessions too: they for instance dropped their demand for a higher share of money from DVDs. They also gave up trying to get reality television and animation covered by union terms. That is important: being able to fill holes with reality shows protected the media companies financially during the strike. Some people point to the fact that the Directors Guild of America, whose contract was also up for renewal, managed to get a broadly similar deal from the media conglomerates without downing tools at all.

The Economist offers a handy guide for totalitarian bureaucrats looking to make it hard to speak against them. It’s a troubling and useful look at the state of media freedom around the world.

Despite the flourishing of alternative media, such as satellite television and internet blogs, that challenge once-impregnable state monopolies on the flow of news, governments keep finding new ways to suppress contrary views. Whereas the dictatorships of old snuffed out opponents or chucked them in jail, today’s softer incarnations achieve similar silence by subtler means. Hyper-regulation via catch-all laws, plus financial carrots and sticks, tend to replace cruder direct control.

There are two ways — actually more, but these two are the most interesting — to read Howard Kurtz’s column about Obama and the media. It’s either a fawning look at a campaign that doesn’t spin the media or an indictment of a media so enchanted that they don’t need to be spun. Either way you read it, Mr. Kurtz offers an interesting portrait.

The Clinton camp, says David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, “is hyperbolic about it. What we don’t do is spend six hours a day trying to persuade you guys that red is green or up is down… . Their own spin was ‘We are the biggest, baddest street gang on the block.’

“We can’t be pacifists and cede the battlefield,” Axelrod says, but “what’s powering this campaign is a rejection of tactical politics.”

“That’s the best spin I’ve heard all day,” replies Clinton communications chief Howard Wolfson, inviting Axelrod to “send over some leather jackets.” “My sense is the Obama campaign spends eight hours a day spinning.” Clinton, for her part, abandoned her inaccessible approach after losing Iowa, scheduling far more time each day for interviews and press conferences. “She felt it was the best way to talk to the American people,” Wolfson says.

In the LA Times, Bruce Wallace takes a look at the (unexpectedly liberal) Pakistani media through interesting eyes:

Most Pakistanis know Saleem, 28, as Begum Nawazish Ali, a middle-aged widow who welcomes viewers into her drawing room on Saturday nights for a little gossip with the guests on “The Late Show with Begum Nawazish Ali.” Ensconced in the set’s chintz and candlelight, the Begum, who hasn’t lost the spark for sex, swaps fashion tips with female guests, flirts shamelessly with the men (even with a mullah on one night), and gets in frequent shots at politicians, including President Bush, for whom she carries a bit of a torch.

(via brijit)

The Columbia Journalism Review has an interesting-but-annoying resource that lets you see what major media organizations own what. The tool’s thorough and useful, but it’s not terribly good at giving you a quick overview of who the big players are. But it interesting to see, for example, that Cox owns lots of local newspapers and local network affiliates, while Comcast owns none.