Mediacology

Via Nonapaley.com

Written by a former Economic Hit Man, John Perkins‘ The Secret History of the American Empire takes you on an inside journey of “corporatocracy” empire building. The book is fairly simplistic when it comes to history, but it confers with all the more academic sources I’ve read about the subject. What is great about the [...]

Update: Apparently Dan Rather was here, and not Lessig. I fixed it. Please watch this. It’s really amazing.
If there is one talk from NCMR 2008, it’s this one by Lessig who tackles the source of media consolidation.

FYI, you can view the whole video channel here.

This Way to Better Media | Free Press:

Despite increasingly complex digital-media offerings and hundreds of channels, we see the diversity of media ownership shrinking, along with the diversity of voices that are broadcast. People are fighting back, organizing, creating alternatives and holding the corporate media giants accountable. The corporations are pushing back. With life and [...]

It’s not secret that PR and media need each other, but propaganda is more subtle and insidious.
Why Big Media Needs Propaganda to Survive – CommonDreams.org:
Corporate owners have a vested interest in keeping courageous and intelligent reporting a journalism-school dream, especially when it comes to the Iraq war. After all, General Electric doesn’t want its reporters [...]

Media Map – Visualizing Ownership in the Media and Telecom Industries:
The landscape of the media industry is rapidly changing, with increasing consolidation and convergence between companies. Researchers and journalists have a need to track these changes, yet no interactive visualization tool is freely accessible online to enable this.
Check out this very cool tool to visualization [...]

Bad News at the Pump: The Dangerous Implications of $100-Plus Oil | ForeignPolicy | AlterNet:
Three factors, in particular, are responsible for the current surge: intensifying competition for oil between the older industrial powers and rising economic dynamos like China and India; the inability of the global energy industry to expand supplies to keep pace with [...]

OK, let’s get one thing straight, the RIAA represents the true counterculture. They have their heads so far up their paradigmatic arse that they are now promoting shrill profiling that equates music piracy sd being a gateway to terrorism. With this kind of logic, half the population will end up in Guantanamo Bay. See the [...]

Continuing the thought from my previous post on oppositional defiant disorder, I came across this excellent new series of pharma ad deconstructions from Consumer Reports, AdWatch (What no embed? Come on guys, get on with the Web 2.0! At least put the videos up on YouTube to spread your meme). Just more evidence that [...]

MTV
Music Videos
MTV Shows
Entertainment News

MTV
Music Videos
MTV Shows
Entertainment News

First of all, OUCH! I haven’t seen MTV in years so I was a little taken aback when its news intro literally blows-up on my monitor. Talk about over-stimulation! Anyhow, the segment looks at the implosion of the record biz from a corporate perspective (geez, if they had only [...]

Big Media is a term commonly used to describe the landscape of consolidated media companies. I object to the term because it is a case of framing gone amuck. The phrase is supposed to immediately generate an image of something big and bad– like the wolf who torments Little Red Riding Hood– but it creates [...]

You can take action here.

Let’s call it what it is. The geography of the planet has been fully mapped, demarcated and corralled by the system of private property (otherwise known as “enclosure“) with the rare exception of dwindling public spaces, reserves and parks (and our various temporary autonomous zones). The next frontiers are interior territories: the mind, DNA and [...]

I haven’t followed the WGA strike as closely as I like, but this video, which is causing a small stir, says it all. The media companies want to squeeze every penny from as many eyeballs as possible, yet little, if any, will be returned to the brains behind the content. It’s an old story and [...]

Sometimes I wish CNN would just roll over and die. An announcement they are creating a news bureau in Second Life confirms that they are trend followers, and are no longer innovators. Yeah, so maybe a 24/7 news network was once a brilliant idea, but with the Web, who cares? Having failed at emulating [...]

Periodically I get requests to review material to see if it’s relevant for media literacy. I was asked to view the above clip, which I found instructive in terms of how not to think about media. What follows is my reading:
Upon reviewing the video I would not recommend it for media literacy. While it is [...]

You may have noticed the Rosetta Stone ad on the right column. Rosetta Stone is a great language learning software package that I have been using to learn Italian. Not only is it a great system, they are one of the more responsible corporations out there providing a tremendous planetary service. Their Endangered Language Program [...]

Jim Cramer CNBC Meltdown – Watch more free videos
I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop on the mortgage scam and real estate bubble so I think Jim Cramer is hitting the right pitch here. The European press is going nuts about the US economy at the moment; I’m a little shocked by how [...]

The offending video
ATT, the exclusive provider for the iPhone, allegedly censored Pearl Jam’s anti-Bush remarks during a Webcast. See below for details.
Pearl Jam Ten Club News: pearljam.com tenclub.net:
After concluding our Sunday night show at Lollapalooza, fans informed us that portions of that performance were missing and may have been censored by AT&T during the “Blue [...]

“We report. You Decide.”

Wondering where your news comes from? One of the underlying principles of a “propaganda environment” is an information complex in which the values of the system are internalized. Remember that traditional media are corporations in the business of selling programming, including news. One of the criticisms of traditional media (as opposed to [...]