End of Silence

I found this story today from online comic strip artist, Scott Kurtz. He recounts his dealings with the comic syndicates responsible for the comics that you see every day in newspapers. I didn’t realize it was such a racket. I’ve seen cartoonists make jokes about the syndicates hovering over them and the criticism that Jim Davis gets for completely and utterly selling out with Garfield, but I didn’t realize what a racket they have going. It’s worse than musicians and record labels. It’ll be interesting to see if Scott’s ideas come to pass. Everybody’s aware of the battle between P2P and the record industry. Cory Doctorow is a big proponent of distribution of books over the Internet.

Some of the things that Kurtz says reminded me of some of what I said last month about large media conglomerates. Also, I thought I had linked Ted Turner’s article on the same topic, but I can’t seem to find it in the archives.

In the wake of seeing Outfoxed earlier this week, it was interesting to find this post on the Tour De France today. Not surprisingly, Germany also seems to have a problem with biased networks who cut people off when they don’t agree with them. Even more ironically, and I’ve been thinking about this for a while, Al Jazeera was founded mainly to combat the many government run news agencies in the Middle East, but they seem to get nothing but bad press over here. I’d really like to see Control Room.

I finally watched Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. I may post more on that later, but I want to re-read some of the criticisms and counter-criticisms. My initial impression is that it isn’t nearly as radical as some have made it out to be. It’ll be a documentary hat trick this week if I get around to watching Fog of War which I borrowed from Casino.

I’m at a loss.

I cannot stand anything about the Bush administration or their policies, both foreign and domestic. I’m not particularly fond of Kerry either. I’ve already whined in the past about my not getting a chance to pick my favorite democratic candidate in the primaries. He’s got a lot to do to convince me that he’s The Guy, but I’ll probably end up picking him as the lesser of all of the evils. I voted for Nader last time and I haven’t completely ruled him out this time. I considered the libertarian candidate, but after reading this, he’s out.

The Wife and I attended a viewing party for Outfoxed this evening at Jon’s. Thanks once again to him and his wife for hosting it, especially since they just got done moving in to their apartment this weekend. I’m sure he’ll have some pictures and notes on his site as well. We had to leave earlier than we would’ve liked so that we could get the kids home to bed.

We watched the DVD, listened to the post-viewing conference call and then participated in a discussion afterwards. I’m horrible with names, but there were some really cool people there and we all resolved to try and do more of these sorts of things. I did recognize Adina, who plugged austinbloggers and filled us in on some more of what she’s been doing with electronic voting. There was also a guy who had participated in the Dean campaign during the Iowa caucuses and someone else who had been a reporter for the Statesman for a time.

The film didn’t really tell me anything that I didn’t already know about Fox. I thought it was good that the overall message was to speak out against corporate-owned media in general, not just Fox. The media consolidation over the last 30 years is something that should frighten all of us. Radio, newspapers, and TV are all controlled these days by a very small number of huge corporations whose main interest isn’t to be journalists, but to make money.

The film also pointed out some of Fox’s more glaring instances of being less than fair and balanced, namely the Jeremy Glick incident and a ridiculous comparison of the likelihood of being killed in Iraq vs. California which is still on their website.

Some of the groups involved in the film are bringing a lawsuit to disallow Fox’s trademark on the phrase "Fair and Balanced" under the reasoning that it’s a phrase that should be available to anyone and that they, in particular, are anything but fair and balanced.

If you want to check out more about what you can do, check out Alternet and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) among many others that are linked via the Outfoxed site. We intend to secure a copy of the DVD to share with friends who missed out on the viewing. Drop me an e-mail if you’re interested in seeing it.

Dig it.