was fun. Mr Cynical was pretty blasé about the whole thing going in, but I was chatting with people I never chat with any more and drinking far too many free beers and generally enjoying the whole debauched scene. DJ Mouse was great and the whole thing was entirely anti-corpo. But not self-consciously so. My poor roommate, who’s a lawyer getting set to do her articles at the Federal Court of Appeals in Ottawa but working for us part time for the summer – she’s tainted now forever. She doesn’t want to work oustide the web/multimedia world any more.
I’m more and more of a free-speech essentialist
as I get older, but then again, your free speech ends when fundamental human rights are trashed. The Canadian Broadcast standards board trashes Dr Laura. I see the contradiction in my position – but I think the right to speech and the right to use a public good to spread speech are quite different things – and the airwaves are a public good. [link via Outlet]
Arg
this ongoing Time Warner/ABC story takes the award for biggest non-story all month. “my god – what will they do next – will the poor subscribers have to miss regis? how will they know how to match tomorrow? the poor souls will have to slink past the watercooler at work, what with nothing to talk about! oh the humanity of it all!”
Seriously – there are dozens of important issues surrounding media distribution in the post-Telecomms Reform Act era – this ain’t one of em.
Project Censored’s
Outrageous:
It seems that the editors of US-based magazines are selling out their editorial space – to the DEA. Now, the line between edit and ad isn’t as clear as it used to be – in the old church-and-state days. My old high school friend Tyler is even leading the charge to dismantling the line altogether with his magazine Wallpaper*, which features an in-house ad agency, I understand.
That said, media outlets have always been commercial enterprises, and I’ve read my Chomsky. I know what’s what. I know, intellectually, that there is no purity. That much (if not most) editorial content is bought and paid for. And that even that which isn’t bought outright overwhelmingly supports a non-critical stance towards the commercialism etc. I’m not naive!
But still – there’s a difference. Magazines aren’t supposed to be outright gov’t propoganda tools. Salon reports that they have been just that.
I should add one thing – I don’t have a problem with Wallpaper* doing their thing, particularly. It’s a fashion mag, or a lifestyle mag – you know what you’re getting. If they did hard news, that would be a different story. In truth I kind of admire the ballsiness Tyler and his crew had in putting the whole thing together.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- Next Page »
